More than 100,000 people attended Electric Zoo before drug overdoses, a rape, and 31 arrests forced organizers to cancel the remainder of the event. A 28-year-old attendee from Elmont, LI, is on life support with kidney failure at Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx. (Photo: Brian Killian/WireImage)
Nineteen attendees were stricken at the rave. Electric Zoo’s Long Island City-based organizer, Made Event, hired its own doctor and ambulances so “they wouldn’t have to call 911, which would bring the cops,’’ a source said.
Déjà Vu? Electric Zoo co-founder Mike Bindra, 44, the former manager the drug-plagued Twilo club in Chelsea, also employed a private ambulance outside the club. The club was shut down by the city in 2001 after unconscious patrons were found hidden by employees and several fatal ODs. City officials charged that Twilo used its own private ambulances for overdoses to remain off the NYPD radar. A lawsuit alleged that management hid dozens of sick patrons rather than calling for help.
Randall's Island
A total of 19 hard-partying Electric Zoo attendees were stricken at the Randall’s Island rave — a fact organizers hid from the NYPD by concealing them in private ambulances and “MASH”-style tents, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
A 28-year-old attendee from Elmont, LI, is on life support with kidney failure at Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx, a source said. Two other partiers died after popping ecstasy pills called Mollys at last weekend’s festival that drew 100,000, sources said.
Electric Zoo’s Long Island City-based organizer, Made Event, hired its own doctor and ambulances so “they wouldn’t have to call 911, which would bring the cops,’’ a source said.
“It was just another way to keep the cops from finding” out what was going on, the source said. “[The organizers] had tents set up all over. It was like a MASH unit.
“This is the same thing that was done in the clubs in the ’90s in the city.’’
Electric Zoo founder Mike Bindra, 44, is the former manager of one of those clubs — the drug-plagued Twilo in Chelsea.
It was closed down in 2001 following two fatal overdoses of MDMA — also known as ecstasy or “X” — there by college students. At the time, some club workers said they were ordered to put unconscious partiers in back rooms and just splash them with cold water to try to revive them.
Linda Wiest — the mom of Johns Hopkins junior James Wiest, who died after overdosing at the club in 2000 — told The Post yesterday, “For [Bindra] to be able to continue and make money and profit, I think it’s atrocious.
“I really thought that he had been shut down when the nightclub closed. I didn’t realize that he was still profiting from events where drugs were being so freely distributed,” she said.
The 65-year-old mom sued the club and eventually settled.
(from l) Mike Bindra, Aimee Boden - President & Park Administrator of the Randall's Island Park Alliance RIPA - Bindra's wife - Laura Tigz De Palma, and Anne Wilson, Director of Planning & Public Funding for RIPA. Bindra and his wife Laura are the founders of the Electric Zoo. RIPA reportedly received a $600,000 fee from event organizers. (Image: NY Daily News)
The annual Electric Zoo festival appears to be on track to return to Randall’s Island next year.
“We’ve been working with this promoter for the last five years and they have a stellar record,’’ Mayor Bloomberg told reporters yesterday.
“They . . . put in as good of procedures as we could think of and have been nothing but cooperative, and I have nothing but good things to say.”
Bindra’s spokesman, Stefan Friedman, fought back against the allegations.
“For anonymous sources to suggest we have doctors and ambulances on site for anything but to treat people in as efficient a way as possible is obscene,” he said. “We are devastated by the tragedies of last weekend and are working hand in hand with the NYPD and all other city agencies — as we have for the past five years — to get to the bottom of what occurred.”
As for his boss’s role in Twilo, “He booked the acts, and he was in charge of various elements of the club,” Friedman said. “But he never oversaw security. That wasn’t what he did.”
Police said they are still trying to figure out where the dead pair — 20-year-old Olivia Rotondo of Rhode Island and 23-year-old Jeffrey Russ of Rochester — and other Zoo attendees got their drugs.
NYPD homicide cops are assisting in the investigation.
Additional reporting by Beth DeFalco
Electric Zoo co-founder Mike Bindra's golf cart sat idle on Sunday after the event was cancelled. (Photo: Geoffrey Croft/NYC Park Advocates)
Read More:
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