Heidi Fleiss, Koki Organd and the Israeli Hollywood Ecstasy Mafia

"Do you think any of this would have happened if you hadn't been attracted to the person most likely to destroy you...?" 

Nick Broomfield 

"...that, I have to give a lotta thought to... That's the best I can answer that right now..."

Heidi

In the 1976 melodrama "Trackdown," an innocent country girl heads for Hollywood looking to fulfill her

dreams. Instead, she is lured into prostitution.

The movie was based on a story written by Ivan Nagy, a Hungarian immigrant who, at the time, was a

photographer eager to make a name for himself in the entertainment business. But the film was panned, summed up in one review as having "all the sleazy elements and people who couldn't care less about another's life."

Now, Los Angeles police are alleging that Nagy--the former lover of alleged Hollywood madam Heidi

Fleiss--is involved in the same prostitution trade he was writing about then.

Nagy, 55, was arrested Wednesday for allegedly recruiting young women to become call girls. The arrest came after a woman--whom police would not identify--signed a complaint on Tuesday alleging that Nagy had tried to recruit her. Police are alleging that Nagy and a partner ran a Westside prostitution ring involving 15 to 20 call girls.

Nagy's arrest, made by the same task force that arrested Fleiss in June, has sent yet another jolt through a tightly knit entertainment community already worried about what secrets Fleiss may reveal. Since the late 1970s, Nagy has worked as a mid-level television and film director, with credits for directing television movies as well as episodes of such shows as "Starsky and Hutch" and "The Powers of Matthew Star."

In the wake of Fleiss' arrest, gossip columns have reported rumors that unnamed studio executives may have used film development funds for procuring prostitutes.

The rumors prompted Columbia Pictures executive Michael Nathanson on Tuesday to issue a public

denial that he has any connections to Fleiss. Nathanson, through a spokesman, acknowledged that he has known Nagy professionally for years but denied any wrongdoing.

Columbia has begun an internal investigation into whether any company executives may have used

company funds to pay for prostitution or drugs, and, sources said, no evidence of misuse of funds has

been found so far.

Capt. Glenn Ackerman, head of the Los Angeles Police Department's administrative vice unit, said that to date police have nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors about studio money and call girls. "We

haven't seen any solid evidence," he said. "We hear all of this conjecture and innuendo. If somebody

wants to bring in some solid evidence for a change we would take a look at it."

Nagy, who Thursday did not return calls seeking comment, is free on $25,000 bail. In an interview in late June, Nagy said that, except for a 1991 bookmaking arrest that he called "a tremendous misjudgment," he had never had any dealings outside the law. In that case, Nagy pleaded no contest--the equivalent of a guilty plea--court records show.

He denied assertions by Fleiss and some of her friends that he was involved in prostitution and other

vices. "That is a lie," he said. "I have no involvement in any escort services. No gambling. . . . It's an out

and out lie. These are vicious vindictive people."

Associates of Nagy describe him as a brusque, disciplined director who can work fast, something critical for low-budget films that lack a financial safety net.

"He looks intimidating, but he's a pussycat," said actor Ted Raimi, who stars in the upcoming "Skinner" that Nagy directed. "He's this big guy with a thick Hungarian accent. I had no problem with him."

"Skinner" ended something of a directing dry spell for Nagy. The film has been described as a "Silence of the Lambs"-type thriller, featuring former adult film star Traci Lords--whose name in the film, ironically, is Heidi.

Its executive producer is Brad Wyman, a friend of Nagy. Wyman once had a production deal at Columbia Pictures and tried to get Nagy a credit on a Columbia film that was never made, according to a private investigator hired by Nathanson. The studio declined to comment on Nagy, and Wyman has not returned numerous telephone calls seeking comment.

How Cookie Crumbled

Logan Corcoran, 17, clearly remembers what it's like to be high on Ecstasy at a rave party. She worries that most teens don't realize the drug's danger. KRT photo by J. Kyle Keener/Detroit Free Press

To his mates in the New York prison where he awaits sentencing for a drug-smuggling conviction, the bearded, soft-spoken Israeli, who Customs Department officials say regularly ministers to a small flock of religious Jewish prisoners, is known as "Rabbi Ya'akov." 

The rest of the world, however, knows the "rabbi," a former Los Angeles resident, as Jacob "Koki," or "Cookie" Orgad. Until his arrest in April 2000, he was the biggest Ecstasy, or MDMA, trafficker ever to be convicted in this country.

According to the 23-count indictment issued by a federal grand jury in the Central District of California in July, Orgad was the leader of an Ecstasy-smuggling organization accused of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to import and distribute narcotics, and other violations. His sentencing, scheduled for October, could cost him 20 years and $1 million in criminal fines.

In the world of drug smuggling, groups from many countries have made their mark. Israelis, according to drug enforcement officials, were prominent in one of the first rings -- their presence in Europe and connections in the diamond industry allowed them to stake out a big piece of the market. The Israelis also involved Chassidic couriers and others in the Jewish community, drug enforcement officials say.

Within the last year, law enforcement officials have arrested dozens of people tied to these rings, including 25 in connection with Jacob Orgad.

On Monday, witness after witness confirmed to the Senate Government Affairs Committee, led by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., that Ecstasy's popularity has mushroomed.

An investigation into the life and times of Cookie Orgad provides some of the reasons why.

Orgad's name first reached the public's attention in 1995, when HBO screened British documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield's exposé, "Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam." Broomfield, who got his start with the BBC, had come to Los Angeles in mid-1994, about a year after Fleiss, born into an affluent family, had been arrested for pandering. Broomfield's inquiries centered on why someone of Fleiss' privileged background had operated a brothel.

Interviewing Ivan Nagy, depicted in the documentary as Fleiss' sometime lover, Svengali and ultimate betrayer, Broomfield noticed several bullet holes in Nagy's apartment ceiling and asked where they came from. Nagy told him that a person named Cookie was responsible for them. Nagy alleged that Cookie worked for Fleiss as "an enforcer and procurer," and that he operated a beeper store called J&J Beeper.

Later, having pursued the shadowy Orgad around various beeper shops, Broomfield interviewed a woman who alleged that Orgad beat her. He also obtained a tape recording of a conversation between Nagy and Cookie in which Orgad urged Nagy to harm the woman. Finally, Broomfield obtained Orgad's beeper number, and called it. Orgad answered, declined to comment on whether he shot up Nagy's apartment, and suggested that Broomfield might end up with "a bullet in his ass."

"Orgad," Broomfield told The Journal, "was Ivan's [Nagy's] enforcer, and then he defected to Heidi. After the film came out, I actually ran into him at Heidi's lingerie store in Santa Monica. He was quite charming, a little jittery. He hadn't seen the film yet, but he had seen our surveillance cameras. The rumor around town -- and certainly Heidi believed it -- was that Cookie had been a Mossad agent."

According to a U.S. Customs agent familiar with the Orgad investigation, there was no such evidence of such an association. But Orgad, a.k.a. Tony Evans, a.k.a. Cookie, a.k.a. "The Keebler Man," had succeeded -- certainly in the two years prior to his arrest and probably for several years before that -- in creating an Ecstasy-trafficking organization of breathtaking efficacy and sophistication.

Orgad's credit card statements, say Customs investigators, show that he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a month flying from homes in Los Angeles, New York and Miami, to tend to his business interests in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Austin, and as far afield as Paris, Luxembourg, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv.

Recruiting strippers and, later, lower-middle-class suburban couples in their 30s and 40s, Orgad outfitted them at malls, trained them as couriers, and pumped millions of Ecstasy (or E) pills manufactured in the Netherlands into virtually every major city in this country, say Customs and Justice Department spokesmen.

The main measure of Orgad's sophistication was the degree to which he had managed to remove himself from most of these transactions, Customs officials say.

During the '90s, Orgad owned a fleet of Mercedeses and BMWs, outfitted his living rooms with the hottest big-screen TVs and designer furniture, and stocked his closets with Armani suits. Orgad was wont, moreover, to drop $5,000 or $6,000 dollars a pop entertaining entourages at the Key Club or Café Maurice.

In Los Angeles, law enforcement officers had linked Orgad to prostitution, pandering, money-laundering and cocaine dealing, but for the last decade or so, he had fallen off their radar screen.

About two years ago, though, after debriefing various Orgad couriers, Law Enforcement identified a man named Kevin McLoughlin as one of Orgad's lieutenants. When police arrested McLoughlin for drug smuggling, he confirmed his relationship with Orgad, and helped flesh out what law enforcers had managed to piece together about Orgad's dealings.

Ironically, Israeli émigrés were perhaps the first to achieve dominance in both markets, although one can argue as to which of the markets ultimately had the greater impact on illicit drug use in the United States.

Expected to go to jury this week in L.A. Federal Court is the case of Gilad Gadasi, 26, of Woodland Hills, who was arrested May 6 and charged with conspiracy to distribute more than 118,000 Ecstasy tablets.

And last week, police in New York arrested two Israelis, David Roash, 28, and Israel Ashenazi, 25, for possession of 450 pounds of E, more than a million tablets packed into eight duffel bags and a suitcase.

Also earlier this month, New York prosecutors secured a guilty plea from another Israeli, Sean Erez, who, according to Justice Department documents, had used Chassidic couriers to import more than a million tablets between late 1998 and June 1999.

In May, DEA agents arrested Oded Tuito, another major trafficker ostensibly based in Los Angeles and New York.

Cookie Orgad, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, had forged ties with the New York-based trafficking group led by organized crime figure Ilan Zarger, who had sold 40,000 pills to the Arizona-based organization led by Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, a former underboss of the Gambino crime family.

Zarger, Gravano and dozens of compatriots have pleaded guilty to trafficking charges in recent weeks.

Fordham Law School Professor Abraham Abramovsky, who has studied Israeli organized crime both in Israel and in the United States, told The Journal that Israelis may have become aware of Ecstasy use in Europe, as well as in Israel, long before Americans. Hence, not only were Israeli youngsters among the first to use the drug at raves, but Israeli criminals were quick to recognize an opportunity to exploit a new market, and to work out the mechanics of manufacturing, smuggling and distributing the drug. "Some of this [involvement] may be related to the former diamond smuggling operations," Abramovsky says. Ecstasy tablets, he explains, are quite small, lending themselves to the same smuggling techniques long reserved for diamonds. In addition, he says, "The drug seems to move along the same routes as the diamond smuggling trade."

Ecstasy, a chemical (methylenedioxymeth-amphetamine or MDMA) made in drug labs, is produced for the most part in Holland and Belgium, at a cost of pennies per tablet. Sold to wholesalers for about $2 a pill, they retail, in the United States, Canada and Australia, where demand has virtually exploded during the last few years, for between $20 and $30 a pill.

The pills, moreover, are marketed rather ingeniously, often with designer labels or pop culture icons imprinted on them. (One batch of E even had Jewish Stars on them.)

Ecstasy acts on those parts of the brain that produce the neurotransmitter serotonin, causing a six-hour high characterized by enhanced feelings of empathy and sociability. Certainly there is no comparing it to crack, which often causes frequently hyper-violent mood swings among users. If anything, Ecstasy achieves the opposite effect -- users are more impelled to reach out and tongue someone to death than to kill them outright.

Ecstasy was first synthesized in 1912 as an appetite suppressant, but attracted little interest until the 1970s, when psychotherapists began to explore its potential to enhance empathetic understanding and emotional release.

Although not believed to be physically addictive, the drug is, in fact, a stimulant, a mild hallucinogen, and a hypnotic. It is also a neurotoxin, whose side effects include elevated blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature. Teenagers who have used it at all-night raves have experienced dehydration, heat stroke, and even heart attack. Researchers, meanwhile, believe that long-term use can cause significant cognitive and mood impairment.

There is mounting evidence, moreover, that however benign the high, the trade in Ecstasy, which has become wildly profitable, is also increasingly beset by violence. According to The New York Times, police first became aware of the propensity for bloodshed about 18 months ago, when an Israeli drug dealer was found dead inside a locked car trunk at LAX. Drug Enforcement Administration officials attributed the hit to a couple of hired hands from Israel.

"It's certainly becoming a free-for-all," says Dean Boyd, a Customs Department spokesman based in Washington. "We're beginning to see murders among rival trafficking groups. Now, we're seeing suburban kids getting in over their heads, with the result that 21-year-olds are being found shot in the head for suspected Ecstasy thefts. Although the Israelis were among the first, we now see many different people chasing more and more money, including Russians, Eastern Europeans and Dominicans."

According to U.S. Customs, however, Cookie Orgad enjoyed a certain pride of place within the trade. Since he was older than most of the newcomers and was recognized as a fixture and a force to be reckoned with, he was rarely challenged.

"Given his reputation," said an agent familiar with the case, "I was pretty surprised when, after two years of investigations, I finally met up with him. I was expecting to see I don't know what, and here was this soft-spoken little guy, somewhat arrogant and uncooperative, but not at all what I envisioned."

The scion of a family of Moroccan immigrants to Israel, Orgad arrived in the United States about two decades ago, becoming a U.S. citizen under the name of Tony Evans in 1995. Investigations of his background in Israel turned up evidence of a brother, Zohar, with a police record in Israel, but nothing on Orgad per se, leading Customs to suspect for a time that perhaps the name Jacob Orgad might have been an alias as well.

During court appearances since his arrest in April 2000, Orgad purportedly put his Armanis in mothballs, sporting a yarmulke and giving the impression he led a pious existence. In prison, "Reb Ya'akov" has grown a beard, eats glatt kosher food and leads prayer services and Torah study.

As part of his plea agreement with the government, Orgad waived his right to contest his extradition to France, where he faces separate charges. If convicted there, Orgad could end up where glatt may be even harder to come by than a hit of Ecstasy.

From Details: The X-Files

Official Selection, Best American Crime Writing, 2002

From Details
Sept, 2001

Israeli Immigrant Jacob “Cookie” Orgad Was an Unlikely Godfather: A King of the International Ecstasy Market Whose Subjects Included Strippers, Hasidic Teens and a Texas Couple with a Retarded Son.

By Julian Rubinstein

In the early evening of April 7, 2000, one of the strangest and most lucrative careers in the history of American drug smuggling was coming to an end. Twenty undercover agents, most from the U.S. Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration, fanned into position outside a plush midtown Manhattan high-rise waiting for Jacob “Cookie” Orgad, the enigmatic Israeli king of ecstasy, to return from dinner.

When he arrived, at around 9:30—a babe on each arm and reeking of cologne—the former “Beeper King” of Los Angeles calmly consented to a search of his three-bedroom penthouse. What would a 43-year-old self-described former rabbinical student have to hide? But with Cookie, nothing was ever the way it seemed. As the search commenced, one of his girlfriends entertained the agents by showing them the marijuana leaf tattooed on her ass.

Such was the bizarre and incongruous world of Jacob Orgad—a.k.a. Tony Evans—a man feared by some and considered a joke by others, whose rise to prominence on the Hollywood scene as a close associate of Heidi Fleiss gives new meaning to the immigrant ideal of the self-made man. Was Cookie the Pablo Escobar of ecstasy? Was he responsible for an increase in ecstasy addiction? If so, he went down without so much as a splash. “Wait up for me,” he told the girls through his thick Israeli accent as he was cuffed and put into a waiting car. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

But Cookie wasn’t going to be coming home for a long, long time. There were too many people—from the notorious former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy “the Bull” Gravano down to the Las Vegas strippers and Brooklyn Hasidic teens employed as drug mules—who had been convicted for working in the worldwide ecstasy empire Cookie shrewdly came to rule. “It was one of the most sophisticated and complex operations we’ve seen,” says Dean Boyd, a spokesman for U.S. Customs. It was also one of the most unlikely.

Cookie’s rise and fall traces a precipitous Wall Street–like graph: His fortunes boomed spectacularly in the mid-to-late 1990s—when the emergence of a massive market for ecstasy reconfigured the power structure of the world drug market—before crashing at the tail end of an investigation that spanned three continents and tore up the lives of scores of the most unlikely pushers imaginable. Take 19-year-old Simcha Roth, a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn who pleaded guilty to ecstasy-smuggling charges in a related case. At his bail hearing, he was released to the custody of two rabbis.

As much as 90 percent of the world’s ecstasy supply is manufactured in secret, high-tech labs scattered throughout the Netherlands, where the materials to make the hallucinogen are not as closely regulated as they are in the rest of Europe and the United States. For years, a cabal of Israelis have used Holland as a base for diamond smuggling through the ports in Antwerp and Rotterdam. In the mid-nineties, some of them noticed that an even more lucrative trade had blossomed around them, one with few players as well positioned to cash in as they were. “Israelis are everywhere, and they get to know each other very fast because of the language and the tradition,” says an Israeli intelligence official familiar with his countrymen’s stronghold on the world ecstasy market. “It doesn’t take long for a guy like Cookie to get big.”

Authorities say that by the time of his arrest, Cookie had brought in more ecstasy to the United States than any other individual ever has: an estimated 9 million pills with a street value of more than $270 million. A former discount-electronics salesman, Cookie climbed to the top of the world drug trade chiefly by lying with such élan that emboldened associates were eventually threatening to “whack” Mafia made man Gravano. But in the end, Cookie’s sex-filled gangster paradise grew too big for its own good.

“I was stupid,” Cookie told me through his lawyer from a federal detention facility in Brooklyn—one of the few comments he agreed to make for this story. “It was a macho thing.”

Cookie: The self-made godfather created himself a sex-filled gangster paradise

What most people who knew Cookie in his early L.A. days remember is that he was a member of Mossad, Israel’s elite intelligence organization. Cookie grew up in Israel—in a big Moroccan Jewish family in the north of the country—and followed his ex-wife, Sigal, and 6-year-old daughter, Ravid, to the United States in 1985. He spent a few years in Fort Lauderdale before moving to Los Angeles in 1989. And though he has been able to keep many of the facts about his life a mystery even to the authorities who tracked his case for years, one thing is certain: Cookie was never an intelligence agent.

Cookie might never have amounted to more than a street-level salesman if it weren’t for his extraordinary ability to exploit opportunity—the Southern California equivalent of good genes. An opportunity presented itself to Cookie in the form of Heidi Fleiss, who showed up at his electronics store one afternoon in 1990, looking for a bargain on a big-screen television. Not that Fleiss needed a bargain. She was already running what she brags was the best operation of its kind in the world—a $1,500-a-night call-girl service. (The “Hollywood Madame” eventually drew three years in prison.) “I dealt with the richest people in the world and the best-looking girls,” Fleiss crows from her Los Angeles home, where she remains sequestered as part of her parole agreement.

Cookie knew who Fleiss was; a mutual Israeli friend had told him that she would be coming in for a deal on a TV. Law-enforcement officials here and in Israel believe Cookie was already involved in drug dealing—cocaine, mostly—but it was small-time stuff; it’s unlikely that’s why Fleiss sought him out. What is clear is that Cookie sold Fleiss a television and drove it to her now-infamous $1.6 million Benedict Canyon pleasure palace himself.

“Next thing you know, Cookie’s doing favors, running errands,” says Ivan Nagy, Fleiss’s boyfriend at the time. The call-girl market, much like the ecstasy scene that would soon explode, was fiercely competitive. With demand exceeding supply, many girls were looking to use Fleiss as a springboard to their own service.

Cookie didn’t look like much—short, pudgy, hairy, with a sartorial style reminiscent of Steve Martin’s Wild and Crazy Guy: tight pants, shirts unbuttoned to his navel, lime-green Valentino jackets, and chest-nesting gold chains. But Cookie recognized Fleiss’s need for someone to protect the business, and the Mossad tale was born. “Heidi and I looked at him like he was a moron,” says Nagy. “But at that time, anyone who suggested they could be some kind of an enforcer was valuable.”

Fleiss (who has little bad to say about Cookie) says she never believed his Mossad yarn but did make use of it. “I had a lot of enemies,” she says. “Sometimes I needed to find out something about a girl and he’d help me.”

“He and his friends would wait around for the girls to come home and then sneak up on them and say, ‘When are you going to go see Heidi?’” recalls one source. “They killed one girl’s cat.”

As Fleiss’s “enforcer,” Cookie had found a place for himself in the Hollywood scene. But he quickly came to realize that the role was limiting. He had a legendary libido—”He could fuck all day,” says one source—but being feared didn’t get you much action that you didn’t have to pay for. Nor did it command respect. While dapper johns like Charlie Sheen were whisked into the clubs with the Fleiss posse, Cookie had to stand in line with the rest of the losers.

But not for long. If there was one thing his days with Fleiss seems to have drilled into Cookie’s head, it was this: Girls are the universal currency; they’re accepted anywhere, and the more you have the more powerful you become. Soon, Cookie’s services to Fleiss involved more than just security. He began recruiting women for her, picking one girl up outside a Western Union by offering to shoot modeling photos. Cookie also ingratiated himself with women by providing them with drugs. “Sometimes guys would request drugs from the girls,” says the source, “mostly coke and ‘ludes.”

The official federal case against Cookie, which charges him as the leader of an international ecstasy-smuggling conspiracy, involves offenses committed only between 1998 and 2000. But law-enforcement sources say he was operating well before that. “He began moving a lot of cocaine in the early nineties,” says one source at Customs.

Fleiss refuses to comment on the drug allegations, but doesn’t deny Cookie was pimping for her. “He knew a lot of really cute girls,” she says. “Some needed money, a little makeover. I turned these girls into millionaires and they loved Cookie for the introduction. I paid him, on average, $500 a girl.”

Around this time, Cookie moved out of his dingy apartment and into a swanky high-rise just off Sunset Boulevard. He was now in the heart of Hollywood, where self-invention is standard operating procedure. But he soon learned that trying to prove you’re legit in an illegitimate world can also be dangerous. Within a year, his new twelfth-floor bachelor pad became the scene of an incident that nearly sidelined him before he became a true contender.

In February 1993, Cookie began spending time with a beautiful 22-year-old named Laurie Dolan. They’d known each other about two weeks when Cookie showed up at her apartment one evening in a limousine and whisked her and another young woman to dinner at the popular fashionista hangout Tatou. “She called me from there,” remembers her father, Paul. “It was obvious that she was out partying, but she said, ‘Dad, I’ll be all right.’”

After dinner, the group showed up at their regular hangout, Bar One, where Cookie was now a part-owner—no more waiting in line for him. He made a show of buying buckets of the best champagne before heading back to his apartment with Dolan and two other women. (“He always liked three or four women in his bed,” says one former associate. “It was like Caligula every night.”)

Dolan surfaced around 5 p.m. the next day, when Cookie left her comatose body at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She never regained consciousness and three days later was pronounced dead, the victim of a massive drug overdose. An investigation into the death didn’t begin in earnest until four months later, in the wake of Fleiss’s June arrest. When the media put together the Fleiss-Cookie-Dolan connection, the mysterious death of one of Heidi’s supposed call girls became fodder for Hard Copy and tabloid headlines all the way to London.

Fleiss claims that she never met Dolan before in her life. But perhaps it was only a matter of time. “A girl like Laurie Dolan was worth $50,000 to Heidi,” says Nagy. “She was gorgeous, natural, young.” Nonetheless, the investigation into her death was eventually dropped after witnesses refused to speak to authorities, and Cookie was never charged. That fact hasn’t changed the mind of her father. “He should have been arrested for murder,” says Paul Dolan. “He took away Laurie’s innocence, her beauty, her life. This is what he did for a living. He drugged girls up, got them hooked, and turned them into prostitutes.”

As the Fleiss affair filled the tabloids in the fall of 1993, casual acquaintances began to reconsider their association with the woman the New York Post called “the Heidi Ho.” For Cookie, who appeared by that time to be using the Fleiss scene as cover for his growing drug business, their relationship meant danger.

As L.A. burned, Cookie split town. For several months, he began showing up nightly in the high-end strip clubs in New York City and Las Vegas, throwing his money around like a sultan. “He would drop $10,000 to $20,000 a night,” says the owner of a New York club.

But in 1994, three clubs he frequented barred him from the premises. “He was soliciting the women,” says one of the New York managers who banned him. “He liked the bisexual ones with big tits. He’d tell them, ‘I’ll take you shopping tomorrow. We’ll go out to eat.’ Soon, they were on his payroll and not coming to work anymore. I thought he was a pimp, not a drug dealer.”

With Cookie, who left almost no paper trail and few documents registered to his name, it was always hard to tell. While he appeared to be angling to succeed Fleiss—at least outside California—back in L.A., he was returning to his straight sales roots. A year earlier, he’d opened a pager store called J&J Beepers, and in 1994, he began a major promotional campaign. According to his own newspaper and radio ads, Cookie was now the “Beeper King” of Los Angeles.

But if Cookie was really looking to go clean, he chose an odd location for his headquarters….