The Golden Era of Clubs, Club Drugs, and Mafia Crews in NYC Nightlife to Miami and Back

The Underworld Podcast

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 871 Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1990's, Manhattan's booming dance club scene was hit by two massive trends: Ecstasy and Techno. With the eye-patch wearing Canadian nightlife impresario Peter Gatien standing watch, massive clubs like limelight and Sound Factory became debaucherous drug dens ruled over by the ever-weirder club kids. Soon enough, though, a techno pioneer who would later go on to be involved with Wu Tang Clan saw the potential for massive profits and brought in roughneck junior mafia farm teams from south Brooklyn and Staten Island and things starting getting dark, quick. An infamous tabloid murder, a massive mafia bust and a lurid drug kingpin trial followed, but not before some of the major players relocated to Miami for a bit and made a name for themselves there. Once some former associates started talking, however, it all came crashing down, not just for Chris Paciello, but for the top level five family bosses he testified against. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	New York City in October of 1995.
0:03.8	Manhattan actually, the Chelsea neighborhood.
0:06.6	The city is still dangerous then, still wild,
0:09.9	and only a few years off it's a record high murder rate.
0:13.1	But it's beginning to turn a bit as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
0:16.3	starts to go hard against, well, everything.
0:19.6	Police Commissioner Bill Bradden
0:21.2	is pushing the Broken Windows Theory against the graffiti artist and the shoplifters to try to clean up the city.
0:27.0	And that means even something that helps bring in tourists and pump up the economy, like nightlife, is going to get targeted as well.
0:33.7	And the NYPD has had their eyes set on bringing down Peter Gation for years.
0:39.0	The eyepatch-wearing Canadian nightlife in Presario
0:42.4	has been the club king of Manhattan for years now.
0:45.8	His massive venues like the Tunnel, Club USA, and Sound Factory, entertaining thousands
0:51.0	of young people from all over the tri-state area every weekend,
0:54.8	with booming sound systems, pumping out techno and all sorts of bacchanalia and just weird stuff
0:59.8	going on inside.
1:01.4	This is the era of the club kids after all. There's also of course a
1:06.1	ton of drugs flowing through them every night. Coke, newly trendy ketamine and of
1:11.4	course copious amounts of ecstasy trafficked in from
1:14.8	Amsterdam by Dutch Russian and Israeli gangsters and nowhere is more
1:20.0	debaucherous than Gaitian's flagship, the Limelight.
1:24.2	Located in a towering former Episcopal Church on the corner of 20th 3 and 6th Avenue,
	...

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