DA PROBES TOP CLUB IN 'HIDING' OF OVERDOSES

The Manhattan DA is probing charges the nightclub Twilo has hired private
ambulances to quietly whisk unconscious drug-overdose victims past cops and
into local emergency rooms, The Post has learned.

Sources say club employees are playing Russian roulette with the lives of
sometimes critically ill patrons in a cynical cat-and-mouse game to protect
the embattled club's lucrative liquor license.

The investigation could deepen the legal and public-relations problems the
club was hit with since employees there were caught on their own security
cameras in October hiding unconscious revelers in closets so cops wouldn't
find them.

"We've got young kids being left in deplorable conditions," said an
administrator at one city hospital.

"It's mostly Ecstasy overdoses," the source said.

"Some of the kids have been hosed down at the club after passing out, and
some of them have come in unclothed," the source said.

"We've had to treat [unconscious] kids for hypothermia because they were
hosed down at the club and left there to cool down and come out of their
stupors.

"It's really sick stuff," said the source.

Messages left with Twilo's two owners, Phil Smith and Steve Dash, and the
club's lawyer, Peter Sullivan, were not immediately returned.

Investigators believe that 20 to 30 patrons have been transported to area
hospitals after passing out from taking drugs since the October incident.

Medical and law-enforcement sources told The Post that when clubgoers
overdose, club employees move the victims to a private area in hopes that
they will "snap out of it."

"What appears to be happening is that they try and let them sleep it off,"
said a hospital source. "But it's until the point where the patient is so
critical that they're desperately in need of medical attention."

Some of the victims were taken to St. Vincent's Hospital, sources said.

Hospital spokesman Mark Ackermann declined to comment.

Sources said that if no call is made to 911, police can't rush into the club
on an emergency basis. And no 911 calls have been made from Twilo recently,
they say, because of the private ambulance service.

Plus, sources note that with no 911 call, ambulance drivers are required to
fill out some paperwork in city emergency rooms, but are dumping off bodies
and leaving absolutely no information about where they came from.

Law-enforcement officials called Twilo's ambulance scam bold and
unprecedented.

"This is the first time we've ever heard of something like this," one
investigator said.

Early one Sunday morning in October, cops got 911 calls saying there were
unconscious people inside Twilo, but when they arrived, bouncers tried to
keep them out.

Police found three unconscious people in a closet, and later subpoenaed
videotapes that showed employees dragging them across the floor or throwing
them over their shoulders and putting them in a closet.

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office did not immediately
return calls for comment.