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

by Peter Gatien

  I’ve done really well, I remember thinking that sunlit afternoon. Could my life get any better?

  When the gods hear a line like that from the lips of a mortal, the Greek concept of hubris kicks in. I was blissfully unaware that a series of unconnected events was coming together just then, ready to shatter my life in ways I could hardly imagine. I look back at the head-in-the-clouds dreamer on that Fifth Avenue stroll and almost feel sorry for him. I had no idea about the tidal wave of trouble that would soon crash down on me.

  PART TWO: BUSTED IN BROOKLYN

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Three Fates

  After failing the first time to defeat David Dinkins in a mayoral election, Rudy Giuliani tried again and won, assuming office on the first day of 1994. His campaign slogan might as well have been This city’s going down the tubes, and that theme played to the middle-class frustration with panhandlers, public urination, and other petty urban grievances. Giuliani portrayed himself as the tough-on-crime crusader who was going to bring the city to heel.

  He kept his own sordid background under wraps. His family ties to mobsters were never mentioned. Giuliani embraced the “broken windows” philosophy of policing, which held that if cops cracked down on quality-of-life concerns like graffiti, turnstile-hopping, and vandalism, the overall crime rate would go down. In practice, the strategy meant stop-and-frisk harassment of anyone with dark skin.

  “There are no small crimes,” Giuliani stated. A sentiment he conveniently eschews as a lawyer for the president. Rudy brought the mind-set of a professional prosecutor to the office of the mayor, demonstrating little understanding of the political nuances of the job.

  In truth, the crime rate had already been going down under his predecessor, David Dinkins. Rudy ranted away regardless, employing law-and-order rhetoric against the lowest levels of society. He singled out so-called “squeegee men,” the panhandlers who waylaid cars at intersections and used a rubber squeegee tool to clean the windshields and then demanded money of the unsuspecting drivers.

  Around this time, the mayor’s mom was quoted as saying, “He’s definitely not a conservative Republican.” Helen Giuliani went on to explain, “He thinks he is, but he isn’t. He still feels very sorry for the poor.”

  In his relentless war against panhandlers, street sex workers, and the homeless, Rudy displayed no sorrow for the poor at all. When cops looked into the squeegee beggars, they discovered there were actually only about seventy-five of them in a city of over seven million. Still, Rudy had made them into his favorite whipping boys, and, miracle of miracles, the cops were able to target them and eliminate the phenomenon within a couple of months.

  “We found out they were a pretty small union,” Giuliani’s deputy mayor, Peter Powers, joked to the press.

  The victory over the squeegee scourge represented a clear triumph for the new mayor. Here was a man who could get things done.

  I hadn’t given two shits about Giuliani back when he was a US prosecutor, and I still didn’t give a damn when he became mayor. I believed that particular road ran both ways: I would have been shocked to learn he cared anything about me. I operated a multimillion-dollar, aboveboard business, and my taxes filled the coffers of the city to the tune of thousands of dollars a week.

  As an upstanding member of the community, I considered my position to be fairly secure. I was protected by the rule of law, due process, and the principle of fair play. There had always been a bit of back and forth between government authorities and purveyors of entertainment. But any mayor of New York City surely had to recognize that nightlife was an essential element of the town’s reign as a globally renowned cultural mecca. He wasn’t exactly mayor of Podunk.

  The quick demise of the squeegee men meant the mayor had to find another menace to set up and knock down. “Paper tiger” is the term for a created enemy that can be made to look threatening but is actually not, and guys like Giuliani always, always need an enemy to exploit. In summer 1995, when he had been in the mayor’s office for a year and a half, Giuliani needed a new paper tiger. He looked around and spotted a certain eye-patch-wearing club owner who stood prominently atop the city’s nightlife scene.

  That year, a pair of cowboy DEA agents named Robert Gagne and Matthew Germanowski busted an Israeli smuggling ring that worked out of JFK airport. The Israelis specialized in MDMA, also known as Ecstasy, X, E, or molly. A fancy-ass form of amphetamine, MDMA had actually been around since the “speed kills” warnings of the sixties. Back in the winter of 1985, the first raves took place amid the raging nightclub scene on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. From there, MDMA emerged from its long hibernation and quickly spread to the European rave scene. Soon enough, the drug hit New York City.

  I grasped the fact that E was becoming more and more common. Simply from the perspective of a club owner, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about Ecstasy. People on E tended to drink far less, so bar receipts suffered. But during the last half of the ’80s and the first half of the ’90s, Ecstasy became as American as apple pie. It was showing up everywhere—at concerts, on college campuses, during music festivals.

  As a public menace, E was definitely a Drug Plague Lite. Crack cocaine had crippled the ghettos in the ’80s. Heroin had people nodding out in doorways. Ecstasy was a much friendlier substance, nicknamed the Love Drug, with users searching the world desperately looking for someone to embrace. Early experimenters in the psychiatric community wanted to name the drug Empathy. When researchers gave MDMA to octopuses, the animals reached out for a hug, attempting to accomplish an eight-armed embrace.

  Personally, I had cleaned up my act, but I wasn’t sober, just not overindulging the way I had been. Off premises and in private, I tried a tab of E myself, simply because I wanted to know what the fuss was about. To me, it didn’t feel all that different from a hit of speed.

  “It’s like the opposite of paranoia,” gushed a friend who will not be named, my E connection and a great fan of the drug. “When you’re rolling, you don’t feel like everyone’s out to get you. You feel like everyone is out to help you.

  “Ecstasy’s just the best high in the world for dancing.”

  They might not have been drinking as much, but those E-kids sure were out on the floor for extended periods of time. At Limelight I watched as a grinning, upbeat mood took hold, midway between a marathon dance contest and a love-in. Leave it to the buzzkill geniuses at the Drug Enforcement Administration to declare war against the love drug. In the mid-’80s, a US senator from Texas, Lloyd Bentsen, pushed hard for the DEA to classify Ecstasy as a dangerous Schedule I drug. That category included heroin, LSD, and marijuana, substances that are subject to the most severe restrictions by the government.

  The Schedule I listing went on the books, but ten years later, there had yet to be a major Ecstasy bust by the Feds. Agents Gagne and Germanowski were out to change that. During a street buy, they stumbled upon a pair of luckless smugglers from Tel Aviv named Israel Hazut and Michel Elbaz. When the DEA agents brought a case against the two, the dealers turned talkative. Ecstasy was all the rage, they told the agents, who were only vaguely aware of a drug that had already made extensive inroads on their turf.

  New York State had not yet bothered to make Ecstasy illegal. But the federal government, not the state, was the DEA’s master, and there was E, classed as dangerous right alongside heroin. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a DEA agent, everything looks like an opportunity for a drug bust.

  Like a lot of people, I was disgusted with the War on Drugs. The whole business seemed like a disaster, criminalizing large sectors of the populace, filling the jails with nonviolent offenders, costing a fortune while producing only uneven results. If it wasn’t even illegal in New York State, I wasn’t worrying about it. In my experience, cocaine was what the police were looking to bust.

  But there was also a dark undertow swirling in certain sectors of the club scene. Coke wasn’t enough. Ecstasy wasn’t enough. People began mixing dru
g cocktails like mad scientists. Frankenstein combinations like crystal meth, Ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms, or Rohypnol—the “date-rape drug”—went into the mix. PCP or angel dust could trigger deathlike trances for the enjoyment of users. Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer with a lot of different names—Special K, Kitty, K-Way—was Ecstasy’s evil twin. Users disappeared down a “K-hole,” a strange, out-of-body state of disassociation and induced oblivion. The drug of choice was more.

  The mid-’90s was the era of the club kids, a group of young sybarites who gloried in épater la bourgeoisie, tweaking the noses of the uptight middle class. They dressed in outrageous outfits, getting costumed up as if they were headed for a psychedelic carnival, and then went to one of my clubs.

  Shirtless and shaved clean of body hair, wearing fishnet stockings and a pair of patent-leather bunny ears, a club-goer might top off his look with a dental insert giving him enormous front teeth. Teased hair; an overtight nurse’s uniform; a dozen pair of nested, multicolored eyeglass frames; a prop syringe the size of a baseball bat; and suddenly an ordinary, mild-looking twentysomething transformed into a phlebotomist from hell.

  On and on came the cavalcade, with mad accessorizing as pumped up and surreal as the outfits—diaper pins, top hats, leather masks, enormous headpieces. The club kids loved to hate the straight world, and the straight world returned the favor, gazing upon the bizarre assembly with disgusted fascination.

  All told, there were only about a couple hundred club kids. Writer Amy Virshup gave them their name in a New York magazine cover story, essentially creating a scene by codifying it. After that came a storm of media interest. In old-time circus sideshows, the “geeks” indulged in all sorts of outrageous antics—biting the head off a live chicken was a favorite—designed to freak out the locals. The club kids served the same function. Club kids were perfect daytime-talk-show fodder; their appearances lent the whole phenomenon national visibility.

  Host Joan Rivers: “Do you ever walk down the street and see someone with a pierced nose, or blue hair, and you wonder, What does their mother think? Or Why do they do that? Or What does that person do for a living? Well, today, right here on The Joan Rivers Show, you are going to meet people who go out of their way to dress to get attention, people whose very existence says, Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”

  I like outrageousness. I like people who are different, who cross a line. So purely on a personal basis, I enjoyed the club kids. I knew a lot of them from the club, and I looked upon their antics with a fond eye. I had been employing people just like them since my Atlanta days, as catalysts who inspired others. Clara the Carefree Chicken, a club kid at Limelight who dressed every night in a ratty yellow poultry costume, was an employee of mine. I even rigged up a swing apparatus so the big bird could swoop over the dance floor. I wasn’t about to throw a wet blanket over free artistic expression like that.

  Purely from a business standpoint, I appreciated the club kids even more. They represented an essential piece of my puzzle. We usually comped them at the door, but they brought in loads of other customers who were eager to gawk at the geeks. I was in the business of getting paying customers into my clubs, and anyone who helped me in that effort got my respect. But just as geek acts were only a part of the action at an old-time circus sideshow, club kids were just one element of the whole nightlife scene.

  They brought a lot of attention to themselves, and they brought a lot of attention to me. They also talked a lot about drug use. I don’t know which part of their act most offended the sensibilities of middle America. Was it the gender-bending costumes? The fact that none of them ever got out of bed before the middle of the afternoon? Or was it the constant chatter about molly and Special K and cocaine?

  All those behaviors rolled up into one outlandish package, but only the last one, the drug taking, was illegal. As such, it was a practice that the straight world could do something about. Go ahead, tweak the noses of the bourgeoisie, but don’t act surprised if you get tweaked right back, twice as hard.

  Around the time club kids were becoming media darlings, actively promoting E as not only an essential ingredient of their lifestyle but the greatest thing since sliced bread, the government started to use another, more ominous term to describe MDMA. It wasn’t the Love Drug after all. No, in the hearing rooms and legislative language of Congress, and in the minds of DEA agents such as Gagne and Germanowski, it became “the Club Drug.”

  The Greeks had the idea of the three Fates, a trio who rule over what happens to mankind. One Fate spins out the thread of our lives, another measures, and a third snips. The three old hags definitely had their hand in what happened that summer of ’95. A JFK Ecstasy bust by a couple of rogue DEA agents was only the first act.

  Next up was a counterfeit arrest out in the suburban wilds of New Jersey. Nineteen-year-old Sean Bradley passed some bad bills at the Woodbridge Center shopping mall and got caught doing it. The whole thing should have ended there, but in order to cut a plea deal, Bradley reached out to the DEA and eventually found himself talking to Germanowski and Gagne.

  “In all the New York clubs,” Bradley breathlessly told the agents, “the kids are wild for Ecstasy.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Germanowski responded, forty-two years old and not exactly hip to the scene. “What clubs?”

  “Oh, you know, Studio 54, Limelight, Nell’s, Palladium, CBGB, all of them.”

  Some of the places Bradley mentioned were already defunct. It didn’t matter. The DEA agents were bloodhounds that had been given a scent. They were off and howling. Caught up in paramilitary fervor, they labeled their squad “Delta 35” and allied themselves with Rudy Giuliani’s wide-ranging crackdown on disturbers of the public peace.

  “I can get you into all the clubs,” Bradley told the agents. The gullible duo signed him on as a confidential informant. Bradley realized he would have to take the agents in hand if they were going to fit in with the nightlife crowd. He actually brought Gagne and Germanowski clothes shopping and performed something of a makeover on them, just so they could get past the door.

  The results were mixed. Gagne dressed in drag. Germanowski dyed his hair platinum, wore a dog collar, and had his partner lead him around the club on a leash—living the dream of some secret fantasy, no doubt.

  I saw the two when they showed up at Tunnel, a couple of strange stiffs standing among the rest of the hopefuls. They stood out. I’ve seen my share of freaks over the years, but something about these two rang false. The one I would come to know as Gagne had hooded eyes and a thick Cro-Magnon forehead. Waiting for hours in the pathetic crowd that always collected in a U-shape around the door personnel, begging for entry, they were allowed in only at the tail end of the night. When they got involved in a shoving match outside one of the VIP rooms, they were tossed from the club.

  The third element in my downward-spiral trifecta came when a teenager named Nicholas Mariniello hanged himself at his family home in New Jersey. The kid had been at Limelight the night before. The coroner’s report ruled he died from suicide by self-asphyxiation. Although no physical evidence of drug use was found, Mariniello’s father embarked upon a grief-stricken crusade, looking for someone to blame. His focus settled on drug use at Limelight and, eventually, on me.

  I sympathized with the father. I can’t imagine the pain of losing a child, and I don’t know how I would have acted in his position. But the well-connected Mariniello family had contacts in the offices of New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, who picked up the phone and called across the river to Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

  Robert Silbering, the special narcotics prosecutor for New York City, laid out the situation in a surprisingly candid statement to the press:

  We knew there could be drug use in Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium, but they’re not going to come in and shut those places down. Peter Gatien was a marked man, and one way or another he was going down. He was the big fish, and if you could get him, it would send a message to the other club own
ers.

  An Ecstasy bust in Queens. A counterfeit arrest in New Jersey. An eighteen-year-old’s suicide in New Jersey. These events occurred within a few months of each other, and I remained blissfully unaware of all three.

  That August my wife threw a birthday party for my forty-fourth, a bash that featured many, many cases of Dom Pérignon champagne. A gaggle of kids—not club kids, but real, actual children—toddled around underfoot. Employees from the clubs crowded in among friends, family, and business associates. Daniel Boulud, my favorite chef, created the feast.

  The night seemed like a righteous reimagining of my parents’ holiday parties in Cornwall, but I should have known something would go wrong. I should have glanced up into the sky above the party, where I would have seen a vision of a balding Republican mayor peering down at me through some sort of Wicked Witch of the West crystal ball. Writer H. L. Mencken’s classic definition of puritanism suited Rudy Giuliani to a T: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

  Well, I was one of those happy someones. Like the old anti-substance-abuse slogan had it, I didn’t need drugs, I was high on my life.

  The first shot in the war of the straight world against New York nightlife came on Saturday, September 30, 1995. September was something of a dark month that year: the state of New York reinstated the death penalty, the New York Times published the Unabomber’s manifesto, and the serial-killer film Se7en was in theaters. But all anyone talked about was the OJ trial.

  I have this crystalline memory of the week before the closure, the calm before the storm. We were doing close to thirty different theme-night parties then, but Mondays, the only day the clubs were dark, gave me a chance to catch my breath, reassess our progress, tweak our approach. Usually something needed correcting, or something had been trashed the week before. But I remember walking in that Monday floating on a pink cloud of satisfaction.