WHITE SMOKE-Patrick Strudwick

a series of terrifying questions. Why was Buck still free when two men had died in his home surrounded by drugs, How much were his wealth and political connections protecting him, and how many more men might have been harmed in that apartment. In White Smoke, America's chem sex Killer, investigative journalist Patrick Strudwick uncovers the secret world behind this explosive

Hollywood scandal. Through original reporting, we discover how a cocktail of power, racism, sexual exploitation, and drug abuse had been detonating in Buck's apartment for years, and how it's connected to a wider chem sex scene playing out in queer communities all around the world, one that provides the perfect hunting ground for predators, but those communities are fighting back.

In this series, we meet the men who lived a nightmare inside Buck's apartment, the friends of the men who died, and the activist who triggered a movement to get Buck off the streets.

but not in the UK. That was where my investigative work began. After that, I became the first LGBT specialist reporter in Britain in a British news room, and it was really during that period that I began looking into the issues behind this case. So in Europe, principally, we call it chem sex KEM for chemicals drugs.

And while that trial was underwe I began talking to principally gay men in London who had been involved in the chem sex scene in London to find out what

was going on beyond this famous serial killer. And what I discovered was a hidden epidemic of drugging, sexual and physical violence or taking place within this scene that was very much behind closed doors because principally men are meeting each other for sex, often through dating apps, hook up hats and meeting in private homes, so you're behind closed doors literally and taking mostly two different drugs, GHB and

crystal math. The problem with these drugs is that GHB is very dangerous because it's very easy to overdose and just flippant into a coma stop breathing and die. Meth is very dangerous because, as a very powerful stimulant, it can radically alter your behavior. It's pretty addictive, and it is so disinhibiting and so kind of supercharging that it can really bring out.

twenty sixteen. Now. The following year, my first love, my first boyfriend from the nineteen nine nineties, ended up in a coma from an accidental g HB incident with his drink was spiked, and later that year started dating someone else who'd also been in a coma for several days

because of PHB. And so what was happening is what I was reporting on in a professional capacity, was seeping into my private life, and people around me, friends, acquaintances, started dying from this same drug, and I just had this sudden, horrible, chilling vision of really A what was happening, what was already happening, and B where this could be heading, even though at that point I didn't know that there was about to be another case which threw in a whole different.

white gay man who had connections. He had connections in high places within the Democratic Party because for years he'd both been donating hundreds.

started to spring up. Friends and family of Jamal Moore, along with local activists from black communities and LGBT communities, started demanding that the police really pay attention because ed

Bark had not been arrested. And I think one of the most stunning initial facts in this case is if you imagine police are called to a house an apartment building in West Hollywood with a dead body there, with drug paraphernalia and meth strewn around, and another guy perfectly fine standing over the body, the idea that he would

not even be arrested for possession of drugs. It's pretty astonishing as an outsider, in other words, a British person who, yes, I've lived in California, I've spent a lot of time there, but even so, I'm not an American, I'm not an American citizen. And to an outsider, it's always been very clear to me how odd the police are in America on compared to many European countries. If you're found with

a few grands of cannabis, you can be arrested. So the idea that anyone could be found in possessions of large amounts of meth and a dead body on their living room carpet and would not be arrested. This set all my internal alarm bells off. So those kept ringing over the next year, and that group of activists kept protesting,

kept speaking out, kept giving interviews to the media. They were protesting outside bugs and they were protesting outside the Sheriff's department, outside West Hollywood City Council and still nothing. And meanwhile, the district Attorney, Jackie Lacy was being personally singled out, personally blamed, which is very embarrassing. And what's striking also as an outsider, is that das are directly elected and so of course their personal popularity really matters

to them. Yet she did nothing. So again I thought, this is this is a really astonishing situation, and I just kept monitoring it. What's going on here? I don't know,

I'm thousands of miles away. What can I do? And then, eighteen months after Jameel Wore was found dead in Bucks apartment, a second gay man, Timothy Dean, aged fifty five was then found dead in the same circumstances, a meth overdose, and his body was pulled out early one morning in January twenty nineteen, and there was a further flurry of media attention. There were further protests. This is now a pattern.

Two black men pulled out of one apartment, the same man standing over him, the same drugs involved, and still no arrest. It was then that I realized this is something much bigger. This isn't a one off accident. This is a pattern, and if two men have died there, how many more men might have been harmed there? At that time, I just started making a documentary in London about the drug GHB and how it was being used

to rape and kill principally gay men. So for the next nine months I was busy doing that while still monitoring the situation in West Hollywood. But as soon as that was over in the September, I got on a plane to Los Angeles and started investigating them. I started interviewing as many people as I could, both directly connected to the case, but also people with more tangential connections but were able to explain what was happening to black men in these P and P situations where there's meth

and GHB involved. And I sort of thought i'd heard it all down. I thought I'd heard everything there was to know about camp sex or P and P, and I thought I'd heard a firm amount about racism in America. But what I hadn't heard was what happens when those two things meet. And what I began to realize was that there are sides to people's fetishes which can be informed by racism, and when you add certain drugs to that,

you're really creating an extremely dangerous situation. And many of the black men that were interviewed on my first reporting trip invoked the same thing, which was plantation slavery dynamics. So there were a lot of well off white men in West Hollywood who would entice young men of color, Black and Latino to their homes with the promise of money or drugs or both, or the promise of having sex with other attractive young men when they got there.

Because if you host a chem sex party a P and P party, you can invite ten twenty people, and if you're an old, unattractive man that owns the house and owns the drugs, and owns them and has the money.

Then you can get whoever you want there, and they may not particularly want to have sex with you, that they might want to have sex with all these other people, and when there's enough drugs involved, who knows the problem being that if you're an older white man who has a particular fetish for black men, I think that we get into problems when that fetish is dehumanizing, when it reduces people to a stereotype, a particular image of a

black man, or even particular body parts. And the disinhibition involved with meth and with GHB means that all those dark fantasies that someone might have that normally might remain in their head are just ripped open in those situations. So you have people who might be in need of somewhere to stay, who might be in need of money, or might be needed in need of some drugs, either because they're addicted or because they just need some escape

because their life is quite difficult. Entering into these homes, and before they know it, they're being encouraged or forced to do things they don't want to do, either taking more drugs than they want to or having sex with people they don't want to or a combination of both of those things. So that was my first reporting chip to Los Angeles in twenty nineteen, and I published a series of articles in early twenty twenty about my experience.

It is there, But even then I knew that I was only just scratching surface, and so later that year I then began to pull together a team to bring this story to audio, to really go into it in extraordinary debt. And so I spoke to Michael Rice, who is a black gay filmmaker in New York who'd made a film in twenty seventeen about how NEF was being weaponized against black gay men by white gay men. And this documentary really opened my eyes to the potential for harm.

So we got together with a production company in London, approached Audible, and we then spent the next two years making making this ten part series.

with far more powerful testimony from Dane Brown. Tell us what happens with Dane Brown and ed Buck that one faithful evening in his apartment.

escapes from skid Row and also a psychological escape. As he said to me, he was trying to escape hopelessness as well as homelessness, and so he started chatting to ed Buck on a gay dating website and they met in person. He didn't know anything about who he was. He'd not heard about Jammel Moore and Timothy Dean. He just thought that this guy was a kind of intelligent

and perfectly nice man. The problem was his own need for escape was so great that really he didn't He didn't probably see the warning signs, and before long he was living in Buck's apart with him, he had nowhere asked to go, And at that point, initially Dane was not addicted to math. He would do it occasionally as

I'd escape, as I say so. Living with Buck, whose fetishes were black men, white underwear, crystal math all mixed together meant that Buck was pushing meth literally into him and constantly pressuring him to take it, and so effectively the deal was, you can live here for free as long as you take math whenever I say so, and do whatever I say. Really, so, Dane was living there doing more and more myth, smoking and injecting over the summer of twenty nineteen. He became addicted while.

to a head. He overdose the first time at the very beginning of September twenty nineteen, ended up in hospital, but again had nowhere else to go, so went back and then overdosed again. And it was the second overdose which would change everything, but had given him both GHB

and meth. And if you can imagine that, GHB is a huge sedative effectively, and meth is a very substantial stimulant, So the two things together are a very odd combination and very dangerous physically because your heart doesn't know what on earth it should be doing, so it's easy to have heart attack.

trying to escape. He then makes it down North Lowell Avenue, where Buck's apartment was situated, onto the intersection, and across the intersection there's a gas station with a kiosk out front. He goes to the kiosk and asks the guy in the kiosk to phone nine one one. He's taken to the hospital and they look after him. And even that

would not be the pivotal moment. Really, Buck has only himself to blame for everything turning against him at this point in terms of the police, because what he did was one final act of cruelty to Dan Brown, which is, when Dane got out of hospital, he went back to get his things and Buck didn't want to give him

his things. Now, given that Dane was otherwise homeless, unemployed, had very few belongings, but the belongings he did have, such as you know, a laptop and a phone, were absolutely critical for him to be able to get another job. This is someone with a degree in computer science. You know, he's you know, very employable in the white circumstances. Buck refused to give him his staff. So that was when Dame said, well, I'm going to go to the police.

Day went to West Hollywood Police station to report his belongings being withheld from him, not to report Buck for you know, forcibly injecting him with meth or bringing him to the point of death. He started speaking to officers there. They went back to Buck's apartments to speak to Bark. They told Dane to go and wait for them. They went to a local library. Sat in the local library. Some point within that the officers spoke to their colleagues

in the FBI. The FBI had been investigating Buck for months, and finally they have a victim who is ready to talk, who is completely credible, who can give them extraordinary detail, and who, unlike everyone else, had actually lived there for several weeks and so it could give them an extraordinary insight into what was really going on. Yes, so before you know it, the FBI is talking to Dane Brown, and when they have his testimony, they suddenly swoop and days later they finally arrest ed buck.

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So we later learned from the testimony of one of the officers on the scene that when police would arrive to visit the scene of a dead body, and then another dead body and then you know, an overdose, picked him but would show them around the apartment and show them pictures of himself with powerful and influential people, people in politics. He was donating money too, and so the message was don't mess with me. I've got friends and high places and you do not want.

them aft, they'd already seen the paraphernalia. They'd already even after the death of Timothy Dean, discovered a bag containing a box which in itself had lots of drugs and paraphernalia that Buck had tossed out of the window after Timothy Dean died to avoid that being detected by police, right and they found it, gave it to the police, So they even knew he was discarding evidence, and they

still weren't arresting him. So by the time they have that Dane, they make the arrest and that's that's it.

black men. So he took pictures of people usually naked except for wearing white underwear, usually black men in white underwear, and he would take endless photos of them smoking meth and you would see white smoke billowing around their faces. That's one of the reasons why we called this series

White Smoke. You would see them injecting meth. And in the videos, it was like watching a film director with control freakery issues directing an actor, because what he would do is direct his victims to the most minute degree, how to tilt their head in such a way that the smoke came out of their mouth in a particular formation, exactly how to stand, how to hold themselves, and this was the most palatable of the evidence that was later shown in court. What we also saw was videos of

him abusing people while they were unconscious. He was sexually assaulting them while they were unconscious, and in several cases it would seem that they were unconscious because of an overdose, and that in itself raised a real moral ethical question about the trial itself, which I put to federal prosecutors, which is this, at the trial, he was not facing any charges of sexual assault, sexual violence of any kind because all those laws do not come under federal jurisdiction.

This was a federal trial, so they couldn't prosecute him for those. Yet they showed several videos of people unconscious being sexually played with by him, people who were not even witnesses in the trial, some of whom they were

never able to identify. There are many victims of red Buck who we will never know, who may not even know what happened to them, because if this, if they were interfered with while they were unconscious because they've been given drugs, they may well still not know what happened to them. Yet that evidence, those images were being played in a federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles to whomever wanted to walk into that building and view the trial.

And as you say, also, there was streams and streams of text messages and messages on social media and on the dating apps, and you know, in some cases those messages were more upsetting and disturbing than even the images, because what you could see beyond the scenes of him assaulting someone or injecting someone or whatever, what you could

see was how he toyed with them psychologically. So you had examples of people contacting him, saying to him, what happened to me, What happened to me when I was tied up? What happened to me when I was unconscious? Please tell me what happened? And he would tease them, he would refuse to tell them. He would say things like the picture tells a thousand words, and that called he came through again and again. We saw the text exchanges between him and Jamel Moore, who knew each other

for about a year before Jamel died. Jammel was going over there regularly over the course of about a year, and at first Jamel knew nothing about math, and there were these desperate, desperate messages from this twenty five, twenty six year old man saying, Oh, before I come out again and do more math, I want to, you know, find out a bit more about it, or he would Jamel would say that he didn't want to do it again, or would to have an excuse for not coming over,

and Buck would break him, would mock him, would just believe him, and all the time luring him back again and again and again, until Jamel Moore himself was addicted. He was not an addict when he met Buck, but Buckward begin by giving him lots of money, like six hundred dollars on their first meeting, which is a lot of money. And he wouldn't necessarily have to engage in anything sexual some of the time, but he would have

to take math. It's an extraordinary case to be paid to take Bristol math until it starts to destroy you, and in such a way that the other person at Buck has complete control over you in a way that he gets off on that. He fetishizes that, and as a black man, he already has an existing fetish when you show up. He would do the same thing to so many people. So there would be a kind of ritual. You'd come in, you'd have to take your clothes off and you'd have to put on the white underwear. Either

wife hunts or long jobs. Those were his two things. Then there was a kind of ritual involved in the smoking of the math, the fetishization of the small billowing around the face. There'd be mirrors everywhere so he could see it for different angles. There'd be cameras taking footage off air all why while he's directing.

them to do it themselves. He'd also try to persuade them to let him inject them, so he would you know, bash their vein with a needle and then there'd be also occasions where someone would come round out of unconsciousness to find him injecting them, which is, as you can imagine, an extraordinarily terrifying situation to be in to then throw in GHB, which kind of uphends the nervous system, the

entire body, and your entire psychology. At the same time, it denotes some who wanted to have the utmost control over another person and in such a way that they were really teetering on the edge.

was you know, the trial itself. And there's real problems with this, particularly for i'd say friends and family, for the prosecution, and to a certainly even the jury in the in a normal trial situation. I've sat through many criminal trials. To have everyone together in one room where you can see and hear everyone informs you quite a

lot about all sorts of elements of the case. So, for example, if you can sit in the public gallery and see the faces of the jury members clearly you can in some ways read their reactions to people testifying, you have some hope of seeing if they believe them. And also jurors can hear and see the reaction in

a public gallery when a witness says something outrageous. So and then of course you also have the attorneys, the lawyers who can better detect if the way that they're pursuing a line in questioning and the way that someone's testimony is unfolding, whether it's landing right, whether this is having the effect they wanted to have. But there was a very sterile environment in every sense of the word,

and a very disconnected one. So a succession of witnesses would come to the stand, they would describe terrible.

any instinct about where this was heading. So we were all sat there hearing all this incredible testimony, but we couldn't see the jurors, we couldn't feel the atmosphere in the room. We had no way of knowing if this was all heading in the right direction.

and direct and to tell the truth. So not that long before the trial, which took place in July twenty one, he finally came off math, got sober, and over two days stood up in that courtroom, facing cross examination and told the truth, and his testimony really was a cornerstone in the trial because it was so clear that he had more experience than anyone else there of what Buck was like over a long period, over six weeks living in that apartment building, and that coupled with his manner

which is remarkably poised and gentle actually, as someone who had been through real trauma, real horror, were cruelty to be able to stand up and be just sticking to the facts, not getting overly emotional, not getting particularly angry, but just telling it like it was with real dignity. That landed, that really landed. And I think that Dane really was the turning point in a trial that was already an onslaught. I'd say all the trials I've ever

sat in, it was the most horrifying. There was a moment in the series which was so difficult in terms of how we approached it, when during the trial we were all due to go back into the court room one afternoon and we were suddenly told no, it's been a journed until tomorrow because one of the jurors had an accident. We don't know the details about why but she needed to go home because she had effectively soiled herself, and the concern was that the details of the trial

were so awful that that it had that effect. We didn't speak to us. We don't know the ins and outs. That gives you some idea as to what the jurors were facing, what all of us were hearing, and what this case really stretches to, which is an extraordinarily call the basement and exploitation of human beings.

friends and family, and they just kept going. They wouldn't shut up, they wouldn't be silenced, they wouldn't go away, even in the face of institutional indifference. Best and four years to the day since Jamal Wall's body was pulled

out of their bocks apartment, we had the verdict. And to be in that courtroom and to see the judge deliver the verdict on nine charges, to find Buck guilty of all nine charges, and to see the people in that courtroom just rupt with relief, with tears, with sobbing, with shouting and crying, you know, right from inside that

public gallery out onto the street, was just astonishing. And again as an alien to the US, as a British person, what came so sharply into focus was on that day, July twenty seven, twenty one, the day.

really historical moment. You know, this is only a year after the death of George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd, when you know, the lives of black people and the deaths of black people were only just beginning to really be taken seriously. And to see justice being served was so powerful and so moving. And four years of hard work from all those activists, and hard work over a long period from the prosecuting attorneys too, one of whom Chelsea nowel and we talk about this in the series.

When I left the public gallery, I looked down the stairwell the main trial room in the room on the floor below. I looked down the stairwell and there was Chelsea Noral having delivered this guilty verdict, you know, thanks to her incredible legal skills, and she collapsed to the floor.

I've never seen that in any criminal trial, right, that lead attorney just fall to their knees out of us a relief, out of exhaustion, out of just being overwhelmed, because you know, just just for us and everyone involved in the trial, she'd spent months and months and months wading through the most terrific material imaginable, working with dozens of victims, some of whom you know didn't want to take part, or couldn't see it through or went missing.

This huge weight of responsibility on her shoulders to finally secure justice in a case that had just avoided.

poetic license. I'm a part of the screenwriters really think in actual daily life that lawyers are so involved invested that it really means that much to them. But at times it does, and that was one of those times.