In this podcast, we're going to talk frankly but sensitively about issues some people might find disturbing, including rape and suicide. If you or someone you know is suicidal in the US Down nine eighty eight, check out this podcast notes page for information on LGBT plus mental health resources in your community.
I'm sitting on the stoop of an apartment that has become kind of infamous in West Hollywood. There's some words that will just always stay with you. This is one sentence that has stuck with everyone who's worked on this podcast.
If it didn't I hurt so bad, I kill myself, but I'll let ed Buck do it for now.
That's an actor reading Jamelle Morre's diary. We're going to use an actor to bring voice to his words, and I kind of feel like a bears repeating in my own voice. If it didn't hurt so bad, I kill myself, but I'll let Buck do it for now. Jamel Moore wrote those words well, he could have been any twenty six year old who found himself exploring the fun and not so fun parts of West Hollywood. The thing is he wasn't just any twenty six year old. And if he had been I wouldn't be standing on the street
talking about him. Jammel Moore was, among other things, a diarist, and like Queen Victoria and Frank and Andy Warhol, he poured his emotions into a journal.
I honestly don't know what to do. Become addicted to drugs, the worst one at that.
Jammel's diary tells the world that it was ed Buck who got him addicted to crystal meth amphetamine. Meth can be taken in many forms, pill forms, snorting. The most common practice is smoking, but like many drugs, injecting it makes the high more immediate as well as doing more damage.
Ed Buck one to think he gave me my first injection of crystal myth. It was painful, but after all the troubles, I became addicted to the pain and the fetish.
In this episode, we're going to talk about the crimes of ed Buck. The thing is, I don't believe he's alone. Actually I know he's not alone.
After Jamuel was gone, I didn't all think that it was going to be swept under the rug like that.
Samuel Lloyd was a very good friend of Jamel. These clips that we're going to hear are from a documentary Jammel in tim It.
Was a surreal realization of how invaluable my life is. A black gay man was.
The rawness and the anger of Jamel's friends. It's right there on the surface. You know, for every beautiful young man that shows up in West Hollywood to have fun, make a life, or let's be honest, escape most parts of the United States, it feels like there's just a team of vultures sitting on the fence waiting for him to fuck up. A hard truth is that it is financially hard for queer people. There is a myth that
gay men, for instance, are financially better off. I'm an economics reporter and a gay man, and in my expert opinion, that notion is the purest form of bullshit. The series, the show is about power and how it's used. You have men like Jamel Moore or his friend Samuel Lloyd struggling, and then you have ed Buck and he is not alone sitting on the fence waiting.
You like to be in new places and be where nobody knew him, and you know, be the boy.
That was mysterious.
He didn't talk very much and you know, and just kind of give a little bit, give a little bit here and a little bit there, and maybe do a little bit something crazy and then just doesn't hear you love doing that.
The difference between Jamel Moore and other victims is that Jamel wrote his problems down.
Man, something is seriously wrong with me and my body. I don't feel normal. I honestly think he has to do with the judge. It makes me feel horrible, like I'm so tired of living this life.
As sad as those words are, Jammel's diary allowed him something and death that he'd never received in life. His diary is how Jammel Moore was heard. It was his diary that allowed his mother to understand what happened. It was his diary that resonated with so many queer people, and it was his diary that helped the local journalists start a movement that would strike at the core of political life in Los Angeles.
I I've been to jail, I I've been ragged and being many time. I've lont my job, I've lost my apartment.
This is shattering the systems. The true crime podcast that's about more than Crome. The life of Jamel Moore after this break In two thousand and nine, Jamel Moore arrived in Los Angeles, and like so many gay black men before him, he almost immediately got involved with ballroom or ball culture. Jamel joined the House of Combe, the Garsans,
headed by the transactivist Gia Banks. Now, ballroom is kind of hard to describe, but I need to take more than a moment, especially given the climate of anti gay, anti trans, and anti drag laws in the US right now. Ballroom is a kind of competition where different houses compete against each other. Essentially and what I would all the Olympics of drag. They have to think of drag in this context as broadly as possible. It's about whether or not you can pull off the look or serve realness.
There are all kinds of categories schoolboy, traditional, drag, military.
If I was to see look at you and guess your category, I would say it would be which queen realness bring it in a sports effect.
I needed some help explaining bal culture in its place in black gay life.
My name is Sean Torrenton. I am one of the founders of Slave TV, the premier destination for LGBTQ entertainment.
Shawn is currently a member of the House of Basquiat, but he and Jamel were once a member of the same house, though they never knowingly cross pass. But we wanted to talk to Sean in part because, well, my producers and I have become really fascinated with bald culture and how it kind of forms a safety debt for black, gay and trans folks.
Just growing up like a ball would be considered a safe space for black and like latinx LGBTQ folks, particularly who are like often facing like multiple layers of discrimination and marginal marginalists, marginalism, marginalization.
I always fuck that word up.
Excuse me another word just discrimination and just being outcasted from society and the communities made up of houses which are like essentially chosen families that provide a sense of like belonging and acceptance and families for everyone within the house.
Importantly for this story, Sean Torrenton has been a part of ball culture in New York and LA.
So I would say LA ballroom is keeping it all school because it's the smallest scene. LA is about like everybody's just enjoying eachself is family. When when you go to the ball everybody's love and everybody just know each other and everybody's connected somehow, So I do of that aspect of the la ballroom scene.
The latest iteration of ball culture got its start alongside the age crisis in New York during the nineteen eighties, and movies like Paris Is Burning brought ball culture above ground. In the nineties, when baal culture reached kind of a cultural peak, I snuck off to more than my fair share in New York from college. That was an important part of my coming out. Sean says, it's important to understand why black and LATINX queer folk are so drawn to this world.
The draw to this world is, you know, well as far as like and I'm just gonna say me, when you are a young kid and you are you know, you didn't come from a privileged background, and the only way out of your situation is through imagination. But then you come to a place where everybody is living in this fantasy and you getting all these cheers and all these accolades because you are being your full authentic self. That draws people in, and you are considered a celebrity
in that community, that would draw anybody in. It's fame is what we all want. But even though you people say they don't want it, everybody wants a little bit of it.
While doing research for this show, I found the writings of Channing Gerard Joseph. He's a queer author in a Storian He traced the roots of drag and his child ballroom or ball culture back to Washington, d c. Of the eighteen eighties, and according to Joseph, essentially drag was founded in protest against homophobia and racism when a former slave named William Dorsey Swan became the first queer activist.
He was arrested for protesting new laws that were being enacted at the time that made dressing as the opposite sex illegal. This was the same time that voting rights
were being taken away from former slaves. Sound familiar, Well, the former slave William Swan became the first documented person to proclaim himself a queen of Drag or simply the Queen Sean Torrington says, you can see a direct line between the protests and community that William Swan created in the ball community that he, Jamel and I were a part of.
A lot of times people don't even have a place to sleep, you know, they walk these balls for the cash categories so they can pay their rent. This is their way to make money. Some girls, in order to survive, they have to escorre, you know, sex works.
Many of the houses now have relationships with brands and social service organizations. The house that Sean Torrington is a part of now is able to provide some housing, about ten to fifteen units, but that is a drop in the bucket when you consider that the homeless population of Los Angeles County it's about seventy six thousand on any
given night. Jamel Moore found the same escape in being himself as the former slave William Swan did in the eighteen eighties, that I did in the nineteen nineties, or that O'shee Sibley, the dancer who was murdered at twenty eight in Brooklyn did this summer. He was murdered for dancing voguing. That's a dance that goes all the way back to a dance called the cakewalk, a dance that slaves did. The rent in Los Angeles is now and was too damn high. When Jamel got to LA it
was hard for him to have steady, reliable housing. He bounced around between friends, couches, and sometimes sleep on the streets. Now, while bal culture is a real thing and the relations chips are real, it's not like joining the house comes with a job. Samuel Lloyd says so eloquently, if you're not making two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Los Angeles,
you're certainly not living in the American dream. Now, with not a lot of job prospects, it's not hard to see how a handsome young man would turn to sex work, especially in a town with a lot of rich gay men, many of them closeted offering hundreds of dollars for sex.
It is the person who has everything and offers you everything with this particular type of risk, i e.
The math and the sex.
Those type of offers are A young, poor black queer person has to balance out. Do I eat today, do I have shelter today? And do I engage in this activity that may be dangerous, But at least I ate, At least I have money in my pocket. At least I'm gonna be okay for a days.
It's around this time that Jamel told a friend that he was seeing a white john in West Hollywood who had messaged him on.
Adam for Adam so Jamel Moore new Buck for a long time. They kind of had not, I guess a very long time, but they had a long standing relationship that was predicated on party and play.
Lindsay Bailey is one of the federal prosecutors who would eventually try at Buck.
So essentially, party in play is what would happen. Is Jammel would go over to mister Buck's house. Buck would provide him with methamphetamine, and in exchange, they would engage in some sort of sexual play. So sometimes just touching, a lot of times it would be you know, sexual photographs, different types of photographs.
We're going to get back to Lindsay Bailey, the prosecutor, but I need to explain party and play for those who don't know. In the gay world, party has taken on a completeletely different meaning. Alex Garner is an author and activist. He's also a former sex worker.
Party in play is simply a reference to using drugs while having sex. Usually that means the use of crystal meth while having sex. It usually means for an extended period of time.
Because the high from crystal can hit quickly, but mats almost as quick and also if you use. Often people get into a cycle of binge and crash, and that can lead to going on the run, which means giving up food and sleep while continuing to take meth every few hours and have sex for several days.
And then, in terms of when it became sort of part of the vernacular of the culture partying play within the per contexts that usually almost referred to almost always referred to crystal meth or some meth was almost always involved in some way. Even though drug use could range from marijuana to ecstasy, to to kintamine to cocaine, chrystal meth became the sort of lightning rod when we talked about party and play in the US context.
And sometimes Jamal would be paid for those sessions in cash. Sometimes it would just be in drugs and they would both smoke methamphetamine. But what Buck really liked to do was slam, so that's injecting methamphetamine directly into your veins. And they had that relationship for a long time.
I pray that I can just get my life together and make it make sense. I hope so many people, but I can't seem to help myself. I honestly don't know what to do become addicted to drugs, and the worst one at that. Ed Buck is the one to think. He gave me my first injection of crystal myth. It was painful, but after all the troubles, I became addicted to the pain and the fantasy.
You can hear the pain and anguish. Jamel did the best he possibly could to break his addiction. You know, I got to say, it's not just the fact that ed Buck introduced Jamel to slamming that's so appalling, or the way he treated his victims, it was the illusion that he cared about them. There are so many gay white men who I've run into who say shit like I'm not racist, I love black men, or I only date black men, but then every single part of how
they act dehumanizes black men. I'm one hundred percent no, I'm actually a one thousand percent sure that ed Buck said that he loved black men. But here's the thing. Ed Buck paid black men to do crystal meth so that he could take pictures of them in underwear, and he wasn't really interested in sex necessarily, but he paid to humiliate and torture black men. For instance, he paid them to let him call them nigger.
Seeking out men in that category and providing them food, shelter, and drugs, You know, are the signs of somebody with a scheme in mind.
When a white man is paying you to call you a nigger, he ain't your friend. This was something that Jamel Moore understood. He was horrified and troubled by what ed Buck was making him do, and in the fall of twenty sixteen, Jamel called his mother in tears, screaming into the phone, saying, this man shot me up with some stuff. I don't even know what it is. And by the way, he did everything he could to quote handle his life well, which meant getting the fuck away
from ed Buck now. With help from friends, he did just that, moving back to his family in Texas in the spring of twenty seventeen. So many of the things that he needed to get his life together, they just weren't available to Jamel. For instance, he was beyond the age of being able to be on his parents' health insurance, was in withdrawal. He needed more than willpower, He probably needed consistent medical care, trauma therapy, rehab a detox is.
Withdrawal symptoms were mistaken for pneumonia, Lindsey Bailey picks up the timeline.
In July of twenty seventeen. I think Jamel was an addict and needed another fix, essentially, and so he reached out to the person that he knew would reliably get it to him. He sent Buck a text message that said I've been missing La, along with a video of somebody being slammed with methamphetamine and a question mark. Buck responded with I believe the text was along the lines of be here now, and he bought Jamel a one
way ticket from Texas to Los Angeles. Jamel took a backpack and basically everything he owned, got on that plane and flew from Texas to Los Angeles. Buck sent someone to pick him up from the airport. The driver picked him up at I believe it was about one PM, and he got to Buck's apartment at about one forty five PM, went inside and never came out.
No one knows exactly what happened after Jammel walked into that apartment.
There weren't photos or videos from that day, but we can imagine that it was much like other times in which Buck slammed Jammel, probably to the point where he lost consciousness. And died. Buck went to a neighbor to ask what to do. The neighbor started to perform CPR while Buck called nine to one to one, and when the paramedics got there, Jammel was already gone.
For Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies responded to a nine to one one call from North Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood. A young black man was lying unresponsive on a mattress on the floor, naked except for white sox. Tennant's name was ed Buck. He described the dead man as his friend. Buck said his friend had ejected meth. A little after that, he said his friend became very warm to the touch. It took ed Buck almost two hours just to pick
up a phone and call police. This is shattering the system. More after this, this is shattering the system. I'm Sonari Glennon. When we left off, Jamel Moore lay dead in Edbuck's apartment, cold, naked and alone. The last thing Jamel Moore saw would have been pretty frightening. Buck's home was genuinely a frightening place. He had photos of all kinds of politicians in prominent places, but also there was a ray of gear devil mass
gas masks, all kinds of paraphernalia. Henry Scott, the former editor of Ujoville, said they called Buck's apartment the gates of Hell for a.
Reason, and ed Buck's apartment and insanely he allowed photographs to be taken by some of the text workers. The living room, there's a big matt press on the floor, there's a sofa. There are bins of a drug paraphernalia in store.
Ed Buck Long had a reputation for being obsessed with black men. Henry Scott, the journalist, talked a lot about his obsession with black men.
He had several little plastic bins in his living room of white underwear, and he insisted that the young gay black men put on whiteies. That was one of the passions. He claimed that he actually was friends for these young men he used. He told me at one point that Jamel Moore was a young friend of his who he had helped through life. That's what he claimed.
An investigator arrived from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's office. On the floor next to Jamel, he noted ziploc bags swelled with water. A rolling toolbox was parked against the wall. Inside were several syringes with brown residue, a scale, lighters, a straw, a glass pipe with burn marks, and a clear plastic bag containing a crystal like substance. The examiner was able to unlock his phone using his password nineteen
ninety one, Jammel's birth year. According to news reports, there was a text from American Airlines that said that Jammel had flown that morning from Houston to lax. The examiner performed an autopsy. There were no signs of visible trauma. There was, however, puncture wounds visible on his left in our forearm. Jamel tested positive from methan fetamine and the examiner found quote a notebook located in the decedent's property
that indicated using intravenous drugs with ed Buck in the past. Again, reports say that the examiner ruled the death and accidental methan fetamine overdose. In less than five days after his death, the case was closed. Jamel Moore died on July twenty seventh, twenty seventeen. Meanwhile, ed Buck was a man about town. By the Thursday after Jamel's death, he showed up at a Wiho City meeting of the Stonewall Steering Committee of the Democratic Party. Now that's a gay arm of the
local party. There was Buck Chilling, pretending that nothing was wrong.
Than that shouldn't have happened. It just shouldn't have happened.
By August first, Jamel's mother, Letitia Nixon, began contacting all kinds of media outlets to try to draw attention to the plight of her son.
My son filed police reports. He's be cried out to so many people, and we all failed them. I just hope that the Sheriff's department does not fail my son. I'm asking for justice. It's crazy how the whole entire situation was handled. My son's dead and five days later the case is closed. I just want justice. That's it.
My whole life has been turned upside down when you fight for the ones you love, and I will not stop until I get justice ed. Buck needs to be held to accountability for all the things that he's done.
Letitia Nixon would soon get the attention of a small local website called we Ho Times. The story contained most of what Nixon claimed. The story would also contain this titbed that would bring the case to national attention, if not an arrest. It called ed Buck quote one of California's most prolific and substantial political donors, a detail that many readers in Los Angeles were completely astonished to hear. Now, while the local media began to take notice, the Sheriff's
office failed to mail more this time around. Lindsay Horvath was on the city council when Jamel Moore died. She served two terms as mayor, long before the death of ed Buck's apartment. They were on the opposite sides. How do you choose not align?
There were any number of issues. I was a big affordable housing advocate. He opposed many projects. He lived in rent controlled housing, but he was wanting to close the door on a lot of people from being a part of the West Hollywood community in a lot of different ways.
What are those? I mean a lot of different ways. It seems like there was an eternity in that phrase.
Well, I think that there's a lot that he did that was not about creating an inclusive community, which I think a lot of people come to West Hollywood.
For help me understand where what would frustrate you about, say, the sheriff's deputies and dealing with the death of Jamel Moore.
Oh wow, it was more than frustration.
Lindsay Horbath was a council person at the time, her frustration with police and especially the sheriff reached a boiling point.
It was absolutely devastating to hear about the death of Jammel Moore. The sheriff's deputies who were involved in the investigation had indicated at some point thereafter that it wasn't the first time that they had been called to that particular residence, and so not only in that specific investigation, but just knowing that there are there were ongoing issues with that residence and to know that ultimately it resulted in the death of now we know multiple people at
that residence was just absolutely heartbreaking. To know that it was something that was known to law enforcement and yet and yet it still happened.
Horvath was among a handful of politicians who spoke out earlier, like Mike Bonnam, let.
Them know that there is someone in office with some influence who is going to be calling the sheriff, and is going to be calling the district attorney, and is going to be asking for a thorough and complete investigation into this death and the circumstances around it.
One of the biggest mysteries of this story is why the then La County District Attorney, Jackie Lacy, chose not to pursue a case against ed Buck after the death of Jamel Moore.
She chose not to bring the case, say more, I think I think it was a choice, and there was speculation as to why she made that choice, whether it was his political contributions or political influence, whether she didn't want to take on what she perceived to be of flaws in the sheriff's investigation and expose those publicly, But for whatever reason, she chose not to pursue the case.
I called her office after Jammel Moore's death several days in a row, asking her office to help create safety for people who wanted to come forward and testify and share information about what they knew about the circumstances surrounding Jammel's death, but what they also knew in terms of
the circumstances of what happened at that residence. And it took many people coming forward, including my phone calls, not only including my phone calls, for her to even be willing to grant immunity for people to come forward and share valuable information.
All of this is entirely structural Alex Garner, the former sex worker and present day author and activists, and.
Those structures create the vulnerabilities that allow someone to be mistreated. Because someone like Ed Buck can I recognize those vulnerabilities that the system has created and realized they can take advantag of it. Because if you're young, gay and black and doing sex work, you have no expectation that the police are going to take you seriously or do anything to protect you. There's still profound stigma associated with being sex work, with being a sex worker, or just having
gay sex. So having to talk to a healthcare professional or a legal representative about your sex life is inherently difficult because of the in trensed homophobia in our culture and society, not to mention obviously in trenched racism in terms of our relationship to the criminal justice system. So those vulnerabilities are created by a system, a system that
is incredibly strong. But people who want to take advantage of others can identify that and say, oh, I know that they're less likely to call the police on me for this reason. I know I can push them a little bit more with a few extra dollars for this reason. I know I can get them to be silent about this for this reason. So it really is all of these structural issues around jobs, housing, mental health and health and physical health, and then homophobia, racism, classism, all of
these sorts of things are immigration policies. All of these things construct a world in which someone has to function and is largely vulnerable because of these structures.
And even while articles were being written, ed Buck was still luring men to his apartment with the promise of money and drugs.
He was a troublesome kid.
On the next Shattering the System, Sympathy for the Devil, a Rise and Fall of ed Buck.
His mother, interviewed over the years, said she knew when the phone would ring it would be the school reporting another problem. But her son, she picked up the phone saying, now what's he doing? So he was a little bit difficult. He was a very handsome young man. He became a model.
I'm Scenari Glinton and this is Shattering a Sisco. Shattering the System is a production of Macro Studios and iHeart Podcasts. I'm your host, Scenario Glinton. You can follow me on Instagram at snari plus. The Number one. Our executive producers are Charles D. King, Asha Corpus, Win Royo Reccio, Jonathan Unger, Lindsay Hoffman, and Sonari Lenton. That's Me. Our podcast is co written and produced by Ralph Cooper the Third and
Ben Cory Jones. Erica Rodriguez is our associate producer. Dana Conway is our archival producer, Chris Mann is the audio engineer, and Lisa Pollock is our consulting editor. Sound design and music provided by Chris Mann with pod Shaper clips were provided by the TYT Network. The Young Turks Special thanks to Portia Robertson Maigas and Karen Grigsby Bates, and to Michael Thomas of the Jamel and Tim documentary and filmmaker
Jace Bryan of the Beyond at Buck documentary. Stay tuned for sympathy for who That's Next on Shattering the System Wow