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fabric closed down permanently (pg. 2)
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| Woony |
The arrangement (at least) generally is that they don't cause trouble in return for being let in, which like I said, makes me think that someone else is dictating the arrangement when the dealers are being so obvious. Or the club tolerated it, vieweing it as some kind of first class customer service? :p I find it hard to believe though when the club knows it's being held under a lens.
I heard that there is a Hell's Angels guy doing the door at Kater here in Berlin, what they do is they only let in their own guys and basically have a monopoly on that club. I don't know if the dealers are more obvious there though since I basically never go there. |
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| Lews |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
I find it hard to believe though when the club knows it's being held under a lens. |
That's exactly what I found so odd about the whole thing. |
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| rubez |
more importantly, will their mix cd's stop?!
they just released one - Fabric 89: Gerd Janson (19 Aug 2016)
i will be playing this in solidarity:
1. Cannibals - Tony Thomas
2. Style Dish - Afro Deep
3. Working Night - John Thomas (Octave One Mix)
4. Synchronicity - O.C.B. (Spincycle Remix)
5. Make Shape - Frederik (16B Remix)
6. Night Moves - Envoy
7. Infinity - Louis Botella
8. Seventeen - Ladytron (Slam Dub)
9. Appendix D - Danilo Vigorito
10. Soul - Danilo Vigorito
11. Stolen - Secret Society (Selway Remix)
12. D Clash - Bryan Zentz (Slam Mix)
13. Monoid/UCMG - Oxia – Contrast
14. Serenity - Marco Bailey
15. Steel - Sven Väth (Marco Carola Remix)
16. Riddles - Redhead (Tom Hades Remix)
17. Can’t Stop - Dan Corco & Fred Carreira
18. Sonic Tools - Tulasonic
19. Inspiration - Underground Resistance |
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| djdk |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lews
I find it odd that The Independent article everyone is throwing about on FB right now doesn't actually make it clear how Islington Council will profit off the closure, just that the Tories are to blame for cutting money to Council, which has then led to them closing Fabric because they need money? Perhaps I'm mis-reading it, I haven't had enough coffee today :( |
I read that as that the money that Fabric makes goes into central govt coffers whilst the proposed developemnt would give money direct to the council (or something like that) |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
Interesting, to me that makes it seem that unlike what they said in that speech, they had to bow to organized crime. Unless the doormen are widly incompetent, if a dealer gets inside a club it's the because the club wanted him inside. |
I'm not sure I agree with that. There is a big rave in Manchester called Illuminaughty (who have started spamming MD with their events, actually), and for a while they put on events at Manchester Academy 2, a big multi-room venue which happens to be part of the university student union complex. Because it was part of the university, the security staff were hired in from a professional company. Their treatment of the costumed psy-trance nutters was so hostile and unfriendly that Illuminaughty eventually had to move venues due to hundreds of complaints after each event. These guys would search people up and down, poke their fingers down your socks, make you take off your shoes. Everything. It felt like entering a prison camp, and needless to say completely ruined the atmosphere.
And despite all that, drug taking was still completely rife, and if you went out into the smoking area there were still loads of dealers lurking. This security team were arranged through the university and imposed upon the promoter against their will. I find it hard to believe that they were in league with the dealers. Granted, the bouncers often are, but not in 100% of cases.
Look at the stuff that gets smuggled into prisons. The police can't keep drugs out of there. If there's money to be made, criminals will get past a stringent pat-down search, no problem.
With all that said, as I previously mentioned, Fabric never actually wanted to confiscate everyone's drugs. It would ruin the club. People could get thrown out of there for being too blatant, but there was a tacit tolerance, as there is in almost every club.
Regarding Berghain, in my experience the dealers all lurk outside. There's no shortage of shady industrial estate around the place to conduct illicit transactions. But generally in Berlin, I noticed that drug taking and signs of drug use really weren't obvious. In almost any British club you can see the visible effects of drug use everywhere by about 1-2am at the latest. |
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| Woony |
I absolutely do not doubt that you can get past security but the thing is that dealers don't just hit up a club once, they will generally deal in the same spots. It's impossible to deal in a club over a period of time without it being obvious to security. Good doormen have a strong facial memory and they will know who the regular dealers are. Most clubs with multiple doormen have them taking turns patrolling the club so they will know what's going on inside. I have friend that works in the nightlife and seems fairly into all these club politics and he basically told me that if a club's doormen don't know who the dealers are they've ceded control of their club.
I know the dealers in Berlin tend to lurk outside but that's why I was getting at, why wasn't Fabric doing that when it would have made them less liable.
Regarding drug use, I think part of why drug use isn't so obvious here is that clubs stay open so long (most people don't even leave the house till 2am) that people have more time to space out their high, you don't have get your bang on till 6am and if you want to last another 8, 12 or 20 hours you're going to have to ration your supply of drugs :p I mean it's basically the same with binge drinking in the UK, isn't it? |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
I absolutely do not doubt that you can get past security but the thing is that dealers don't just hit up a club once, they will generally deal in the same spots. It's impossible to deal in a club over a period of time without it being obvious to security. Good doormen have a strong facial memory and they will know who the regular dealers are. Most clubs with multiple doormen have them taking turns patrolling the club so they will know what's going on inside. I have friend that works in the nightlife and seems fairly into all these club politics and he basically told me that if a club's doormen don't know who the dealers are they've ceded control of their club. |
They would have to have exceptional facial memory at Fabric, which was one of the criticisms levelled by the police:
| quote: | | The banning of dealers is “wholly inadequate” and involves a binder containing 100 faces that door staff cannot be expected to memorise, Scotland Yard’s chief licensing officer Ian Graham adds. |
http://www.islingtongazette.co.uk/news/ fabric_drug_deaths_damning_dossier_reveals_scale_of_substance_abuse_inside_farringdon_superclub_1_46
74138
Of course, it's totally possible that the doormen were in on it. That's what happened at Cream and the Ministry back in the '90s. But I feel things are much more professional now, and Fabric had far, far too much to lose to risk allowing its doormen to partake in organised crime within the organisation, given how strict the police scrutiny has been on the venue for years now.
More likely, I suspect, is that the security, while more rigorous than at many clubs, were still doing "just enough" to outwardly appear hard on drugs. From stories I've heard from people who went to Fabric, sometimes they'd search the out of you and other times they'd just do a rudimentary pat-down. The above article points out that police "noted that no one was asked to empty their pockets on entry." |
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| SYSTEM-J |
Also, going back to the property development conspiracy, it's worth noting the timeline of all this.
1. Six people have died at Fabric in the last five years, which is a lot more than most clubs or festivals. Hence why drug laws are coming into play here and not for every single club or festival in the country.
2. The police carried out an investigation in 2014 after a similar incident. Their recommendations were supposed to be enforced last year (the sniffer dogs and so forth) before being dropped.
3. Someone died at Fabric in June of this year and another person was hospitalised on the same night.
4. Police conduct another investigation shortly afterwards and drawing damning conclusions.
5. Another person dies at Fabric within a month of that.
Do you really need a slightly fuzzy conspiracy to see why the police might want to close this club down in light of this sequence of events? |
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| Woony |
Maybe Fabric had bouncers but for any bouncer worth is salt memorizing a hundred faces is nothing. The bouncers at Berghain for example have the faces of hundreds (if not over a thousand) of regulars memorized and they almost never slip up. They will often even still recognize strong regulars if they don't go for a couple of years.
Of course they were only looking to do "just enough", that's what every club does but then why would you have a situation where you obviously have a horde of dealers running around openly approaching people?
Things are much more professional now but so is organized crime, they love that things are more stable, easier to make money. I wasn't saying that Fabric is corrupt, they might just not have a choice. You say they might risk a scandal by cooperating but they also risk their club by not cooperating and possible much more, one of the guys from Fabric apparently had to walk around with a bullet proof vest for six months.
Regarding the "conspiracy" (I wouldn't call it one), I wouldn't say that the deaths have nothing to do with the closure but they represent a damn good opportunity to get rid of something they've would have loved to years ago in regards to the valuable property. Apparently they've also unveiled the new development plans just a few days earlier, it might be a coincidence but I've done some reading on the construction business, the amount of blatent bribery straight out of a bad mafia movie is absolutely unbelievable so I totally think that is a reasonable assumption (although there obviously also is a good amount of good old anti-drug moralism at play) there is obviously no hard proof though. I suppose the reasonable stance would be to say that there both was a moral (drug deaths) and a financial motive (even without any corruption / bribery the council will benefit from the development plans) at play. |
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| Sand Leaper |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
Well, drug laws are obviously being selectively enforced, or they'd have to close all the clubs and festivals. They are almost always strictly enforced when it's convient, so I have a hard time believing there's at least not something else going on there. Maybe not straight up bribery but at least an interested in getting rid of the club in favor of development plans. |
As SYS-J pointed out, Fabric has been a gigantic fish to fry for the authorities in the London drug war for years. I would argue that it's not drug laws being enforced selectively, but rather that Fabric makes itself an exceptionally easy and visible target by consistently letting punters break them, often with serious consequences. This certainly makes for a convenient opportunity to close down a notoriously drug riddled club, but how "hidden" a truth is this, really?
That said, I'd like to hear more about how Berlin gets away with such exceptionally lax alcohol licensing standards and open end across the board, when this is pretty much anathema once you travel a few hours north by plane. I can see that Berlin has overwhelmingly had SPD-affiliated mayors, especially since the wall came down. Maybe that has helped? |
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| Woony |
Maybe i'm underestimating how much of a anti-drug hard on UK police have, when it comes to clubs it's mostly for show here to make it seem like they are doing something (same as the clubs). Maybe it's because of people's different drug taking habits but this weird fake-status quo works here but you don't really here about drug deaths very often here.
All of Germany has incredibly lax alcohol licensing standards. This is the country of beer, even the far right conservatives (CSU) that are vehemtly anti-drug are infamous for getting faced at the Oktoberfest. There's a joke that every CSU politician has at least one drunk driving incident :p
The opening hours actually go back to 1945, the allies voted to remove the hours the Soviets had put in the place and then it just stayed that way, Berlin was never conservative enough to make political capital out of a clamp-down on opening hours so the CDU never really tried. |
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