Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture - Hardcover

Chapter One
THE ONE-EYED DON

New York City, Early October 1995


It was one of those brilliant autumn days in New York, the city radiant with luminous color. While the soothing afternoon light skipped gaily across the surface of the Hudson River, Peter Gatien's world was all grim turmoil. A couple of nights ago, in the early hours, the stony-faced Gatien saw his flagship venue in Chelsea, the Limelight, padlocked by the NYPD. Friday evening, just at the peak of business, and his temple of thump-thump-thump-located at the corner of Twentieth Street and Sixth Avenue in a weathered Victorian pile that once housed St. Peter's Episcopal church, then later a drug treatment center-was packed to the vaulted rafters with gyrating penitents hanging off the two tiers of metal balconies that surrounded the cavernous main floor. The irony wasn't lost on the revelers, who seemed to take a perverse delight in frolicking on the altar or sniffing blow in the pulpit. Out on the churning dance floor, the atmosphere was like the pagan party scene in some Hollywood biblical epic, the last fling of a primitive tribe threatened with extinction by powerful social trends few of its members could fully comprehend.

Meanwhile, a string of stretch limousines idled impatiently outside the noisy nightclub, which was fast becoming a stone monument to an era of all-out licentiousness, now vanishing under the puritanical political regime that had taken over the city. Nonetheless, a long procession of young party people, all eager to pay the twenty-dollar admittance, shuffled along the avenue. A drag queen with a clipboard and a bad attitude inspected the line for the undesirable or the unfashionable.

All of a sudden, the block was filled with police cars and paddy wagons, their flashing blue lights illuminating the bulky brown façade and soaring bell tower. A team of undercover detectives-men and women who had been busy buying drugs in the Limelight since early August-was already in position inside the club, when a phalanx of fifty uniformed cops, wearing nylon NYPD windbreakers and carrying high-powered flashlights, stormed through the narrow front entrance of the edifice, rushed up the spiral staircase and through the lobby, which was filled with the obligatory video monitors and bad art installations. Their senses assaulted on all flanks, some of the police wore earplugs to protect themselves against the cacophony emanating from the colossal speakers. Above their heads, half-naked gifts writhed in cages. Barreling down the dark corridors, pushing their way through the startled crowd, and peering into murky recesses, the cops fanned out through the labyrinthine club, each of them carrying a list with the names and photos of thirty known drug dealers.

The Limelight was a huge space. The ceiling stretched four stories high over the main dance floor. Five staircases from the main chamber led to numerous lounges, alcoves, VIP rooms, and the chapel area (sometimes known as the Shampoo Bar), all of which were decorated in different themes (the TV Room, the Peacock Room, the Topiary Room, the Opium Den, the Arcadia Room). No wonder the cops became disoriented and had trouble finding their way around.

The paramilitary seizure did not go according to plan. The police were puzzled that none of Gatien's employees seemed particularly surprised by the bombshell assault. As the animated night dwellers filed out of the club, the cops also wondered why twenty-six of the intended targets were absent that night. They'd received numerous reports about the furious drug action at the club. They'd heard about the special rooms, designated as hard-core drug spots, where guards stood outside and permitted only trusted patrons to enter. But, that night, the place was cleaner than the manicured grounds of Disney World.

In the end, the bust was a nonevent. An embarrassed NYPD only managed to make three minor arrests of small-time marijuana peddlers. The cops suspected that someone had tipped off Gatien in advance about the raid. While the Limelight was temporarily padlocked as a public nuisance, within a week Gatien was back in business, having paid a $30,000 fine and posted a $160,000 bond. He also filed a list of nightclub employees with city hall and agreed to forfeit the bond in the event that anybody on the list was involved in peddling drugs on the premises.

The raid was the disappointing culmination of a two-month investigation into Gatien's operation, fueled by the demise earlier in the year of eighteen-year-old Nicholas Mariniello, who died at his parents' New Jersey home after a night of partying at the Limelight. His heartbroken parents suspected their son had died of an overdose of the designer drug Ecstasy-a commonly used social lubricant among the young ravers and club kids who flocked to the Chelsea hot spot. For years, the local precinct had been deluged with angry and tearful calls from ordinary suburban moms and dads saying their kids, some as young as fifteen or sixteen, had come home stoned or had gone missing after a visit to the Limelight. But the Mariniello family was politically connected. They knew important people. They phoned former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, who supposedly put in a personal call to New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau began to probe Gatien's finances. Major behind-the-scenes cogs whirred into action, even though the Morris County, New Jersey medical examiner, after conducting an external examination (Mariniello's parents nixed the idea of an autopsy), revealed the cause of death not as chemical overindulgence but instead "asphyxia due to hanging" and the manner of death as "suicide."

Special narcotics prosecutor Robert Silbering, the city's top drug enforcement official, whose office assisted in the raid, defended the police action: "It's not as if we targeted the club without good reason," he commented. "According to the information that the police department received, the drug dealing at the Limelight was both open and substantial."

Pacing up and down in his spacious office at the Tunnel, another one of his lucrative Manhattan dance halls, the normally unflappable Peter Gatien was scalding mad. Not that you could easily tell. Red-faced fury was not Gatien's style.

Like its owner, the Tunnel had a decidedly spooky quality. Situated right by the West Side Highway, the gigantic club was housed in a former railway depot-40,000 square feet of enveloping blackness-that was said to be haunted by the ghosts of the homeless people who used to live there. When the place was empty, employees swore you could hear the sounds of crying children.

Gatien was dressed like he had just come from the gym. A framed photograph of the club owner posing with the Staten Island rap group Wu-Tang Clan sat on his desk. Expensive-looking art prints with a nautical theme hung on the walls. A rack of silver weights gathered dust in the corner. From the next room came the sharp sound of a shredding machine hungrily eating up documents.

The forty-four-year-old Gatien, who was passably handsome in a gaunt sort of way, looked like he was nursing a hangover. His lips were dry and cracked; his thin, short hair plastered to his skull. He appeared both edgy and exhausted. His pallid skin looked like it hasn't seen sunshine in ages.

In the wake of the raid, the club owner had spent the morning meeting with his lawyers and fielding phone calls from anxious investors and landlords worried about the stability of his nighttime kingdom. He was afraid those months of delicate negotiations with the Forty-Second Street Business Improvement District-regarding a new club to replace his former Times Square hangout, Club USA-were now ruined. He also feared that because of the bad publicity, the Atlanta Olympic Committee would withdraw...