On July 12, 2025, two hours into our 37th event, NYPD and FDNY came through the door. They shut everything down. They arrested me, arrested the staff member scanning tickets at entry, arrested a third member of the team. Three people in cuffs for throwing a rave.
I spent the next 12 hours in a cell. White lights. Cold. Soul-crushing. No one told me why I was there. Not for the first hour. Not for the sixth. Not until roughly five minutes before they were about to transfer me to Central Bookings did someone finally say the words: felony possession of narcotics with intent to distribute.
They found nothing on me. My fingerprints weren’t on anything. The bar wasn’t mine. The venue wasn’t mine. I was a promoter renting space for a party.
Here’s what happened.
Event 37 was running at 5x the ticket sales of our previous event. The momentum was the highest it had ever been. We had a brand new 16-piece Turbosound speaker array. CDJ3000s on both floors. The production was real. And then the convoy pulled up.
An eyewitness from the community saw the whole thing — the meeting before the raid, the coordination, the vests. DOB. FDNY. NYPD. They hit multiple venues the same night. 96 Morgan got raided. A friend of mine, Mayte, had her partner James arrested at a completely separate event in Soho. Same night. Same operation. This wasn’t a response to a complaint. This was a coordinated enforcement sweep.
The venue owner, Mario, was present at the event. He opened the door for the cops. Then he fled. The drugs they found belonged to a vendor — not to me, not to my staff. But the cops couldn’t find the actual owners, so they pinned the charges on the people standing at the door. That was us.
On top of the felony, FDNY issued 15 building violations — to SLIST. We don’t own the building. We don’t lease the building. We were renting a room for a night. $25,000+ in fines placed in my name for a property I have zero ownership stake in.
The first thing I did when I got out was financial triage. Not a press release. Not a breakdown. Math. How many refunds are we looking at? Can we survive this? The answer I landed on: reschedule with tickets honored, not cash refunds. Send everyone free tickets to a new date so we don’t go out of business refunding every single customer.
Out of roughly 150 attendees that night, 5 requested refunds. Five. The other 145 held their tickets or bought new ones. That ratio says more about the community we built than any metric I could publish.
Three days after the arrest, on July 15, we published a GoFundMe for legal defense. The community showed up. People donated who had no obligation to — fans from Philly, jazz musicians from Cambridge, DJs we’d never even booked. One of our people contacted the president of Techno Tribe on my behalf. The fundraiser was seeded through direct DMs before the public push, so it had social proof from the jump.
This wasn’t our first encounter with the police. Since our very first events in SoHo, we’d been the target of swatting by rival promoters and online trolls. Five-plus NYPD and FDNY investigations before Event 37. All clean. Every single one. This was the first time — after 37 events, thousands of guests, and hundreds of DJs — that anyone was actually charged.
Days after the arrest, the informant confessed. A tech house promoter. They preemptively admitted they were the ones who called the cops — scared that I already knew, hoping we’d be “even.” We were not even.
Mayte’s brother works in ATF. His read: the raid was politically motivated optics. New department head showing off. Half the charges won’t stick. The DOB operation was planned in advance against multiple venues. This wasn’t about drugs at our party. This was about quotas.
The immediate aftermath was chaos, but it was structured chaos. We lost access to the after-hours venue we’d been renting. Calendar went uncertain. I went quiet on the SLIST account — stockpiling content during the silence, waiting for the right moment to post everything at once.
But SLIST never stopped. Within weeks, I was booking legal venues with proper permits. August 2 comeback with three stages. August 15 free rave at Lebain — our first named post-arrest legal venue. The explicit framing in every conversation: “It’s a legal venue this time with all permits.”
I told one person that night, while the dust was still settling: “This is either going to ruin me or 10x the whole brand and movement.”
People in the community were already calling me legend before I’d even processed what happened. The court case was expected to run six months from October. I started with a court-appointed lawyer — “Just court appointed for now, I want to see if they want to push this.”
Nah, SLIST is forever.