clubprincess Posted April 15 Report Share Posted April 15 Selling to Hartford honcho. April 13, 2001 -- EXCLUSIVE Selling to Hartford honcho.Nightlife king Peter Gatien is selling Limelight to a controversial Connecticut club owner whose properties also face allegations of rampant drug dealing and deadly overdoses. Limelight is under contract for sale for $3.4 million to David Squillante of Hartford, who, with partner Jonathan Peters - a club DJ - has already put a non-refundable $300,000 down payment in escrow, The Post has learned. Squillante and Peters intend to sign a 28-year lease on the property - a 19th-century church on Sixth Avenue - and convert it into a 1,500-capacity dance bar and 125-seat restaurant called Worship, according to an investor prospectus. Gatien hopes the deal will be clinched by Memorial Day, along with the separate sale of his other Manhattan club, Tunnel, to someone else, his lawyer, Alan Klinger, said yesterday. But while regulators have been eager to see Gatien leave the nightclub business - dogging him with drug investigations, nuisance-abatement proceedings and liquor-license hearings since the mid-'90s - they may find little comfort in his successor at Limelight. Squillante's two clubs in Hartford - the Velvet Night Club bar and the after-hours club System - were padlocked for a week in January on allegations employees ignored open drug dealing on the dance floors. The clubs were allowed to reopen only after upping security and agreeing to uniformed police monitoring, but they remain under investigation, said prosecutor Brian Austin Jr. of the Connecticut state attorney's office. Gatien's Tunnel club is currently facing up to a year's closing under a city nuisance-abatement action that is almost identical to Connecticut's prosecution of Squillante's clubs. Hartford police are also investigating the overdose death of Jason Kratt, 25, of Columbia, Conn., after a night of partying at System - in another striking similarity between Squillante and Gatien, where an 18-year-old Tunnel patron suffered a fatal overdose in 1999. "We've had numerous other overdoses that wound up in the hospital, along with numerous sexual assaults," said Hartford Police Sgt. Franco Sanzo. Like Gatien - whose landlords claim his two Manhattan clubs are behind more than $2 million in rent - Squillante also has financial problems. Velvet has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to court documents. "There are some similarities there, that's for sure," Austin noted of Gatien and Squillante. Squillante's partner, Jonathan Peters, is a DJ who frequently spins Saturday nights at Sound Factory, another Manhattan club haunted by drug allegations. "We've been negotiating with lawyers and accountants, and we've asked whether they thought there would be any problems getting a liquor license, and they said no," Klinger said. Squillante and his lawyers did not return phone calls.NY Post------------------*Get the f*k off my dance floor.. * Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
musicbeat Posted April 15 Report Share Posted April 15 change is good, i hope it happens-NYC nightlife needs a revolution--a makeover like this would be great As for Tunnel, I hope an owner with deep pockets gets it. I would love to see that place modernized, with great a soundsystem and all the latest-- it needs an image makeover too, anything is possible Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BRIAN1500 Posted April 15 Report Share Posted April 15 "There are lots of rumors going around about me and limelight...I wanna let you guys know that I'm staying at SF...If SF burns down, then i'm going down with it." -Jonathan Peters This is a sample from his speech at SF this sunday. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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