Largest ever ecstacy seizure in Italy

LONDON: This is a story that links two continents, four police forces, a disgraced British duke, an Australian soap star, a cocaine dealer called Gerald, a London socialite and the world's biggest Ecstasy bust.

The saga starts in Hollywood and ends, via London and Amsterdam, in the small Italian beach resort of Lignano where, on a cold Easter Monday evening last week, local police found two Nike hold-alls containing 333,000 distinctive pastel-colored pills in the boot of a sporty little Lancia.

If the consignment had got through to its destination -- the streets of Los Angeles -- it would have brought in nearly US$11.2 million.

The bust was the end of a two-month investigation for the police and the beginning of a nightmare for a well-heeled young Englishman, Alex Bruell, 26, one of two men now in police custody in the Adriatic resort of Trieste, where they were charged on Sunday with drug trafficking. The pair now face jail sentences of 20 years.

Bruell was born in Bournemouth but raised in Beverly Hills by his father, then an eminent Hollywood psychologist. His mother, Biba Hiller, a Knightsbridge-based property dealer and socialite, last week became the fourth wife of Angus Charles Drogo Montagu, 12th Duke of Manchester. The Duke was recently released from a prison in Florida where he had been serving a three-year sentence for fraud.

This weekend Hiller, speaking from a luxury hotel while on honeymoon in Jersey, told The Observer her son, educated at top private schools in Beverly Hills and Britain, was "naive but not a criminal".

"He has everything going for him and has never been in any trouble before," she said.

The new duchess said Bruell had recently been licensed by police in London to work in the security industry. Her husband said: "I believe he is the fall guy for others. He has been exploited."

The other suspect is 30-year-old Australian Simon Main, believed to be the stepson of an Australian quiz show host and filmstar. Main is based in Beverly Hills where he claims to be a journalist. The Italian police say he has asked Robert Shapiro, the Los Angeles-based lawyer who helped get O. J. Simpson acquitted of murdering his wife, to represent him. Shapiro's office refused to comment last week. Main is understood to deny all the allegations against him.

Bruell appears to have less illustrious legal representation, making do so far with a court-appointed local lawyer.

Police say the Briton broke down in tears within hours of his arrest. He then outlined, they say, details of one of the most ambitious drug-smuggling operations ever.

Bruell is thought to have met Main on a recent trip to California. The Australian gave police an address in the suburb of Studio City, but it appears that he only stayed there briefly before being moved on because of his "boisterous" lifestyle.

Somehow Bruell appears to have been sucked into the world of drug dealing. The Italian police claim he told them he became involved in a cocaine deal that went badly wrong when 14kg of the drug were stolen by an Italian criminal -- "Gerald" -- who is based in Britain and has connections with major English villains.

To recoup the loss and repay his backers, police say, Bruell hatched another scheme. He traveled to Amsterdam, where Dutch contacts arranged for him to pick up 453,000 Ecstasy tablets. The cost price for Ecstasy is around $1.12 a pill. British customs officials are now liaising with their Dutch counterparts to track down the manufacturers.

Customs sources say that since Ecstasy fetches up to $32 a pill in the United States -- nearly twice the average of $17 in Britain -- increasing amounts are being trafficked across the Atlantic from laboratories in Europe, particularly Holland. If all Bruell's 453,000 pills had been sold, they would have realized $15.2 million.

The former security consultant next surfaced in the Adriatic resort of Lignano, the home of his fiancee. By the time they were on to him, police say, he had already sent more than 120,000 of the pills to America. Some went in a Federal Express parcel, others were shipped in a consignment of furniture. The police -- tipped off, they say, by an underworld informant -- put Bruell under surveillance and began monitoring his mobile telephone calls. "We created an invisible cage around him," said Frederico Frezza, the Italian investigating magistrate who ran the operation.

Bruell appears to have been something of an amateur. His 6ft 4in frame was obvious in the bars and clubs of the small Italian resort. A squad of 25 Italian police tracked him everywhere, even on the beach. They rented a flat near the modest three-bedroomed apartment he was living in, and hired and borrowed dozens of cars to follow him inconspicuously.

Many of the calls Bruell made, police say, were to Main, who had arrived in Rome from California. For weeks the two argued over where the handover of the drugs would take place, the police say, though their conversations were discreet and gave nothing away.

"All the phone conversations were conducted as if they knew they were being intercepted," said Col. Carlo Germi of the surveillance squad. "They gave no details of their appearance or information about their location."

Main wanted to meet in the attractive Tuscan towns of Lucca or Pisa. Bruell refused to move so far from his base with 80kg of Ecstasy in his car. Finally the two met outside the pizzeria in Lignano. It was an astonishing lapse of security. The two men were tall, fair, tanned, muscular, very good-looking and very conspicuous. They attracted a lot of attention. "They were fantastic," one female admirer later told police.

For an hour the pair argued, say the police, then Bruell agreed to collect the drugs from his home and hand them over.

At 21.00 the police say they watched him park his sporty Lancia in the pizzeria carpark. Main, perhaps spooked by the Easter holiday crowds on the streets, wanted to move on again. Fearing that they would lose them, the police made a snap decision to move in. They swooped, arrested the pair and found, in two bags in the boot of the car, the biggest pile of Ecstasy any of them had ever seen. But there remain a number of loose ends. Main was equipped with a two-way radio with an earpiece and GSM positioning device. Police say he was getting instructions from a man called Dave throughout the operation. He is believed to be an American, and the U.S. Drugs Enforcement Agency is investigating. So far all attempts to track down "Dave" have failed.

-- Observer News Service