Padlocks and police raids are replacing hot celebs and dazzling sights and sounds at Peter Gatien’s nightclubs these days.
The recent, brief closing of the Tunnel, which city officials branded a “drug supermarket,” is the latest legal setback to the Ontario-born king of clubs.
Gatien had run high-energy nightspots in Canada and Atlanta when he took over a West 20th Street church and turned it into the Limelight in 1983.
With his eye patch and shoulder-length hair, Gatien was portrayed as a hip new kind of entertainment entrepreneur, particularly after he added two more clubs, the Palladium and the Tunnel.
But in May 1996, he was indicted on federal drug-conspiracy charges.
Prosecutors said the winning Gatien formula was simply to attract a young crowd to his clubs by encouraging narcotics-peddling in them.
He was also hit with tax-fraud charges, for allegedly cheating the city and state out of more than $1 million.
While this was going on, his righthand man, Michael Alig, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in a grisly 1996 slaying.
Gatien staunchly denied the charges and vowed to win in court.
The drug case finally reached trial early last year. Despite lurid testimony by drug dealers against him, Gatien was acquitted.
The tax case ended with Gatien’s guilty plea last March. He faces a 90-day prison term.
The latest wave of bad news began in January, when a Long Island youth, Jimmy Lyons, died at the Tunnel on his 18th birthday after overdosing on Ecstasy and Special-K.
Two weeks ago, cops arrested 14 people at the Tunnel, most of them on drug-related charges, and the city closed the club.
The State Liquor Authority quickly voted to yank Gatien’s liquor license – too quickly, since a State Supreme Court judge agreed with Gatien that the SLA had acted without giving him his chance to rebut the charges.