Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  Club Kids who doubled as drug dealers dressed up too, including Limelight's most visible dealer, Andre “Angel” Melendez, a Colombian-born hopeful actor who wore a harness of white angel's wings that spanned nearly six feet. The dealers at Limelight and Tunnel offered a variety of pick-me-ups, downers, hallucinogens, and aphrodisiacs. Clubgoers could choose from ketamine (an anesthetic used in animal surgery, which can cause schizophrenia-like symptoms), GHB (a liquid depressant sold by the capful or swig), Rohypnol (the so-called date rape drug), speed, cocaine, and marijuana. But it was Ecstasy that defined the Club Kid era. Ecstasy induced self-confidence, hypersensitivity, a desire to touch and be touched.

  At Alig's “Emergency Room” parties, a tent decorated with a medic cross—tilted to resemble a giant X—was set up on the chapel dance floor. Club Kids Junky Jonathan and Richie Rich dressed in nurse's uniforms and wrote out “prescriptions” for their favorite par-tygoers.

  “I feel depressed.”

  “You need an Ecstasy prescription!”

  “I'm too hyper.”

  “You need a K prescription!”

  “Patients” brought the prescriptions to another area of the chapel where Club Kids in white lab coats would dispense the drugs like Pez candies into the patient's mouth.

  Alig even took Ecstasy with his mother, Elke, at his birthday party at Tunnel. They arrived by limo and were escorted in by security as fans screamed, “Michael! Michael!” Alig led his mother by the hand through the club and danced with her on the main floor. Everyone wanted to meet Elke, the belle of the ball. Alig gave his mother a hit of X and told her it would take away her headache. She later told Geraldo Rivera on national television that she enjoyed Ecstasy, that it took away her headache.

  At Peter Gatien's height he had a thousand people on his payroll and was making millions of dollars a month in combined revenues from Tunnel, Palladium, Club USA, and Limelight. By some accounts, his clubs earned up to $350,000 a night on cover charges alone. He branched out into movies, executive-producing A Bronx Tale, with Robert De Niro, in 1993. He funded several of Alig's creative projects, including Project X, a Club Kid magazine, and Klub Kid Kards, campy trading cards with photos, bios, likes, and dislikes. Michael Caruso's card depicted him at the DJ booth with a hit of Ecstasy on his tongue.

  When Caruso became a promoter at Limelight in 1991, he made $100 a week plus $3 per guest. By 1994, he was a club director, making $1,400 a week and living his dream. Caruso was photographed, high on Ecstasy, with counterculture icon Timothy Leary He hosted Moby years before the DJ techno stylist became a Grammy nominee and multiplatinum recording artist. Lord Mike's fame and drug consumption would soar at competing rates. At the pinnacle of his celebrity, he was snorting cocaine four to six times a week, smoking pot six to eight times a week, and swallowing two dozen to three dozen Valiums and Quaaludes a week.

  Caruso would later claim he had been corrupted by his sudden success and spoiled by Gatien's passiveness. Club security and employees knew that “the two Michaels” were untouchable—if Alig or Caruso wanted to take bottles of liquor from the bar, throw people out, or comp admission for twenty strangers on a whim, it was best to fall into line. Peter Gatien took the two Michaels to private dinner parties, gave them cash and gifts, paid for trips to Europe, covered their rent when they were late. Caruso shopped for Versace shirts with Gatien's ex-wife; he was friendly with Gatien's daughters; he had personal conversations with Gatien about hockey, football, sex, music, and his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, whom Caruso wanted to marry. He felt like club royalty, the lord of Limelight, which was a far cry from his station a few years earlier, picking up auto parts for his dad's repair shop. Caruso believed that Gatien was a close friend, something Gatien would later deny.

  In 1992, Caruso hired Robert Gordon, a small-time thug from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to be his personal Ecstasy dealer. He started out by giving Gordon a baggie with twenty-five pills to sell to his friends in the clubs. Soon it was a hundred pills and he could sell to anyone.

  “Don't worry about the security,” Caruso told Gordon. “Just tell them, ‘I'm with Lord Michael.’ “

  Greed ruled Caruso's heart. He later estimated that he made about half a million dollars in Ecstasy sales from 1991 to 1994. But he didn't stop at drug dealing. He became an accomplished swindler, trying his hand at cellular phone fraud, ATM robbery, extortion, and the hustling and robbing of dealers and friends alike. In the summer of 1992, Caruso agreed to sell twenty thousand pills to a promoter/fashion designer/Ecstasy dealer named Goldyloxx, but when Caruso had trouble coming up with the drugs, he decided it was just easier to rob the guy. Caruso hired two friends to pose as cops and when Goldyloxx sent his assistant, Mr. Purple—known for his purple hair, makeup, and clothes—over to Caruso's Gramercy Park apartment to buy the pills, the “cops” jumped Mr. Purple from behind, pushed him into the apartment, and ordered him to drop his bag of cash and lie on the ground. They handcuffed Caruso to make it seem like a real police bust. After taking his cash, they put Mr. Purple in a cab and told him they were going to let him walk this time. Caruso gave his accomplices $50,000 and spent the remaining $130,000 on studio equipment, $600 dinners, shopping sprees ($1,200 shoes and designer suits), and a first-class trip to Germany with his girlfriend.

  A year later Caruso ripped off his main supplier and U.K. associate, Meru, who had sent a sixty-year-old female courier to the States to deliver nine thousand pills. Caruso took the pills and told the woman to go home, that he'd already taken care of Meru's payment. She knew she was being conned, but what could she do?

  Peter Gatien's club empire was slowly being overrun by wannabe thugs and drug-addicted divas. And yet Caruso's status at Limelight never wavered, even when he installed criminals into Gatien's clubs and handed over more responsibility to his right-hand man, Robert Gordon. Gordon wasn't even a club employee, but he was ever-present and known to socialize with Gatien. Gordon and a half dozen or so of his friends became regular “house dealers” working under the protection of club security. Some of the dealers—Totally Todd, Desi Monster, and Gene the Rabbit—came from Club Kid culture, while others were ravers and toughs who just co-opted it, guys like Paulie “Sir Paul” Torres and Frankie “the Baker” Romano. Gordon took the nickname “Stacy,” short for Ecstasy.

  On any given night, there would be three or four different parties at Limelight specifically tailored to a gay or straight crowd. The house dealers knew that straight ravers liked to buy Ecstasy or keta-mine and dance on the main floor, while gay Club Kids took everything from Ecstasy and speed to heroin, crystal meth, and Rohypnol, hanging out mostly in the Shampoo Lounge. A rope at the back of the Shampoo Lounge marked the division between gay and straight parties. There were even separate entrances. The straight crowd entered at the front door on Sixth Avenue and the gay crowd had a 20th Street entrance. The drug dealers worked both sides of the dividing line and didn't care whose money they took.

  The nightly distribution of drugs was well organized under Robert Gordon's command. Each dealer was given a plastic zip-top bag of party favors with their initials on it. Frankie the Baker was responsible for cooking the ketamine and giving security drugs, just to keep them happy. And everybody had a station. Gordon sold drugs at the foot of Limelight's first-floor staircase on the gay side. On the straight side, Frankie the Baker was by the two phone booths along the south wall of the TV room. Totally Todd was on the main floor. Sir Paul took the chapel. Gene and a guy known only as “Vinnie” were under the staircase on the main floor. Clubgoers just handed over the money and palmed the drugs.

  Dealers worked from 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. At the end of the shift, Gordon would cash out the dealers on the gay side and Paulie would cash out the straight side. If a dealer started out with a bag of twenty pills, he was responsible for twenty pills. Cash and remaining pills were collected, minus a cut of the profits. If Caruso or Gordon saw a rogue dealer in the club, they'd send someone over to shake the guy down a
nd make him pay $300 or more just for permission to sell. Then they'd whisper to security to throw the guy out and steal his drugs. Sometimes they'd come out and beat the guy up for sport.

  By the summer of 1994, trance music had supplanted techno. Trance was a synthesizer-heavy, melodic electronic sound meant to induce trancelike states during the peak of an Ecstasy high. Techno-centric Caruso had less control over the music and found his role diminishing. His drug dealing had also tapered off, and he decided to leave it behind altogether at the encouragement of his new best friend, Chris Paciello, a doe-eyed twenty-three-year-old who grew up in Staten Island and dated the daughter of Johnny Rizzo, one of mobster John Gotti's top soldiers.

  Paciello was born Chris Ludwigsen, but he took his mother's maiden name at sixteen, in rejection of his father, a former bouncer and heroin addict who faced charges in the late 1980s for burglary, auto theft, and drugs. Paciello was tight with the Bensonhurst Bath Avenue crew, a gang that got its start robbing pet shops and video stores and paid the Bonanno crime family for the right to invoke its name for protection in disputes.

  By twenty-one, Paciello had orchestrated a $300,000 bank heist in Staten Island. A year later, in 1993, he was behind the wheel of a Mercury sedan playing the getaway driver in a botched home invasion robbery in Staten Island that ended with the death of forty-six-year-old housewife Judith Shemtov. Paciello had heard that Shemtov's husband, Sami, a wealthy businessman, kept hundreds of thousands of dollars in a safe hidden somewhere in the house.

  Judith Shemtov was sipping tea when she answered a knock at her door and three men with guns shoved their way in and ordered her to “open the safe.” Sami heard gunfire and rushed in to find his wife shot in the face with a .45 automatic. The shooter was thirty-year-old Tommy Reynolds, a Bath Avenue soldier so reckless that he had nearly killed a Gambino crime family associate outside a Brooklyn bar two years earlier.

  Chris Paciello needed a good reason to leave New York while police snooped around the unsolved Shemtov murder. In August 1994, Paciello moved to Miami and bought Mickey's, a restaurant previously owned by actor Mickey Rourke, and managed by John Gotti's former driver Carlo Vaccarezza. Paciello invited Caruso to join him as a promoter and club director.

  Skipping town seemed like a good idea to Caruso. He had burned a lot of friends and was on the hit list of the Latin Kings gang over a brawl outside a rival nightclub. Caruso accepted Paciello's offer and agreed to put in $25,000 for club renovations in return for a 10 percent share of the profits. When it came time to tell Gatien he was leaving, Caruso lied and said he had run up a $40,000 gambling debt. Gatien wished him luck.

  In November 1994, Caruso and Paciello reopened Mickey's as Club Risk. Attendance was lackluster. Paciello lost faith in Caruso's promoting prowess, and Caruso grew increasingly frustrated at being frozen out of management decisions as Paciello took closed-door meetings with Gambino family associates Johnny Rizzo and John D'Amico.

  Caruso's girlfriend, who stayed behind in New York, had just given birth to their son and wanted Caruso to come back home. But it wasn't until he found a murder fugitive in his Miami apartment that he decided to cut his losses. Paciello had given Gambino mobster Vinnie Rizzuto Jr. the okay to hide in Caruso's apartment while the FBI and the Columbo family were looking for him for the murder of a capo's son.

  By February 1995, Caruso had fled back to New York and vowed to his girlfriend that he would uphold his New Year's Eve resolution not to drink, deal drugs, or be lured back into a life of crime. Caruso was fearful that Paciello would kill him just for what he'd seen and heard.

  Fugitive Rizzuto, who was later caught using Caruso's name and identification, would eventually plead guilty to murder and was sentenced to twenty-five years. Club Risk mysteriously burned down weeks after Caruso's exit, and Paciello used the insurance money to open a new club that boasted such celebrity guests as Jennifer Lopez, Donald Trump, Niki Taylor, and Gianni Versace. The handsome nightlife impresario became a celebrity in his own right, dating supermodels and attending charity balls. But years later, the feds finally caught up with Paciello. In 2000, the twenty-nine-year-old club owner pleaded guilty to his role in the bank heist and Shemtov's murder as part of a cooperation deal and was sentenced to seven years. Tommy Reynolds, who shot Shemtov, got life in prison.

  By the time Robert Gagne set out to infiltrate Peter Gatien's nightclubs in January 1996, the “two Michaels” were mostly absent from Limelight and Tunnel. Michael Caruso was promoting and producing musical talent and raising his son. Michael Alig was indulging in a heroin and ketamine habit that sapped his attention away from his Club Kids. But the legacy of drug use and dealing they left behind remained firmly in place, nurtured by a new coterie of promoters and dealers.

  23 DEEP COVER

  NEW YORKERS ENDURED A bipolar winter in 1996. A record-setting blizzard dumped more than twenty inches of powdery snow in Central Park on January 7—the second-biggest snowstorm in New York City history. Schools were closed, travelers were stranded, Broadway shows were canceled, and 26,528 tons of salt was spread on city streets. The icy crush was briefly followed by an unexpected thaw, when bone-chilling 6-degree lows turned to gentle 55-degree highs. Club Kids could return—without fear of frostbite—to the steps of Gotham's nightclubs dressed in skin-exposing lederhosen and peek-a-boo bustiers.

  Gagne and Germanowski decided it was time to return to the scene of their chilling rejection: Tunnel. But if they were going to make it past the velvet ropes, they had to find a way to remedy their D-crowd status. They needed a style makeover.

  “Couture” was the cure, according to fashion-savvy Sean Bradley, who was upgraded from “source of information” to full-fledged, cash-earning confidential informant. The agents shopped off the sales rack at the Gap, but Club Kids, Bradley explained, shopped at Patricia Field, a boutique in Greenwich Village that catered to a heroin-chic cross-dresser sensibility. They squeezed $1,000 in costuming cash from DEA and headed downtown.

  As they walked down a flight of steps into the flashy East 8th Street boutique, Germanowski was struck by a scent that reminded him of his brother: the smell of designer clothes.

  Germanowski had been eight years old when his eighteen-year-old brother, David, moved from Pittsburgh to New York to be a dancer. David was a committed bon vivant, no apologies, no regrets, and straight-up gay. He listened to Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, and Queen (the one band he and his brother could agree on) and thrilled to the 1970s disco scene. Germanowski, on the other hand, played drums and imbibed a steady diet of Kiss, hair-metal bands, and later hard rockers Godsmack and Pantera. “For the record,” Germanowski liked to say, “Scott Weiland, the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots, should be granted an exemption from the president of the United States to be permitted to use heroin anytime he wants. He was a lyrical genius when he was on that stuff. He got clean and his music stunk.” Gagne hated it when his partner said that.

  David was thirty-four when he died of AIDS. He had moved back home in the last months of his life to be taken care of by his family. Sometimes Germanowski would put an empty pot in the front yard and let it fill with rainwater. He'd drop a cloth into the pot, soaking it through, and then laid the cool rag on his brother's pale, gaunt face so David could smell fresh rain and grass. He died in 1993, a year after Germanowski graduated from DEA Academy.

  “Well, I'm definitely in a gay store,” Germanowski said to Gagne as they strolled through Patricia Field.

  “What do you mean?” Gagne said. “How do you know?”

  “It's not a phobia thing. It's just—designer clothes.”

  “Can I help you?” a salesman named Kevin asked the agents with a tone of practiced kindness.

  “We need trendy, fashionable outfits,” Gagne said. “And money is no issue.”

  Kevin took a long look at the two misplaced muscle-bound gladiators dressed in American Eagle collared shirts, blue jeans, and Nikes. He accepted the challenge. For the next two hours, Kevin guided his
guests through style dos and don'ts, with Gagne as his human mannequin. He schooled the agents on the proper selection of quality fabrics, how to coordinate colors, how to accessorize.

  Germanowski watched the fashion show from a plush couch, nibbling cubes of cheese and sliced fruit and sipping white ginger tea, occasionally posing questions like: “So you're saying I don't have to buy all my clothes at Dick's Sporting Goods?”

  Kevin dressed Gagne up in seatless pants, Jean-Paul Gaultier belly shirts, leather pants, a velvet handmade jacket with cashmere detailing. As he lectured the men on proper fit, Kevin would press his hands slowly along Gagne's muscular back and shoulders, flattening out and rubbing down any lumpy seams. Gagne held his breath and talked himself into a safe place (Be cool, laugh, make jokes, go along with it). He tried to act relaxed. Gagne had watched enough Three's Company to know how to be “light” (although he felt that Jack Tripper overplayed it sometimes). But he was miles from his comfort zone. He kept telling himself: This is my job. This is what I have to do.

  “Hey, Kevin, what about that one?” Germanowski said, pointing to a white, puffy blouse with French cuffs. Kevin unbuttoned the shirt off a mannequin and handed it to Germanowski.

  “How much is it?” Gagne asked.

  “Three hundred dollars.”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  “No, I'm serious,” Kevin said. “This shirt is handmade by two designers here in New York.”

  “I really want this shirt,” Germanowski said to his partner. “Remember how cool Tom Cruise looked in Interview with the Vampire? Dude, I can look that cool.”

  “No, you can't,” Gagne said. “You will never be confused with Tom Cruise.”