by Maureen Orth
Thus, what used to be called speeding is now called tweaking, or bumping up, in the gay world. Tweaking lowers inhibitions—often, reports say, among gay men who still feel ashamed of gay sex—enhances the intensity of the sex, and relaxes the rectum. Along with MDMA (ecstasy), Special K (anesthetic ketamine, a horse tranquilizer), and GHB (an aphrodisiac “date rape” drug), crystal is a fixture at “circuit parties”—frequent large gatherings of gays with enough money to fly to Palm Springs or Miami Beach, for example, for long weekends filled with drugs, alcohol, and sex. One of Andrew’s crystal dealers also ran a circuit-party business. In Life Outside, Michelangelo Signorile describes a circuit party at a hotel in Palm Springs with a drug dealer on practically every floor. At times dealing drugs supersedes or underpins the particular business of running the giant party itself.
Such drug use is commonplace throughout various sectors of gay life—a dark secret not much publicized outside the community—and San Diego certainly is no exception. “In order to fit into the gay community in San Diego you have to do drugs,” says Joe Sullivan, a former Hillcrest bartender who used crystal meth daily for eight years. “To be on the A list for people’s parties, you have to do drugs. And when I say drugs, I mean crystal. If you abstain, you don’t get invited.”
On the West Coast, crystal meth is also widely integrated into the multimillion-dollar gay social-networking industry of sex-phone lines—which help link men seeking sex or sexual service—as well as bars, bathhouses, and clubs. “It gives you a gung-ho sex drive,” says one crystal dealer. “That’s why there are all these bathhouses and late-night places that are so busy. The majority of them go all night long.” According to a report on methamphetamine use among gays in Los Angeles published in 1997 for the AIDS coordinator of the City of Los Angeles, Dr. Cathy J. Reback states, “The creation of social settings where crystal use is common—or in some social situations, expected—serves to normalize crystal in gay culture.”
Crystal, which can be snorted, smoked, drunk, eaten, injected, or absorbed through the rectum, is made with everything from asthma medications to battery acid. The ingredients are easily obtained in Mexico, and recipes on the Internet lend themselves to home manufacture. (Each pound of meth produced leaves behind five or six pounds of toxic waste.) Meth labs in garages or warehouses are found throughout “East County,” the eastern part of San Diego county, which is heavily Hispanic. But crystal, which is primarily used by whites, can be “cooked” anywhere—makeshift labs can fit in a suitcase.
Crystal retails for about $600 an ounce in San Diego, but it runs higher if purchased in smaller amounts. AIDS-prevention workers are alarmed that tweaking often means throwing caution to the wind during sex. Popular now, especially among young gays and those already infected with AIDS, is the practice of “barebacking” while on crystal—having unprotected anal sex, an extremely high-risk behavior for acquiring HIV. Reback goes on to say, “Crystal use has been described as a way to dissociate from the fear and responsibility associated with sex within the era of HIV/AIDS.” As such it is highly prized.
Crystal makes braggarts like Andrew even louder, filling them with bravado and enabling them to focus speedily on tasks at hand. Yet despite its reputation for providing great sex, crystal is also known for giving users a nasty down. “Terrible Tuesdays” is an expression in San Francisco applied to those who have partied all weekend on crystal, gone to sleep fitfully Sunday night, gotten up and worked on Monday, and then faced sleeplessness, irritability, or depression on Tuesday as the drug makes its way out of the body.
In order to sleep at all, habitual crystal users like Andrew are often forced to use powerful downers—Vicodin, Xanax, Valium—to even out the high. Crystal, aggressive and edgy, artificially stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain to produce a positive feeling. But later it can leave a person feeling so depressed and down that the only solution is to bump up again. Or the high is too good to pass up one more time. In any case, more of the drug is eventually needed.
Each person reacts to crystal differently, but in time it makes people depressed, mean, irritable, and paranoid. In extreme cases, their behavior can resemble pronounced schizophrenia. In addition, crystal addiction is considered among the hardest to overcome because of the way it physically alters the brain. Even after the acute effects of withdrawal fade, addicts hit “the wall,” a period of six to eight months “during which the brain recovers from the changes resulting from meth use,” according to the 1998 Koch Crime Commission Report. “During this period recovering addicts feel depressed, fuzzy headed, and think life isn’t pleasurable without the drug. Because prolonged use causes changes in the brain, will power alone will not cure meth addicts.”
Friends often suggested that Andrew was tweaking. Nevertheless, he was a skilled liar, and he appears to have been careful with his use—there were periods when he even castigated others for being on crystal—and he always ate heartily, thus avoiding the emaciated, hollow-eyed look of many tweakers. “He probably got used to it,” one of his ex-dealers says. “You can sleep on it and eat and drink on it. He had the money. I’m sure most people didn’t even know he did it.”
According to this dealer, Andrew began using crystal regularly in 1993, at parties during Gay Pride Week in San Diego, which takes place in the summer. That corresponds to a period when he in fact lost weight. Crystal can act like a permanent diet pill. The dealer says Andrew wanted his drug use to be a secret. “He tried to lay low with it; he was pretty closeted with it. I knew all the important people that nobody was supposed to know were using it—he was one of them who wanted it very quiet.”
The dealer, who ironically had a close family member who was a high elected official in a Midwestern state, says Andrew began buying small amounts of drugs through the dealer’s partner in the fall of 1991. Then his use escalated. Over several years, beginning in 1993, Andrew purchased a sizable amount of crystal meth at least twice a month. The dealer says Andrew’s monthly outlay sometimes was $4,000.
Early on, Andrew apparently realized that he could sell crystal in the Midwest and make a handsome profit. “He can get it here for six hundred dollars an ounce. Then he could turn it around and sell it in the Midwest for three thousand dollars an ounce,” the dealer says. “That’s a quick turnaround.” Andrew also worked as a mule for the dealer, flying first class. Many dealers used to send crystal through commercial shipping services that never checked—“anything could make it through,” the dealer recounts. “But now you’re taking a risk for something being mailed.” In 1997, the dealer says, these services began to “buckle down. Now you have to fly.”
That setup was perfect for Andrew. He would tell people in Hillcrest that he was traveling on the weekend, jetting off to one spot or another, but he hadn’t decided where. He would insinuate that he knew famous gays such as entertainment mogul David Geffen, referring to Geffen by his first name once to Dr. William Crawford, for example, after having come back from a weekend in Los Angeles. David Geffen says he never met Andrew.
What seems more likely is that Andrew traveled either on tickets purchased through credit-card-fraud schemes—one convicted airline ticket fraudster now in jail serviced Hillcrest—or that he was recruited by a San Diego porn star who made his real money as a high-priced call boy. (Porn stars are the supermodels of the gay world.) The porn star would receive invitations from rich, often famous gays, as well as closeted married CEO’s, and he would ship pretty boys or willing young men out for weekend trysts. They often traveled first class. “The escort once opened a FedEx package containing ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in front of me,” says Joe Sullivan, the former bartender. “That’s what he was being paid for the weekend.”
Joe Sullivan says that he, too, was recruited to be a jet-setting escort, but he refused. “Andrew ran with the crowd which spent time with these men. The clients were just very beaucoup-bucks wealthy. You’d literally get fifteen hundred dollars a day to fly to New York, pl
us tip, plus first-class expenses.” Even so, a sexual relationship was not always assumed.
“Sex isn’t involved a lot of the time,” says Sullivan. “It’s just companionship. You have a nice, young, attractive person who can make your friends jealous.” At first Andrew, he says, just “started hanging around these people. And then, from everything I could tell, he became one of them. It’s all done out of state.”
Though Sullivan himself did not see Andrew using crystal, he knew that Andrew was hanging around with the circle of one of his former employers—among them his former boss’s partner and fellow dealer. (This dealer later confirmed in detail Andrew’s drug use.) According to Sullivan, “They were the white guys that you could go to and buy drugs. They would get it from the Mexican Mafia.” These dealers were hardly a secret, but people rarely spoke about them. “The gay community in San Diego is very weird,” says Brian Wade Smith, who knew Andrew there. “There are a lot of homeless kids, a lot of drugs, but it’s all very hidden. I live in Minneapolis now. If I took Minneapolis people to San Diego, they would be really shocked. Everybody’s on crystal in San Diego.”
One night in 1995 at Rich’s Bar, Andrew said to his friend Shane O’Brien, “I need you to follow behind me walking down the street. Walk twenty feet behind me and wear my jacket.”
“I knew at that point he was dealing drugs,” says Shane. Andrew explained that he was working in a pharmacy and getting the drugs there. Shane said no. “I could look like him. I said, ‘I’m not going to get shot walking down the street because people think it’s you.’ He got put off and said, ‘Fine. I’ll find somebody else.’”
Twice Andrew had Shane drop him off at an adult video store on University Avenue. “I just made a ‘purchase,’” Andrew told him, when he came out carrying a brown paper bag. “Want to see what’s inside?” Shane said yes. “And he opened it. There were stacks of bills inside the brown paper bag. I said, ‘Did you sell something?’ He said yes. That happened twice, that he made a ‘purchase.’”
The brown paper bag became an accessory of sorts for Andrew. One Monday night at the Brass Rail, a Hillcrest club with a drag show, Eric, a blond waiter with spiked hair, remembers, Andrew was perched at the bar when he suddenly pulled a huge wad of cash out of the bag and said, “I’m going to buy me some drugs and sell me some drugs.”
Taurey Willis, a rave disc jockey originally from England, saw Andrew doing lines of crystal and dealing drugs at a 1995 party thrown by a wealthy gay couple from the Midwest at a mansion in nearby Del Mar, the site of the famous racetrack. “There was group sex and fetishing going on, and a couple of guys dressed in heavy leather gear,” says Willis. “Way too wild for me.” One room was the drug room. “I saw Andrew in that room doing business. He was selling.”
Taurey believed that Andrew was also some kind of sexual middle man. On Fridays at Flicks, Taurey says, “really attractive younger guys” would go up to Andrew, who would make quick introductions, and the guys would then hastily leave together. “There was no standing around talking or having a drink or anything.”
The wealthiest and most celebrated men in San Diego would not even go into a gay bar. “The social life is totally private invitation,” says Nicole Ramirez-Murray. But for someone like Andrew, who was happy to trade in drugs and sex and make arrangements, there were constant opportunities. Joe Sullivan once answered an ad in La Jolla soliciting bartenders and waiters for a season of private dinner parties. “The pay was great,” says Sullivan, who was told by the middle-aged businessman who interviewed him that the guests would be prominent local businessmen, some of them married. “Everything sounded great until he brought out this picture book of some of the waiters and bartenders at these parties.” They were wearing G-strings “with strategic holes placed in the G-strings, and they were dressed up as bunny rabbits with genitalia as their noses.” The interviewer explained to a suddenly disinterested Sullivan that “at the end of the season of dinner parties, a cash prize would be given for ‘the best service.’”
Andrew enjoyed this rich, coastal, closeted crowd. And just as he had once been taken to the gay leader to be fixed up, Andrew could now be the silky hustler, the one who traded knowledge and favors and drugs for access and travel. A major Hillcrest drug dealer was familiar with Andrew’s activities. “There’d be the wealthy locals, and then they’d have guys in from out of town. I think he was probably in charge of maybe organizing the tricks and the sex parties.” The dealer adds, “They’re wealthy and retired. Even these guys—a lot of them—do crystal sometimes. A lot of people into their fifties do it heavy out here. That’s why they call San Diego the crystal capital.”
IN THE WORLD in which Andrew now sought to elevate himself, where looks and wealth ruled, and where sex was the commodity and drugs were the fuel, crystal meth was bringing to the fore practices long confined to the seamy underbelly of gay society. Bootleg “candid” videos, in which subjects, some of them drugged, had no idea they were being filmed during sex acts, became widespread. The drugged subjects were said to be in the “K hole,” able to perform physically but completely non compos mentis because they were on the drug Special K, notorious in the mainstream press as a date-rape drug. Secret videotaping went on constantly. Andrew wanted to be part of it all, and he plied himself against a backdrop peopled with murky characters and marked by surprising violence and brutality. It just wasn’t talked about.
The most notorious party giver in Hillcrest—the ringmaster of the Evil Circus—was a diminutive ex-seminarian, half Irish, half Greek, who claimed to be both a chemical engineer and a Catholic priest, and Andrew desperately tried to keep up with him. Theodore “Vance” Coukoulis certainly knew his chemistry, and he applied that knowledge as a con artist, but he had no degree of any kind in science. Yet he and two real priests once got all the way to Kiev to deliver to the local branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences a paper on a chemical formula he had helped develop that might decrease low-level radiation in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Although he had passed through several Catholic seminaries across the country, Vance Coukoulis was never, nor will he ever be, ordained. He is not in a state of grace.
Vance Coukoulis was a premier party-giver in Hillcrest, and Andrew constantly sought invitations to Vance’s parties. But in 1994 Vance had gotten busted for possession of drugs in Hillcrest after neighbors complained about his noisy parties. He then served a short time in jail, after which he was put for five years on summary probation, which carries no sanctions. He was arrested again in 1998, in Sedona, Arizona, for the “sexual exploitation of minors” by means of pornographic videos. A mother charged that her missing fifteen-year-old son had gotten drugs from Vance, who allegedly had sex with the boy and enticed him into posing for pornographic videos.
The state offered Vance a plea-bargain, which he refused. Preparing to go to trial, prosecutors launched a further investigation and uncovered enough additional evidence to expand the original four charges to eighteen counts of sexual exploitation of minors—the sum of which carry a penalty of over three hundred years in prison.
A court document alleges that Vance “introduces himself to young people as a priest who worked in the Vatican with the Pope, or as a former priest. Once the young males, many of them under eighteen years of age, trust the defendant, he then takes them to his home, or locations such as hotels, where he gives them alcohol laced with drugs.” The document subsequently describes videos in which “young boys appear to be either unconscious or drugged to the extent that they cannot resist the sexual advances made upon them.” Vance then “often uses sadomasochistic sex toys and paraphernalia on the boys, the defendant shaves the pubic and anal areas of the boys, the defendant diapers the boys, powders their buttocks with baby powder, the defendant places a baby bottle in the mouth for the boys and the boys are shown sucking brown fluid from the bottles, sexual acts including anal, oral, and masturbation are displayed and the defendant appears in the video wearing a baseball cap.”
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bsp; Interestingly, among the items found at the time of Vance’s initial arrest in March 1998 were a leather collar, a whip, a leash and restraints, a spiked leather bracelet, a vibrator, a pacifier, diapers, and a magazine article and documentary about Andrew Cunanan.
Having sat in the Yavapai County jail for several months without visitors, Vance, who claimed his arrest was false and ridiculous, talked about his past with an eye toward his future. “If I become a priest and get ordained in the next year and a half, I’ve got to be careful about some stuff,” he said. Still, he didn’t hesitate to acknowledge the source of his unique social standing in Hillcrest. “Out of fun I had a dungeon built in my home.”
Vance’s dungeon was notorious in Hillcrest, a must-see venue for a social animal like Andrew. The son of an Air Force officer who retired as a general, Vance liked to teach young, fresh, newly out gays about S&M. His walls prominently displayed pictures of himself with the pope along with S&M paraphernalia, and he boasted that one day in St. Peter’s Square, “out of a million people in the crowd, the Holy Father saw me, walked over to me, and asked me if I wanted to work with crippled children in the Vatican.” He claimed that he had lived in Rome for two years. The truth, however, which Andrew and his friends in Hillcrest never knew, was even stranger.
