The Golden Era of Clubs, Club Drugs, and Mafia Crews in NYC Nightlife to Miami and Back
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No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld. New York City in October of 1995. Manhattan, actually. The Chelsea neighborhood.

The city is still dangerous then, still wild. And only a few years off, it's a record high murder rate. But it's beginning to turn a bit as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani starts to go hard against, well, everything. Police Commissioner Bill Braden is pushing the broken windows theory against the graffiti artists and the shoplifters to try to clean up the city. And that means even something that helps bring in tourists and pump up the economy, like nightlife, is going to get targeted as well.

And the NYPD has had their eyes set on bringing down Peter Gation for years. The eyepatch-wearing Canadian nightlife impresario has been the club king of Manhattan for years now. His massive venues like The Tunnel, Club USA, and Sound Factory, entertaining thousands of young people from all over the tri-state area every weekend with booming sound systems, pumping out techno, and all sorts of bacchanalia and just weird stuff going on inside. This is the era of the club kids, after all.

There's also, of course, a ton of drugs flowing through them every night. Coke, newly trendy ketamine, and of course, copious amounts of ecstasy, trafficked in from Amsterdam by Dutch, Russian, and Israeli gangsters. And nowhere is more debaucherous than Gation's flagship, the limelight.

Located in a towering former Episcopal church on the corner of 20th Street and 6th Avenue, the spot's hidden tiny rooms have become infamous for open-air drug markets, orgies, and everything else needed for a proper good time. The only debate raging regarding the drug sales there is what role exactly Gation plays. Is he merely burying his head in the sand as the dealers run amok? Or is he overseeing the entire thing, the top of the pyramid, as the NYPD insists?

Either way, the dealers all seem to answer to Lord Michael Caruso, a Staten Island DJ turned wannabe mafioso who helped bring techno to New York and then helped bring ecstasy to the club kids. Years later, he would go on to manage members of Wu-Tang Clan. Caruso is also talented at making enemies, which is why he's enlisted the help of some real heavyweights from Lucchese and Bonanno crime family connected farm teams like the Bath Ave. Crew.

That's where Chris Paciello and his team of skull crushers comes in. By this night in the fall of 1995, though, the roid of mafioso with a model good looks had smartened up and disappeared to Miami, where he was set to become his own nightlife kingpin in the trendy clubs of South Beach, going from a Brooklyn street corner thug in tracksuits to dating Madonna in a matter of years.

Paciello isn't the only one missing from the club that night, as the NYPD, after investigating Gation for months, even having undercovers in drag making buys, finally raids Limelight. Dozens of cops storm the club on a busy night, but they barely come up with anything. Everyone suspects a crooked cop had tipped off Gation. He skates away pretty easily that night.

But see, the NYPD brass aren't finished. And pretty soon, this story of clubs and techno and ecstasy, it's going to rope in some brutal murders, a massive drug ring, and a number of New York City's infamous five-family main men, including some bosses. This is The Underworld Podcast. Welcome back to The Underworld Podcast, where every week, two journalists, me, Danny Gold, and my co-host, Sean Williams, talk about the underworld.

Tell you stories from the depths of international organized crime, some national organized crime, and even some lovely regional organized crime. Stories that we've either reported on on the ground, researched a whole hell of a lot, or

Sean, introduce yourself and inform the people what you've got going on, you German Kiwi English bastard. Thanks for the lovely intro. I am working on a pretty crazy story. I thought it was one thing turned out to be another and now all kinds of insane information is tumbling out. Turns out there's quite a lot of stuff on the internet. Who knew? Yeah.

But nothing quite as cool as going undercover in drag to pick up drugs in a New York club. So I'm keen to know how that one goes in the rest of the show. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the 90s, man. Everything was like a Law & Order episode. But as always, you can support us at patreon.com slash down the world podcast for a minimal amount of dollars.

and get all sorts of bonus material, including mini episodes and interviews that don't go on the main feed. You can also sign up on iTunes with one click. Our website is underworldpod.com. We've got merch there, including the articles of clothing bearing our very sincere and off-repeated PSA. Don't Instagram your crimes. Do not do that, no matter how much you want your drill career to go viral.

Now, Sean, the people at home might not know this, but I've seen the photos and you were actually a big time, what's it called? Candy raver, right? You had the glow sticks and the pacifiers and the JNCO jeans and candy necklaces and all that. And you actually have zero spinal fluid left. Would you say that's accurate? Well, I mean, you can only go so far. JNCO jeans. I'm going to need my lawyer there. But yeah, unfortunately, a lot of that is true. And-

We can trickle out some of the embarrassing details further down the show. But yeah, let's get on with the story. Wait, is it actually? I saw that as a joke, but now I feel like maybe it is true. Maybe I'll post some pictures of me with loads of glitter eyeliner with some weird glow sticks and shit from...

Let's just say New Key 2007. It was a great time. Yeah. We have some younger listeners, I think, who weren't aware of the 90s rave and techno club scenes. But I highly recommend you, if you're home right now, search on YouTube, wherever it was. I think like Maury Povich or Sally Jesse Raphael. They used to have Michael Alig and the Club Kids on who are going to feature in this story. And I'm trying to think if there are any movies that capture it. Maybe Hackers or like...

What was the one with Parker Poe? Party Girl. Oh, great movie. We love a young Parker Poe. Definitely go watch that if you can. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what half of that stuff is, but on the good side of the pond, I mean, you've got human traffic. It's all gone Pete Tong. There's this great doco about the KLF a couple years ago called Who Killed the KLF? That's definitely worth watching. And then you could go down all your German stuff and the Berlin techno raves and techno Viking. Oh, my God. Starting to miss those suicidal Mondays, man.

But that's much later on, I feel like. We're talking here, like, I mean, definitely in the UK, but this is like early 90s, you know? Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'm talking like early 2000s, maybe late 90s. Were the K left the ones that burned a million dollars? Yes. Yeah, they're awesome. Yeah, I bet they regret that now, huh?

I don't know. They probably got a podcast. Where am I going with all this club kid stuff? This story, it revolves around that club scene and the cast of criminal characters that revolved around it. So a lot of it is based off of two books. One is Clubland by Frank Owen, which is just a remarkable piece of work.

Owen is the kind of journalist I definitely admired and wanted to be like. He wrote for The Village Voice back when all Wheatleys were the shit. All sorts of underground culture stuff, but also crime and gonzo sort of things. And his book opens with him buying and taking ketamine for the first time. So there's that. He also broke a lot of the really wild info in the story.

And there's another really good book too, Mob Over Miami, that centers on Chris Passiello by a former Daily News police reporter. Michelle McPhee is her name. That's also a great read, and I use those two books as the main sources. There's also a documentary about the limelight that I think Peter Gation's daughter made

But actually, I didn't see it and didn't know about it until this script was well done and I had to look up how to pronounce Peter Gation. But yeah, this story revolves around sort of three separate stories, three main characters we're going to focus on, all with intertwining storylines. And they all come together in the ecstasy-fueled heyday of the 90s Manhattan club scene and the emergence of both techno and club drugs as a mainstay.

Wow, it's a good job there are professional writers who can spin complex narratives like this together on podcasts instead of just failed comedians doing fartjags, eh?

Yeah, you could say that. And so the first guy we've got is Chris Passiello. He's a Staten Island and Brooklyn tough guy, junior mafioso, who became a celebrity nightlife entrepreneur in Miami after kind of robbing and fighting his way through New York City and the club scene. And then we've got Lord Michael Caruso, who went from being a DJ music club promoter to a drug kingpin of sorts, while also doing his fair share of just like scumbag

scumbaggery, robbery, setting up friends. And then we've got Peter Gation, who was this kingpin of New York City clubs, and maybe we'll find out an ecstasy kingpin. Gation comes from humble beginnings. He's a small-town Canadian boy, just made good. Born in Cornwall, Ontario, which I assume is just like Letterkenny, with a dad who was a mailman and a mom who was a teacher. He loses his eye in a hockey incident when he was a kid, and that's when he picks up wearing the eyepatch, which becomes his kind of signature thing.

From the start, he's the natural born businessman. And he uses his settlement money from the accident, I guess there was a lawsuit involving the hockey thing, to open a clothing store and then a bar when he's barely old enough to drink. And it's kind of like, you know those kids, I don't know if you knew any of them growing up, but just like natural born hustlers that are just great at making money. Like in high school, I'm not talking...

Like drug dealers, obviously they're great at making money too, but I mean, like CD burning was a thing, right? Before obviously Spotify and all that, kids would buy CD burners early on and they would burn popular albums on blank discs and sell them for like $5, you know? Or kids who did like, you know, we would sell after prom tickets or in college, the spring break hustle for group chips when that was a thing and they would make tens of thousands of dollars, like $5.

selling tickets to these nightlife events or group travel and that was a thing. I remember someone I may know having to basically smuggle down like $40,000 to Mexico during spring break and all that. Whoa, that's a lot. I mean, the amount of PS1 games that I played in black and white with a biro pen stuck in the lid so I could pay my friend's pirate games. And yeah, there was a bunch of kids who like

Used to put digital cameras around the back of the electronics store and then we let our... I mean, they let their mates pick them up after the shift and then we... Sorry. They sold them down the market. That was a good one. That made a lot of money. Yeah, I mean, that's just stealing from retail, which is basically what you do when you're in high school. Yeah. Remember? Doing... That's what everyone... Is there ingenuity there? No. Anyone who's 17...

Who paid full price at a shopping mall was not living life right. But I don't even know if there are shopping malls anymore. Anyway, Gation, he's one of those dudes. He ends up buying a nightclub in Florida, of all places, when he's only 22. The place had gone bankrupt and it was up for auction. And he makes it the first limelight. This is all actually, this is all from Frank Owen's book, by the way.

He sells up for a nice profit after a few years of it doing well. Then he does the same thing in Atlanta and really goes hard on the spectacle. This one has an aquarium with sharks on the dance floor and live black panthers and all that for opening night. And this is late 70s, early 80s, and that's kind of a big deal. He's a real showman and he's making it big. So where else are you going to go but New York City?

In 1983, he buys this church in Chelsea, which back then, I mean, the neighborhood's just kind of run down and desolate, not like it is now. And he fancies up the interior and he opens Limelight. And when it opens, it's just like gaudy. And it has some celebs going there and people from the music scene. But eventually after a couple years, maybe even after only like a year, year and a half, he opens Limelight.

Like most nice life spots, it loses its sheen and Gation, who is pretty much sober, ends up falling into the habit of having these like crack smoking orgies and cheap motels with hookers, as one does usually when the going gets tough in business. Yeah, we've been there. I mean, actually, I was living in New York. I interviewed one of the guys who tended bar at Studio 54. And he was like, yeah, it was kind of cool. I mean, all we did was serve vodka sodas in our underpants and take too much coke. I mean...

It sounds pretty much like most clubs. Maybe it's just a mistake or perhaps I'm just a really bad interviewer. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I feel like those things are always look a lot cooler when you're in the past looking back, you know, although some of them actually do seem like a really good time. But yeah, so Limelight is kind of failing and he meets this guy, Michael Allig, and his club kid weirdos and they set up shop there. Here's how Owen describes their parties. One called Disco 2000 and this is in 1990. Quote,

A typical night at Michael Alex Disco 2000 was akin to stumbling across a secret society devoted to vice, where elaborately costumed, rouged, and wig-topped pleasure seekers engaged in a triumphal procession of shocking acts that scorn law and morality's very existence. Were they kissing? So basically like an average Friday night. Yeah, an average Friday night for Sean when he lived in Berlin. Look, I mean, if I'm feeling like it by the end of the show, I'll tell you about the poo slide, but let's move on. Jesus Christ, I don't think anyone wants to know about that, actually.

No, I barely did. Owen continues, quote, Here, hedonism was a religion. Transgression was celebrated as a consecrated right, and intoxication was manifold, induced not just by the apparently infinite supply of chemicals available, but by the pounding music, the extravagant clothing, the erotic displays, the playful games, the dazzling light shows. Okay, so there are lights, people in loud clothes, and they're taking drugs. Got it.

Yeah, I mean, it was. If you actually Google them and look it up, they had a pretty wild look, man, and they did wild stuff. It was basically, what is wild? Sex and drugs and weird sex and lots of drugs. I think that's basically what it come down to, but it definitely looked like a good time, and they were definitely...

they did the talk show circuit, which I thought was always really funny. They had their wild and crazy styles. It was very typical New York, I think, in a lot of ways. I can't even imagine if they were around now how annoying the social media reaction would be

around them. Terrible. But basically drugs, lots of them being used. Take the nowadays bathroom stalls and make it the entire club and that's what we had. It kind of almost seems weird to me now when it comes to law enforcement being super interested in stuff like that. Club drugs, like cocaine I get. There's still a heavy focus on that. But it just seems, I don't know.

Weird for cops to be so aggressively pursuing club dealers, people using it for their personal use. But I guess that's what they were like with weed back then too, even in places like New York. And I guess maybe it's because you see Instagram ads for ketamine therapy every five minutes, so it just feels off right now. But yeah, I don't know, man. Maybe it's not weird at all, but that's kind of... They were super aggressively looking into these clubs. It starts to happen around this point.

Yeah, I mean, there was never really a scare around ecstasy or NDMA until like the late 90s, early 2000s. I feel like there were a couple of deaths in clubs. But before that, I mean, it just wasn't much of a thing. I mean, it's not that dangerous, right? All the stats don't point to ecstasy, I mean, MDMA being dangerous, particularly beyond any other drugs. So there's always a call for it to be descheduled or whatever. I think there were a couple of situations where

in the 90s that got hyped up in media in terms of rapes happening and overdoses or people getting dehydrated, like one or two deaths or something like that. And I do remember, I was young, but I remember a sort of panic involving the spinal fluid thing. That was a big thing and messing up your brain, stuff like that. So there was a, I'm sure you had your 2020 piece on it and then parents flipped out or post headlines about

and people got worked up about it. But it definitely was, there was a, not an aggressive panic, not like we've seen with, with like, you know, fentanyl or meth, but there definitely was, you know, some, some panic around it.

In 1991, Gation's also convinced to hire a promoter who goes by Lord Michael Caruso. And Caruso is a Staten Island kid who Owen says helped bring techno from Europe to the US. See, in the early 90s thing, in the club scene, it was really ramping up. Ravers were the thing. And these big techno acts, they're coming to limelight and lots of E's being sold. And Caruso is overseeing it. He's making bank, and so is Gation. I kind of wonder what the purity was like in those days, you know? Like,

Was it mostly meth? Was it real MDMA? Or was it just, I don't know, some combination of the two? I don't know. I'm guessing it was pretty crap compared to today, right? Because there was so much speed on the market from Central Asia, Turkey. I don't know if that was making its way to the States, but it was definitely in the UK and Europe. So I'm guessing they were cutting it with that stuff. Yeah. Owen talks about this interesting phenomenon he was seeing in the clubs where he had these like

roided up tough guys from South Brooklyn, from Staten Island, from Jersey. They're all coming into Manhattan, the bridge and tunnel guys, to places like Limelight to party with the ravers and the club kids who were the kind of kids that these kids would attack generally on the streets. It's almost this sort of kumbaya moment. I mean, track suit and baseball bat types just kind of raving away, talking about peace and love. Caruso was a big part of that, and he was also this sort of techno pioneer.

and, like we said, a major ecstasy dealer, along with what Owen calls his sociopathic goodfellas friends. But we'll get to that in a second. Caruso had grown up in the Italian parts of Staten Island, but he ended up hanging out a lot on the projects with eventual members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and he was big into hip-hop and also the drug game. He sold coke, he sold weed, and he did it through one of these Lucchese street crews as a teen. Far down the totem pole, though. Lucchese's

I think we've talked about them a lot before. They're one of the five families in New York of the mafia that control it. And these groups all had these younger crews, the guys that were late teens and their 20s, not made guys, but associates, the guys who would do the errands, the guys who wanted to get made and were kind of trying to get there and doing their own hustles and giving the made guys and the real mafia guys a taste. This Luke Casey farm team crew was the Port Richmond crew. And these guys...

We'll get them a bit more when we dive into Chris Paciello's story, but they were no joke. They were dividing up kilos. They ran hookers. They did serious felonies, strong-arm robberies. They killed informants, and Caruso kind of idolized them. That's the thing about him. He did a lot of kind of hardcore shit. He's going to be doing robberies and selling drugs, but he wasn't as serious as a lot of these guys were, and that ends up showing.

He'd picked up on techno on a trip to England and he brought it back with him to the States. That's what Owen says, but I kind of feel like it wasn't a thing in Detroit already too, like in the 80s, you know? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe there's different versions, but I'm not as tuned into the music history with that. Apparently, he brought a version back from England that wasn't super popular in New York yet. And also super popular in England at the time was Ecstasy, and he brought a lot of that back too, and he kind of helped turn Staten Island onto it in Brooklyn. Yeah.

So you had all these roughneck kids going to the clubs in Manhattan, doing ye and being all lovely, but also they were starting brawls. And Caruso, he started promoting these techno parties, selling pills there too, and he gets hooked up with Alig and Limelight and Gation, and he brings his promotions there. Alig, who I've mentioned a couple times, you don't really go into him too much, but he was basically the leader of the club kids and all this sort of like wild nightlife promotion stuff.

And once that happens, Caruso starts bringing in these young gangsters in a circle to the promised land of the Manhattan nightclubs. And they start moving weight. They kick out all the freelance dealers and the little club kid dealers, and they replace them with their own people.

So Caruso and his goons, they're basically setting up shop, and then we have the Bath Ave crew, which is another one of these mafia farm teams. They start imposing themselves all over the club in the rave scene, basically taking over. Because what is some club kid dealer going to do to these roughneck Brooklyn Goombas? Says Owen, quote, Caruso and his followers represented a new breed of gangster who started popping up like toxic mushrooms on the Manhattan club scene in the early 90s.

They kidnapped, robbed, extorted, and generally terrorized the effeminate club kid dealers and candy ravers who used to control the narcotics trade at trendy clubs. Caruso's also getting a reputation at this point as being a bit of a snake. He ends up setting up some of these guys to get robbed that he's friends with. He gets infamous for just portraying people and colleagues, and he has to have protection eventually. And one of these guys, these young bodyguards he starts running with, is Chris Passiello.

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Paciello was born in 1971, and his actual name is Chris Lowigson. But he later changes it to fit in with the guys he ends up running with. And he comes up in Borough Park, Brooklyn at first, which is a working class Irish and Italian neighborhood back then. Had a Hasidic population then, now it's very heavily Hasidic. His dad was an amateur bodybuilder and big dude who also worked as a bouncer and was a professional arm wrestler. This is all from Mob Over Miami, the Michelle McPhee book.

She really goes into Paciello in that one. That's more of a focus on him than on Gation. His family life starts out great, but it kind of gets fractured when in 1982 his dad gets shot after throwing a guy out of a bar. He gets addicted to painkillers, then gets on heroin, and starts being a burglar and doing crimes. He gets arrested a lot, and it really affects Chris. Yeah, I guess that's a grim portent of the bigger drug crises to come. I feel like this kind of biography you don't even get now, right? This dad who's a

Who's a professional arm wrestler? That's nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's also, he ends up being, I don't really get into it, but he ends up being kind of very anti, not anti-drugs, but when he has friends that are trying to get off it, he's the guy who does it. A couple of them have stories about Chris barging into bathroom stalls and picking them up and taking them out when they're relapsing. So he has that sort of edge to him and does some good guy things, but...

By the mid-80s, he's basically in the beginning of Goodfellas, just hanging out at a mob-run car service with the other teenage hooligans, doing the errands and whatnot. He ends up getting his first arrest for stealing car stereos. And then he just goes hard, and he focuses his energy on stealing cars. Gets really good at it, and he's stealing luxury cars.

He also starts doing roids and becomes a workout fiend and just a real brawler. By the late 80s, he moves to Staten Island, which is just a real mob hotspot. Lots of bosses and top guys had grown up or moved out there, like Sammy the Bull. It has a bad rep. I think we make fun of it a lot in New York, but there's actually beautiful neighborhoods and houses there. There's high-ranking members from each of the five families that live there at this point. Yeah, I'm starting to really identify with this guy now. I really feel his story.

According to McPhee, he starts running with a crew called the Untouchables, who were the largest stolen car ring in the US at the time and were known for being just really good at what they do. I actually heard, I don't know if this is true, I think it's just something I saw online, that the Nick Cage movie Gone in 60 Seconds was based on them somewhat. But these guys, they would steal cars from all over, they'd rip off dealerships, and they would ship them off the docks in Red Hook all over.

That's the one thing to pick up on with Paciello. He just jumps around from crew to crew. He teams up with anyone he can get money with and eventually screws them over to get more money. And it kind of reminds me actually when we talked about how the Russian quote unquote mafia operated in Brooklyn around then. It wasn't like a classical hierarchy, right? It was just people teamed up with each other on various scams and hustles with whoever they could get money with.

So Paciello, it wasn't just the Untouchables. He also went with the Bath Ab crew. He was also with another Mafia Farm crew at times, the New Springfield Boys. They were just known for burglaries, robbing, cracking safes, smashing grab ATMs. So this is like the 80s. There's no security cameras and phones aren't everywhere. People like this coming up among the thugs and the gangsters, they're just getting money like this any way they can, breaking into buildings, breaking into houses. It was the social club scene stuff with like,

Donnie Brasco and parking meters, like whatever they could to get paid. Paciello loves to get his hands dirty too, and he gets known for being just a real bad brawler and just being juiced up to the gills. He also gets into a fight with an off-duty cop at 18 and gets arrested for it.

There's also this wild story where he gets arrested for stealing a boat once, like a 40-foot yacht, I think, and they had to break into the NYPD impound lot and torch it so there was no evidence. So yeah, it's just like a life of shakedowns, robberies, fights, violence, stealing cars and ATM machines, smacking people around with baseball bats. And they start calling him the binger because he just loved to binge on doing crimes. He also had a very nasty rep for robbing friends by this point.

I feel like that boat one is lifted straight from a GTA mission somewhere. Also, shouldn't he have been getting sent to prison at some point? I mean, he's literally known for binging on crimes. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, he could get away with a lot back then. I think he did a couple short jail sentences, but pretty, for the most part, kept out of it. Giuliani still really sweeped up all of that shit. Yeah.

His main crew, though, was the Bath Ave crew. They hung out at Nick's Candy Shop, which sounds very 1920s and cute, but it's not. They were the farm team for the Bananos. There were about a dozen of them, and the top seven guys each got the number one through seven tattooed on them. Said one of them to McPhee, quote, "'We were like the hit squad. The tattoos meant you shot. We carry guns, and whatever we had to do.'"

And those tattoos actually end up playing a role in their later trials, which don't get your gang affiliation tattooed on you. They were just known for being these terrifying thugs. A lot of drug deals, weed, coke rings, selling weed in the parks, extorting other drug dealers. They start taking on hits in 1991. They do a bunch of murders. The Bath Ave crew and the Springfield crew, they eventually kind of merge. And some of them get involved with the nightclubs in Manhattan as promoters and bouncers.

So like what level of glam are we talking here with these New York clubs? Are they still like pre Giuliani war torn New York clubs or are they like fancy kind of meatpacking era clubs? I don't know. Like do people still go clubbing in Manhattan these days? I mean, those clubs come in like the bottle service ones come in later than this.

These were like big, massive clubs, dancing, fun. It was a good time. Obviously, there were still those spots, but the whole bottle service thing was not a thing at this point. It was like massive clubs, kind of like what you see in Deep Brooklyn now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was a different, it seems like a lot more fun because I started going out during the bottle service club era and that was fucking awful. Actually, I think I rant about that in a little bit, but that was corny and just like the worst. These were still kind of wild and fun and New York was still kind of gritty and in its heyday in terms of that sort of stuff at this point.

Paciello, though, he's getting too wild with the robberies and he hits a few banks and that's never a good idea. And then there's the Shemtop murder. This is February 1993. He had been tipped off that this businessman in Staten Island in one of the rich neighborhoods had saved a lot of cash. I think the guy had a bunch of 99 cent stores and then also had a porn business on the side. And he's said to be holding anywhere from 50,000 to a million.

So him and his crew, three other guys, they go to do it. And the plan is to go in, tie up his wife, and force the guy to give up his safe. Chris is the driver and the guy who tipped him off, so he stays in the car. One of the other guys stays outside, and the two go to knock on the door, and they're going to run up in the house. And they do it with masks on, with guns out. And within 10 seconds, everything just goes wrong. Someone accidentally squeaks the trigger and kills his wife, Judy Shemtov.

And then they just run away. They split. They freak out. Guys are throwing up. There's no real evidence, though, and no one sees anything. No witnesses see anything. But, um...

Yeah, it's just bad news. And things are getting too hot for Paciello at that moment. But he had already linked up with Lord Michael Caruso as his production in the clubs, and they had been tearing up Manhattan together. There's actually this infamous fight July 4th at the Sound Factory, which is where we had my after prom. Shout out to Sound Factory. These guys have been known for just busting up clubs, robbing people, so they get turned away because some of these bouncers also didn't play.

Chris comes back, Paciello, and he cracks the head bouncer, this guy named Alex, who ran with an outlaw motorcycle club in the head. And that's going to come back in a little bit. Anyway, that's pretty much the final straw. There's just too much heat. So while Gation is dealing with the club kids, Caruso and Paciello, they relocate to Miami. And you got to understand Miami, South Beach then, it's not what it is now. Although now it seems like every day in spring break, there's another headline about gunshots and stuff getting closed down. But back then in the late 80s,

And it basically fallen into disrepair. It was not a hotspot. It was worn down. Junkies, dealers, just not glamorous. But things start to turn around in the early to mid 90s. You get that, you know, Gloria Estefan, Madonna, Versace mansion stuff just starting to pop off. And Miami is becoming a hotspot again. I think it's also probably the best real world season of all time. I think it was 96 or 95. Yeah.

You ever watch that one? I feel like I got an education on a lot of stuff I shouldn't have been learning from watching that season. But it was an excellent, excellent season. Yeah, now you're showing your age. Also Miami. I don't know. Maybe I'm just not a Miami guy. Maybe it sounds better in the late 80s. I don't know. Miami can be great for like a week at a time, dude. I mean, I went down there a lot because I had friends down there in college. And...

Just everyone's got nice cars and you go drive around in an M3 and people smoke giant blunts and drink Cisco and blast trick daddy. But I'm also showing my age with that too. It was a good time. Good times in Miami. I still try to get down there in the winter for a couple days every time just because...

You need that. But yeah, Miami is becoming a hotspot again. And Caruso and Paciello, they take their Staten Island, Brooklyn, hustling gangster talents to South Beach and open up a club. They buy a bar, like an abandoned bar basically from a rundown bar from a Gambino soldier who was close with John Gotti. And then they open this thing with two Gambino associates. And it's actually fronted, I think, by Mickey Rourke of all people.

And they call it Risk. And it's a pretty good success. It's not huge, but they make some money. Paciello starts to remake himself as this Miami guy from the Staten Island thug. And now he's in Versace and Armani, even though he's got this murder rep back home hanging over him. And still, all the mafia guys from New York, they come down to party there. And they also try to get a taste from Paciello.

He's still a little dumb at this point. He's getting into fights. He's a real bruiser. Steals a neighbor's car for no reason. All sorts of stuff he shouldn't be doing. Caruso's getting a little sick of it, and he can't really hang with a real gangster like Chris. So he's always been more of a wannabe. And the final straw is Chris stashes this mafioso guy down there from New York who's being hunted by the feds on a murder charge. And I think he was also...

being hunted by one of the other families. It was like a cross-family thing. And he has him hide out in Caruso's apartment. Caruso just has enough, and he hightails it back to New York. At one point, he even goes and he finds that bouncer, the outlaw motorcycle guy, and he tries to make amends. He tells him he knows where he can find Paciello, you know, like I said, betraying all his friends. The bouncer, though, had somehow ended up befriending Chris before, and he secretly records Caruso diming him out, and he later plays the tape for Paciello.

So Paciello at that point flies to New York, tracks down Caruso and just threatens him with a gun saying, you're lucky I don't kill you. And then he starts extorting him. Caruso, meanwhile, this is like 1995. He goes back to work for Gation and he's pumping drugs all over his clubs. At the same time, Paciello's club Miami Risk is

is failing. So, you know, they light a match. It suspiciously burns down. And with the insurance money, he's already become this kind of socialite down there. He links up with a woman named Ingrid Cesaris, and she's like a real deal socialite, right? Fabulously wealthy family, best friends with Madonna, knows all the A-listers. And November of 1995, they open up Liquid, which becomes the hotspot A-list. All the celebs are there.

Kate Moss, Madonna, all that. All of a sudden, Paciello is moving with the real celebrities. He's dating supermodels, red carpets, benefit dinners, real estate magnates. He's being mentioned in Variety Magazine, GQ, all that. He's dating Sofia Vergara, Daisy Fuentes, Nikki Taylor, Madonna, all that. Yeah, I've heard of those guys. They're pretty big.

The crazy thing is all this is happening and no one knows about his mob connections or anything he's done back home. He's just this guy on South Beach that came from New York and he's doing really well, you know?

He's trying to play like the nice guy, the club impresario. A lot of his employees actually ended up loving him, but he's still actually getting the fights. He gets into a brawl with this arena football player, I think over, uh, over Nikki Taylor. And then he fights a former Mr. Universe, although that's because the guy called his friend the N word. So I think we kind of got to give him credit on, on that one, you know? Yeah.

Meanwhile, Staten Island and Brooklyn, all the young thugs he used to run with, they're still dealing, robbing, and shooting, and things are getting out of control. I think there was a Colombo family war, some other stuff going on, but it's really crazy. Lots of murders. And the feds launch Operation Little Caesar. That's a good one. That's one of the best ones we've had. I guess it's slightly racist, but it's just about right.

Right. So they raid the Bay Ridge neighborhood, Bath Beach, Bensonhurst. They target all those mobster farm teams. 38 suspects are rounded up. A lot of those junior mob soldiers, a lot of the guys that Chris did dirt with. Some he had backstabbed. And some of these guys, they're going to start talking, which is bad news for Chris Passiello. Meanwhile, back in New York, the club scene is just getting more just drug addled and out of control.

In March of 1996, there's the infamous murder of Angel Melendez, who was one of the club kids who was also a dealer, by a drugged out Michael Allig and his friend Freeze. They actually make a movie about it, I think, and Allig is played by Macaulay Culkin, but it's one of these just classic movies

New York City, you know, New York Post headline tabloid murders. I think they kept the body in a bathtub for a few days and chopped it up and put it in suitcases and dumped it in the river. Something that I think, I'm surprised that one of the true crime podcasts hasn't done it. Maybe they have. And it's sort of this signifier really between that and Giuliani really going to war against nightlife that this club scene, the one Gation ruled over, is nearing its end days.

It's actually going to be replaced with something much worse. Like we talked about the gross, just like meatpacking bottle club scene, but that is a story for another day. Just what a horrendous time to be in New York. You know, that like early two thousands, just the worst. Let me tell you.

I mean, how did Meat Packet itself become such a hellscape? It's fucking terrible these days. I think we blame Sex and the City. I think that was a part of it. But no, because it was in Manhattan and there was space. So you could open up clubs there and that's what people did. And now it's just been a hellscape for like 25, 30 years. But I do remember a lot of blame going towards Sex and the City in the late 90s. People forget the influence that show had over terrible young people coming to New York. But

I digress. May of 1996,

Nearly a year after the opening intro raid, I think maybe nine months, Peter Gation gets arrested by the DEA after they raid his townhouse and they charge him with conspiracy to distribute MDMA. Something like 25 other people are arrested too. And the feds have been trying to get him forever. You know, they've been flipping a bunch of informants they pick up on other petty charges, sending in other undercover to make hand to hands, really just doing a massive investigation. And they finally go after him.

They accuse him of overseeing the whole drug distribution at his clubs and getting a cut. Some of his second in command, guys like Michael Caruso and Steve Lewis, who actually is another prominent nightlife guy, I think who still does nightlife, they actually are going to testify to that. Also around then, Frank Owen actually ends up having Michael Caruso come to his office in the Village Voice, you know? And he tells him he's going to run this article about he was the kingpin at Limelight, and Caruso just breaks down in tears. So yeah, Owen's a badass, man. You got to respect that, right? Yeah.

Alec ends up getting arrested for the murder and the feds try to flip him against Gation too. They're trying to flip everyone. They're just desperate to lock him up. A bunch of the informants will go on to end up being discredited though because they're all just like waste-oid dealers and club kid junkies and some of them end up discrediting the FBI agents on the case because they did a lot of improper and illegal stuff. I think there was drug use, there might have been sex, illegal surveillance, all that.

They attempt to flip Alec. He does the same thing happens. He kind of gets discredited and accuses the feds of being, you know, renegade officers, all this sort of stuff. Most people seem to think, you know, Gation was at least guilty of knowing drugs were done and sold in his clubs, but not in on it.

In 1997, they follow up. He gets hit with the RICO and the tax evasion charges. They're just throwing everything at him. And then also in 1997, Caruso gets arrested for distributing coke in ecstasy. Right away, he signs a deal to testify against Gation, and he also snitches on his own lieutenants.

In 1998, the Gation trial finally starts, and it's just this wild trial of club kids and small-time dealers, and worst of all, most despicable of all, nightclub promoters. And there's all sorts of just incredible and hilarious testimony, but Gation's lawyers basically dismantle everything. They just completely destroy the case, expose them as liars. Caruso gets eviscerated. The lawyer is actually Benjamin Brafman, who, if you guys remember, he was on the OJ Dream Team.

And yeah, he just destroys all the witnesses as unreliable, the feds as overzealous, and Gation beats the drug charges pretty easily. Says Owen, quote, the overall impression left by the trial was not of a single drug hierarchy headed by Kingpin Gation, but of several competing drug crews trying to gain advantage by bribing individual Gation employees.

I mean, what a clown show by the feds. We've done a few New York shows where the feds have messed up like this. Is this when they're going undercover as drag queens as well? And just getting picked up on the job? That was two of the guys who made a bunch of the buys and were sort of heading up the investigation. Yeah, they did that. I feel like they didn't need to go and drag them, maybe. Maybe that was a personal choice.

Well, I think it was like they were like, you know, six foot two clean cut Irish and Italian guys who like aren't going to blend in. You know what I'm saying? So like, what do you do when that happens? You wear a dress and a wig and a bunch of makeup. And that's actually, you know, it seems like a good time to see me. But yeah, no, there were there were I mean, the 90s were some there were some big takedowns that the feds did in New York. Like you had our episode on the, um,

The wild Cowboys was around then maybe a couple of years earlier. Same thing with, uh, some of the Jamaican posses in New York. So there were some pretty successful takedowns preacher crew, I think was around then, but this was, um, I guess this was the late nineties. This was a very sloppy, sloppy operation. Um,

In January 1999, though, Gation does plead guilty to tax evasion charges. He gets hit with like 90 days in jail and $2 million in back taxes. And his days as a nightlife kingpin, they're pretty much over, especially because New York, like I said, is moving away from the massive big club scene into smaller places. I think, I'm trying to think of what pops up in like the next five to 10 years in those 2000s. Like, I don't know, Don Hills and Sway and Beatrice and Marquis and Avenue and kind of, you know, the cheesy shit like that.

Is that that club New York place? That's the one where Shine popped a few off and went to prison for PDD, right?

Yeah. You wrote the article about him for Rolling Stone. If you guys missed that, definitely go look at that. Shine went down there and interviewed him. Gation also ran The Tunnel, which had one of the most famous rap nights of all time, which was Sunday nights at The Tunnel with Flex and all sorts of artists were broke. Biggie, DMX, all that 90s New York hip-hop. It became pretty infamous too for just like...

I guess it didn't get the same level of attention that Limelight did for drugs, but Tunnel was like a gnarly place and a place where a lot of people made their careers. A lot of people got robbed too, because it had those, this amazing Sunday night rap night.

Paciello's name does come up a few times at the trial, with Caruso kind of pointing the finger at him and the Bathtab crew as the protectors of the limelight drug dealers. But in the meanwhile, he's still in Florida just kind of running the nightclubs and being A-list. He opens up a bunch of other new spots. He's dating the celebrities still. Life is good, and he's basically the Prince of South Beach.

but the whole time, the Bonanno, the Colombo, and Lucchese associates, they're going down there, they're getting into his clubs, they're trying to get their taste. And his mafia ties, they end up getting exposed by Frank Owen, the Village Voice, but it's Miami, you know? You get to remake yourself, and no one really pays that much attention to it. Side story,

Owens claims Paciello had some secret investor on Liquid called Mr. Slick, who was an old school Florida gangster turned legitimate businessman, who didn't take too kindly to like some of the Italian New York guys going down there to extort Chris. So much so that at one point, one of the Gambino guys comes down and he has his people meet him at the airport. And they take him out to the Everglades and show him some chainsaws. And after that, the guy leaves Chris alone.

So I don't know. I was trying to figure out who it was. I mean, Traficante was long dead by then. We're talking like late 90s. But it's got to be just like one of these crazy Cubans. That's my assumption. It's got to be some wild South American. But yeah, it's funny. He brings us up, which is just like catnip for me. And I just can't... He doesn't go into it at all. And I search for more on it. But you can't figure anything that's out on it. So maybe...

Maybe I think Frank Cohen actually has a sub stack. So maybe he talks about it more on that, but, um, definitely get his book. It's, it's amazing. I can't, I can't speak highly enough of it. Paciello at one point around then he's trying to open up a club in New York city, but he fails because of all the bad press he's getting with the mafia stuff. But the walls are closing in between the roundup of all the junior mafia guys, junior mafia. Hey, uh, in, in that I mentioned earlier, his name is coming up in the limelight trial and he's also a target from the Miami PD. Yeah.

In 1999, that same year, he hires an off-duty Miami Beach detective to work security.

He's butting up to the guy, getting real close with him, divulging things, like things that he shouldn't. He even confides in him that he may look into getting a rival nightclub guy who was pissing him off, beating up really badly or killed. And it turns out the guy, like I said, is an undercover officer. Okay, that's a pretty sharp switcheroo by the cop, so fair play. Is it? Or is it like the oldest trick in the book, you know? Yeah, it's so obvious that it's not obvious, I don't know.

Yeah, well, either way, it works. So, Paciello goes so far as to introduce this undercover cop to the boss of the Colombo family, who had come down, and he was, I guess, trying to impress the cop. In New York, a lot of those guys were picked up are starting to flip, including on the infamous Shemtov robbery gone bad.

the murder that we talked about. So Chris is being investigated, I think at this point, by the feds, the IRS, the NYPD, and the Miami PD. In December of 1999, the feds finally jump on him, and it just drops like this bombshell in Miami. Chris and a bunch of others get indicted on a ton of charges, including a lot of members high ranking in the Bonanno family. Murder, robbery, racketeering. He also gets charged with a bunch of robberies and burglaries from 1987 to 1993.

His celeb friends, they actually stick by him and a bunch of them help post his bond and go to his hearings. He's legit dating Sofia Vergara at the time. I'm talking like, you know, pre-modern family Sofia Vergara. But the feds just have him dead to rights and it's just this massive trial with, or massive, you know, build up. Tons of press because it's, you know, this pretty boy Miami club owner dating celebs who's now going down for murder. All the Miami papers and the New York papers just, I mean, love it. But, you know,

At this point, Chris just, he can't hold it. He's going to talk. So he becomes a witness for the government and his whole family goes into witness relocation because he's going to go so far as to talk about some of the bosses of the five families. In October of 2000, he pleads guilty to murder, robbery, and racketeering. And his testimony leads to the takedown of many Bonanno crime film members. I'm talking like higher echelon guys. Yeah, I mean, sure. How is he not getting whacked at this point?

Hey man, it ain't what it was. He's released in September of 2006 after serving six years.

he's in witness protection, but he doesn't stay in it too long. He ends up moving to LA and he opens up some pizzerias soon enough though. I think by like 2010, 2011, 2012, he's back in Miami. He's opening up restaurants and nightclubs. You know, at this point I'm shocked he doesn't have a podcast, but I guess Sammy the Bull can do what he did and be out there. You know, who's to say this guy, this guy can't. So here's an August, 2012 New York post headline.

Quote, mob rat Chris Paciello chooses Miami club lifestyle over witness protection. I think I looked into it. I think now he actually owns a pretty, pretty like fabulously, you know, elite gym called anatomy fitness. And I just saw an article that says he bought a house for $4 million in 2020 and sold it for 9 million in 2022. So yeah, doing well, you know, maybe he doesn't need a podcast, but, uh, Miami forgives man. Miami forgives. Yeah.

Meanwhile, though, Gation had tried to reopen Limelight, I think in the early 2000s, but it just doesn't do well. There's this famous OD of a 19-year-old that makes the cover of the papers, kind of sinks it, and I think he's actually back in Canada now. He might be doing some low-key nightlife stuff. Caruso, at one point, ends up managing Capadonna of the Wu-Tang Clan, but it gets leaked that he's a snitch and it becomes a scandal at some point or whatever, so I have no idea what he's up to now, but...

Yeah, clubs and club drugs are back in New York City in a huge way. I don't think they ever went away, but whether it's like Finance Bro EM at Mirage or some of the bigger places in Manhattan are just getting weird nowadays or a leathered out basement in Ridgewood, New York has a great club scene again.

You know, and you can get your ketamine treatment legally for like 500 bucks a session off Instagram or at wellness centers in Midtown. So, you know, we've kind of come full circle at this point. Nice. I like that. Oh, and by the way, just before anyone forgets, it's just a slide that people poo on and then go down. I never went on it. I swear.

Although, actually, I'm not going to tell the other story I was going to tell. That's too bad to say on there. Wait, is that a thing you've heard about or you've seen that really exists in Berlin? So at Berghain, the really famous place in Berlin, there's

So there's a room, allegedly, where there's a night where people shit down a slide and then slide down it and have a great time. I have genuinely been in the room where people pee on a metal grating onto people who are just dancing below. I went on the top floor and looked down and it was just like one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen in my life.

I was on a lot of drugs, so it was fun. We're definitely getting banned from YouTube when this episode goes up, and I'm pretty sure, pretty glad we don't have any host-read ads for that. No, I don't think we should. We'll leave it in. But yeah, I'm glad we don't have any host-read ads for this episode for once. But yeah, patreon.com, Sassanian World Podcast. Sean will be telling more stories about his Berlin life, and we'll put up there that shouldn't be heard by literally anyone. Maybe, maybe not.

Yeah. But yeah, until next week.