Evil Empire

Investigators say he was bigger than Sammy the Bull. His minions say he ruled the drug trade in the Valley's rave scene. Now, authorities have "English Shaun," the man they claim reigned over a nighttime empire of ecstasy, meth, violence and excess.

Comments (0) By Susy Buchanan and Brendan Joel Kelley Thursday, Jul 18 2002

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And in more ways than one. Attwood is tall, lanky and bald, with pale white skin and pinched features. His accent is where the "English" comes from, a Mad Hatter tea-time lilt. He has braces on his teeth, his lips are thin and pursed, and his blue eyes glimmer mischievously, even in a mug shot. Friends and former roommates describe him as a sort of vampire — largely nocturnal, with a thirst for the GHB they say he drank like blood, and a more than passing resemblance to Nosferatu. He could be proper, charming, polite, with an intelligence that matched his magnetism.

Attwood came over from the U.K. in the early '90s, working as a stockbroker. The National Association of Securities Dealers reports that in 1999, while working in the Valley, "Attwood was censured, fined $68,016.90, and barred from association with any NASD member in any capacity." The sanctions were based on findings that Attwood and an associate "engaged in excessive trading in a customer account. Attwood also failed to respond to NASD requests for information."

Kevin Scanlon

As the Valley's rave and club scene grew in the mid-'90s, insiders say, so did the demand for ecstasy and so did the Evil Empire.

Friends describe English Shaun as a sort of vampire - nocturnal, with a thirst for the drug GHB, which they say he drank like blood.

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Read Westword's related feature story about black-market GHB, "Sip of Fools."

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Coen, who formerly dealt Attwood's ecstasy and used his funds to promote raves, remembers him back then. He was "like a guy from a big brokerage house in London [who] had somehow walked into the wrong party but was having a really great time," he recalls. "He seemed out of place, but he was outgoing enough that he made people quickly forget it and just accept English Shaun as part of the overall weirdness around them."

That weirdness was an inherent element of the nascent rave scene, populated by glitter girls, drag queens, club kids in rabbit ears, and fueled by music and drugs. Coen was a part of it, too — and he was among the first to stake out its enormous built-in drug market, long before Shaun went from being a stockbroker to an "E" broker.

Now 30, Coen graduated from Arizona State University in 1993 with an arts degree. He lives alone in an elegant four-bedroom home in Tempe. He says he began frequenting the rave scene purely as a raver, not a dealer, just before and after graduation. "Raves and dropping E every weekend was a symptom of my senioritis," he says.

In '93 and '94, he says, there was no organized system of dealing in the Valley. "The scene then was really just a few hundred ravers. The scene hadn't reached the critical mass of people who were into it and doing E as a part of the whole experience, where someone would look at the possibilities and see a profit potential."

But that all changed in the summer of 1995. Before then, Coen says, anyone could fly to San Francisco or New York and bring back a supply for the weekend's parties, making enough money to cover the plane ticket while still having a couple "rolls" of E left over. But as the scene grew, so did demand.

Coen saw that he could easily subsidize his lifestyle by selling E on the side, he says. Corresponding with this realization, or perhaps inspiring it, was a visit to an ASU frat brother who had moved to Hollywood to be a script-reader and had delved into L.A.'s underground club scene. The script-reader kept a jade ashtray full of E tablets in his bedroom.

Coen's friend said the E came from a cocktail waitress in a techno club on the Vegas strip. Although the script-reader refused to link Coen directly with his source, they negotiated a deal: Coen could phone in an order with five days' notice, then fly to L.A. to pick it up — $1,200 for 100 pills, a price he later negotiated down to $5,000 for 500 pills, the maximum order his friend would allow.

Two weeks later, Coen flew to L.A. and returned with 300 pills. "We got rid of them in one weekend, just me and a few friends working three parties." Besides a private party and a rave at the Icehouse, there was an easy market at Chupa, the legendary Phoenix after-hours nightclub where gay pretty boys and drag queens — two key factions in the founding of every major city's rave scene — congregated once the raves in Phoenix began to attract young suburban "candy ravers."

Coen was not choosy about his clientele; drag queens, candy ravers, Coen sold to them all. He remembers selling off 100 pills "in 10 minutes" at a private party with DJs, at a profit of $15 a pill. In a scaled-down version of the operation that authorities claim Attwood would eventually control, Coen recruited 13 dealers to fly to L.A. for him, making weekly trips.

By the last half of '95, Coen began extracting himself from the hand-to-hand sales at parties, concentrating instead on wholesaling the drug to small-time dealers. After the New Times piece about the Valley's emerging rave scene, "Rave New World," came out in December '95, business was booming, he says. He started charging $25 a pill to the newbies; his friends still paid $20.

Today Coen speculates that this jacked-up pricing may have been what gave Shaun an entree into the E market, in 1996. That's when the rumors began that a bald-headed Englishman was slipping into the business end of the scene.