THREE ARRESTED AFTER PREYING ON HELL’S KITCHEN REVELLERS
In April 2022, a young gay New Yorker headed out for what should have been a fun night in Hell’s Kitchen. But things went terribly wrong for 25-year-old social worker Julio Ramirez. After getting separated from his friends at popular LGBTQ+ venue The Ritz Bar & Lounge, he was caught on CCTV getting into a taxi with three unknown men. Shortly afterwards, the cab driver approached a police officer to say Julio was unconscious in the back seat. The young man was pronounced dead later that night, the victim of “a possible drug overdose”. As his family reeled from the news, the tragedy was compounded by a shocking realisation – someone was siphoning money from Julio’s bank accounts through Apple Pay. As his brother later told the press, “They had literally taken every dollar that he had – all his savings and all of his money.”
One month later, 33-year-old political consultant John Umberger went out to another LGBTQ+ venue, called the Q, located very close to the Ritz. He was found dead several days later in his employer’s Manhattan townhouse – his phone was gone, and tens of thousands of dollars were missing from his accounts. It was initially dismissed as an accidental death. John’s mother said the police told her, “It looked like John had gone out to a club, been robbed… then gone home and done a bunch of drugs because he was so depressed over what happened.”
‘SHADY OUTSIDERS’
With John’s mother refusing to accept this initial interpretation of events, police began to slowly piece together what was really going on in Hell’s Kitchen. It became clear that a gang – “Shady outsiders that come into these gay spaces”, in the words of one local resident – was preying on people in the area. They were engaging targets as they left bars and clubs, offering them drugs spiked with a potentially deadly mixture of fentanyl, lidocaine and other chemicals, with the intention of robbing them. What made the attacks particularly insidious was that they were taking advantage of the carefree, high-trust nature of venues where LGBTQ+ people could let their guard down. As a local resident told The Guardian, “Maybe someone’s hitting on you, or you’re hitting on them – it’s not unusual for someone to just offer you a bump [drugs].”
Victims began coming forward with their own experiences of being drugged and robbed – and of having their stories dismissed by police. One man who spoke to the press anonymously said officers in the NYPD simply told him to stop going to Hell’s Kitchen gay bars if he was so worried. State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who is gay himself, spoke out about how the police were dragg
