“Drugs are, of course, the problem, but they cannot be the excuse,” Riggs went on. “There is no excuse. I know that. However, there are reasons why so many young people end up drug-addicted, drug-dealing Club Kids, and various outcasts of society. And I for one am committed to finding out those reasons in myself.”
Alig was panicked. It was almost his turn to speak and he had nothing prepared. Riggs's speech was long and heartfelt and ended with Hallmark-card recollections of the night he and Melendez had laughed as they first glued feathers onto his cardboard angel wings.
“Wherever you are,” Riggs concluded, “I hope that you are flying in peace on the real wings that you deserve.”
The judge praised Riggs for his newfound remorse but still sentenced the twenty-nine-year-old to the requisite ten to twenty years’ incarceration for first-degree manslaughter.
Alig's lawyer requested a postponement of Alig's sentencing, pending a psychiatric evaluation, but the judge denied the motion.
“Do you wish to be heard?” the judge asked Alig. Nervous and bewildered by the turn of events, Alig stood up and fumbled his way through a rambling non-apology
“I came here today not prepared to accept my sentence, so I didn't come with a speech because I was told we were going to postpone for another week, two weeks, or something like that, I don't know,” Alig said. “All I know is that I've been told lots of different things by lots of different people.”
Alig claimed he had been “used by the feds” and then “railroaded” by people who lied to him to get him to accept a plea bargain. But he knew as the words fell from his mouth that he was only making his situation worse.
“You are the victim?” the judge asked Alig.
“In a way, yes.”
“In a way, you are the victim?”
“Yes.”
“I don't think that you are the victim,” the judge said. “I think that Angel Melendez is the victim—”
“He is also the victim,” Alig interrupted.
“He is the victim of your selfish, uncontrolled ego that has yet to be harnessed, that has yet to face reality.” The judge made his final remarks: “For you the show is over, the party is over. Mr. Alig, you are sentenced to ten to twenty years.”
37 HAPPY NEW YEAR
THE JUDGE HAD SEALED Alig's fate, officially heralding the death of the Club Kid scene. And on that same day, in the same hour, some twenty-five hundred miles west of the Manhattan criminal courthouse, along a tree-lined street in a quiet suburban San Fernando Valley neighborhood, LAPD narcotics detectives were preparing to deliver a similar fate to Ecstasy dealer Oded Tuito.
Tuito had been puttering about in his ranch-style home all week while a task force surveillance team had been watching his front yard through binoculars, waiting for the right moment to descend. It was the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and he and his wife, Aliza, were planning to host dinner with friends. Tuito had been trying to tie up loose ends before the holidays—making phone calls and readying drug packages for shipment. He was unaware that an anonymous tipster had recently alerted cops to his drug dealing.
On September 30, police had followed Tuito as he drove his gray GMC Yukon to his cousin's beeper store in North Hollywood, picked up a box, and then delivered it to a FedEx in Canoga Park. The package, marked “motorcycle parts,” was destined for a warehouse in Pittsburgh. Inside the box was a brick kilogram of cocaine (worth about $25,000 on the street) wrapped in fabric softener and duct tape. The cops had decided to do a controlled delivery—to let the drugs reach the intended recipient but secretly follow and control the shipment every step of the way.
On October 1, while Michael Alig was being sentenced, a police officer posing as a FedEx employee was delivering Tuito's cocaine to the Pittsburgh warehouse. The men who accepted the package were immediately arrested and the facility was raided. Pittsburgh police arrested six suspects, seized $47,980 in cash, and collected seven plastic baggies filled with “X-files” pills, in addition to the cocaine.
That same evening in Woodland Hills, Tuito and Aliza were entertaining guests when narcotics task force officers started banging on the front door, arrest warrants in hand. Judy Ben Atar was supposed to be at Tuito's house, but a fight with a girlfriend had delayed him. Jackie and Koki also had been invited but were out of town. In the end, police rounded up four of Tuito's Los Angeles associates and charged them with drug trafficking. Four kilos of cocaine, five kilos of marijuana, 525 Ecstasy tablets, and three bags filled with $64,268 in cash was seized. Also collected were a Colt rifle, a pump-action shotgun, a semiautomatic 9 mm Beretta found under a bedroom mattress, and a small handgun belonging to Aliza.
The Fat Man, however, had escaped. Tuito had heard a disturbance on his front lawn that day and glanced out his window. When he saw drug cops in flak vests running up his grassy front yard, past his son's swing set, guns drawn, Tuito quietly slipped out the back door—and disappeared.
38 “HE LOST EVERYTHING.
MY GOD”
IN DECEMBER 1 997, a couple of months after Michael Alig's sentencing, Bob Gagne got an unexpected phone call from Alig's mother.
“Does Michael know you're calling me?” Gagne asked.
“No, Michael has no idea.”
Gagne taped their conversation. He wanted to get to the bottom of Alig's betrayal.
“I know Michael wants to turn his life around and start with a clean slate,” Elke said as she ruffled through letters her son had written from jail. “He's talking future. He's talking about what he wants to do when he comes out. And he knows that he has been had, he has been had by a very rich man.”
“Did he tell you that in the letters?” Gagne asked.
“I have something in writing, in front of me, that was addressed to an attorney that we want to hire, but we haven't been able to hire him sufficiently because of lack of money,” Elke said. She read out loud from her son's longhand notes.
According to Alig's letter, he believed that his attorney, Gerry McMahon, had colluded with Gatien's attorney, Ben Brafman, to help Gatien's case while letting Alig's case suffer. He was accusing his attorney of a conflict of interest. He was also worried about his upcoming federal sentencing—the reason for Elke's call.
Alig had already received ten to twenty for Melendez's murder. But he still hadn't been sentenced on the federal drug charges, and the U.S. attorney's office had torn up his cooperation agreement after he signed the affidavit recanting his statements against Gatien. No one on the fed side was going to bat for Alig now. And even though he was looking at no more than seven years for drug conspiracy, if the judge decided to throw the book at him, he could be forced to serve his two terms consecutively.
Elke was emotional and scattered as she spoke. She was having trouble concentrating. Her son was in prison and she was desperate to protect him. Gagne tried to bring her back around.
“I have to understand what happened between Michael and his attorneys,” Gagne said. “The affidavit concerns specifically myself and Matt. And there's pretty strong allegations in there.”
Elke said the answers were in Michael's notes. She continued to read:
“ ‘Instead of discussing my case … we constantly discussed Peter's case, what the feds may have done that was unorthodox—to discredit them and have Peter's case possibly dropped—and my signing many papers for Peter's benefit, some taking much of the blame off of Peter and attaching it to myself. Other papers I signed were sworn statements on unethical moves made by the feds, which turned them subsequently against me.
“ ‘All of this was done, or so my lawyer told me, so that Brafman would “speak to his friends at the DA's office,” since he used to be one himself, and he'd do something to reduce whatever time they would otherwise be giving me. Shortly thereafter, my lawyer, Mr. McMahon, told me not to be surprised’—and listen to this Bob!—'not to be surprised if I hear or find out that he has received a lump sum of dollars from Brafman, because he, (a) has done a s
ervice for Brafman, (b) has not received enough money from me.’ What do you think about that?” Elke said.
“No comment. Keep going.”
“You're thinking something, Bob. You're just as human as I am.”
Gagne wasn't going to tell Elke that Alig's betrayal had wounded him and hurt their case immensely. He hadn't seen or talked to Alig since. But still, he felt something for the kid. He imagined Alig—spacey from all the medications he was on for his depression and withdrawal symptoms—signing away on meaningless pieces of paper and thinking he'd be back with his clubland family. Alig was a little fish swimming with sharks.
Alig would later file a complaint with the appellate court about his lawyer's alleged conflict of interest. In his response to the filing, Gerry McMahon denied ever receiving any money or benefits from Braf-man. He also claimed that he had counseled Alig not to sign the affidavit.
“In truth,” McMahon wrote, “Mr. Alig signed the affidavit for Peter Gatien because he loved being in the limelight and seeing his name in the newspaper.”
Elke believed that it was McMahon who was trying to make a name for himself, by currying favor with Brafman. Alig had told his mother that before his sentencing, he was promised by the attorneys that Gatien would come visit him in jail—the club owner had allegedly offered to pay Alig to redesign the Limelight while he was behind bars.
“I'm kind of not following you,” Gagne said to Elke. He followed, but he needed her to be very clear about what she was saying. “They wanted Michael to redesign the Limelight?”
“Yeah. And they sent Michael blueprints,” Elke said.
“They sent him blueprints?”
“Yeah. And you know Michael …”
“Yeah, he gets excited about that, because he's good at that stuff,” Gagne said.
“You're right,” Elke said. “And he was really excited about it and the sum of fifty thousand dollars.”
“The sum of fifty thousand dollars?” Gagne said, pushing Elke to clarify.
“Uh-huh. Which never, you know, was paid. Shortly after that Michael was moved to Rikers; he couldn't start on the blueprints. He lost everything. My God.”
Alig claimed that after he signed the affidavit against the agents, he'd never heard from Brafman or Gatien again.
“Now, was the fifty thousand dollars—I mean, I can understand the fifty thousand dollars, they wanted him to redesign everything,” Gagne said. “But was part of the deal to say bad things about myself and Matt?”
“The fifty thousand dollars that was offered to pay for redoing the Limelight was just a bribe for Michael to do the affidavit,” Elke said.
“Right,” Gagne said. “That was my question.”
It was hearsay. Brafman would vehemently deny that Alig had ever been promised money for anything. But at the time, it gave Gagne some small peace. Trial was a little over a month away. He numbered the tape as an exhibit and tucked a copy into the evidence file for safekeeping.
39 JANUARY 14, 1998
BEN BRAFMAN PACED CONFIDENTLY in front of the jury, delivering his opening statements: “This trial is going to show that life in this city is like life in Peter's Gatien's clubs.”
Gatien watched from the defense table as his attorney set the stage for the most important public moment of his career. His personal finances, his struggles with addiction, and the drug-infested environs of his club empire would soon be revealed in lurid detail. Reporters sat elbow to elbow with Club Kids and Gatien supporters in Judge Frederic Block's packed Brooklyn courtroom. Several in the press would note in their stories the next day that Gatien had ditched his signature eye patch for tinted sunglasses, possibly as an attempt to soften his image. Gatien's wife, Alessandra, and his daughter, Jennifer, sat in the front row of the gallery with earnest expressions.
It had been twenty months since Peter Gatien was awakened that May morning in his town house and arrested on drug conspiracy charges. In the lead-up to trial, New Yorkers were fed sensational tidbits in the local rags—allegations of government misconduct competed for column inches with stories about Gatien's lascivious hotel parties. Two days before trial began, government witness and Alig's best friend, Cynthia Haataja, aka Gitsie, was found dead in her apartment of a heroin overdose. The fragile twenty-two-year-old Club Kid had once promised Alig she would smuggle in enough heroin for him to kill himself if he got life in prison.
The Club Kids were in the throes of a nasty hangover, a cultural regression only compounded by the bleak national headlines of the last twenty months: a six-year-old beauty queen was murdered on Christmas Eve in her parents’ basement; Heaven's Gate cultists committed mass suicide in a San Diego mansion; a fame-obsessed serial killer murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace; Princess Diana died in a fiery car crash while being chased by paparazzi.
Just days after Gatien's trial began, the nation would be rocked by a new scandal and subsequent details of President Clinton's blow jobs and cigar play in the White House with a twenty-two-year-old intern. Sex and sin led the news. The glamorous had become grotesque. Reality TV superstars, paparazzi millionaires, and willfully insouciant heir-heads were just around the corner. The nation seemed to have collectively lost its impulse control.
Gatien was feeling the sting of backlash. For a decade, his clubs had dominated New York nightlife. But megaclubs were a dying breed under Mayor Giuliani's quality-of-life edicts that cleaned the city of broken windows, visible homelessness, and anything that was unfriendly and unsafe to commerce, tourism, and families. The forty-six-year-old club king now had just one of his four clubs, Tunnel, in operation; he was facing tax evasion charges for skimming millions of dollars in profits from his business; and if the jury before him now found him guilty of drug conspiracy and racketeering charges, he could get up to twenty years in prison.
“Some people used drugs in our clubs despite our best efforts,” Brafman said to the jurors. “Some of the millions of people who came to the clubs in the six years in this case came for drugs. But it was not a part of a criminal conspiracy by Mr. Gatien.”
The government's charges, Brafman claimed, were based on fabricated evidence and the coached and researched testimony of low-life criminals and drug dealers who would lie on the stand to save themselves.
Gagne, Germanowski, and Flaherty sat at the prosecution table with assistant U.S. attorneys Eric Friedberg, Lisa Fleischman, and Michele Adelman. In her opening statement, Adelman told the jury that the government was not charging Gatien with directly selling drugs or taking a cut from the drug sales in his clubs. Gatien, the feds alleged, was the mastermind and financier of a well-organized employment hierarchy, and he encouraged drug distribution to maximize his own profits from door fees and bar sales. Gatien rewarded top employees, Adelman alleged, with gifts and invitations to his infamous hotel bacchanals.
At his clubs Tunnel and Limelight, Adelman said, “thousands of young nightclub patrons would take hallucinogenic pills as if it was candy at Halloween and drug dealers dropped cocaine powder into the hands of club patrons as if it was sugar.”
The jury of seven women and five men were mostly middle-aged and working-class. They included a truck driver and a retired factory worker—not the types one would meet snorting cocaine in the Police Room.
Michael Caruso would be the government's first witness. Gagne and Germanowski had arrested Caruso in early 1997 in Staten Island, where he was living with his girlfriend and infant son. Caruso had turned a corner by then. He'd come clean about his role in bringing Ecstasy into Gatien's clubs, he'd given up his former cohorts, and he'd admitted to a long list of crimes—fraud, robbery, identity theft—that he'd never gotten caught for and had no good reason to admit, other than full disclosure. Gagne had believed Caruso when he said he was done with all that. He'd liked Lord Mike from the start and would continue to check in on him over the years.
When Caruso took the stand in Gatien's trial in 1998, he hadn't worked Gatien's clubs in years, but he had an insider's perspective.
AUSA Eric Friedberg shot a series of probing questions at Caruso in an awkward (and painfully straightlaced) attempt to teach the jury about the nightlife scene.
“What were Club Kids?” Friedberg asked.
“They were basically flamboyant club categories who worked in nightlife only—mostly, I should say,” Caruso said like a freshman anthropologist. “They had shocking outfits from time to time that they wore, like high platform heels, makeup on their faces, sometimes high designer wear, sometimes homemade designer wear, piercings.”
“Was there a leader of these Club Kids?” Friedberg asked.
“Michael Alig was the Club Kid king.”
“What characterized the behavior of the Club Kids at the club?”
“They were nightlife party people that, you know, partied pretty heavily, and anything that was hip, great, cool, was considered fabulous.”
“You mentioned this term ‘fabulous.’ What does that mean?”
“Hip, great, cool, over the top.”
“Was that a term the Club Kids used themselves?”
“They used it to describe a night; the night was fabulous, that outfit was fabulous.”
The government put up a large Velcro photo board as a kind of visual who's who of the racketeering and drug conspiracy hierarchy. At the top of the photo family tree was Gatien. Below him were the directors and party promoters—Alig, Caruso, Steve Lewis, Baby Joe Uzzardi, all responsible for making sure drugs were available at the parties. Below these were house dealers—guys like Rob Gordon, Paulie Torres, Frankie the Baker, Goldyloxx. And at the bottom of the tree were the bouncers who permitted sanctioned dealers to enter the clubs.
In evidence were Gatien's financial records and club budgets. Caruso testified that he and Gatien had negotiated the cost of Ecstasy punches into club budgets during a conversation at Limelight in 1991.
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