by Peter Gatien
A few weeks before, after they had spelled out all the indictments, I’d had a single face-off with Agent Gagne. Tunnel had been under surveillance by Gagne and Germanowski, who had posted themselves in a warehouse across the street that housed Martha Stewart’s business headquarters. Gagne and Germanowski supposedly witnessed me working in my office.
That day, Sean Bradley was along for the ride with his DEA handlers, and he later told the tale to Ben Brafman. According to Sean, a stakeout is screamingly boring. Sitting in a warehouse, watching a guy go over paperwork and take meetings with his staff, apparently lacked the exciting evildoing that the surveillance team had been hoping for. During the downtime, Gagne suddenly erupted in a laugh.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if we saw Gatien taking a hit of coke right now?” he asked.
That fantasy of Gagne’s went on to become the first line of the charging indictment, claiming the DEA agents had seen me remove a “one-hitter” from a drawer in my desk and inhale cocaine. There were several problems with this. Given where they were staked out and where my desk was, I wouldn’t have been visible through my window, whether I was dancing naked, doing drugs, or howling at the moon. On top of that, my desk didn’t have drawers. It was just a simple slab of glass.
Before the police showed up to shut down Tunnel that night, I’d read in the indictment the accusation of my coke use at work. By that time a club closure had become a regular occurrence, so I can’t even recall the specific infraction. A noise complaint? Sidewalk crowding? I passed Gagne outside Limelight, stopping to confront him.
“You’re Agent Gagne, right?” I asked.
He nodded, an odd, stricken expression crossing his face.
“Come on,” I said, “let’s air it out, right now, right here, man to man. You know as well as I do that you didn’t see me snorting coke in my office—that’d be physically impossible.”
He gave a shit-heel smirk. “Don’t worry, it’ll all come out in the wash.”
“‘Come out in the wash’? What does that mean? You upend my whole life, close my businesses, hassle my family, and that’s the most you can say? ‘It’ll all come out in the wash’?”
Gagne just shrugged and walked away. I was disgusted and furious, but I had to keep a lid on my emotions. I was afraid any comment, any hostile move I made, might come back to me in court.
On Wednesday, January 14, 1998, my first day in front of a jury, I sat beside Ben Brafman and his defense team. If convicted on the charges, I faced a maximum prison sentence of twenty years. Unlike state convictions, where you’re out on good behavior after a third of your stretch, on federal raps you’re legally bound to serve at least 85 percent of your sentence. I was staring at a prison term that might have me incarcerated until I was sixty-three years old.
In his opening remarks, Ben Brafman told the jury bluntly that the prosecution was “asking you to end someone else’s life.”
That may sound like an exaggeration, since even if the prosecutors wished to strap me into the electric chair at Sing Sing, the conspiracy charges they ginned up against me weren’t technically capital crimes. But I felt the full force of Ben’s statement. Being convicted would end my life as I knew it—my life with my children and family, my life running a successful nightclub empire.
I was producing plays and feature films, developing plans for getting into the hotel business, planning for a future that would shepherd me into a life beyond nightclubs. All that would disappear with a long prison sentence. Directly behind me, in the gallery, Alessandra, Jen, and other members of my family sat, as they would for every single session.
That morning the prosecution and defense teams introduced themselves to the members of the jury, who numbered eighteen people, twelve jurors and six alternates. Looking middle-aged and middle-class, the jurors didn’t have the opportunity to introduce themselves to us. Among them were a truck driver and a couple of housewives. None of them looked like they had seen the inside of a nightclub recently.
Boning up on advice for how to behave in court, I had read that the defendant should avoid staring at the jury. I had also read that I shouldn’t avoid looking at them. Which piece of advice was right? I didn’t know what to do.
Five people sat at the prosecution table: three assistant US attorneys—Eric Friedberg, Michele Adelman, and Lisa Fleischman—and two special agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Robert Gagne and Matt Germanowski. I was facing down the same pair of vultures who had been circling me for years, ever since they busted some Israeli smugglers who’d blurted out that Ecstasy was popular in “all the clubs.”
And that quaking accused gent sitting beside Ben Brafman? That would be me. I have no hesitation in admitting that at that moment, as the proceedings opened, I was scared shitless. Pure, gut-wrenching terror.
I felt torn between two contradictory understandings. I believed that the government’s legal action was a total charade, a total mutt of a case. I didn’t even know what the hell I was doing in Brooklyn, since none of my clubs were located there. Ben told me he’d heard that the DEA had shopped the case across the river to the US Southern District of New York, which covers Manhattan. The US attorney in that office, Mary Jo White, didn’t want any part of it.
So I should have been sitting pretty. How could I possibly be convicted when the government’s case was trumped up, venue-shopped, relying on the testimony of thugs, addicts, dope dealers, rogue federal agents, and, in one instance, a convicted killer? The “flipped” witnesses were testifying in return for leniency on their felony crimes. In a just world, the judge would dismiss the charges, hold the government responsible for overreaching, and send us all home.
But a second, much darker understanding spurred my panic and woke me up in a cold sweat every morning. Through the year and a half that I waited for my case to come to trial, I gradually realized that the government doesn’t play fair. In my case, at least, the US Attorney’s Office had embarked on a crusade to end my life, as Ben put it. The prosecutors were out for blood.
“You are in for a knock-down, drag-out slugfest in this case,” Ben told the jury.
I tried to think of reasons why this might be so. The only answer I could come up with was that Rudy Giuliani was invested in this legal assault, and that it wouldn’t stop until it landed me behind bars. There were plenty of other indications that the case possessed some mysterious urgency for the government, that I was being specially targeted. When Ben attended a proffer session, where the defense and prosecution get together to see if terms of a plea deal can be hammered out, the prosecutors treated him as though he had leprosy.
“I’ve been doing this for thirty-five years, and I’ve never had a proffer like that,” Ben told me. “I can understand if prosecutors might characterize you as a piece of shit, since you’re the defendant, and that’s the way they justify themselves. But I’m an officer of the court, same as them. I know I don’t lie and I don’t cheat. They treated me at that meeting as if I, personally, was a piece of shit, simply for acting in your defense, and that’s not OK. In fact, it’s very far from being OK.”
Just two days before we went to trial, I opened the New York Times during a break in the opening session of the court proceedings, and I ran across a tiny story headlined “Possible Trial Witness Dies.” The text read:
A woman who was considered a potential witness in the upcoming trial of the nightclub owner Peter Gatien was found dead Monday in a Queens apartment, the apparent victim of a drug overdose, the police said. No foul play was suspected. Cynthia Haataja, 22, was discovered by her roommate in a bed in their apartment at 1129 47th Avenue in Long Island City.
I knew Cynthia Haataja by the name of “Gitsie.” She ran with the club kids who frequented the Wednesday-night Disco 2000 parties at Limelight. Pretty, with curly hair that was blonde when it wasn’t dyed green, she once went on Phil Donahue’s talk show with a few other members of Michael Alig’s crew, putting herself on display to frighten and appall Mr. and Mrs. F
ront Porch America. I liked Gitsie and considered her one of the more sane aliens visiting us from Planet Club Kid.
DEA special agent Matt Germanowski had been bearing down on Gitsie for months, shaping her up to testify against me. Gagne and Germanowski were put on her scent by the cops from Manhattan’s Tenth Precinct, who arrested her on the street with $40,000 worth of ketamine. The DEA agents told Gitsie they could make the drug bust go away in exchange for signing up as an informant in my trial.
But even when Gitsie agreed to testify, Germanowski wouldn’t leave her alone. The middle-aged federal agent seemed obsessed with Gitsie, who was just twenty-two, saying how pretty and sexy she was.
“I love you,” Germanowski told her repeatedly, badgering the woman to take a trip to Florida with him. Gitsie became frightened, confiding to her mother how extreme the situation was. She also reached out to my daughter Jen, pleading for help, saying she was afraid of the DEA agent and didn’t know what to do.
“You’ve got to speak to a lawyer,” Jen told her, and gave her a name to call. The attorney contacted the DEA and demanded that Agents Gagne and Germanowski cease all communication with his client.
Gagne and Germanowski must have had visions of Gitsie spilling details in court about their own crimes and misdemeanors, the multiple ways they skirted the law. Thoroughly spooked as Gitsie was, she could have blown Gagne and Germanowski out of the water. Repercussions from Gitsie’s betrayal of the DEA were immediate. Undercover agents targeted Jen, attempting to build a case against my daughter for dealing drugs. There didn’t seem to be a line that the agents wouldn’t cross.
Brafman heard additional sordid tales of the two agents in a deposition he took from Alig. Michael claimed they smoked weed and did cocaine in front of him, ignored glaring evidence of drug use in his apartment, and once even took him with them to score dope. I didn’t think Michael Alig would make for a particularly believable witness against government agents, but it turned out he was telling the truth. Ben subpoenaed cell-phone records that tracked the Feds to the apartment of Alig’s drug dealer.
Their explanation was that Alig was their confidential informant, and he had crapped his pants while they were driving around with him. They stopped off at the dealer’s house, Gagne and Germanowski solemnly explained, merely to let him get cleaned up.
When I faced such opponents, what did I have in my defense? I knew I was innocent, but that seemed a very small, fragile truth to pin my hopes on. I had always maintained my faith in the US Constitution. I didn’t think America was a police state. But since my arrest, I had entered into a realm where up seemed to be down and the supposed good guys behaved like criminals.
The only thing that stood in the way of me getting crushed was Brafman. “If I didn’t win this case,” he told Alessandra later, “I was going to quit practicing law.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he told the jury, “in this case, you are going to see, I submit, government at its best and government at its worst.” He continued:
Government at its best is this: an open trial, in a public courtroom; no secrets, everything comes out, before people randomly selected—average New Yorkers who said they could be fair and impartial—with a trial being conducted before a fair and impartial judge. That’s government at its best. That’s democracy at its best. Anybody who thinks our system doesn’t work, they are wrong.
Then Brafman went on to characterize the methods that the prosecution used to develop its case as “government at its worst.” Strong-arm tactics, multiple superseding indictments, plus use of ridiculously flawed informants like Sean Bradley, Sean Kirkham, and Michael Alig, all of them criminals themselves. God help the poor schmuck who finds himself in the crosshairs of a prosecution using tactics such as those.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
The government took five weeks in 1998, from mid-January until mid-February, to present its case. I’d say about 10 percent of that time was devoted to my alleged transgressions. The rest was spent on enumerating, investigating, and deliberating about the crimes and trespasses that the witnesses testifying against me were either convicted of or charged with.
I had never experienced a criminal trial before. The proceedings would have been comical if there weren’t such serious consequences. Everyone else, from Judge Block on down, seemed unruffled by what was, for me, a series of through-the-looking-glass moments. Time and time again, I was startled to hear the prosecution elicit testimony that placed its own witnesses, I thought, in an extremely bad light. As the trial progressed, Friedberg found himself having to prompt a particular government witness to tell the court how he had ripped off other drug dealers, how he had lied, how he had stolen, how he had assaulted people. He kept asking the witness if he had lied in specific instances and the witness kept confirming that he had.
Jesus Christ, I thought, if this is the prosecution’s case, I can’t wait to hear the defense. I kept glancing over at the jurors. But I couldn’t read their expressions.
The prosecutor summed up that same witness’s testimony:
AUSA Friedberg: It was brought out on direct examination that from 1991 to 1995, there were a lot of situations that you lied in, isn’t that correct?
Witness: Yes.
AUSA Friedberg: At the time it was brought out on cross-examination that you believed it was in your interest at that time to lie, isn’t that right?
Witness: Yes.
Ben Brafman characterized the government witnesses as “not worthy of belief.” I kept looking over at Friedberg and Adelman to see if they were embarrassed, but they were like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, seemingly incapable of any thought beyond “Off with his head!”
The trio of informants who had been listed in the initial indictment, Michael Alig and the two Seans, Bradley and Kirkham, were long gone, deemed too compromised to testify. Gitsie couldn’t testify because she was dead. Another witness, Brooke Humphries, was supposedly operating as a confidential informant for the DEA, but she was caught muling heroin between New York and Texas, and had to be crossed off the list.
Agents Gagne and Germanowski, proudly seated at the table alongside AUSAs Friedberg and Adelman, wound up not taking the stand. Gagne spent his time glaring at Ben Brafman, in such a constant, maniacal, and demented way that Ben privately expressed fears that the agent might somehow plant drugs on him or otherwise engineer his arrest. He had seen Gagne’s and Germanowski’s reckless disregard for the rule of law. He finally confronted Gagne outside court one day.
“What the fuck’s your problem?” he demanded of the man. “I’m just here doing my job.”
Instead of its star DEA agents, or its original informants, the government recruited other criminals who’d been busted and turned, hanging all its hopes on them. They also carefully tried to portray my alleged offenses in the most despicable light.
AUSA Friedberg: “This case is about Mr. Gatien essentially aiding and abetting and organizing people to essentially poison the youth of this city, at clubs, with drugs.”
AUSA Adelman: “You might be shocked by the appearance of some of these club kids. You will even be more shocked by the huge amount of drugs that they distributed at Peter Gatien’s nightclubs.”
The prosecutors tricked up Exhibit 185, a poster-board presentation. It was modeled on the stereotypical diagrams of criminal hierarchies plastered on the walls of every television detective’s office known to man. At the top was a shot of yours truly, with what I thought was a random collection of faces laid out below me.
The night of my arrest, when I’d been tossed into a holding cell with other people who had been picked up in the sweep, I couldn’t figure out what we all had in common. As far as I could tell, they’d busted a few dozen drag queens, penny-ante hustlers, anonymous vagrants, and marginal hangers-on. Trying to solve the mystery of what brought us together, I asked a few of them.
“Hey, look, do you know me?” I asked.
“Nope,�
�� came their responses. Or “Nah, man, I don’t know you, but I’m a friend of Steve, who works in your club.”
The next time I saw them was when a few of their mug shots appeared on the prosecution’s display board. I couldn’t understand Exhibit 185. Looking at the lineup, it seemed I was the godfather of a vast criminal enterprise. A couple of my alleged associates were busboys at my clubs, but other than that, I was at a loss.
The list of names and nicknames rattled off in court certainly sounded like a rogues’ gallery: Paul the Baker. Junkie Jonathan. Gene the Rabbit. George E. The It Twins. Christopher Comp. Baby Joe. Desi Monster. Flyin’ Brian. Frankie Bones. Anthony Acid. Lord Michael. Goldyloxx.
Friedberg and Adelman exposed details of my “hotel parties,” drug binges that had occurred during the period covered by the indictment. They brought up four such instances over the course of five years. The prosecution used the parties as an element in the RICO conspiracy, theorizing that those multiday blasts were a way I rewarded drug dealers for their service, instead of a series of poor, hedonistic choices made by an addict who’d yet to seek help.
Ben Brafman objected:
The hotel parties is the only testimony that will come before this jury linking Peter Gatien directly to the use of drugs and personally to the distribution of drugs. What [the prosecutors] have done, Your Honor, is [develop] a very weak theory that Mr. Gatien was a drug user and a drug distributor and that’s why the jury should convict him.
Apart from trying to create a link between the people on the board and the RICO conspiracy, it seemed that the prosecutors’ motive was simply to embarrass me in court. It worked. I had to face my wife and children after they heard details of my coke use, wild parties, and raucous behavior.
The blowouts had been extreme, I have to admit. I’d ordered mounds of food, towers of seafood, catered dishes, a lot of which were brought to the room and left untouched. Coke doesn’t exactly make you ravenous, just full of extravagant thoughts. At the end of a two-or-three-day binge, inhaling and freebasing ounces of the stuff, I would inevitably enter into a state of paranoid delusion. I remember gazing out the window once from the luxury suite at Manhattan’s Four Seasons Hotel, witnessing what I believed were armies of aliens, advancing through the streets and coming to get me.