This article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of High Times. It only dawned on me this week that I could upload it here with the PDF: High Spies of the Mossad
The voice on the other end of Alex Barak‘s phone on the evening of July 14th 2003 asked about some used furniture Barak had put up for sale, after the bar and cafe he ran in central Tel Aviv went under after a couple of years in operation. Barak went downstairs, and moments later a gunman opened fire from point blank range and fled on foot without a trace. The single bullet that hit Barak drilled into his spine, leaving him confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the chest down for the final decade of his life.
The bullet that disabled Barak didn’t kill him, but marked the cruel and definite end to decades of living dangerously.
To this day the shooting of Alex Barak – reportedly a one-time Mossad operative and organized crime figure – depending on who you ask – remains unsolved.
In the coming weeks, Israel’s largest medical marijuana supplier will unveil a new, highly-potent strain inspired in part by Barak, who died in December 2012 and whose life story has so many twists and turns it might be best understood if you are completely baked.
The “BarakAryeh” strain will be a highly potent 70% Indica, 30% Sativa mix, with an average Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the active ingredient in marijuana) concentration of 20%. The company producing the strain “Tikun Olam” says the herb will have “fruity flavors and odors” and is recommended for sleep disorders, pain, and nausea and vomiting. The first plants of the strain will be ready to harvest in a few weeks, the company said, after which they will hold a small internal ceremony.
It’s an interesting posthumous chapter for Barak, whose name first made the news in Israel and around the world on July 4th 1984, when he was found by customs inspectors in a shipping crate at Stansted Airport in London, next to his childhood friend Felix Abutbul, who in the years to come would become one of Israel’s most famous mobsters. In a crate next to the two childhood friends was Omaru Dikko, the former Nigerian Transportation minister who had fled Lagos after a military coup overthrew the government of Shehu Shagari in 1983. Accused of embezzling millions of dollars in oil revenue from the country, he was placed on a wanted list by the government in Nigeria, and hid out in London. Next to Dikko was Dr. Levi-Arie Shapiro, an Israeli anesthesiologist from the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikvah who was taxed with drugging Dikko and making sure he didn’t choke on his vomit on the flight back to Lagos.
Barak, the leader of the kidnapping team, would later serve 8.5 years in prison in the UK, while Abutbol and Shapira both were released after six years. In foreign press reports at the time, Barak was described as the head of a Mossad operations team sent to kidnap Dikko, though Israel has always denied any role in the plot, and there has always been widespread speculation that the team were private contractors hired by enemies of Dikko’s.
Behind bars Barak spent years finishing most of his autobiography, a self-published, semi-fictional account of his life story entitled “The Man Who Died Twice: An Israeli Legend”, that shows Barak on the cover, wearing a black Israel Defense Forces beret and looking somewhat like a mid-90s Saddam Hussein.
After he left prison, Abutbul continued his rise in the Israeli underworld, becoming the king of Netanya, the largely-Francophone coastal city that has become synonymous with organized crime in Israel. When Barak was finally released from prison and returned to Israel, he fell back in with Abutbul, becoming a trusted associate, and allegedly running a number of hustles making up for lost time in prison in the UK, while also opening one of the first internet cafes in Israel. The best friends, Felix and Alex remained close until August 2002, when Felix was gunned down outside the casino he ran in Prague by a motorcycle-riding hitman. When the news made it back to Barak police believe he plotted his revenge, and a few weeks later he was arrested sitting in a car outside a Netanya house belonging to a man who had been involved in a dispute with Abutbul. Police said Barak was carrying a camera and had a list of his friend’s rivals, though Barak denied he was plotting to take lethal revenge on Felix’s killers.
The arrest was reported in the Israeli press and the payback wasn’t long to come, in the form of a single bullet to Barak’s spine several months later, an attack that some have stated may have been linked to his time in the Mossad, and not to his alleged underworld ties.
The headline of a July 15th, 2003 article in Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s most widely-read daily read “A bullet in the back: Man of mystery Alex Barak shot and badly wounded last night outside his house”. The article reports that witnesses said they saw a man in a white tank top and a baseball cap shoot him before fleeing on foot, and that before he hit the ground, Barak said “someone must look after the girl” and fell unconscious. That was the moment that one lifetime for Barak ended, and another, one in which medical marijuana would play a major role, began.
Often touted for their success in amassing Nobel prizes, Israeli scientists have also been among the pioneers of the study of marijuana, chief among them 82-year-old Hebrew University of Jerusalem chemistry professor Dr. Rafael Mechoulam, who in the 1960s became the first to isolate THC and began to research its medical benefits. Today in Israel over 11,000 patients are licensed by the Health Ministry to use cannabis for medical reasons, and Tikun Olam is one of the most prominent of the handful of companies, producing high-grade marijuana for over 3,000 Israelis who receive their herb each month, including cancer patients, ALS sufferers, and Israel Defense Forces soldiers suffering from PTSD and night terrors.
Tikun Olam grows the weed on an 11,000 square meter complex of greenhouses in an undisclosed location in the north of Israel. They also run two store-front dispensaries – one in north Tel Aviv and the other near the grow farm in the town of Safed, the small, predominantly ultra-Orthodox hilltop town in the Galilee known as the resting place of Jewish holy men. They also have an office in Tel Aviv, which is currently located in an apartment a few blocks from the dispensary. Walking up to the office last week, the aroma of high-grade marijuana permeated the stairwell. Asked if the neighbors complain about the smell, Tikun Olam head of advocacy Eran Rise said “no, actually the opposite.”
Inside the apartment office sits a 26-year-old orthodox Jewish man from Jerusalem named Yedidya, paralyzed from the neck down following a car accident when he was 14. He sits in his wheelchair in front of a table where a half-open sack of “Erez” sits. Yedidya says marijuana changed his life, and though his parents were wary when they were first heard the idea, since he began smoking he no longer takes a daily cocktail of pain killers and anti-depressants.
“My parents were against it at first, but then they saw that I was finally able to sleep through the night and that it helped give me back my appetite and get over depression, so they accepted it.”
Like most of the company’s 12 strains, Erez, the company’s first, was named after a Tikun Olam patient, former Leukemia patient Erez Petkovic, who died in 2007. The strain Eran Almog, which packs a jaw-dropping 28% THC content, was named after Eran Almog, who passed away in 2007 at age of 23 from Castleman’s syndrome and was the son of IDF Maj Gen Doron Almog, who took part in the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976. Other strains include “Gog and Magog”, a 20% THC Indica and Sativa blend, named after the biblical end of days battle and Avidekel, one of two strains that contain almost zero THC and which Tikun Olam says provide the medicinal benefits of marijuana without getting the patient high. The next strain the company will market is “BarakAryeh”, named after Alex Barak and Arieh Lefkowitz, a Parkinson’s patient and survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp who died this year aged 80.
Alex Barak‘s ex-wife Lauren Barak today lives in a small apartment next to the posh Kikar Hamedina shopping district in Tel Aviv, not far from the Tikun Olam dispensary. The 50-year-old Paris native looks every bit a former model – tall, blond and elegant, a look that she has helped her run an image consulting company based out of the small ground floor apartment where she lives with her 14 year old daughter Noa.
Stepping around the small living room of the apartment, she hands out a copy of Alex‘s autobiography, adding “don’t feel bad if you can’t finish it, a lot of people have tried and failed.”
Lauren was upstairs at her and Alex‘s Tel Aviv apartment when the shots rang out that 2003 morning, and was the first to come to his aid. The moment was a harsh dose of reality about the life her husband had chosen, a life she said she always preferred not to ask or know about, even if it was impossible to ignore that their lives were not typical.
“During all of my marriage to Alex I always preferred not to know what he did or didn’t do, but I would see things though, the type of people who would come by our house especially,” she said, in particular Alex‘s friends from Netanya and associates of Felix’s.
Alex‘s injury and the care-taker role that landed on Lauren’s shoulders were a burden on their marriage, and in 2006 they divorced, though as Lauren tells it, they agreed to share custody of Noa and remained best friends and partners.
“After the accident he wasn’t the same person and neither was I. I had to learn how to be independent, to learn how to live and take care of things without Alex, which was a real challenge because he was always the type to take control.”
Lauren said her ex-husband discovered medical marijuana after attending disabled rights protests a couple years after their divorce. He then became an activist, a familiar face at hearings at the Israeli parliament on disabled people’s rights and on medical marijuana, later becoming the chairman of “Nes Maoz”, an organization for medical marijuana patients in Israel.
Barak, who was paralyzed from the chest down but retained 20% of the use of his arms, managed to smoke on his own, unlike the more severely disabled who have to be medicated through edible marijuana or THC pills. He was a very heavy smoker in those last few years Lauren said, adding that while she didn’t quite understand, she did notice that he instantly stopped taking all of his pain medication after he began medicating with marijuana.
Like other of his loved ones, it was clear that to Lauren Alex was larger than life, a man who lived at full-throttle, even when confined to a wheelchair.
“He never complained about what he couldn’t do, I never heard him do it once. It tells you what type of man he was, how strong-willed he was.”