by Peter Gatien
The previous week had gone pretty much perfectly. We’d maximized the number of entries every night, even on the traditionally slower ones, like Tuesday. Normally we would tinker on Mondays when the clubs were dark, change out the DJ lineup, maybe, create a new theme, bring in different promoters. That Monday we didn’t need to change a thing. For the first time in my life as a club owner, I thought I had everything figured out.
The following Friday we were closed down.
That night, undercover cops fanned out through Limelight, looking for sales of illicit drugs. The actual raid hit at closing time, five a.m., on the first of October. A squad of uniformed officers moved in and joined their plainclothes cohorts. The cops ordered the music shut down. They herded all the patrons into the lobby and then out onto the street. There, they ushered them into an impromptu lineup. I remember seeing my former customers huddling in the cold night air.
The legal justification for the raid involved an old city statute. The so-called nuisance-abatement law had never been employed to shut down a nightclub before. It was originally designed for use against brothels. Directed by Giuliani, the City Hall brain trust had come up with the new strategy, put into play by Silbering, the special narcotics prosecutor.
I made for an easy target. Look for a guy wearing an eye patch.
We had 3,500 people in the club that night. For all the high-profile brass, plainclothes, and uniformed personnel involved in the operation, the cops made only three arrests, all on misdemeanor weed charges. One of my busboys got swept up in the net when he was pestered over and over by an undercover who said he was looking for a high. Annoyed, the busboy finally gave the guy a single joint of his own, and paid for the act of charity by getting popped.
I myself wasn’t busted, but it was as if Limelight itself had been. Silbering had a paper sticker slapped across the front door that was like an eviction notice:
BUSINESS CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE NEW YORK CITY COMMISSIONER OF POLICE. EFFECTIVE DATE: 09/30/95. TO LICENSEE/OWNER OF ESTABLISHMENT: Under Public Safety Threat/Summary Closure, the Police Commissioner has issued an order requiring the immediate cessation of all business activities at, and the closure of this establishment. The Police Commissioner has determined that this establishment presents a public safety threat due to an offense occurring at this establishment during the establishment’s operating hours, involving the licensee/owner, or its employees, agents or patrons, or otherwise involving circumstances having a connection to the operation of this establishment. The Police Commissioner has determined that continued operation of this establishment presents a danger to the public and has ordered its Summary Closure.
The notice wasn’t signed by Rudy Giuliani, but the sticker had his fingerprints all over it. He held a press conference crowing about the closing. Mr. Mayor had found a replacement for his squeegee-man bugaboo. The bloodhounds Gagne and Germanowski had put their noses to the ground on the trail of Ecstasy. Their informant Sean Bradley, the luckless counterfeiter, had spun his tales of nightlife decadence. The suicide death of young Nicholas Mariniello was cited in the aftermath as a reason for the raid.
I never made a single cent off a drug sale, ever. In my business life, the sole sacred, overriding principle was always protecting my liquor license. Without that, I had nothing. There didn’t seem to be any due process. The judicial hearings that led to the closing were all ex parte, meaning I didn’t have the chance to plead my case. Bang, I was shut down, and the court action to get reopened could take weeks.
Silbering confronted me amid the chaos of the raid. “I’ve got to ask, Peter, were you involved?”
I picked up a bottle of Perrier that rested on top of a nearby bar. “You see this, Bob? I can buy one of these for a dollar and sell it here for seven dollars. Now why in God’s name would I jeopardize a sweet arrangement like that to get into selling pills?”
That night, I overheard a phrase that would come to symbolize the Giuliani administration’s rancid view of nightclubs, one I would hear repeated again and again in the coming months. “This place is like a drug supermarket,” the New York Daily News quoted an undercover cop on the Limelight raid. “You find everything in there: pills, marijuana and cocaine. You name it, they have it.”
A “drug supermarket.” A ridiculous concept, especially when the raid had actually turned up only a paltry amount of weed. But police, prosecutors, and the media fastened upon the term, as though Limelight operated some sort of illicit Duane Reade. “Drug supermarket” became a convenient catchphrase, a two-word package tied up in a neat bow and used to sway public opinion. A Big Lie was born and took on a life of its own.
Don’t fight it, my lawyers advised me, settle. I was a little stunned by the turn of events. In over twenty years of club owning, nothing like this had ever happened to me. I had no playbook. The attorneys counseled me to take the hit meekly, to avoid making trouble. I agreed to post a large bond and had to close the club for five days.
The silver lining, which took me a while to identify, was that the incident opened up a dialogue with city authorities. In the atmosphere of hysteria that surrounded the raid, the cops offered soothing assurances.
“Our goal is not to close the Limelight forever,” police spokesperson Robert Messner told the Times. “It’s a feature of New York City and it is a positive thing for a community to have nightlife. What we want is to change it from a place that has rampant drug use to one that has no active drug life.”
All right, I thought. I mean, good luck with that. In 1990s America, and especially in nighttime Manhattan, a place with “no active drug life” sounded like a pipe dream. No such location existed—not City Hall, not Rikers Island, not St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It lived in the fantasies of conservative puritan Nazis, maybe, but nowhere else. Still, I liked the sound of “it is a positive thing for a community to have nightlife.” Amen, brother.
The term of the original indictment was six months. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, I met once a month with representatives from Manhattan Narcotics, the same arm of the NYPD that had shut me down. We still had something of an adversarial relationship, but at least we were talking. Face-to-face, I had to believe that Silbering and his crew would realize I didn’t have horns growing out of my head, that I was being tasked with an impossible job, and that I would continue to demonstrate goodwill in an effort to comply with the city’s demands.
The settlement also dictated that I hire a security consulting firm. I chose Kroll Associates, a leader in the field. Now I had security monitoring my security. I could furnish Silbering and Manhattan Narcotics with glowing reports from Kroll, which indicated that I was actually doing an effective job at drug interdiction in my club. I eventually hired Kroll for all my venues, a hefty undertaking at $10,000 each per week, but one that might keep my other clubs safe from similar treatment.
I had taken a first shot across my bow. I duly reefed in my sails, steered my vessel into port for a temporary refitting, and hired on more crew. But I was determined to captain on. I didn’t think there was anything else I could do.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When the Whip Comes Down
After the weeklong padlocking of Limelight in fall 1995, I somehow fooled myself into thinking the raid and its aftermath represented the end of government harassment. I was making a good-faith effort to work with city authorities. I kept hearing rumors about a large-scale investigation into my affairs, but New York City is rampant with rumors, especially in nightlife.
One aspect of running a multimillion-dollar company involved palling around with the powers that be by attending fundraisers and benefits that seemed to dot the social calendar with the regularity of religious holidays. It’s called the “rubber-chicken circuit,” for the inedible food customarily served. Usually my in-house legal counselor and all-around superconnected New York advisor, Susan Wagner, encouraged me to attend. Susan had worked in the Koch administration and had a lot of credibility, to the extent that I considered h
er my conscience and usually did whatever she told me to do.
I always hated the whole black-tie merry-go-round of events at the Waldorf, Cipriani, the Rainbow Room, and other upscale outposts of the business and social elite. But Susan convinced me that attendance at those dinners was obligatory, a way of claiming my place in the power structure of the city. I would skip them at my own risk.
Among the soirées I attended that winter was a prestige fundraiser for the Republican Party in the Waldorf Astoria’s big banquet hall. The featured guest was Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and the celebrity attendee was Donald Trump. I got herded into the receiving line as soon as we entered the hall, suddenly finding myself face-to-face with Rudy, who reached out to shake my hand before realizing who I was.
By that time, I had a fully formed distaste for the man. Not long before that dinner, an AIDS group that had criticized him had suddenly lost city funding. When it was below zero outside and the homeless shelters were packed, the mayor routinely sent cops in at three a.m., rousting everyone and checking for outstanding warrants. Ever the prosecutor, Rudy hounded newsstand operators, buskers, and street artists in a relentless campaign to make New York City a more boring place to live. He had a habit of issuing authoritarian directives like some military dictator, then seeing his moves get knocked down in court.
That night at the Republican benefit, Giuliani grabbed my hand for an automatic receiving-line shake.
“Mr. Mayor,” I mumbled.
As he recognized me, a stricken expression crossed his face. He briefly looked panicked, then dropped my hand like a hot poker. Recoiling, the man muttered something I didn’t catch, an oath or a curse. I’ll never forget the look Rudy Giuliani gave me, a mix of fear and loathing that stunned me.
The incident chilled me, but not enough to prevent me from going about my business. I had enterprises to run that employed over a thousand people. Juggling four clubs—three when Club USA closed in 1995 after the building landlord went bankrupt—meant that I was too busy to care what the mayor of New York thought of me. I had events to organize, a million details to attend to, staffers to supervise, cajole, and encourage.
In the wake of the Limelight raid, my security personnel expanded. I never wanted cut-and-buff gym rats, the kind that were often jacked up on steroids. The job was not to win fights but to prevent them. I favored the more difficult-to-find people with military experience in black ops, or ex-cons who were well equipped to deal with outbreaks of violence. My team of Secret Service–level professionals could have provided security for the pope or the president.
I also continued to employ my usual army of managers, technicians, hostesses, graphic artists, cashiers, bartenders, door people, and maintenance crews. Professionals I took on included lawyers, insurance advisors, community liaisons, corporate event bookers, and specialists in government relations. On a nightly basis I dealt with cops, crooked or otherwise, and less often with city inspectors, community board members, and petty officials.
Tunnel had five different sound systems, and sound technicians had to make sure they were all running properly. I hired one lighting tech whose sole job was to go around to all the clubs and change the gels on the lights for the evening’s theme parties—bright, fun-filled pastels for gay nights, darker and more brooding tones for Goth and rock ’n’ roll, fire-engine red for hip-hop.
The ’80s and ’90s represented the era of the party promoter in nightclubs, and some of my time back then was spent managing a corps of people who were not quite employees, and not quite freelancers. I had never really had to deal with promoters before I entered the New York City market. I’d publicized my clubs in Atlanta and Florida via word of mouth or, rarely, in Miami, through radio advertising.
Even in New York, using planners wasn’t a universal practice. The Sunday-night hip-hop parties at Tunnel, for example, never required promotion. Word in the neighborhood was all I needed. “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge,” as Dr. Dre rapped. And even though DJ Flex is often credited with “creating” Tunnel Sundays, it wasn’t the DJ or promoter who made events happen, it was the entire organization behind the promoter. No single person can do anything in nightlife without a strong organization.
Party planners were mostly small-time operators whose main skill was putting together lists of viable contacts, and whose value was their ability to attract customers to my clubs. They mostly were young, avid club-goers themselves, working to support their nightlife habits. In the pre-AIDS glory days of the early ’80s, a promoter might deliver eight hundred to twelve hundred entries, but that level of success faded quickly. By the ’90s, a good party planner could bring fifty or a hundred people into a club, and a great one might attract four or five hundred.
Gradually I began to engage several planners for each night we were open. They had different constituencies, so four or five promoters together might be able to guarantee a thousand or so paying patrons—not a negligible number.
For each club I owned, I blocked out future dates on massive whiteboards installed on the walls of my offices. Planning went on weeks, sometimes months, ahead of time. Surrounded by my scrawled-over whiteboards charting what dates were coming up, I would assemble party planners for busy, chaotic, sometimes raucous afternoon meetings where we hashed out the details.
The planners were specialists; certain promoters handled themed parties that catered to the queer community, for example, while other promoters focused on rock nights. Party planners were forever promising me the moon, swearing they could deliver crowds, hordes, whole armies. I didn’t pay any attention to anyone’s assurances, but simply checked the door lists at the end of the night. If they guaranteed me hundreds and delivered a dozen, they were out.
I employed three in-house art directors, each with a staff of five, to work on the nightly transformation of each club. I also hired an incredibly talented artist named Gregory Homs to create advertising and invitations for the different parties at all of my clubs. Well known for his album covers and movie campaigns, he took on the challenge of coming up with multiple designs every week. Gregory was inclined to emphasize the outré aspects of nightlife. I recall him saying at the time that “a culture is defined by its taboos,” a philosophy I shared. That attitude showed in his work.
Postcard-size club invites became a symbol of the era as surely as Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. It’s almost a quaint concept, in an internet age, to recall a time when an actual paper-and-ink object represented a way for people to connect. The invites—which granted free or reduced-price admission—served as nightlife currency.
I worked with dozens of planners in the course of setting up parties and events at my clubs, juggling twenty or thirty theme nights a week. The most a planner could expect to knock down was a few hundred dollars a night. The attraction wasn’t money but prestige, influence, camaraderie, the warm-and-fuzzy feeling of being an insider. Those clubs were a place where kids who felt alone, who felt like outsiders, could find each other, and the feeling of belonging is a powerful thing.
The only notorious party planner ever, the one who played a part in the fall of my nightlife empire, was an Indiana-born live wire who was about to turn thirty in spring 1996. Michael Alig started as a busboy at Danceteria and become a ringmaster of the club kids, promoting a Wednesday-night theme party at Limelight called Disco 2000.
I originally signed Michael on because he’d attended Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, and FIT served as a locus for the young, hip, and creative. FIT students salted the Limelight crowd with a bit of flamboyance and color. I liked Alig well enough, but most of the time he was like a gnat buzzing around my head, asking for favors, claiming my attention. He was born to push people’s buttons, and he shared that characteristic with a lot of people on the club scene.
On the night of March 17, 1996, Alig and his roommate, Robert “Freeze” Riggs, murdered another club kid, Andre “Angel” Melendez. (Angel had long been eighty-sixed from my clubs.)
Days later, they then dismembered Andre’s body and disposed of it, ineptly, in the Hudson River.
The murder and its ghastly aftermath didn’t come to light until about eight months later, when the police started investigating in earnest and local outlets picked up the story. Alig had apparently started the rumors among the club kids that he and Freeze had killed Angel. He told so many stories no one could keep them straight, and one month later, in December 1996, Alig and Freeze were busted.
Not a single element of the crime took place anywhere near Limelight. But rumors swirled, as rumors will. That I employed Angel to supply my clubs with drugs (nope). That he was killed in Limelight’s basement (of course not). That I ordered the hit (no, no, no). The stories were wild, and eventually the incident came to symbolize the druggy decadence that supposedly infested New York’s nightlife at the time.
How the straight world loves tales of druggy decadence! It’s one of their favorite titillations. Articles were followed by books, memoirs, documentaries, and not one but two feature films—one of them starring Macaulay Culkin—that all exploited the Michael Alig story. The motive for the murder has been spun a number of different ways. Alig pleaded self-defense, but at other times he claimed it was premeditated. Others theorized Alig had been dope sick, or he was having a midlife crisis as a club kid approaching thirty, or he was a symbol of everything wrong with modern culture. You’d almost conclude from the way people talked that Alig was worthy of all the ink spilled about him, all the miles of celluloid. As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t.