The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

by Peter Gatien

  A lot of high rollers come into the nightlife business not looking ahead to what happens beyond the first big scores. Party planners were hustlers, trying to make a living in a not-terribly-honest profession. They might have initially made huge numbers and considered themselves a success. Two months later they were wondering where all the partygoers went. Meanwhile I wound up having to clean up the mess they left behind. But just as I did, Flex sought to build something that lasted beyond a few nights.

  I kept thinking about how the limited number of Mecca shows we hosted saw massive pushback from the local precinct house. Police are a pretty cynical lot, and New York’s Finest, as much as I respect them, push cynicism to the extremes. On the Mecca nights, I heard the word “animals” spit out too many times by too many cops. I felt a reflexive anger toward that mentality, though because my mother did not raise fools, I always kept my reaction carefully under wraps. But the racist blowback against hip-hop always brought to mind the prejudice I saw growing up as a Catholic French Canadian.

  The people turning out for hip-hop-themed parties at nightclubs were New Yorkers like anyone else. They deserved the same opportunity to bust loose and party down. Pursuit of happiness is a guaranteed constitutional right, and it isn’t supposed to be dependent on the music you like or the color of your skin.

  As far as violence went, I remained a relative babe in the woods. On the streets of my childhood, fights were usually conducted with fists, not knives and especially not handguns. Over the years, and with all the public blood that’s being shed, it’s become clear to me how deeply embedded gun violence is in the culture of the States, and how violence stains the American soul. As the ’60s civil-rights firebrand H. Rap Brown said, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”

  For all my years living in the city, I still wasn’t really aware of that period’s incredible unrest in the Bronx, or Queens, or uptown. Like most clueless white people, I thought I had a general idea. I read the newspapers and heard reports filtering in from the front lines. But I didn’t have a boots-on-the-ground understanding of what was going on.

  If I had possessed a true understanding of the extreme situations those outer-borough communities were facing every day and night, I might have hesitated in resurrecting hip-hop parties at Tunnel. Because it was bad. From the late ’80s up to and beyond the time Flex and I sat down together to strategize, the Bronx had the highest murder rate in the country. Forget LA’s Compton or Chicago’s South Side—in the projects of the Bronx, Queens, and Harlem, the bullets flew and young people died with a depressing regularity.

  Castle Hill, Soundview, and Mitchel Houses in the Bronx; Woodside, Edgemere, and the Redfern Houses in Queens; the Polo Grounds Towers and Harlem River Houses in Manhattan—places caught in a crushing vise between gangs and drug violence on the one side and police brutality on the other. Brooklyn had its share of violence, too. Cheap crack cocaine and official neglect was the lethal combination that worked to transform any neighborhood into a battleground. It was a tragedy going on out of sight and out of mind of most Manhattanites.

  Bad neighborhood. Don’t go there. Drugs. Gangs. Murder. Such was the refrain the privileged sounded to their children. But the kids from neighborhoods under the gun didn’t have a choice of environment. They created powerful, dynamic rap, the soundtrack of their lives. They listened to it, danced to it, traded mixtapes of it. They’d heard about the Tunnel parties through word of mouth, and they were the ones Flex and I were trying to provide a safe space to let loose.

  I trusted Flex to know the music. What I didn’t know was how to feature it in my club on a consistent basis. I had seen so many venues follow a predictable trajectory: there’d be a big splash when a club opened, followed by a gradual but inevitable decline, with downtown trendsetters yielding to the bridge-and-tunnel crowd from the outer boroughs and Jersey, then maybe a Latino period, then closed doors and lights out. That was how it had happened with the original Tunnel, and I had witnessed a similar pattern all over downtown.

  Club promoters had tried catering to hip-hop in the early 1980s, when I first opened New York Limelight. But the drug violence that engulfed communities during the middle of the decade scared most promoters off. Even in the early 1990s, crack was still a malevolent force on the streets. Any incident with weapons, any reputation for serious violence could kill a club faster than a lost liquor license.

  “We have to find a way to keep people safe,” I told Flex. “At Mecca we were taking blades away from kids all night long.”

  “You’ve got to understand. Those people are getting out of the club at two or three a.m., riding the subways because they can’t afford a livery cab. They have to make it back to their own front doors in one piece. Of course they’re going to be carrying something to protect themselves.”

  “So what do we do? I can’t have blood spilled on the dance floor.”

  He leaned forward. “It’s simple,” he said. “We take their shit off them before they get inside. You ever been to Rikers, Peter?” he asked.

  New York City’s correctional facility on Rikers Island was a notorious hellhole, a familiar second home for anyone unfortunate enough to be caught by the police while being black in the city.

  Flex answered his own question. “Nah, I know you ain’t ever been to Rikers, because you ain’t got the complexion for correction.”

  He was right. Compared to him, I was a north-country bumpkin. Flex detailed the elaborate searches that visitors to the jail had to endure in order to visit their loved ones. Metal detectors, strip searches, body-cavity searches—the correctional officers at Rikers were infamous for their heavy-handed and sometimes illegal thoroughness. Meanwhile, contraband such as weapons, cell phones, and drugs somehow still got through to the inmates.

  “We do it like that,” Flex said. “Like Rikers, only better.”

  “Look, I can’t put people through a fucking proctology exam just to get into my club. Nobody would stand for it. Word would get out.”

  “You ain’t getting me,” Flex shot back. “A lot of folks don’t have a place to hang out without fearing for their lives. They always have to be looking over their shoulders, worried some asshole will go off on them. You provide a super-chill place, a safe zone, with all the usual bullshit totally cooled out. You take care of that, and if I’m bringing the sounds, I promise you they’ll put up with anything just to get through the door.”

  We had a long series of talks. I wanted in, but only if we could do it right. Mecca at Tunnel had gone wrong. But rap was a sort of pressure valve for communities that had a heavy weight pressed down on them. It was the next big wave in culture. I knew pop music would eventually embrace hip-hop, and no amount of bigotry or small-mindedness could stop it from happening. Italian greasers who’d attack any black kid who dared to walk through their neighborhoods were cranking Run-DMC, NWA, and Public Enemy on their car stereos. Like jazz and rock ’n’ roll before it, hip-hop busted down social barriers. It was just that powerful.

  With Flex and other staffers brainstorming, we made a fundamental decision regarding Tunnel’s Sunday-night door policy. One way to keep things chill on the dance floor was to maintain the gender ratio at a sixty-forty mix in favor of young women. I had toyed with the idea of separate entry lines for women and men in other clubs. The strategy might have appeared sexist, but it seemed the only method to keep the crowd from becoming overwhelmingly male. In some old-style school buildings you can still see doorways labeled “Boys” and “Girls,” built for those gender-segregated times, which amounted to a similar strategy.

  For the Sunday-night hip-hop parties at Tunnel, I put in place two separate entry lines, one for men and one for women. The new door policy flowed not so much from sexism as from realism. From long experience I understood the difference in the atmosphere of a club with majority testosterone or majority estrogen, and I could glance at a dance floor and make a good estimate of the gender ratio just from the vibe. Seventy-thirty, with males in the
majority, was a recipe for testosterone-fueled aggression. Sixty-forty in the other direction made for a much healthier, much smoother, much sexier experience.

  I always remember the tense exchange in the movie Marathon Man between Laurence Olivier’s Nazi and his torture victim, played by Dustin Hoffman. “Is it safe?” Olivier demands over and over again, asking about a lost cache of diamonds. On Sunday nights, while I monitored the atmosphere of Tunnel, the question echoed in my mind.

  Is it safe?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Hypnotize

  Keeping things chill would turn out to be the key that made Tunnel Sundays the phenomenon they became. I understood the reality of the street only in an abstract sense. I was a lower-middle-class kid from Canada, after all. In the 1950s, the Ontario version of a Saturday-night-special handgun might be a cricket bat, say, or a broken beer bottle. That was the extent of it.

  For Tunnel Sundays, I needed security people with hard-core experience. My pool of applicants expanded once word got around in the community of New York bouncers, bodyguards, and security muscle that there was work to be had at a newly reopened nightclub on Manhattan’s wild West Side. Hiring man-mountain Sterling Cox as Tunnel head of security was a vital first step to our success. Sterling knew the Street, and also was familiar with practically everyone in the business.

  Ramona Diaz had come to me via the illicit underground circuit of bare-knuckle boxing matches, a real-world version of the fictional Fight Club that existed in gyms, basements, and back lots all over New York City. Mona had transitioned from fights to bodyguard duty and then to security at China Club, before finally landing at Palladium. With the gender-separate door policy at Tunnel, I needed female security personnel to perform searches on female customers.

  Mona was the perfect hire. She used to bring her infant daughter, Nicole, to work with her, a situation not uncommon with my staffers. “Club babies,” we used to call them. Nicole would sleep in reception while her mama performed her duties at the door, twenty feet away.

  Nobody got over on Mona. Most Sunday nights she took her place at the entrance to Tunnel in a trio of kick-ass females, including two more streetwise women, Diamond and Big Candy. The three had an easy camaraderie and a no-nonsense approach to security that I came to admire. They understood that deflecting aggression rather than answering it in kind represented a fundamental secret of the job. In security, attitude is everything.

  Mona and the others clearly enjoyed their work. When the male supermodel Tyson Beckford came into the club, Mona performed an extra-thorough search on him. She went at it as if the public face of Ralph Lauren Polo was in reality a well-known terrorist. She wasn’t about to let the guy off easy. Stopping just short of a cavity search, Mona then passed him on to Big Candy and then Diamond for similar treatment.

  “We used to handle the shit out of him,” Mona recalled, laughing. To Beckford’s credit, he took the elaborate procedure with a grin.

  Customers vocally objected to getting searched all the time, especially celebrities. Puffy would come in and curtly inform door security that this time he would not submit to getting patted down.

  “I’m not getting searched,” he would say, the words Do you know who I am? at the tip of his tongue.

  “Yes, you are getting searched,” Mona would say, and something about her simple declaration convinced Puffy it would be futile to resist.

  “We knew Puff was always going to be a jerk,” recalled Lee Coles, one of my top security guys. “He usually had a beef with someone. It was always something.”

  Everyone knew damned well who Puffy was, who Method and Redman were, or Jermaine Dupri or Lil’ Kim, but every single person who came through the door on Tunnel Sundays was getting searched without exception. If you violated the security rules in some minor way, you were banned from the club for a week or two. It was the only strategy we had to keep the place safe. Even then, the strict search policy failed to discourage some people from presenting themselves at the door “walking heavy.”

  “Biggie used to come all the time with a gun on him, a little over-and-under derringer,” remembered Lee Coles. “We must have taken that fucking thing away from him a dozen times.”

  The informal policy was to confiscate and keep blades, saps, and Mace, but to secure firearms and return them to their owners when the night was over. There were four or five empty beer cases on the floor in the search area, and by the end of the night, they would be cluttered with random weaponry.

  “To this day I still have some of the knives,” Lee Coles told me recently.

  Some of the Second Amendment enthusiasts who came into Tunnel walking heavy were high-profile names.

  “This your nine, ’Pac?” Coles asked Tupac Shakur one night, after extracting a 9 mm handgun from the small of the volatile rapper’s back. “Take it back to your ride, brother, because you ain’t bringing it inside.” The rap star had a particularly thorny reputation among my security corps.

  “It was funny with him,” Coles remembered, “because if ’Pac came in alone he’d be a pussycat, but if he was with a posse, man, we had to watch out—he’d always act like a real asshole.”

  Lee Coles and the other door personnel understood that security involved more than weapon searches at the door. It extended to the whole area around the club, especially to the line of patrons waiting to get in. The line for Tunnel Sundays became legendary. It ran from the door at Twenty-Seventh Street and the West Side Highway, around the corner toward Eleventh Avenue and, most weeks, well beyond.

  Across Twenty-Seventh stood the enormous Starrett-Lehigh warehouse, a place just like Central Stores, where trains could be pulled up right inside. The block formed an urban canyon of sorts—a convection oven in the summer, a howling wind corridor in the winter with gusts blowing in directly off the Hudson River.

  The wait on the line was usually two hours. The slow progress along Twenty-Seventh from Eleventh to Twelfth was often compared to the journey from East Berlin to West during the Cold War. Our version of the Grenztruppen der DDR, the notorious East German border guards, was the NYPD. We worked with the local precinct to close the street and erect curbside barricades. Cops used to post themselves at the door of the club or thread their way along the line, actually carrying mug shots with them, trying to ID bad guys.

  “That line would start at two o’clock in the afternoon,” Mona remembered. “Girls would pee themselves during the wait all the time. They’d arrive at the door all stinky and I’d say to them, ‘Damn, girl, why’d you not just find somewhere to go?’ And they’d say, ‘What? I ain’t losing my place.’ Some of them, Tunnel Sundays was their whole life.”

  There were dozens of recognized hiding places for weapons in the area. Coles knew them all. He didn’t look overpoweringly big or muscular, but he was one of the toughest mothers I’ve ever encountered in all my years. He could handle anything. He often went undercover in the Tunnel’s main room, checking for drug transactions, displays of weaponry, altercations in the making. Most people instinctively got out of his way. We used to call him Moses, because he parted the Red Sea.

  Monitoring Lee Coles’s progress from afar, I’d marvel at his abilities to chill out unruly patrons.

  “You wish to speak to the manager, sir?” he’d say, the soul of patience. “Well, OK, that’s strike one right there. Keep on with your shit and we’re going to put you to sleep.” Sooner or later the troublemakers, many of whom Coles knew from growing up, would get the message.

  But sometimes his message went ignored. Whenever anyone stepped too far out of bounds, especially if they went so far as assaulting a staffer or another club-goer, I’d be the one who ultimately made the decision.

  “Get ’em out!” Lee Coles would call. If the incident was particularly severe, he’d add one fateful word. “Headfirst!”

  In those instances, their “head opened the door,” as Lee Coles dryly phrased it. Mona had a slightly different take. To her, the ejected customers resembled a w
ell-known cartoon character. “They were like Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, you know? They’d fly straight out and then hang in the air for a little while.”

  The security corps at Tunnel Sundays formed a tight, mutually supportive community. I always liked to hire older men and women, people with families and steady home lives, who didn’t feel they had anything to prove. After a few months the staffers began handling recruitment themselves, and the whole arrangement virtually ran on its own. Many times Big Candy, Lee Coles, or others would hear of prospects and know their actual release dates from Rikers Island. They would be out there at the bus to greet them and offer them jobs.

  “You’re the one they call Tank?” they’d ask, and later that night the big guy would be on the job at one of my clubs.

  The people working security ate takeout together, joked with each other, had each other’s backs. I was struck by the fact that the Mona–Big Candy–Diamond trio would keep tampons, deodorants, and other such products on hand at the door.

  “Girl, you smell funky—I’m not going to let you in the club like that!” I once overheard Mona saying to a woman she was searching, sending her to the bathroom with a blast of perfume.

  My security people often used to get tipped for escorting patrons to their cars at the end of the night. Other times they’d act as guardian angels for the talent. Busta Rhymes was a regular. He led a totally chaotic life outside the club. Lee Coles would treat him to a meal and give him rides home, week after week. Coles was also good at handling talent more volatile than Busta. It happened more often than you’d think that an artist would attack a fan. He took it as part of his job to defend the crowd from the rappers.

  Many of my security personnel carried weapons outside the club, most of them unlicensed. What I didn’t realize at the time was that some of them were armed inside the club or at the door as well. Mona kept a .38 in a shoulder holster and a smaller-caliber pistol in her boot. I guess what I didn’t know didn’t wind up hurting me.