diary: A weeklong electronic journal.

Richard Johnson

diary
entries

Posted Friday, Oct. 5, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET

There is one party I wasn't invited to last night on the Upper East Side that would have been worth covering. The hostess is a drug dealer who has been supplying top-quality reefer and cocaine to A-list clients for at least 25 years.

I remember going to one of her soirees in the early '80s when she was living in a beautiful apartment in Washington Mews. These are rows of carriage houses just north of Washington Square dating back to the early 1800s. Her particular apartment had been renovated by a Rockefeller heiress using an artist who had worked animal shapes into the three-dimensional plaster designs bordering the ceilings. If you kept studying the ceiling, you'd start to see birds and snakes, sort of like Ray Milland in Lost Weekend.

Fat Deborah (not her real name) is a wonderful, gregarious hostess, and her guest list was as good as anyone's—maybe better in one way since they were almost all clients. So she had a self-selecting group of partying types whose life expectancy might be lower than the norm but whose fun quotient was above average.

I'd been told about the party by a friend and wandered in. In those days, no one had security at the door or a guest list. But once inside I bumped into many people I knew, some of them super-achieving, ambitious Ivy League types I wouldn't have suspected were stoners.

I was introduced to Fat Deborah, who was indeed obese, and she seemed very happy to meet me, somehow trusting that I wasn't going to call the cops.

Later, as I was leaving, I was told to be very careful about any future dealings with Fat Deborah. "She's under surveillance. They are watching her apartment."

It occurred to me years later that Deborah might be a snitch.

Police sometimes allow, for instance, an after-hours club to stay in business year after year. The obvious explanation is the management is paying off the police. But there's another possibility: The police allow the after-hours to stay open so they can keep tabs on everyone hanging out there. If they closed the place, the bad guys would scatter underground. This way, the cops can keep an eye on them.

There is a certain after-hours on Avenue B that has been operating for 15 years. Patrons, who start arriving at about 4 a.m., knock on a windowless steel door. The doorman either admits or doesn't. I was once turned away. "You look too preppy," he said.

Nearly everyone I know has a story to tell about the night they ended up at Slay the Dragon—which is not the real name but is what a friend of mine mistakenly calls it. The stories always end with the shock of exiting the dungeonlike club and finding oneself blinking in the bright sun as real human beings, freshly scrubbed and purposeful, are striding off to work.

It is a mystery how Slay the Dragon has managed to continue operating despite all sorts of crackdowns under three different mayors, especially after eight years of Rudy Giuliani. So I like the undercover surveillance theory.

Maybe the police have had the same arrangement with Fat Deborah over the years. She is so infamous, a movie of her life supposedly was made a few years ago starring Susan Sarandon. I don't know the title. This might be apocryphal. But it's part of her legend now. And the legend grows.

Some people might wonder why I don't write about after-hours or drug dealers. It's not my place. I'm a reporter, not a cop.

Before I got onto the gossip beat, when I was a general assignment reporter in the '80s, one day I received an anonymous letter from someone who was very angry that illegal gambling clubs were operating in townhouses on the Upper East Side. The letter writer, who probably had lost his life savings, listed the addresses of four or five.

I showed the letter to Steve Dunleavy, who was then the metropolitan editor. "Give me a couple hundred dollars for expenses, and I'll check these out," I volunteered.

"No way, mate," he replied. "I don't want to put them out of business. I like those places." True story.

diary
entries

1 2 3 4 5

Posted Friday, Oct. 5, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET