LAB MASS-PRODUCED ECSTASY, AGENTS SAY

The Bunker Was Shut Down Earlier This Month. Police Said It Could Make 1
Million Pills In A Batch.

Authorities say a secret underground lab buried in a mountainside near
Allentown was capable of producing million-tablet batches of the illegal
club drug Ecstasy.

Attorney General Mike Fisher displayed photographs of the sophisticated
bunker yesterday at a news conference in Allentown, about 25 miles from the
hillside where it was discovered.

The lab had become a major source of the hallucinogen on the East Coast
before it was raided this month, Fisher said.

Prosecutors said a Bangor engineer, Duane Michael Policelli, built the lab
inside two giant metal tanks, buried beneath a long driveway leading to a
hillside home that he dubbed "The Citadel."

Concealed beneath boulders and behind a hidden door, the lab had
electricity and plumbing, a press for making pills, automated machinery,
and sinks where raw materials were converted into drugs, state narcotics
agents said.

"We believe he was supplying up and down the East Coast," Fisher spokesman
Kevin Harley said. "If he needed to fill an order for a million pills or
tablets, we believe that, based on the amount of chemicals found and the
equipment he had, he could easily fill that order."

Policelli, 51, was arrested Dec. 12. Investigators said he had been making
the drug for at least two years.

Reached at his Easton office yesterday, Policelli's lawyer, Brian Monahan,
declined to speak about the case. He has previously said that his client,
who is free on $100,000 bail, regretted any embarrassment he caused his
family. Authorities said Policelli had been storing chemicals for
processing into Ecstasy at a defunct garment factory in Roseto. Last year,
Policelli applied for a zoning variance, seeking permission to use the
plant to make fruit drinks.

Ecstasy got its start in urban dance clubs and raves in the 1990s but has
since spread to middle America. Once almost exclusively imported from
Europe, the pills are increasingly being made in clandestine labs
throughout the United States, drug enforcement agents said.

Police raided a lab near San Diego in October 2001 that they said was
capable of making between 1 million and 1.5 million tabs of Ecstasy a
month. At the time, authorities called it one of the largest labs ever
found in the United States.

Agents shut down a lab in Connecticut earlier this year that they said had
been producing Ecstasy pills stamped with the logos of this year's Super
Bowl teams, the New England Patriots and St. Louis Rams.

Other alleged Ecstasy labs have been busted during the last two years in
Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia and Michigan.

Ecstasy is the street name for 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, a
synthetic stimulant and hallucinogen.