Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  “Where does this guy live?” Simonson went on.

  “What are you going to do?” Uzzardi asked.

  “It doesn't concern you, but I'm going to find him and take care of it, so he'll never do that again.”

  Gagne sighed and told his partner: “We better find the little bastard first.”

  On Saturday, May 11, at 7:30 in the morning, Gagne, Germanowski, and Flaherty tracked Bradley down in an apartment next to a strip bar off Route 35 in Hazlet, New Jersey.

  “Sean, we gotta talk,” Germanowski said. Bradley invited them in. His girlfriend, Jessica, and three other strippers were half dressed, sitting around a giant glass bong in the living room getting high. The agents spoke to Bradley alone.

  “Where are the pills, Sean?” Flaherty asked.

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” Bradley said.

  “We know you ripped off John Charles for the pills,” Ger-manowski said.

  “No, I didn't, G! I would never do that!”

  Bradley went back and forth with Flaherty and Germanowski, denying that he'd stolen drugs from Simonson, denying he had any pills. Gagne had had enough. He saw a tiny kernel of toast on the table, pointed to it, and began to speak in a low voice to Bradley.

  “You see this crumb, Sean?” Gagne said. “This crumb is your life, and every time you lie to us, I'm gonna push this crumb closer to the edge of the table. And when it goes over the edge—you're done.”

  That is so corny, Germanowski was thinking. He and Flaherty exchanged arch glances.

  “Where are the pills, Sean?” Gagne said.

  “I'm telling you,” Bradley said with big eyes, “I don't have ‘em.”

  “I'll ask you again.” Gagne dropped his fist on the table, pressed his index finger on the crumb, and slowly pushed it toward the edge of the table. “Where are the pills?”

  “I don't know! I swear—I didn't do it!” Bradley's face was red, his breathing faster.

  Are you fucking cartooning me? Germanowski thought. How is this actually working?

  “This is your last chance, Sean!” Gagne lifted his fist, threatening to crush the tiny crumb and push it off into oblivion. “Where are the pills, Sean?”

  “Okay! They're upstairs! They're upstairs!” Bradley cried, tears streaming. “I'm sorry! I just did it because John Charles is just such a jerk. I hate him!”

  Bradley tearfully escorted the agents upstairs and recovered about five hundred pills from his jacket.

  “Sean, you did not eat fifteen hundred pills last night,” Gagne said. “Where are the rest?”

  Bradley pulled more bags of pills out from hiding spots around the apartment. Before the agents left, they broke the bong and seized a small glassine envelope filled with marijuana, a film canister containing Blue and Whites, and 185 plain white Ecstasy pills—exhibit numbers thirty-five through thirty-seven—which were deposited in the DEA evidence vault.

  Bradley was called into DEA on Monday, May 13. Gagne informed him that they'd tried to talk to the prosecutor, but there was nothing they could do. He'd already been given too many chances: in April he had been arrested for trying to sell ketamine and ephedrine pills he was passing off as Ecstasy to an undercover officer at the same mall where he was first busted for counterfeit bills. The agents had tried to help then, even speaking on his behalf at his court hearings. But now they were done with him. He was under arrest for distributing Ecstasy and lying to federal agents.

  Bradley teared up as his former handlers processed his belongings and took his mug shot picture and fingerprints. Germanowski discovered a clear plastic jug in Bradley's backpack. It was filled with a liquid recipe resembling motor oil and crushed almonds. He shook his head and smiled. He had tried his best with Sean.

  29 INVESTIGATING

  THE INVESTIGATORS

  PETER GATIEN WAS OUT on bail, running his clubs and preparing for trial. He seemed to be fighting an uphill battle against a city that had once welcomed him. He was under investigation by the IRS for tax fraud, he was in danger of losing his liquor license, and club attendance was down 20 percent. He insisted he had no knowledge of drug use in his clubs and believed he was being unfairly singled out, a victim of his own success as the club king of New York.

  “What standard do you think a club should be held to?” Gatien told the New York Times. “If somebody in the subway pushed somebody over the tracks, nobody comes down on a subway station. In a nightclub, it's ‘Let's close them down.’ “

  The agents saw it differently. They knew Gatien wasn't selling or directly profiting from the drugs, but they believed he was actively supporting their sale and distribution—creating dangerous conditions—in order to maximize club attendance and profits.

  At a press conference immediately following the May 15 arrests, the U.S. attorney told reporters that Gatien's clubs were “virtual Ecstasy supermarkets,” and claimed the club owner had “installed a management structure at the Limelight and the Tunnel designed to ensure successful distribution of Ecstasy to nightclub patrons.

  “We determined that the dealing of drugs at both of these establishments was not just a lucrative sideline but was really the centerpiece of the operation,” U.S. Attorney Zachary Carter told reporters. “To a certain extent, it can be fairly said that these clubs existed to distribute these substances. … The drugs were the honey trap that attracted these young people to the club in the first place.”

  Months later, Carter's hard-boiled quotes were the inspiration for an irreverent “Honey Trap” party—an obvious snub at law enforcement, a crack at the government's assault on nightlife.

  But law enforcement had had enough of the drug use associated with the club scene. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton were on a cleanup mission, putting more cops on the street and increasing arrests for even minor offenses such as drinking alcohol in public. When New York City's crime rate in 1995 registered its steepest drop in twenty-three years, Bratton credited police for taking on not just criminal behavior but outright seediness.

  “We were probably the most permissive and tolerant city in America for social deviancy,” he told the New York Times. “Now we're one of the least tolerant cities when it comes to the abuse of public spaces.”

  The failed police raid on Limelight in 1995 had been a sore spot in NYPD's quest to make New Yorkers safe from drug dealers and other “social deviants.” When Gagne and his partners’ investigations received heavy rotation in the press, NYPD gladly joined forces with DEA.

  Giuliani and Bratton had already revived the city's nuisance abatement laws to successfully close drug dens, brothels, and illegal gambling operations. Under the same laws, city attorneys could get a judicial order to close the clubs if it was determined that drugs were rampant and sold in an “open and notorious” manner. Gagne and Germanowski lent their confidential informants to NYPD as part of covert buy operations inside the clubs. The DEA informants would be used to help bring undercover NYPD narcotics detectives into the clubs and help facilitate drug buys. Just three open and notorious buys would merit a judicial closing order—and it didn't take long to get there. But before police came in with the closing order, the agents made another round of arrests.

  On August 20, 1996, at 3:45 a.m., seven DEA agents, including Gagne, Germanowski, and Flaherty, and several NYPD detectives arrested two bouncers at Tunnel for conspiracy to distribute drugs.

  “What is going on here?” Gatien came out of his office to confront the agents.

  “We're federal agents—” Germanowski began to explain.

  “Right, right,” Gatien interrupted. “I knew you were coming.”

  Gatien asked to make a copy of the arrest warrants. The agents insisted on escorting him to the copier machine, so he invited them up to his office.

  Gatien turned and looked at Gagne as they walked up the stairs.

  “Aren't you Gagne?” Gatien asked.

  “Yes,” Gagne said. He noticed that the club owner had pron
ounced his name “Gawn-yay,” as Gagne's own French Canadian ancestors would have. Nobody called him “Gawn-yay.”

  “Why would you lie like that?” Gatien said, presumably referring to the one-hitter allegation in the affidavit—the shaky claim that the agents had observed the club owner snorting drugs off a silver tray in his office. “Man to man, I want to know why you would swear to something that was not true. Man to man, you should not do that. I do what I do, and you do what you do. If you are going to go after somebody and get them, you should be man enough to do it without lying.”

  “What you believe is true and what I believe is true are two different things,” Gagne said before feeling a nudge from his partner, who had been suddenly distracted by the strange scene just outside Ga-tien's office. Two men were sitting on the floor, counting money out of two industrial-sized black garbage bags. The bags were filled to the top, stuffed so tightly that they couldn't be drawn fully closed. As they pulled out crumpled wads of tens, twenties, fives, and ones and folded them into neat piles, neither man noticed that officers had just walked in.

  “You are the other one that has been here?” Gatien asked.

  “Yes, Matt Germanowski. I'm a special agent with DEA.”

  “I know what is going on in the other clubs. Why in the hell aren't you doing something with them?” Gatien said. “I know you are doing your job, but you shouldn't have to ruin somebody's life and turn it upside down like this to do your job. It's starting to become ridiculous.”

  Three days later, Tunnel and Limelight were shut down by the NYPD after DEA's informants had helped them to meet the requisite number of undercover buys. A spokesman for Gatien told the New York Times that the authorities had purchased illegal drugs a total of five times. “To get only five buys, Mr. Gatien should get a medal,” he said.

  Peter Gatien cut a deal in court: he agreed to pay $30,000 in fines to the State Liquor Authority, forfeit the $150,000 bond he'd put up after the police raid in 1995, and hire the consulting firm Kroll to monitor security in the clubs and develop a plan to ensure that preventing drug activity became a priority to club management. For this, Tunnel was allowed to reopen, but Limelight, his famed Gothic church, was ordered shuttered for a year as punishment for the rampant drug dealing.

  It was a small victory for law enforcement, and the agents were pleased that their informants had helped to bring about Limelight's temporary closure. But it came at a cost. One of the informants who helped shut down Limelight was a twenty-four-year-old hustler named Sean Kirkham, who would soon bring a dark chapter into the agents’ lives.

  Kirkham first contacted DEA looking for work after reading about Gatien's arrest in the tabloids. Kirkham had been a party promoter for clubs in New York, the Hamptons, and Miami. He knew the scene and the players, and he checked out as a past informant for Miami DEA. He seemed legitimate to Gagne and Germanowski, so they signed him up as a paid source. Kirkham began arranging meetings and taping his conversations with Ecstasy dealers who sold in the clubs. He got doorman Darryl Darrin to talk about management's alleged knowledge of drugs in the clubs. But when Kirkham's usefulness waned, when his stories stopped adding up and the agents stopped calling—that's when Kirkham turned against his handlers. Unbeknownst to Gagne, Germanowski, and Jay Flaherty, Kirkham kept a recorder in his backpack and had been secretly taping the agents during their meetings.

  Clubland author Frank Owen would later profile Kirkham for the Village Voice. In their jailhouse interview, Kirkham described himself as a Canadian descendant of Inuits who was orphaned as a child. As a teen, he traveled through Europe, working as a waiter in Paris, a tour guide in Salzburg, a doorman at a club in Greece. He said he was deported when his visa ran out, and he moved to New York at nineteen, where he slept on the streets and in homeless shelters. He attended NYU for two years and worked at Club USA in New York, where he first met Alig and Gatien. He moved to Florida and infiltrated the Miami Beach Russian Mafia and the South Beach nightclub scenes, rubbing elbows with nightlife celebrities and Colombian cocaine traffickers while feeding tips to law enforcement for cash.

  Kirkham was a master at mixing truth with small lies. Kirkham also claimed to reporter Owen that the agents gave him a weekly clothing allowance to keep him in designer clothes and that they let him have his pick of costumes and accessories from the DEA wardrobe room. He said that Germanowski taught him how to detect and avoid surveillance by using reflective surfaces, à la The French Connection. He said that he and Gagne partied together in Miami at Chris Paciello's nightclub.

  Kirkham was certainly paid cash for his information as an informant, but he never received a clothing allowance and there is no “DEA wardrobe room” (the agents had to wear the same thrift store duds for almost five months). Gagne recalled seeing Kirkham in Miami once, but they never went club-hopping. And while Germanowski enjoyed imagining himself as a cloak-and-dagger undercover with mirrors in his pockets, he had to admit that he just wasn't that cool.

  In the fall of 1996, Sean Kirkham placed a call to Peter Gatien and dropped a bombshell: he said he had taped proof of government misconduct by the agents. Gatien hung up and called Benjamin Brafman.

  Brafman was a savvy defense attorney who got his start as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan DA's office. As enticing as Kirkham's claims may have been, Brafman wasn't going to take the bait. He passed the information to the assistant U.S. attorney who was prosecuting the Gatien case, Eric Friedberg.

  Friedberg knew that the Gatien investigation was a high-profile case, and if their DEA agents were guilty of using corrupt means to bring Gatien to prosecution, Friedberg needed to get a handle on the situation as quickly as possible. Instead of confronting the agents, he targeted them: a secret FBI investigation was opened on Gagne, Ger-manowski, and Flaherty. As the agents prepared for trial, they had no idea they were getting the Chinese wall treatment from the federal prosecutors they spoke with almost daily.

  Likewise, Sean Kirkham didn't know that Gatien was leading him straight back to the feds. In September 1996, in a bizarre collusion between the prosecution and the defense teams, Brafman arranged for Kirkham to meet a man named “Pat Cole,” who was introduced as one of Gatien's private investigators. Cole was really FBI agent Pat Colgin, the lead investigator in the case against Gagne, Ger-manowski, and Flaherty.

  Colgin pretended to buy Kirkham's tapes on Gatien's behalf. The FBI listened to the tapes carefully and got an earful of mundane debriefing meetings. Kirkham said he had more tapes. It seemed he was looking for a handout any way he could get it. FBI bought five more tapes and heard nothing amounting to misconduct. Maybe that should have been enough to clear the agents, but Gagne did have a reputation for being a maverick.

  It was decided that—just to be sure—they would put the men to a test. In October 1996, Colgin asked Kirkham to set up a sting on his former DEA handlers.

  Germanowski got a call shortly afterward. Kirkham was full of news, said he had an idea he wanted to share. Could they meet him right away?

  “What's up, Sean?” Gagne said as he and Germanowski slid into the booth at a diner in Manhattan where Kirkham was waiting.

  Germanowski noticed a man with gray hair sitting nearby. He had no setup at his table—no silverware, ice water, food, or menu. Germanowski thought it odd, but he tucked it away.

  Kirkham told the agents that if they really wanted to nail Gatien, he had a plan: he would get Gatien alone in his office and secretly record their conversation. Then he would take the tapes to a friend who could edit them to make Gatien “say things.”

  “What are you saying to us?” Germanowski asked.

  “I can make a tape of Peter,” Kirkham said, “and if we can make it go to ten minutes, we can make that tape say whatever you want.”

  Kirkham was practically winking at the mysterious man in the next booth when he felt Gagne's sledgehammer fist in his chest. Kirkham's shoulders popped forward, his neck tensed, and his eyes bulged as he gasped for breath.


  “Don't ever say that to us again,” Gagne said in a contemptuous growl.

  Germanowski stifled his laughter as Kirkham coughed for air.

  “Sean, we're not going to arrest you,” Germanowski said. “But you're done. Your day with us is over.”

  Back at the office, Germanowski's first call was to AUSA Eric Friedberg to tell him they had to drop Kirkham as an informant.

  “I need you to get Gagne and Flaherty and come to my office right away,” Friedberg said. “And bring your supervisor.”

  “Ooo-kay,” Germanowski said. “But, Eric, do I need an attorney too?”

  “Not anymore.” Friedberg laughed.

  When they arrived at Friedberg's Brooklyn office, the mysterious diner, Pat Colgin, was waiting for them. Friedberg introduced Colgin and explained that the agents had been targets of an FBI investigation on corruption allegations. But it was all over now, Friedberg said. Kirkham's tapes were bogus, and when they refused his offer at the diner, the agents were officially in the clear. (Colgin was kind enough to refrain from mentioning that Gagne had punched Kirkham.)

  Gagne was stunned. Friedberg seemed to be in a celebratory mood. But the agents were stone silent. Their integrity had been under attack based on the claims of a drifter con man. They had been working alongside Friedberg for three months, never knowing he was in on the secret. It was a crushing revelation, and it would damage their working relationship with the prosecutor through to the end of the case.

  “Hey, listen, these are yours.” Colgin offered Gagne Kirkham's au-diotapes.

  “I don't want them,” Gagne said coldly. “You keep them.”

  On October 16, 1996, Sean Kirkham was arrested for lying to federal agents. He pleaded guilty, fled to Vancouver, and then turned himself in three months later. He was sentenced to fifty-seven months in prison. Kirkham was blacklisted in DEA databases, but it didn't stop him from trying. His name would come up again nearly a decade later, when he tried to sell the FBI information about the London train bombings and terrorist activity in Bulgaria. His information proved to be false.