Ed Buck was a fixture on the West Hollywood political scene, an advocate for causes like the fur ban and AIDS awareness, a donor to Democratic officials.
But behind the walls of Buck’s Laurel Avenue apartment lurked a nightmare. For nearly a decade, the wealthy white Buck lured young black men at the lowest points of their lives — homeless, addicted, turning to subsistence-level sex work — to what he called “party and play” sessions. ”.
Inside a house whose vileness belied his reputation as a man who had achieved great wealth at a young age, Buck harassed men with drugs and sexually assaulted them while they were unconscious or immobile. In two cases, he injected his victims with such strong doses of methamphetamine that they were killed.
Convicted at trial of a series of serious crimes, including the distribution of methamphetamine resulting in death, Buck will appear before a judge on Thursday morning to learn his fate. His lawyers have called for the 68-year-old to receive a sentence that would one day allow him to return to society.
Instead, prosecutors have urged US District Judge Christina A. Snyder to send Buck to prison for the rest of his life, saying that sentence is necessary not only to punish him but also to protect the public. “If Buck were ever released,” they wrote, “it would fuel his compulsion to inject others until his last day.”
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Drug abuse was at the core of Buck’s sexual deviations, according to testimony and evidence presented at his 2021 trial, which opened a window into a dark subculture of Los Angeles’s gay community.
Buck moved in a world steeped in drugs and defined by power imbalances between those who solicited sex and the often destitute men who offered it. He advertised on Adam4Adam, a gay hookup site, that he was interested in “party and play” sessions, widely known for the use of methamphetamine during sex.
A parade of men testified that the defendant offered them extra money if they would let them “beat” them or allow him to inject them with the drug. In what prosecutors called a “reward and punishment approach,” he would sometimes withhold payment if they didn’t smoke enough methamphetamine or let him inject it.
In his seedy apartment, which was littered with drug paraphernalia and sex toys, Buck treated the men “like lab rats in his twisted experiments,” Assistant US Attorney Chelsea Norell wrote in a sentencing memo.
He drugged them to the limit of their bodies’ tolerance; once they were unconscious or immobile, he sexually assaulted them, strangled them, slapped them. One man, injected with something that rendered him unable to move, managed to regain control only when Buck revved up a chainsaw in front of him and adrenaline surged through his body.
Buck filmed many of the episodes. In a video played at trial, he instructed a masked man to smoke methamphetamine: “Look directly at the camera, flare your nostrils and blow slowly. Now, if you add to that the eyes wide open, it would be a perfect shot.”
One witness, Carlos, described being told by a friend that a man was paying $200 to smoke methamphetamine and “walk around in his underwear.” Because he was living under an overpass at the time, between camps in Hawthorne, West Athens and Gardena, he “had to fight to survive,” he testified. “He did what he might to eat, to take care of me, to continue being a father.”
To protect its privacy, The Times withholds the last names of witnesses who described being sexually abused.
Carlos went to Buck’s apartment regarding 20 times over a six-month period. He used methamphetamine and GHB, a party drug; sometimes Buck would spray an ethyl chloride cleaning solvent on a rag, hold it over Carlos’s mouth and watch him inhale.
Buck “liked to see me when I might barely stand, barely conscious,” she recalled. “He wanted me to fall all over the place,” a state where he “was able to do whatever he wanted as far as playing and all that.”
The host sometimes referred to black men with an insult, witnesses at trial said.
Two men died in the apartment. Their bodies were found in almost identical circumstances. Gemmel Moore, 26, flew in from Texas on July 27, 2017, on a ticket that Buck had purchased. Hours later, he was dead. A forensic investigator found Moore lying on a mattress, with the TV on and showing scenes of pornography. Syringes, pipes, sex toys and methamphetamine were found throughout the apartment.
Authorities initially ruled Moore’s death accidental. It wasn’t until her mother and her friends publicly disputed the finding that Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives reopened an investigation into whether the fatal dose was self-administered.
Buck wrote in a text message, misspelling his victim’s name: “I have eight more days to go to this Jamall sheriff looking into my shit. On the 28th of this month we will know what will happen, if they remove my muzzle and I can speak. He sent the message to Timothy Dean.
Dean, 55, a former basketball player who worked as a fashion consultant at Saks Fifth Avenue, went to Buck’s apartment on Jan. 7, 2019. Within an hour, he overdosed, Norell wrote in a sentencing memo. Before calling 911, Buck cleaned up Dean’s vomit and blood and threw syringes and tubes out a window, according to Norell.
Cory McLean held the ashes of his best friend, Gemmel Moore, 26, who was found dead of a crystal meth overdose in Ed Buck’s West Hollywood home on July 27, 2017.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Authorities found Dean, just like Moore two years earlier, lying on a mattress in Buck’s living room. There were three large mirrors once morest the walls. The bottoms of Dean’s feet were white, indicating that he had been dead for some time, Norell wrote.
debilitating tions among the most vulnerable populations, and he did it all without a shred of remorse.”
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It took another man on the verge of death for the authorities to finally arrest Buck. In September 2019, he injected Dane Brown with three doses of methamphetamine. Brown managed to stagger out of Buck’s apartment and to a nearby gas station, where he called 911.
Buck was arrested a week later.
“He values no human life beyond his own,” Norell wrote, urging Snyder, the judge, to send him to prison for the rest of his life. He “he uses human beings as playthings, destroying their lives simply to appease his own sexual desires. “He has killed two people and nearly a third,” he continued, “he destroyed families, created and amplified addictions.
But Mark Werksman, Buck’s attorney, asked Snyder to view his client’s “increasingly risky and self-destructive behavior” through the lens of the abuse he had suffered as a child and his growing drug addiction.
Born in Steubenville, Ohio, Buck moved with his family when steel mills closed and the small town on the Ohio River entered a recession, Werksman wrote in a sentencing memorandum. The family settled in Phoenix. His father took a job at a sewage treatment plant, while his mother worked on a production line and later as an office manager.
When Buck was 11 years old, his father sexually abused him when his mother was not home, Werksman wrote. Buck, who was raised Catholic and served as an altar boy, was also sexually abused by several priests and a monsignor, according to his attorney.
As a young man, Buck worked as a small-time model and actor in Europe, then returned to Phoenix, where he took a job as a bike messenger for a friend’s business that provides information to auto insurance companies, his mother wrote. 94-year-old Margaret Buchmelter, in a letter to the court. He eventually bought the struggling company, Rapid Info Franchise, flipped it over and sold it in 1986 for $1 million, the woman said.
Buck, a millionaire at 32, retired from business and devoted himself to political causes in Arizona, such as leading a campaign to impeach the state’s governor, Evan Mecham, of whom he hung an effigy/pinata in an office dedicated to the campaign. . Mecham later declared him a “militant homosexual.” Buck responded, “You’re right. And?”. In 1991 he moved to California and took up residence in the rent-controlled, three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment on Laurel Avenue where, decades later, two men would die.
At age 40, Buck was abusing amphetamines, which he had been prescribed to treat narcolepsy and other conditions, Werksman wrote. He went on to use methamphetamine, smoking and injecting the drug daily until he was arrested, his attorney said. “Despite facing inconceivable amounts of abuse and pain from a very young age, from some of the closest adults around him, Mr. Buck made a conscious effort to escape that abusive environment and contribute positively to society. Werksman wrote, noting his support for political causes and advocacy for LGBTQ rights and AIDS awareness.
Werksman requested a sentence that would allow Buck to one day be released from prison.
Questions regarding the man’s wealth still hang over the case. Prosecutors asked Snyder to order Buck to pay $51,562 in restitution to his victims and a $400,000 fine, citing a probation officer’s estimate that his estate is closer to $2 million. When he was arrested, investigators found bank statements showing he had $3,477,335 in multiple accounts, Norell wrote.
Jasmyne Cannick walks away from court as Latisha Nixon, mother of Gemmel Moore, holds hands with Joann Campbell, sister of Timothy Dean. Moore and Dean died in Ed Buck’s West Hollywood apartment of methamphetamine overdoses.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Buck’s attorneys called these figures “grossly inflated.” His mother loaned him $1 million to pay for her legal fees, Werksman wrote; he owes several hundred thousand to the Internal Revenue Service and must pay a similar amount in capital gains taxes following one of his former attorneys liquidated much of his assets.
Prosecutors and the defendant’s attorneys have agreed to postpone the hearing to determine the amount he will have to pay in restitution while his attorneys gather records of his finances.
The Times staff writers Michael Finnegan, Hailey Branson-Potts, Richard Winton and Matt Hamilton contributed to this article.
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