ECSTASY ON NEW HIGH

HOUSTON — Along the teeming streets of Little Saigon, shoppers crowd storefront operations like the Pho Hung Restaurant, Cash Box Karaoke and A+ Foot Relax — but behind the scenes, another business is booming.

Sales of MDMA, the club drug known as Ecstasy on rave party dance floors in the 1990s, are making a nationwide resurgence. Along with new variants chemically engineered to produce similar euphoric sensations, the synthetic stimulants are produced in China, refined in Canada and smuggled south throughout the United States.

And control of the distribution networks has fallen into the hands of another relic of the early 1990s — Asian organized crime syndicates.

“They seem to have a good deal of influence in the U.S. as far as their MDMA interests,” said Lawrence Payne, a national spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, in a telephone interview from Washington.

Seizures of MDMA tablets rose from 10.2 million in 2006 to 15.1 million in 2010, including a peak of 18.3 million in 2008, according to the most recent National Drug Threat Assessment published by the Department of Justice. Along the U.S.-Canada border, the smuggling route favored by Asian criminal organizations, seizures doubled from 1.9 million tablets in 2006 to 3.9 million in 2010.

Agents have seized tablets pressed into shapes depicting the “Simpsons” cartoon characters, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and even President Obama, Payne said, adding that “some of these pills look like legitimate children’s vitamins.”

Making things even more difficult is that Ecstasy today is not always the same MDMA used by club kids in the ’90s, but is evolving into a category of drugs that includes a host of recently developed chemical variants.

“They’re pressing them into pill form and passing them off as MDMA or putting them across as a safe alternative to MDMA,” Payne said. “It’s a crazy, ever-changing cat-and-mouse game.”

At the same time, there seems to be an expanding customer base: Usage rates jumped nearly 40 percent among Americans older than 12 between 2005 and 2009, according to the latest DEA figures. And this growth seems to be driven, in part, by the activities of Asian gangs.

“Ready availability of Ecstasy has enabled distributors to expand their customer base of young adult Caucasians to include new user groups, most notably African-American and Hispanic users,” the Office of National Drug Control Policy reported this month. “The Asian transnational criminal organizations have begun distributing Ecstasy to African-American and Hispanic street gangs, which distribute this and other illicit drugs in markets throughout the United States, most notably in the Southeast, Southwest and Great Lakes Regions.”

Even in this sprawling port city on the Gulf Coast — a major stronghold for the Mexican cartels dealing in cocaine, heroin and foreign-grown marijuana — Asian groups dominate the market for MDMA and its synthetic variants.

“They’re very insular,” Anthony Scott, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA’s Houston field division, told The Daily in an interview at the agency’s local office. “They pretty much isolate themselves. Unless they know you, they pretty much only deal with Asians.”

The pairing marks a natural evolution for both the gangs and the drugs. In the early 1990s, Ecstasy was the prime choice of young, oversexed white people with glow sticks and ample free time. Meanwhile, crime syndicates like Wah Ching and Hung Mun were running human smuggling rings, credit card fraud schemes and extortion rackets. A 1992 U.S. Senate report called Asian organized crime “a major new threat confronting law enforcement around the globe.”

Asian crime networks found themselves well-positioned to profit from — but also fuel — the recent revival in popularity. Along with the main chemical ingredient in MDMA, loosely regulated facilities in the Far East began to supply chemicals used to make the new variants.

Following established smuggling routes, the groups started moving their ingredients to Canadian laboratories for refinement.

From laboratories based mostly in British Columbia, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy report, smuggling groups started using the vast northern border to move hundreds of thousands of tablets into the United States. Consumers in Los Angeles pay from $3 to $11 a hit; the price in New York City ranges from $3 to $25.

Here in Houston, hundreds of thousands of pills arrive for wholesale distribution in this sprawling Asian enclave just west of a vast Halliburton facility. A number of local cases have shed light on how the networks do business, including the recent investigation of Long Vo, 52, described by one investigator as a businessman with diverse interests in golf courses, hotels and condos in the Vietnamese city of Nha Trang.

The investigation got a big break on June 7, 2008, when an undercover agent bought 5,000 pills from a courier named Hai Le, court records show. Posing as a commercial pilot with limited time in town, the agent dealt at first with a broker named Cong Dinh.

The airline cover story, with its implication of far-flung connections, made plausible the agent’s next offer, according to court testimony. On April 3, 2009, Vo personally handed over $20,000, which the agent agreed to move from Houston to Philadelphia in a test money laundering run. Vo “claimed at one time that he has up to 13 million U.S. dollars in Vietnam that needs to be moved back into the United States and Canada,” testified Officer Tony Huynh of the Houston police. As a condition of getting Vo’s money laundering business, the agent also agreed to buy 10,000 tablets of MDMA a week.

Over the course of about 15 transactions, the undercover agent bought more than 40,000 MDMA tablets from Vo, court records show. Eventually, the investigation led to the Mercury Cafe, a club operated by Vo’s wife in Little Saigon.

Vo used Mercury, a popular hangout for younger Asian men, as a headquarters for recruiting lower-level distributors of the 1,000-tablet bundles known as K-packs, according to his defense lawyer, Albert Fong.

In 2010, the FBI secured a search warrant for Vo’s house. In the hall coat closet, they found a backpack containing about 34,000 MDMA tablets. They also found a small arsenal of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Last year, Vo pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to distribute MDMA, making a sealed agreement with prosecutors. On Jan. 4, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

The Mercury Cafe was shut down, according to Angela Dodge, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice.

But as Vo’s co-defendants await trial, the cafe has already re-opened in the same storefront in Little Saigon, next to an electronics shop that also offers English language lessons.

Reached by phone last week, Vo’s lawyer said he accepts responsibility for his days at the Mercury Cafe.

“We’re not going to appeal the decision,” Fong said. The case, he added, fit an increasingly familiar pattern: “It’s always the Asians that seem to be pushing large quantities of MDMA.”