Thom Senzee, author of this article, is a West Coast-based freelance journalist, and a regular contributor to San Diego LGBT Weekly.
In the weeks since news outlets across the globe picked up a story that WeHo Times broke about the death of a 26-year-old Texas youth at the home of politically influential West Hollywood resident, Ed Buck, a disturbing picture has emerged of a man who evidence suggests is equally comfortable mingling among America’s uppermost-echelon citizenry, as he is rattling the nerves of sex workers by way of alleged coercion, heaps of cash, piles of illicit drugs and allegedly involuntary injections of methamphetamine.
In the days immediately following the publication of an abbreviated version of the article you are now reading at another publication, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced that it would take a second look at the circumstances surrounding the youth’s death. Two week’s ago, at West Hollywood’s monthly City Council meeting, Councilwoman Lindsey Horvath encouraged anyone with information about the Buck’s proclivities regarding meth and sex workers to talk to the L.A. County District Attorney’s liaison at the local sheriff’s station, assuring that they need not fear prosecution if doing so might implicate them in minor drug offenses.
Horvath’s fellow council member, John Duran reminded members of the public in attendance and those watching the meeting on city television or online that there are no guarantees, and that prosecutable offenses are, by definition, prosecutable. At least one person in attendance saw Duran, a friend of the man in whose apartment the Texas youth died, as trying to discourage people from coming forward.
Meanwhile, a growing mountain of evidence—including multiple eyewitness accounts, smartphone images, background interviews, on-the-record interviews, court documents, hospital bills and text messages—reveal a pattern that depicts well heeled politico Ed Buck as a man with a history of allegations that he pays young, good-looking African American men anywhere from $500-$3500 to inject, smoke and otherwise ingest potentially fatal doses of crystal methamphetamine and GHB during allegedly paid sexual encounters.
But the sex takes a back seat to Buck’s alleged primary fetish, according to several sources, who say his first interest is getting young, black men to take dangerously large doses of street drugs.
“My situation [with Ed Buck] was always, ‘how long do you want to see me for and we’ll come up with a number that we both can agree on,” said a 28-year-old, part-time sex worker who asked to be identified by the alias, “Damar Love” in order to protect his full-time job as a security guard.
“When I get there, I always want my money up front, and that’s how it always started,” Love said during a recent interview. “Initially, when I got there I understood that he was already well under the influence, because he told me he had already been up for two days and was still doing drugs as far as liquid GHB, shooting meth—crystal meth, and smoking it. When he insisted that I get high and continue to get high, that’s when I started to do my research on him.”
Damar Love believes that Buck was unaccustomed to his level of concern for his own safety as a potentially vulnerable sex worker in another man’s home environment. Buck, he says, did not like his unwillingness to turn off his smartphone, which he used to ensure his girlfriend knew where he was. Nor did Buck like him using his phone to shoot photos inside the apartment. He didn’t know the young man was also using his smartphone to research his host a little before letting his guard down. Says Love, the money Buck paid was incredibly good, but the scene was unsettling.
“I was like, ‘why are you insisting that I be high?'” he said, recalling his thoughts during the first of three visits he says he made to Bucks apartment. Indeed, this reporter has confirmed that photos of Love in his underwear were taken inside Ed Buck’s apartment in West Hollywood.
A glass pipe, the type which meth users frequently employ to smoke the drug, is visible on a sofa to his left in of one of the photos.
“‘Why are you insisting I shut my phone off and I don’t have any contact with the outside world while I’m here with you alone in your place,'” Love continued. “At that moment I knew it was time to forget about pleasing the client and start asking questions for my personal safety. That’s when I wanted to know what he did for a living and when I wanted him to know that I had people who knew where I was.”
Damar Love says he had never seen anyone as intoxicated as Buck allegedly was during that first encounter.
“Being under the influence to the level that he was and the idea that he was trying to get me to that level was—let me put it this way, the only thing I could think of that was not about him wanting to get me that high so he could do something bad to me that I didn’t want done, was maybe he just didn’t want me to remember anything,” Love said.
“Either way, I couldn’t see myself letting him get me that high. First of all, GHB? The only thing you’re supposed to take with GHB is water. It doesn’t mix with anything, not meth, not alcohol, not poppers—not anything. You can die if you start mixing that shit.”
According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, GHB is the abbreviation for Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, a substance that occurs naturally in the brain in very small doses. GHB, the street drug, offers users affects that include, “euphoria, drowsiness, decreased anxiety, confusion and memory impairment. GHB can also produce visual hallucinations and—paradoxically—excited and aggressive behavior.”
Confirming Love’s stated knowledge of the dangers of mixing the drug with other intoxicants, the DEA also notes that GHB “greatly increases the central nervous system’s depressant effects of alcohol and other depressants.”
The July 27 death of Gemmel Moore at Ed Buck’s Laurel Avenue apartment near Norton Street in West Hollywood was quickly classified by the Los Angeles County Coroner as accidental and methamphetamine-caused. Multiple sources who have known Buck for several years say, while they were shocked by the tragedy of Moore’s death at the home of the Democratic Party donor, activist and organizational heavy-hitter, they weren’t totally surprising.
Observant readers of the original WeHo Times article about Moore’s death, written by longtime West Hollywood journalist and historian, Ryan Gierach, may have noted a disclosure at the foot of the story. In it, the editor disclosed that the writer and Ed Buck are closely acquainted.
Published with the headline, Sex, Politics, Meth and Death in West Hollywood, the article’s footnote specifically read, “Disclosure: Ed Buck was a regular source, contributor, donor and confidant of Ryan Gierach’s while he was publisher of now-shuttered WeHo News.”
“I never saw Ed use drugs, but I saw evidence of it in his home,” Gierach said during a phone interview with this reporter Thursday. “While I never saw him use, I saw the affects of it and I heard from him about it.”
Gierach says when he stayed as a guest at Buck’s home for about two weeks in 2012 after he, Ryan Gierach, got out of rehab for alcohol abuse, he expected that his host was using and would continue using meth while he was there. Not only did Gierach see evidence of meth use while living briefly under Buck’s roof, he claims Buck spoke openly about it. However, says Gierach, Buck refrained from using drugs in front of his houseguest.
“He didn’t do it in front of me,” said Gierach.
Asked why he would stay with someone who was using illicit drugs when he had just left a treatment facility, Gierach was unabashed about his own past struggles with chemical dependency, including with methaphetamine. At the same time, Gierach was unflinching about his purported resolve to abstain from using meth even though it was allegedly present while he stayed with Ed Buck.
“I knew what I was getting into,” Gierach said. “Meth use was long behind me. I wasn’t in rehab for narcotics use. I was there for alcohol abuse. I can stare meth in the face and not be tempted because I know what it can do to my life—what it did to my life a long time ago.”
While the brief stay with Ed Buck happened in 2012, Gierach first got to know Buck years earlier, in 2005. Buck was a political insider and a prime source for deep and rich story leads and exclusive information for Gierach’s only-game-in-town, hyperlocal online news publication, WeHoNews.com. Gierach sold his URL for the news site to the City of West Hollywood earlier this year after running it for more than a decade.
“Ed was once a good guy,” he said. “Ed is one of the reasons we have easier access to documents at West Hollywood City Hall now. You used to have to stand there and go over the documents by hand with a clerk right there watching you, page-by-page. Now you can get documents online. A lot of that has to do with Ed.”
He points to Buck’s work with the Department of Motor Vehicles making a special license plate available for a fee that goes to spaying and neutering dogs and cats. According to Gierach, few appreciate Buck’s genius in marrying the issue of animal rights during a push for a citywide fur ban with a city council race.
“It was a way to bring the weight and power of a political action committee to bear on a local race with manpower and money at a hyperlocal level,” he said, referring to a campaign that put Councilman John D’Amico in office in 2011 along with a history-making ban on fur sales throughout the City of West Hollywood.
While D’Amico was the councilman who sponsored the ordinance that led to the ban on retail fur sales, everyone familiar with the story knew the fur ban was Buck’s baby. It was an advent that not only enhanced his reputation in WeHo, but it also put him on the map nationally as a progressive who can get things done. USA Today quoted Buck as saying, “This is monumental…a sea change in the [animal rights] movement.”
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-09-26/west-hollywood-fur-sales-ban/50560364/1
One source interviewed for this story who asked to remain nameless, said that out of the blue, after Ed Buck had heard about their family’s financial emergency, Buck handed them a bag full of cash.
“It was a large amount of money, more than enough to solve the emergency,” the source said.
‘If there was ever anybody in West Hollywood whose bed you expected a dead body to turn up in, it was Ed Buck.’ —Former West Hollywood Mayor Stephen M. Martin
Requests for Restraining Order, Allegations of a Violent Temper
The fur ban wasn’t universally supported in West Hollywood. The fact that one of the world’s largest fur trade associations, the Fur Information Council of America is based in West Hollywood may not be a coincidence either. FICA, the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, Councilman John Heilman and others lobbied against the ban, calling it overreaching. In fact, in 2012, the ban was softened somewhat because, as FICA and others argued, it didn’t comport with state law.
Buck, whose list of friends, acquaintances and “picture-with” photo opportunities includes some of California’s most powerful and popular Democrats, such as West Hollywood City Councilman John Duran, Congressman Ted Lieu, Gov. Jerry Brown and even former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, scared some people during the fur-ban debate in 2011.
When former city councilman, Steve Martin ran again along with a slate of candidates that included Ed Buck in 2007, the two were friends and allies. Buck even transferred $1000 from his own campaign coffers into Martin’s. Neither man won the election, however both garnered significant shares of ballots cast: 39 percent for Martin, 28 percent for Buck.
Yet according to Martin, by 2011 Ed Buck had become openly hostile and unstable, both in his public demeanor and in his personal interactions with Martin and others when they disagreed with Buck.
“It was clearly obvious after 2007 that this guy had a serious personality disorder,” Martin said, noting that after an effort that Buck helped lead to save a local historic resource didn’t go exactly as he planned, the activist became “erratic and unpredictable.” Asked if he and his colleagues suspected drug abuse as a potential cause of Buck’s allegedly hostile behavior the former councilman was definite in his reply.
“Everyone knew it,” Martin said. “It’s bullshit if they say they didn’t. It was like a family; you know, everyone in the family knew it. There were people who embraced it and they were, frankly, members of city council. They knew Ed had a lot of problems; they knew Ed was a controversial member of the community.”
Says Martin, Ed Buck’s interest in politics wasn’t any less sincere than anyone else’s. His love of animals is real, Martin says, adding that he believes Buck’s concern for good governance is likewise genuine.
The former councilman points out that Buck’s first success as a political operative was in leading the push to impeach and oust Arizona’s 17th governor, the late Evan Mecham, who was convicted of obstruction of justice charges and misuse of government funds.
That was 1988, not long after Buck had sold “for a million-dollar profit” his Phoenix-based tech company, according to the Arizona Republic. The Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily paper, reported in a Page Two story that Buck had changed his name from Edward Buckmelter and built the company while sleeping on a mattress in a storeroom of its office.
“I don’t think initially Ed was cultivating political relationships for anything but personal affirmation,” Steve Martin said. “But he soon learned there was an upside to it, that it did give him a certain amount of protection, a certain amount of buffer when it came to acting out in ways that were bullying.”
Martin, the former WeHo mayor, city councilman and participant in the founding of West Hollywood, believes meth has distorted Buck’s native personality, and that while the city and the local community has done a great deal to try to mitigate the ravaging affects meth has had on the local gentry, the community continues to be hammered by the drug.
Ed Buck, says Steve Martin, is no more immune from West Hollywood’s long-running meth epidemic. According to a PBS Frontline report, which cites a prominent UCLA study, meth use can lead to brain damage as well as “psychotic behavior, including paranoia, insomnia, anxiety, extreme aggression, delusions and hallucinations, and even death.”
Martin, who was opposed to the fur ban, recalls how Buck allegedly tried to bully him into changing his position.
“He really got up in my face,” Martin said. “It was really peculiar. I remember thinking, ‘does he really think I’m going to be afraid of him and change my mind?’ I mean the the idea that you’re going to somehow frighten someone with physical confrontation into changing their political position is to me completely obnoxious.”
Near the beginning of our interview Martin repeated, almost word-for-word, a refrain that similarly situated local leaders and activist told this reporter with the understanding their remarks would not be attributed to them by name…
“The death was shocking news, but not surprising news,” Martin said. “You can quote me on that.”
Previously during the same interview, the former councilman said, “If there was ever anybody in West Hollywood whose bed you expected a dead body to turn up in, it was Ed Buck.”
Purported reputation notwithstanding, there’s very little documentary evidence of Buck’s below-the-radar alleged penchant for erratic and temperamental behavior. Background reports and other searches yield little more than his names, previous addresses and age. One exception to the dearth of legal documentation regarding Ed Buck’s alleged threats of violence is a copy of a petition for a restraining order filed by a marriage and family therapist who Buck came to see in 2002.
“…He talked of narcolepsy and seemed to want amphetamines,” the therapist, James E. d’Jarnette testifies in the court document. “When I told him I am not a medical doctor and could not prescribe medications, but could talk to him about his feelings and interpersonal relationships, defendant leaned forward aggressively, began shouting and behaved irrationally…”
D’Jarnette’s 2002 complaint further states that Ed Buck continued for days to harass him by posting strange fliers defaming him throughout his building, and by phoning him, allegedly at one point threatening to make the therapist feel his (Buck’s) pain.
According to Steve Martin, Ed Buck’s neighbors have, for years, allegedly experienced similar bullying.
“But no one wants to do anything about it because they all know Ed is politically well connected,” Martin said.
Grieving mother awaits apology, expects investigation
When LaTisha Nixon, a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier who lives in Humble, Texas, a suburb of Houston called the West Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to ask how she could get a copy of its incident report about her son Gemmel Moore’s death at Ed Buck’s apartment, the response she says she got from someone who she says identified himself as “Watch Commander Ramirez,” was hardly one you’d expect from a sheriff’s deputy addressing a grieving mom.
“He said, how did you get this number?” Nixon told WeHoTimes. “He said, how did you know to call here?”
Nixon explained to the deputy that she is a mail carrier in Texas and that she delivers mail to law enforcement officers’ homes on her route and had asked their advice because she was not being told everything she wanted to know about her son’s last hours. That seemed to satisfy the watch commander.
Nixon wants to know if her son was still alive when first-responders came to Buck’s house. She wants to know who called 911. She wants to know who the first-responders were—what agency arrived on the scene first. Was it the Sheriff’s Department or the L.A. County Fire Department? What did they see when they arrived? Who was at Ed Buck’s apartment when they arrived? Where was Gemmel’s body.
“So far, no one at the sheriff’s station will tell me or provide me with a report,” she says. “I leave messages and no one provides information. I think there’s something they’re not telling me. It’s like they’re hiding something.”
Nixon said Times she wants a proper toxicology report, a full accounting of the events surrounding her son’s demise and an apology from Ed Buck. She’d like to know more about why there are so many reports that her son and other young, African American men were allegedly injected with dangerously large doses of methamphetamine by Ed Buck. If such an investigation uncovers wrongdoing by Buck that led to her son’s death, she also wants him to serve time behind bars.
“I don’t want anything bad to happen to him,” she said. “I see online that he has done good things. I just think drugs have destroyed his mind. I want justice for my son. You think he could reach out and apologize, or offer to pay for the funeral. But we’ve heard nothing.”
Nixon can’t help but wonder if there’s another reason that authorities, including the sheriff and the coroner have dispensed so quickly with her son’s case.
“I do not play the race card, but can you imagine if this was a white young man, and my black son was the one whose apartment he died in?” Nixon said. “But because it’s a young, black man who died at a wealthy, white man’s apartment who has powerful friends, you have a coroner’s report that says he died of an accidental meth overdose—end of story, no investigation.”
She believes others who could help in the investigation are afraid to come forward.
“I spoke to one of Gemmel’s friends,” Nixon said. “Cameron. He’s scared. He knows Ed Buck has powerful friends and that Ed Buck knows he’s seen what Ed does in that apartment.”
Cameron told this reporter twice that he has seen and experienced first-hand some of the allegations against Ed Buck vis a vis alleged methamphetamine abuse and allegations he paid young men to “slam” (a street term for intravenous meth use) dangerous amounts of the drug.
“I have text messages from Gemmel,” said Cameron, who asked that his real name not be published because of the criminalized status of sex work.
“Gemmel used to always say, ‘damn, I have to go pick up this money, but I don’t feel like slamming;’ you know what I mean? He didn’t want to have to go over there and shoot up.”
According to LaTisha Nixon, Gemmel Moore flew back to L.A. the same day he died. That was July 27. Moore had been back at her home near Houston for about three months after a few years in the Los Angeles and West Hollywood area, some of that time allegedly spent staying for extended periods at Ed Buck’s apartment. She says Ed Buck bought her son’s plane ticket back to Los Angeles.
“When he first came back to us, we thought he was acting strange, so we arranged to have a full-panel toxicology test done on him,” she said. “But he didn’t have any drugs in his system by the time we did the test.”
According to Cameron, Gemmel was a rarity among his peers.
“I know people say this when someone passes, but Gemmel was real,” Cameron said. “Gemmel had your back and he was funny! He could always make you laugh. Even in this situation, he would find a silver lining and he would probably have us laughing right now. But I’m not laughing. I miss my friend.”
‘Shot up Against His Will’
LaTisha Nixon says she got a disturbing phone call from her son, Gemmel Moore a couple of years ago when he was still living in L.A. She believed the call happened after one of the first times Moore, known to some “on the scene,” by the name, Juelz Carter, visited Ed Buck.
“He said he had been shot up against his will by this man, this rich white guy,” Nixon said. “He was terrified. I told him to call the police and go to the emergency room. I thought he did that, but we can’t find a record of it now.”
Cameron said he recalls that incident and says it’s par for the course for a young, African American man visiting Ed Buck to “party.”
Damar Love’s last visit to Ed Buck allegedly ended with a similar incident.
“I’m a security guard for my real job, and I work sometimes 10- or 12- or 13-hour shifts,” Love said. “I was at Ed’s house and I fell asleep. I woke up because I felt a prick on my arm. My arm was tied down and it was red. I got myself untied and I grabbed a taser Ed had on his table. He had two tasers and we both had one pointing at each other. He ran to the back of the apartment and I used his phone to get an Uber and got the hell out of there.”
Love said his heart was beating so fast he thought he might die. A hospital bill with his name on it from Centinella Hospital shows unspecified emergency room treatment received during the same 48-hour period cell phone photos of himself and Buck appear to have been taken inside Buck’s apartment. The photos include Buck making unusual faces and pulling his mouth outward to the sides with his fingers, and Love in various sexually aroused poses wearing only his underwear.
“I called 911 in three different police jurisdictions from the Uber that day,” Love said. “I called West Hollywood, Hawthorne and Inglewood.”
Stonewall Dems say Goodbye to Ed Buck
The highly influential Stonewall Democratic Club, on whose board and steering committee he sat until late last week, has asked Buck to step down. According to board chair, Lester Aponte, Buck agreed to resign.
Aponte declined to state on the record whether or not he was aware of the alleged reputation for erratic behavior, alleged bullying, intimidation and alleged drug use and mistreatment of young, African American men in the sex-work trade. He referred us to the following statement:
“We mourn the tragic loss of Gemmel Moore, who died in West Hollywood on July 27, 2017, of what the coroner determined to be an accidental overdose of methamphetamine (meth). We are saddened to see the promising life of this young black man cut unnaturally short. We send our condolences to Mr. Moore’s family and all who cared about him at this difficult time and hope that they find peace. This terrible tragedy is a stark reminder of the devastating and deadly effects the use of meth and other dangerous substances is having on our LGBTQ communities, particularly among our youth and communities of color.
In the wake of this tragedy, there have been allegations made against Mr. Ed Buck regarding the circumstances of Mr. Moore’s death. We understand Mr. Buck has not been charged with a crime and we cannot comment on those allegations. They are serious, however. We have requested, therefore, and accepted the resignation of Mr. Buck from the Stonewall Democratic Club Steering Committee.”
A “homegoing” memorial service was organized by friends and family for Gemmel Moore, also known as Juelz Carter, Saturday, Aug. 9 in Los Angeles. A candlelight vigil held at the West Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was also held, led by LaTisha Nixon.
An abbreviated version of this article first appeared at WeHo Times.
