Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  In 1994, he was convicted of heroin trafficking and was sentenced to three and a half years in an Israeli prison. The judge granted Tuito's request to take a week to settle his affairs before beginning his sentence. A day before he was to report to jail, Tuito fled Tel Aviv using his brother Daniel's passport. He later settled in quiet, tranquil Woodland Hills, California, where he rented a single-level ranch-style home and sent for Aliza and the children to join him.

  Tuito dressed thrifty, never flashy. He preferred track suits and loafers to suits and dress shoes. His friends considered him to be a protective and loving father to his children, and his new neighborhood had all the trappings of suburbia: a wood swing set in the yard, teenagers with heavy backpacks walking to the middle school down the street, and the Motion Picture Retirement Home—senior living for the stars—just a few blocks away. In the summertime Tuito would host family-style barbecues in his backyard at least twice a week. He fed his guests homemade savory meatballs and garlicky Moroccan fish.

  In America, Tuito continued to ply his trade. He bought cocaine in bulk from an unknown Colombian connection and marijuana by the pound from a Mexican dealer. Tuito paid $400 a pound for the weed and sold it for $1,000 to a burgeoning network of buyers in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Pittsburgh. A member of Tuito's crew would later estimate that he sent about two thousand kilos of cocaine and six thousand pounds of marijuana (the equivalent of about three million joints) to Pittsburgh alone between 1995 and 1997.

  Tuito was known as a fierce competitor who muscled out middlemen and rivals. In February 1996, gunmen shot him in broad daylight as he was walking down the street in Los Angeles. Tuito ran for his life and escaped with only minor injuries. The incident was never reported, but the shrapnel scars on his right leg and buttocks would become identifying marks in his criminal record.

  Tuito's L.A. ring included trusted friends and relatives who helped him to transport and distribute his drugs and collect the cash. They opened front businesses—Sami's Bakery and MGM Beepers—in a cramped strip mall in the San Fernando Valley. Every few months, Tuito would make personal visits to his buyers in Pittsburgh, Miami, and New York to tend to business and party in the strip clubs and nightclubs.

  Tuito told his friends he would never return to Israel now that he was a fugitive. But he still sent money home to his family in Zerufa. Tuito could afford to help his family—business was good. But good is never enough. Tuito wanted legitimacy as an American businessman. And he needed to open a cash-heavy business to hide his drug money behind. A Laundromat or hole-in-the-wall take-out joint would have sufficed for his needs, but Tuito wanted something with cachet—a social spot, where he could invite friends and entertain women. He set his sights on Pittsburgh.

  Agent Gagne had never heard of Oded Tuito, but he already shared curious parallels with the man who would one day become his number one target. Gagne and his partner had told Ghel and Michel that they were Pittsburgh nightclub owners, in order to hide their real jobs as drug cops. Oded Tuito wanted to be a Pittsburgh nightclub owner in order to hide his real job as a drug dealer. And Tuito's club-owning dreams were inspired by the glamorous nightclubs he had visited in New York—the very clubs that Gagne and Germanowski were now trying to infiltrate.

  22 THE CLUB KING OF NEW YORK

  NEW YORK HAS LONG been an electric cultural intersection, a place where artists and civilians come together to indulge in poetry and poison as they write the era's next social chapter, from Harlem's Prohibition-era speakeasies, drunk on jazz and bootleg whiskey, to the mournful heroin-steeped blues clubs of the Village in the forties and the bohemian hippies at Woodstock in 1969, who smoked pot and prayed for peace as they swayed to folk and rock music on a rain-soaked muddy farm. In the seventies, New York gave us disco.

  New York's Studio 54 made $7 million in its first year, 1977, by courting celebrity and mastering the art of the velvet-rope rejection. At Studio 54, disco was the feather-haired muse of the lip-gloss set and cocaine coursed through the blood of the satin-and-glitter fashion victims on the dance floor. When the club's owners went to prison for tax evasion three years later, New York nightlife was ripe for the taking. Enter Canadian-born club entrepreneur Peter Gatien, who staked his claim just in time to cash in on the impulsive 1980s-era Wall Streeters and yuppies who believed in spending their hard-earned money in conspicuous fashion.

  Peter Gatien was a six-foot-tall willowy figure who dressed in black, chain-smoked cigarettes, and wore an ominous black eye patch that covered a hollow socket. Gatien had lost his eye in a hockey game at the age of sixteen and used the $17,000 insurance settlement to open a discount jeans store. The young businessman soon realized that alcohol earned better profits than jeans. He could make $4 on a pair of $8 jeans or sell 25-cent beers for $1.25, a 500 percent markup. At nineteen, Gatien opened his first club in his hometown of Cornwall, Ontario. He took a dilapidated country-and-Western tavern, painted the walls black, put up a disco ball, and transformed it into a rock-and-roll club, with Rush as the opening-night act. (Rush was also, incidentally, Bob Gagne's favorite band.) Gatien went on to open successful clubs in Hollywood, Florida, and Atlanta, Georgia, where patrons danced on a glass floor with live sharks swimming underfoot. New York City was the next frontier.

  The Episcopalian Church of the Holy Communion on Sixth Avenue and 20th Street is a grand piece of architecture designed by Richard Upjohn in 1844 as a Gothic-inspired house of worship with fifty-foot-high ceilings and stained-glass windows depicting biblical scenes. The church attained landmark status in 1966 but fell on hard times and was deconsecrated in 1972. By 1983, when Gatien purchased the building, it was Odyssey House, a rehab center and refuge for recovering addicts. Gatien poured millions of dollars into its redesign: the main dance floor and stage area featured a high-tech sound and light system, and a half-dozen staircases led clubgoers to sprawling lounges, DJ booths, cozy alcoves, and VIP rooms.

  On November 9, 1983, Gatien opened Limelight to an estimated ten thousand clubgoers. Andy Warhol, Billy Idol, and other celebrities were shepherded past the patrons, who were lined up for six blocks. Some guests arrived dressed as biblical figures. A Jesus impersonator, held aloft on a cross, was refused admission. Religious protestors, horrified at the hedonistic reimagining of a house of God, staged protests outside. Peter Gatien was seen standing on the steps of his church that night, watching the birth of his own American dream.

  The same year Limelight was born, a seventeen-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology dropout named Michael Alig was working as a busboy at the club Danceteria on nearby West 21st Street. Michael Alig, like Peter Gatien, had business acumen. As a boy in South Bend, Indiana, Alig sold candy bars out of a shoe box he kept in his locker. He'd buy five for a dollar and sell them at a dollar apiece to classmates, who nicknamed him “Michael the Candy Man.” Alig was a five-foot-eight waifish gay teen with soft brown eyes, charismatic energy, a sharp intellect, and a rapacious hunger for attention. Alig had left his small-town roots to reinvent himself in New York. He studied the club business until he became Dance-teria's most successful party promoter. Alig would make phone calls all day, then hit the bars at night, handing out free admission tickets to attractive night crawlers. When Alig worked the door, if he thought you were sexy, it didn't matter if you were underage, you were in. And he made sure you had a good time—drink tickets, drugs, and sex were party favors.

  Alig soon nurtured a burgeoning circle of suburban youth and trustafarians who delighted in his impromptu mischief. He was their puckish leader, the pied piper of the latchkey set. They embraced adolescence, wearing diapers and pigtails and sucking on pacifiers. They painted their faces with polka dots and dressed up like every night was Halloween. When Danceteria's owners bought the club Tunnel on the Westside Highway, Alig was let loose in the wide open space and his Club Kids followed.

  The Club Kids experimented with a life-as-theater aesthetic. Their bodies were pierced and fish-hooked and tattooed like walking art
work. The grotesque was glamorous. Alig's cohort and fashionista staple Ernie Glam created wild outfits (seatless unitards and glittery headpieces fashioned from wires and tubes) that evoked sex, science fiction, and campy fantasy in one-off looks he described as “robo-mutant club freak” or “perverted-sex clown aesthetic.”

  “The outfits weren't just outrageous, they were just sometimes disturbing,” Village Voice columnist Michael Musto said in the 1997 documentary Party Monster. “I mean, everything from oxygen masks to blood on the face and all these apocalyptic images. The aesthetic was one that was both embracing American capitalism and mocking it at the same time.”

  When Alig tired of the boundaries of a club space, he took his band on raucous field trips, or outlaw parties. He wasn't the first to throw them, but he made them famous. The inaugural outlaw party was on an abandoned railway bridge, overlooking 99 Tenth Avenue, the future site of NYFD headquarters. Alig and his posse once posted detour signs on the Williamsburg Bridge, handed out cocktails to astonished motorists, and partied in the traffic jam. He held massive outlaw parties inside packed subway cars, where painted clubgoers danced from car to car; and at a Burger King in Times Square, where Alig ordered a hundred burgers for his guests and danced on the tables, sloshing vodka from a plastic cup. He once rented an eighteen-wheel big rig, had it fitted with a sound system, liquor bar, and disco ball, and invited two hundred partygoers to take a ride inside the disco truck. Panicked partiers fainted as the truck reached sweltering temperatures, the sound system crashed to the floor, and the driver failed to hear them pounding to be let out.

  In 1987, Alig was twenty-one years old and the most famous party promoter in America. Alig and his Club Kids were written up in the pages of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and People magazine. They were TV guests of Joan Rivers and Geraldo Rivera.

  Alig's popularity as a promoter coincided with Peter Gatien's initial descent as a club owner. Limelight courted 1980s chic, hosting star-studded Academy Awards parties, William Burroughs's birthday party, and celebs such as Mick Jagger, Rob Lowe, Phoebe Cates, Melissa Gilbert, and Grace Jones. The club had even staged such rock luminaries as Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Guns N’ Roses. But a confluence of financially challenging events almost buried Limelight. In May 1985, former Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager rebounded from tax evasion to open a rival club, Palladium, luring Gatien's regulars away with free admission. In 1987, a stock market crash drew away the wealthy clubgoers who paid full-price door fees and bar tabs. The club's faithful gay patrons also seemed to be less interested in dancing and more focused on fighting the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging the community. Compounding lackluster attendance was the increasing gentrification of Limelight's former industrial-zone setting. The new next-door neighbors didn't appreciate the big bass beats of Prince's “Erotic City,” powered by 14,500 watts through 130 speakers, rattling the windows of their loft apartments at 4:00 a.m. By 1989, Limelight was nicknamed “Slimelight.”

  But then Tunnel's owner made the mistake of cutting Michael Alig loose, believing the Club Kid scene was on its last legs. Gatien quickly scooped Alig up.

  Gatien saw himself as a patron of fashion, art, and music, but unlike Studio 54's gregarious Rubell, Gatien seemed to have little interest in circulating. Alig, on the other hand, was charming and arrogant, the consummate party host, court jester, and people pleaser. Alig played the role Gatien would not. Gatien gave him cash, creative control, and carte blanche to reinvent Limelight. In turn, Alig remade the Gothic church into a thriving, moneymaking epicenter of nightlife once again, a feat that officially crowned him king of the Club Kids.

  By the early 1990s, crass yuppie materialism had burned out, giving way to the cult of disenchanted youth. The Club Kids’ simple message to anyone who felt neglected, misunderstood, or less than beautiful was: “Be somebody.” It was the same message of the reefer smokers and dealers in the clubs of Harlem during the Jazz Age who encouraged hipsters to “light up and be somebody.”

  “There's a place for you,” is how Club Kid James St. James described the new scene. “If you feel like you're a freak, if you've got a hunchback, throw a little glitter on it, honey, and go out and dance and show the world that it's okay.”

  Every time Club Kids showed up on TV, new young converts from middle America would be inspired to run away to New York to join them. Alig let them believe that in his world, they could become freakish superheroes. It was liberating and boundless.

  “There was a plan to take over the country by spreading that mentality to other cities,” Alig's pal Walt Paper told Time Out New York years later. “But unfortunately, everyone got strung out on drugs and ruined it.”

  In 1991, Alig discovered twenty-two-year-old party promoter and techno DJ Lord Michael, who would herald a new era in Gatien's clubs by flooding the scene with suburban ravers, wannabe thugs, and a seemingly limitless supply of Ecstasy.

  Lord Michael was a dark-haired, blue-eyed Italian American who two years earlier had been just Mike Caruso, a college dropout and deliveryman at Mike's Radiator Repair, his father's shop in Staten Island. When a car accident put Caruso out of commission, he took the advice of his DJ cousin and began promoting parties. Caruso got his nickname during a trip to the United Kingdom and Amsterdam with a group of DJs and tour managers. When he exchanged his entire budget of American dollars for pounds all in one shot, he was stuck carrying around a ridiculously large wad of cash. The other managers dubbed him “Lord Michael,” and the nickname stuck.

  During his trip abroad, Caruso met a blond Grateful Dead-loving British hippie in his late thirties named Meru, who handed Lord Michael his first Ecstasy pill and encouraged him to bring techno back to New York City. Techno was high-energy, aggressive dance music. Whereas regular dance music was about 115 to 120 beats per minute, Techno revved up the floor at 140 bpm. Caruso was energized by the London rave scene—the all-night parties, strobe lights, and thumping techno beats—and the serotonin rush of his first hit of Ecstasy. When he returned to the States, he gave a crateful of techno records to spinners Anthony Acid and DJ Repeat, who played gigs in Staten Island. Michael Alig's boyfriend, DJ Keoki, happened to catch one of Repeat's shows, and soon Repeat, Anthony Acid, and their manager/party promoter, Lord Michael, were working parties at Limelight.

  Caruso's popular Thursday night “Inner Mind” parties in Limelight's chapel room attracted the same faithful bridge-and-tunnel crowd that attended his Staten Island gigs. Gatien couldn't have been happier, because the B&T kids from the outer boroughs paid full-price door fees and bar tabs, unlike the Club Kid divas, who didn't think they should have to pay for anything.

  In the spring of 1991, Caruso's mentor, Meru, traveled to the States and paid him a visit in Limelight's chapel. Meru gave the new party promoter 150 Ecstasy pills—a free sample to seed the clubs. Caruso would later testify that he handed Ecstasy out no charge at his “Inner Mind” parties and gave twenty doses to Peter Gatien as a show of respect. The pills were a huge hit. A few months later, Caruso made a deal with Meru for two thousand pills at $8 a pill and sold them for $20 each. Two months later, Caruso placed another order for six thousand pills.

  In the summer of 1991, Caruso added a Friday night “Future Shock” party to his Limelight lineup. Record numbers of guests stormed the Gothic church when word got out about Lord Mike's free Ecstasy punch—a special recipe of cranberry juice, vodka, and $1,000 worth of crushed pills. Caruso would mix up the concoction before the club opened and then serve it from a plastic-lined garbage pail around 12:30 a.m., handing the spiked cocktail out in plastic cups from the chapel floor or behind the DJ booth where he spun records. Clubgoers lined up an hour early waiting for the frenzied handout to begin. The punch would be gone in five minutes. Caruso's techno sounds, combined with the club's laser shows and strobe lights, only intensified the Ecstasy-taking experience. A good Friday night saw about three thousand guests. Caruso's “Future Shock” Ecstasy parties could bring in
more than four thousand people and $66,000 at the door, plus another $25,000 to $30,000 at the bar.

  Limelight's resurgence gave Gatien financial power. By 1992, he had bought up his competitors Tunnel and Palladium and added a fourth spot, Club USA, to his collection. Alig helped to oversee the design of new theme rooms and lounges for his old stomping grounds at Tunnel, including a padded room filled with plastic balls, unisex bathrooms, and a lobby area where a wall of urinals filled with sand served as ashtrays. Alig's parties drew an eclectic mix of gay icons, performance artists, and marginal celebrities who enjoyed rubbing elbows with the fabulous Club Kids. Alig idolized drag queen RuPaul and Lady Miss Kier of the band DeeLite, who were frequent guests. He threw campy glitter-fraught award ceremonies for actress Donna Douglas (Elly May Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies) and Tina Louise (Ginger from Gilligan's Island).

  Alig's famous “Blood Feast” party at Limelight was an ode to the slasher films he grew up watching with his mother, Elke. The theme: dead Club Kids. They covered themselves in fake blood and screamed at guests from glass coffins. Club Kid James St. James wore a bloody white dress and fishnets, scraps of rancid, raw liver hanging from his body, as he writhed on a gurney. Alig—who arrived at his party with a fake bloody axe through his head—was depicted on the party flyers as a dismembered murder victim, with Club Kid doyenne Jennifer “Jennytalia” Dembrow sampling his brains with a fork.

  Alig's Wednesday night “Disco 2000” parties at Limelight delighted in debauchery and questionable performance artists such as Ida Slaptor, who would spray champagne enemas onto cheering crowds and pull Christmas lights from her rump. Costumed exhibitionists went by such stage names as Clara the Carefree Chicken, Danny the Amputee, and George the Pee Drinker. Alig was known to urinate on people from the tops of stairwells and trick friends into drinking cups of the same.