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

by Peter Gatien

  In the overheated prose of Jack Newfield, my clubs were “satanic,” with a “long history of illegal drug sales and violent assaults.” I woke up every morning with a feeling of sick dread, knowing I would be demonized in the Post that day. I couldn’t figure out what I had ever done to provoke such unrelenting nastiness.

  Now, I had long been accustomed to attacks from right-wing puritans. The spectacle of public exhilaration on the dance floor of Limelight, Tunnel, or Palladium really bothered some people. I’ve encountered such attitudes all my life. In a lot of cultures the act of dancing itself is subject to all sorts of prohibitions. New York City’s restrictive cabaret law had been used to hassle artists, taking down Billie Holiday, among others. Nightlife, my chosen realm of operations, had tended to trigger hysterical attacks from the “daylife” world.

  Upright citizens always seemed on the verge of lighting up the torches, grabbing their pitchforks, and getting the mob together to snuff out the fun. I had assumed that some of the behavior was motivated by the hatred that adults harbored for the carefree ways of the young. Kids partying until four a.m.? Don’t they have to work? And there were other more bigoted motivations for the hate, such as homophobia and, especially in the case of Tunnel, outright racism. I’d always been sure I was on the right side of the nightlife-vs.-daylife battles.

  I never would have thought that Jack Newfield was a member of that priggish, conservative crew. He seemed to be something of an old-school liberal and had always been a loyalist to the cause of organized labor. In his columns he championed the fight against lead paint in public housing, targeted corrupt politicians, exposed predatory nursing homes, and fought the prosecution of a man who’d been wrongly convicted of murder. He seemed like a guy I might like to have a drink with.

  But Newfield took a hard right turn on his way to liberal sainthood. His rants changed when he left the Voice and transferred to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The Post was not really a newspaper so much as a propaganda sheet for right-wing causes. “I read three newspapers and the New York Post,” was a line I heard around town. The tabloid acted as a newsletter for Rudy Giuliani, and Newfield went to work on me as Rudy’s hatchet man.

  “The point is not to confuse objectivity with truth,” Newfield wrote, justifying his deeply subjective approach to reporting, where opinion and fact mixed together.

  Something else, something deep and dark and personal, motivated Newfield. He had a personal ax to grind. Rumor was that Newfield had some close personal experience with drug addiction. As in the case of Nicholas Mariniello’s family, Newfield apparently felt the problem stemmed from another, outside evil—or so he wanted to believe.

  Being trashed, lied about, and roasted in the media was incredibly frustrating. There was not a damned thing I could do about it. You can’t win a war against anyone with a printing press. It’s an unfair fight, and you’re doomed to surrender. Unfortunately, in 1996, the internet was just a fledgling platform for chat rooms and AOL. It wasn’t the great democratizing influence that it became just a few years later. I could have used a few young bloggers speaking up about my clubs and telling the truth about what went on behind our velvet ropes. As it was, the press was dominated by the old guard, and the old guard had decided to “clean up New York” at all costs.

  At William S. Burroughs’s Limelight birthday bash, the guest of honor made a few funny, choice remarks that included this pithy bit of wisdom: “An old drag queen once told me something and I’ve never been able to forget it. ‘Bill,’ she said, ‘the world is divided into the Pricks and the Johnsons. Pricks always want to impose their views on you and control what you do. Johnsons mind their own business and leave you alone.’”

  But Burroughs, in all his wisdom, forgot to mention that sometimes Pricks and Johnsons switch sides. Jack Newfield’s move to the Post, where he was reduced to carrying water for Murdoch, was a classic case. The process by which a Johnson reverses course and becomes a Prick has since fascinated me. I’ll never be able to understand it.

  After my arrest, the Post sent undercover reporters into my clubs. They pronounced each “boring,” without any evidence of illicit drug use. In a Newfield column published only a month later, he rebranded Limelight as a den of iniquity, with club-goers using hypodermic needles to shoot up in dark corners, a tableau that was titillating but false.

  Most of the other press coverage I got after getting busted piled on the negativity. A select few of the downtown mags came to my defense, with a memorable line in PAPER: “Why don’t you go ahead and crucify Peter Gatien while you’re at it?” But in general, the media were eager to try me and judge me guilty.

  Ben Brafman warned me that the defendant’s chair was “the loneliest seat in the world.” But having him sitting next to me made a measurable difference. He viewed his role of defense attorney as akin to rescuing a drowning man. “It’s like I’m a great swimmer and I can pull you out of the water, no problem,” he told me. “But there’s also a tide we’re both fighting against, made up of all the other factors that are added on top of what’s happening in court. The tide can be a corrupt prosecution, say, or the portrayal of you in the media, and despite me being a great swimmer, that stuff can sweep you out to sea.”

  After he took my case, Ben Brafman signed on as the defense lawyer for Vincent Gigante, an organized-crime figure nicknamed “Vinny the Chin.” Apparently a nightlife king and a baby-faced Central Park killer weren’t enough for Brafman.

  “Hey, Ben,” I asked him, “is it really good for our team that you’re defending someone like the Chin right now?”

  “That’s funny,” Ben responded. “He said the same thing about you!” I like a lawyer with a sense of humor.

  I knew that in the past I had cultivated a dangerous air. My eye patch helped to distinguish me from the crowd. The press referred to it as my “trademark” eye patch, as if I wore it for fashion, just an overage club kid playing dress-up. Because of that image, I served perfectly as a villain for Rudy Giuliani and a scapegoat for Jack Newfield. There I stood, or, rather, there I stood out, the face of New York nightlife, a convenient mark.

  Yes, absolutely, there were drugs being consumed in my clubs. But there were drugs being consumed pretty much everywhere else in the known universe. Any claims—and there were many—that I employed “house dealers” to supply them to club-goers was fantasy, a macabre straight-world vision of what a downtown club was like.

  The way I saw it, the authorities had presented me with an impossible task. I couldn’t prevent a pill from coming into Limelight. I needed customers, and I wanted them to let loose and have a good time. Telling the difference between a happy transplant from the Midwest who thinks he’s finally found an urban nightlife paradise, and a partier high on E, was a task my bouncers couldn’t consistently perform, just as they couldn’t be expected to distinguish between an inebriated woman simply exhausted from dancing and one plummeting down a K-hole.

  It would have been ludicrous to label anyone involved in a New York City nightclub “innocent.” I swam in the same waters as everyone else. In our society, recreational drug use was a fact of life. Ever since I learned my lesson at the Aardvark, I didn’t drink, smoke weed, or do other drugs while I was on the job. As the Kipling poem had it, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . .” Amid the late-night wildness in my clubs, I was the designated driver.

  But the nightlife profession in general and my eye-patch persona in particular did a great job of making me look guilty.

  The wheels came off the prosecution’s war wagon almost immediately. The team assigned to the case was headed up by a pair of assistant US attorneys, Michele Adelman and Eric Friedberg. That summer they spent a lot of time doing triage as their prize trio of informants—Sean Bradley, Michael Alig, and Sean Kirkham—began to implode.

  Sean Bradley’s arrest for dealing narcotics was the prosecution’s most immediate concern. Finding himself in deeper and deeper trouble, Bradley
wrote an incredible rambling, incriminating “Dear Judge” letter, detailing his experiences during his six-month stint as Gagne and Germanowski’s confidential informant.

  The agents supplied him with drugs, Sean stated in the letter, taught him how to mask his urine tests, and in fact encouraged him to continue to distribute Ecstasy. To keep Bradley’s pipeline open, the DEA agents allegedly allowed a shipment of ten thousand hits of the drug to be imported from Amsterdam by Sean’s girlfriend, Jessica Davis.

  “While undercover,” Bradley wrote, “Agents Gagne, as well as Agent Germonowski [sic], they used XTC, Agent Gagne smoked pot, and did Special K on more than one occasion.”

  Bradley whined about being repeatedly shorted on his “c.i. money,” meaning the pay the government provides for confidential informants, which in Sean’s case meant $750 or $1,000 at a time. He complained that Gagne posed rude questions to him about his go-go dancer girlfriend. “Has Jessica ever fucked another girl and you at the same time?” and “Does she take it in the ass?” Agent Gagne, stated Bradley, was “one of those stereotypical males who think they are very macho, and have to prove this by bragging about their sexual conquests.” Such talk made Sean “feel so very uncomfortable,” and “upsetted” him.

  He seemed to have a better relationship with Germanowski, and there’s a pathetic quality to certain sections of the letter. The kid makes it sound as though he got played.

  Now as far as Agent Gormonowski [sic] goes, I was so happy to have met him. We became friends, I don’t mean just mere associates, I mean we were friends. He seemed really concerned about me, not just the case, but with me and my girlfriend . . . I would call Gee [Germanowski], talk to him, see how he was doing, always asking about his wife and son. He was like the older brother I never had . . . He took me to his house in Tinton Falls once, he even gave me his home phone number. He said he never did that with any other c.i., that it was against the rules. Gee once came to the bar that my girlfriend strips at to watch her dance . . . He also promised me that when the case was over, he would move me to a safe place, and I could start a new life with the reward money.

  Sad, as Donald Trump would say. And a little chilling, too. Of course, it’s against policy for DEA personnel to fraternize with CIs, not to mention provide drugs to them, do drugs with them, go on drug runs with them. Anything coming from Bradley had to be taken with not a grain but a whole pillar of salt. On the word of a whack job like this I was facing twenty years?

  “Agent Germanowski and Gagne made it clear to me the government wanted Gation [sic] at all costs,” Bradley wrote. “They bent rules. They broke rules.” He quoted Agent Gagne: “If criminals lied, and cheated, sometimes the government had to do the same to get their targets.”

  Bradley claimed that the DEA agents assured him that as a payoff, as a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, he would receive a percentage of all assets the government seized in the case. “Basically [Germanowski] promised me over a quarter of a million dollars.”

  A quarter of a million dollars was, apparently, the prize that kept Sean Bradley interested and in the game. For anyone that kind of money would serve as powerful motivation, but especially for a young kid with dollar signs in his eyes. The US government runs a lucrative racket by seizing the assets of the accused, and in the case of civil forfeiture, the subjects don’t even have to be convicted in a court of law. There are stories from all over the country, but mostly in the South, that allege sheriff’s departments arrest people simply because the cops are interested in confiscating a Lamborghini or Tesla.

  Freezing my bank accounts was simply the government’s first step. Next they hoovered up all the funds from those accounts, putting liens on every property, confiscating cars, just seizing any and all assets. Sean Bradley was apparently eagerly awaiting his cut of the blood money.

  Bradley’s “Dear Judge” letter prompted AUSA Adelman to come down on him like a ton of bricks. She also discovered that he had reached out to my attorney through one of my legal team’s investigators, John Dembrowski. Bradley was charged with making a false statement to a DEA agent, and Adelman threatened to “bury him” if he continued to communicate with my defense team.

  Gagne and Germanowski did all they could to shore up the government’s tumbling house of cards. They visited Michael Alig. Even though Michael was under increasing suspicion over his involvement in Angel’s murder—mostly because he was blabbing about it to “anyone who would listen”—the DEA agents offered all sorts of wild deals. Michael said later he was promised he would walk on the murder if he cooperated in the case against me.

  Around the time that promise was being made, a cork-lined wooden crate washed up on a Staten Island beach, containing the remains of Andre “Angel” Melendez. The whole club scene had become convinced that Alig had been involved in the killing, and those who weren’t were tipped over the edge by an article in the Village Voice that spelled out the details. Yet the DEA agents were so set on nailing me that they were allegedly willing to give Michael a pass on a gruesome murder.

  Next to implode was Sean Kirkham, the last-recruited of the informants that the government pinned its hopes upon. Kirkham turned against his government handlers, alleging that, while he was running a gay escort service, AUSA Eric Friedberg called him up looking for sex. Kirkham said that while working for Friedberg, he himself became the prosecutor’s boy toy. Playing both sides, he reached out to Ben Brafman and offered to sell the Fed’s investigatory file in the case against me for $10,000. Ben immediately contacted the US Attorney’s Office, a sting was set up, and the Feds busted their own informant.

  After all that went down, and as I watched the case blowing up in their faces, I thought AUSAs Adelman and Friedberg would toss in the towel and admit defeat. I myself always try to listen when the universe seems to be telling me something. But the prosecutorial mind-set of “win at all costs” prevented Adelman and Friedberg from hearing the clear message being sent.

  Instead, they followed the advice of the old street wisdom: “If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards.” Employing a legal strategy that involved a “superseding indictment,” the two AUSAs simply changed the rules of the game. They filed a reworked criminal complaint that did not depend on the testimony of Bradley, Alig, and Kirkham. Incredibly, Adelman and Friedberg would employ that tactic nine separate times before I finally faced them in court, filing one reworked criminal complaint after another. Even that situation didn’t entirely settle my fears. I knew the government’s problems were growing, but the prospect of twenty years in the slammer had a tendency to bring out the cynic in me.

  Michele Adelman wasn’t going to quit. The woman had a photo of me tacked up on the wall of her office, and I don’t think it was because she liked my looks. It was a huge, blown-up poster, lacking only a bull’s-eye pattern for target practice on a gun range. I was Michele’s literal poster boy.

  While waiting for trial on the conspiracy-to-distribute charge, I became very familiar with the many ways the government could fuck with me. Alessandra and I were indicted by sales-tax raps that would have swept up any merchant operating a cash business in New York.

  I kept scrupulous books. I paid my taxes. But I also sometimes doled out payroll in cash. I dotted every i but occasionally failed to cross every t. So sue me, I’d think. But that’s exactly what New York State did. Listing my wife on the charges was a cruel twist of the knife.

  The sales-tax charge was followed by a barrage of permit denials, regulatory demands, and nitpicking violations of municipal ordinances. For example, Limelight carried a certificate of occupancy for four thousand people, a status carried forward from when the building had served as a house of worship. Lo and behold, that certificate was withdrawn, and a new one was filed that limited the club’s occupancy to 375 people. At that rate, the staff would have outnumbered the customers.

  On and on it went: fire inspections; building inspections; sanitation violations; police actions; citations for noise,
loitering, unlawful assembly. Death by a thousand cuts. The government doesn’t run out of money, and it doesn’t run out of time. Meanwhile, waiting for my court date, I was running out of both.

  Under the ongoing assault I managed to keep my clubs open, but barely. I was beginning to understand that I couldn’t defend myself without money. I desperately needed cash flow to pay my legal fees, which were spiraling into the stratosphere.

  I once made a stab at totaling it up into some sort of grand figure, representing what kind of fortune I would have needed to survive it all. I came up with a ballpark figure of $20 million. That’s what it takes to keep the government off your back nowadays. Twenty million to pay the lawyers, the court costs, and the fines, and make up for lost revenue.

  And I still had to show up in court to face Adelman, Friedberg, and company, trusting that my champion, Ben Brafman, would win the day.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Up Against the Wall

  “The jury is here,” Judge Frederic Block of the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, announced. “I’m going to bring them into the courtroom now.”

  Those words kicked off the most excruciating, absurdist, belief-defying, panic-stricken four weeks of my life. I stood accused of conspiracy to distribute drugs. The US Attorney’s Office had tossed in a RICO charge in the last of the seemingly endless “do-over” indictments they threw at me.

  RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) is a law originally created to target Mafia dons. But increasingly it’s being invoked against more ordinary joes, because it is devilishly difficult to defend against. Prosecutors love it. In RICO prosecutions, hearsay testimony is allowed, among other adjustments that stack the deck in favor of the government.