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

by Peter Gatien

  I’d been totally out of control. My drug use had been one of the things that had cost me my previous marriage, and had shredded my relationships with my kids. Now I was suffering for it all over again. I endured my fifteen minutes of shame. No one enjoys having their worst moments trotted out in public, their most extreme, indefensible behaviors aired out. The picture painted wasn’t pretty. My sins, which were exhaustively and accurately told, were placed in the limelight, so to speak.

  Friedberg and Adelman seemed particularly intent on highlighting my extravagances, focusing on how much the hotel parties cost, for example, and how readily I put the charges on my Amex card. They took every opportunity to point out my wealth. They let the jury know that my credit-card bills were sometimes $50,000 or $60,000 a month. It was true. I used credit cards for business expenses, booking talent, everything. Running three megaclubs was expensive. Adelman routinely referred to me as a millionaire. My vacation home in Canada was characterized as a “mansion.”

  The move felt calculated. The jury of my peers likely did not have American Express cards, or if they did, the monthly charges were very different. The hotel parties, my income, my upscale lifestyle worked to alienate the middle-class men and women on the jury. Look at this rich schmuck, he’s out of control, he has to be guilty. Watching it play out, I had to conclude that Adelman and the other prosecutors were trying to convict me on the basis of being a rich fuck, even though that particular charge wasn’t technically listed on the indictment.

  After all the talk and all the testimony, through all the back and forth between lawyers and prosecutors, a simple, glaring fact remained: I was not in court accused of selling drugs, taking a cut of drug sales, or even doing drugs at luxury hotel blowouts. The government’s “drug supermarket” theory maintained that the availability of drugs at my clubs attracted customers, who paid entry fees, and, therefore, I had profited by conspiring to promote drug use.

  The whole idea was offensive. I was the most successful nightlife entrepreneur at that time. I had gotten to that position not by encouraging drug use but by working my tail off to make sure that coming to my clubs was an outrageous, inspiring, and cutting-edge experience, as well as a smooth, pleasurable, trouble-free one. It was a tremendously difficult feat to pull off. A lot of people had tried, and no one had succeeded to the extent that I had, running top venues in a cutthroat business. Now all that work, all that expertise, all that creativity was being written off. My success, said the prosecutors, was due to lines of white powder and batches of little smiley-face pills.

  Ben Brafman cleverly totaled the number of patrons who visited my four clubs over the years covered in the indictment, then also tallied the number of hits of Ecstasy mentioned in all the testimony presented.

  Brafman: We come up with 6,866,000 people—6,866,000 people went to Mr. Gatien’s clubs during the period charged in the conspiracy . . . That is a lot of people, isn’t it?

  Witness: A lot of people.

  Brafman: Lot of people to be using 40,000 pills over five and a half years?

  Wielding a pocket calculator in front of the jury, Ben concluded that among the club-goers there had to be a lot of them—around 6,826,000, in fact—“who did not get Ecstasy.” The Times labeled Ben’s defense a “virtuoso performance.” I’ll take those numbers and apply them to anywhere else in New York City, from Madison Square Garden to City Hall, to Metropolitan Detention Center, and to the pedestrians on any block of Fifth Avenue.

  The phrase “drug supermarket” continued to be used in court, and continued to piss me off. David Lee Roth had been moody and restless in the Limelight VIP room in April 1993. He liked to smoke weed, and was disappointed in being unable to make a connection at the club. He left to score, and an hour later he wound up getting busted in a drug sweep of Washington Square Park. The park was a real-life example of a drug supermarket, and it was under the city’s control, not mine.

  The government had eight hundred hours of wiretapped phone calls on audiotape—informants, party promoters, people who worked in nightlife. Not once, in all those tapes, was my name mentioned in any context. I finally understood Ben’s plan of defense, using the government’s own evidence to blow up the prosecution’s case. Eight hundred hours of painstaking surveillance, he pointed out, that yielded exactly zip.

  “Look,” commented Judge Block as the trial drew to a close, “this is not one of the more uninteresting trials I have had in my young career so far.”

  I, for one, was riveted. Though I didn’t feel any less frightened as I saw the case unfold, as far as I could tell it was a wheezing, clanking, smoke-belching machine, a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang contraption of sorts, but one that wouldn’t fly. Somehow, the less competent the prosecutors seemed, the more dangerous they appeared. If they could bring a mess like this into court, I reasoned, they were capable of anything.

  Ben Brafman was especially baffled that Agents Gagne and Germanowski, who had sat at the prosecutor’s table for the whole trial, failed to take the stand. “Never, in all my years in court, have I ever seen an instance where the arresting officers didn’t take the stand. It’s just unheard of.”

  He came to me near the end of the excruciating trial, just before the government completed presenting its case, with a radical idea. “Peter, I’m thinking of resting without calling witnesses,” he said. “I want to rest essentially without presenting our case to the jury.”

  “That’s best?” I asked, not knowing what else to say. “Isn’t it a risk?”

  “There’s a risk, and I’ve agonized over the decision. But we don’t have to prove anything. The burden of proof is on them, on the government, and you sat in that court just like I did. They haven’t come anywhere near to proving their case. The prosecution was a travesty. I’ve never seen worse. It’s just . . . unbelievable. I point that out in my summation.”

  Over the previous year and half, we had worked hard at preparing our defense. We’d hired investigators to interview dozens of witnesses. We’d exposed the activities of the lead DEA agents in the case to the extent that the prosecution had been afraid for them to testify. All told, in investigator’s expenses and attorney fees, I think I laid out close to $2 million developing our response to the government’s case. Now Ben wanted to forget all that and essentially take a flier.

  I couldn’t process my thoughts. “If you think it’s the way to go,” I said weakly.

  “You’re the defendant, Peter, and if you tell me we ought to go in there and present our case, and have witnesses testify, I mean, if you strongly believe that . . .”

  He trailed off. Then he said, “Let’s think about it, come back to it, talk it over some more.”

  Consumed with Hunter S. Thompson levels of fear and loathing, I finally agreed we should let the government hang itself all on its own. Ben told me that he, too, spent a sleepless night before coming into court with that decision.

  In the end, the prosecution’s case, full of sound and fury, signified nothing. After five weeks of court proceedings that included sixteen days of hearing testimony, on the morning of February 9, the following exchange occurred:

  Judge Block: Defendants rested?

  Ben Brafman: Yes.

  Judge Block: All parties rest. [To the jury] Ladies and gentlemen, the testimonial part, the evidentiary part of the trial has now been concluded.

  Though I hadn’t been a religious man since I was a child in Cornwall, had I been in the habit of praying, I would have taken the opportunity right about then. We were trusting the members of the jury to see the holes in the government’s case, which we believed were big enough to drive a semi through.

  But I couldn’t read minds. I didn’t know what the jury was thinking. What if they hated the picture of thousands of people dancing in a sweaty, exuberant mass, partying until the sun rose? What if they resented extravagance and addiction? What if they hated me?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  All Yesterday’s Parties

  On Wednesd
ay, February 11, 1998, as darkness fell on a raw late afternoon, I stood in the Brooklyn courthouse waiting on the clerk of court to announce the jury’s verdict.

  Of all the things I’ve done, of all the situations I’ve found myself in, nothing was more life defining than that moment. Fate had reduced me to a cornered animal. Ben Brafman stood beside me, and Alessandra, Jen, and other loved ones were nearby, but they weren’t the ones facing prison. Isolated, solitary, vulnerable, I felt the enormous power of the state bearing down on me.

  “I understand you reached a verdict,” Judge Frederic Block said to the jury foreperson.

  I knew the statistics. The federal government wins 95 percent of its cases that go to trial.

  “The clerk will take your decision,” Judge Block said. The clerk stepped forward.

  “Has the jury reached a unanimous verdict?” the clerk asked the foreperson.

  “Yes,” came the answer.

  After a five-week trial, the jury had deliberated for all of three and a half hours. The legal experts I had read all agreed that fast verdicts are more likely to be guilty ones. I had also read that before the decision is announced, if jurors failed to meet the eyes of the accused, it was because they would be returning a verdict of guilty. Gazing over at the twelve-person jury, not one of them would look at me.

  I took off my wristwatch and my rings, passing them back to my family. I wouldn’t need them in prison. My heart hammered in my chest. Ben shook as he grabbed my hand. In a rush I thought of Cornwall, the Aardvark, the first Limelight nightclubs in Florida and Atlanta.

  Andy Warhol popped into my head. In later years he’d tired of his famous line, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” and had taken to riffing out variations, such as “In the future, every fifteen minutes someone will be famous.” I felt as though the clock was running out on me.

  “Racketeering Act One,” intoned the court clerk. “Conspiracy to distribute MDMA, cocaine, and flunitrazepam—proven or not proven?”

  “Not proven,” said the jury foreperson.

  “Racketeering Act Two, distribution of controlled substances, Future Shock parties, proved or not proved?”

  “Not proven.”

  Racketeering charges are deemed proven or not proven, and all six came back exonerating me. Three conspiracy counts yielded not guilty verdicts for all of them.

  Not proven. Not guilty.

  The high from those verdicts surpassed any drug experience I’ve ever had in my life. I embraced Ben Brafman, tears streaming down both of our faces. Then I turned to Alessandra, climbed over the courtroom bench that separated us, and lifted her off the ground, trying to give her the strongest, most tender embrace she had ever experienced. A wave of love passed over me, for my family, for Ben, for life itself. Jen raced out of the courtroom to a pay phone so she could spread the news to the rest of the family.

  Nothing could have been sweeter. I thought I was home free. The weight had lifted. I had triumphed.

  But the government, in its limited wisdom and unlimited power, wasn’t through with me just yet.

  “Why can’t we get this guy?” wailed Rudy Giuliani.

  Ben Brafman heard of the mayor’s cri de coeur through the legal grapevine. Rudy was reacting not to my acquittal, but to our victories in a series of court cases that had followed in the wake of the federal trial. By slipping out from under the RICO conspiracy charges, I had only enraged the government, making it come after me all the more.

  As intense as the federal trial had been, the shit that came afterward was nonstop. I got hit with a barrage of venue closures, one after another. Tunnel would get closed by this or that fugazi application of the nuisance-abatement laws, and it would stay dark for months while I awaited a court date. But every time I had a chance to appear before an actual judge, instead of before a city inspector or bureaucrat, I won the case. Over and over.

  No wonder Rudy was frustrated. But so was I. After I beat one city agency in court, another one would step up to take its shot. In a stretch of fourteen months, Tunnel was closed for seven of them.

  I had always retained my Canadian citizenship as a fail-safe. First out of concern for myself, and then for the well-being of my son, Xander. The US had a terrible tendency to get involved in wars, “police actions,” and military interventions. I didn’t want either of us drafted into another Vietnam. But keeping my passport opened me up for criticism in court.

  “This man is nothing but a carpetbagger, with no feelings of patriotism toward the US,” fumed one prosecutor.

  The government action that finally brought me down came not from the Feds, not from New York City, but from New York State—the tax-evasion charges that had been wending their way through the courts for a long time. Paying some of my employees in cash was my crime, one that I shared with perhaps 99 percent of the business owners in New York. But it turns out that “Everybody’s doing it!” is not a viable line of defense.

  On $50 million in receipts over the course of five years, the state claimed to have been shorted $600,000, a little over 1 percent. Anyone else would have been assessed, not arrested.

  “We can win this,” Ben Brafman promised me. “I’ll stick with you every step of the way. But we could go through a court battle and you’d wind up still owing the money. I have to ask if it’s worth it.”

  So I pled out to two months in Rikers Island jail, a sojourn that could probably fill another book. Suffice it to say that, knowing how my time in MDC had gone, I reacted to incarceration with extreme anxiety. But to tell the truth, as soul crushing as the Rikers experience turned out to be, I was happy to do the time rather than face another trial. I didn’t realize that when I agreed to the plea, my status as a tax felon and an immigrant would make me vulnerable to deportation. In fact, I had been assured that wouldn’t be the case.

  I was two years a free man in NYC, out of the clutches of the government and able to pursue my embattled business. In September 2002, the other shoe dropped. On a routine visit to the probation office, I found immigration cops lying in wait. They loaded me into a van and whisked me away. No phone call, no stopping at home to pick up a toothbrush, no nothing. It was like those cartoon images where someone is grabbed so suddenly they leave behind their shoes and socks.

  I had fallen into the arms of the INS, the soon-to-be-renamed US Immigration and Naturalization Service. I had been through the mill at Rikers and the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, but I nominate the holding cells of the INS as the lowest rung of incarcerated hell. I essentially disappeared for forty hours, with no one in my family aware or able to find me.

  In lockup, I started chatting with the immigration officers. “They’re going to have to move you right away because this facility is full,” one told me.

  I looked around. I was the only one being held on the whole floor.

  The INS transferred me to the Buffalo detention center in Batavia, New York. There, no one could contact me—not my lawyer, not my family. The cells were freezing and bare bones, the conditions Third World awful.

  “Is somebody trying to kill you or something?” an immigration officer asked me when I arrived. “I’ve never heard of someone from the City winding up way up here.” No writ of habeas corpus exists when the INS steps in. I was placed in quarantine and not allowed visitors.

  Teeth chattering, filthy, and depressed, kept incommunicado, I recalled the words of Oscar Wilde, when he was left chained in the rain after his arrest for the high crime of loving the wrong person. “If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners,” he said, “she doesn’t deserve to have any.”

  Eventually my family and lawyer found me and I was bonded out, but in August 2003, after a torturous journey through the courts, immigration Judge Elizabeth Lamb assigned me the status of an “aggravated felon.” By that time, in the wake of 9/11 and the US Department of Homeland Security reorganization, the INS had been rechristened Immigration and Customs Enforcement—the now-notorious ICE.
I was once again put on ICE, so to speak, trapped in detention limbo for a month.

  Throughout the process, I had become reacquainted with a grim truth: if the government ever decides to take you down, you are definitely going down, because the government will find a way. Especially if you slip through the clutches of someone like Rudy Giuliani, you can rest assured he’ll come back to get you.

  Giuliani wound up standing beside Donald Trump as the president’s personal lawyer, pronouncing the immortal line, “Truth isn’t truth.” While I was being battered by immigration and city agencies, Giuliani embarked on a career as a lobbyist and corporate lawyer. Most tellingly, the same year I was busted, 1996, Rudy had begun representing Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed and marketed the opioid-based pain killer OxyContin. The company’s aggressive marketing focused on denying OxyContin’s addictive qualities. Giuliani brokered a deal in a crucial Florida case that allowed Purdue to continue selling the drug despite early warnings that it was incredibly addictive.

  The result, of course, is an opioid epidemic that caused the deaths of thousands of people—an estimated four hundred thousand and counting. In 2017 alone, forty-seven thousand Americans died of overdose; it emerged as a leading cause of death for people under fifty, ahead of car crashes. Whatever drug use occurred in all the clubs I ever owned pales in comparison to the destruction “America’s Mayor” helped unleash and directly fostered.

  On September 24, 2003, I was released from custody, marched onto a plane, and deported to Toronto. I had $500 in my pocket, which Ben Brafman gave me since otherwise I was flat broke.