This is where the story starts, for anyone who has been there they all know that Electric Daisy Carnival is the happiest place on Earth come spring in the United States. The Las Vegas motor Speedway Below has two Ferris wheels, a roller coaster, a mega slide, a
Tilt-a-Whirl, Burning Man–style art gardens, clown-faced dance troupes
on stilts, seven main music areas — including what organizers say is the
largest festival stage in North America — and a lineup that includes
more than 200 of the world's biggest DJs, including Avicii, Afrojack,
Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren, Calvin Harris and Fatboy Slim. During EDC, the
20-minute drive from the Strip to the Speedway can take two hours. It's
a massive, outdoor Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, a party dreamland
come true.
Rotella's rise as rave master has been meteoric. Ten years ago,
nearly half a dozen Southern California promoters were vying for the
electronic dance music festival dollar, and Rotella's was just a face in
that crowd. Today EDM is on an American high. Acts like Calvin Harris
are getting radio play, Deadmau5 and Skrillex are performing at the
Grammy Awards, and Avicii's "Levels" is heard in every other TV
commercial.
And now there's just one EDM concert king from coast to coast: Rotella.
"If I had to pick one person at the top of the game, it would
probably be him," says Gary Bongiovanni, president of concert-industry
publication and data service Pollstar. "Pasquale really was a pioneer in
helping to bring raves out of the warehouses." But with Rotella's rise has come controversy.
The 39-year-old has been under indictment for more than a year,
facing six counts of conspiracy, bribery and embezzlement. Together the
charges could bring nearly 14 years behind bars, although a hearing to
weigh arguments for dismissal is set for Sept. 18. Rotella remains free
after posting bond, but he must ask for the court's permission to jet to
his far-flung events.
Meanwhile, when a 15-year-old girl died after taking ecstasy at a
2010 event thrown by Rotella's company, Insomniac Events, some L.A.
leaders seemed genuinely scandalized to learn that raves were happening
on public property under their supervision. The combination of the death
and the bribery accusations were enough to get EDC unceremoniously
booted from its home at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
So what does a self-made man from a hardscrabble, Westside background do in circumstances like that?
He takes EDC to Nevada and, beginning in 2011, transforms his
160,000-person, two-day L.A. party into a three-day rave with twice as
many clicks of the turnstiles at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
He fends off mainstream concerns over drug use at his parties to take
on the most mainstream of corporate partners, Live Nation, which this
summer reportedly bought a 50 percent stake in Insomniac for a whopping
$50 million.
He fights the criminal charges — welcoming a reporter into his
helicopter at a time when many criminal defendants would be ducking.
Importantly, Rotella beats a civil suit brought by the Coliseum, which
includes allegations similar to those still pending in the criminal
case. Last month, the court dismissed all civil claims against both
Rotella and Insomniac Events.
He travels to New York and London. He lives large, even as he
maintains that he has stayed true to his roots. Of the criminal charges,
Rotella told a reporter last spring, "I don't lose sleep over it
because I didn't do anything."
Oh, and he gets the girl: He and Holly Madison welcomed a baby girl, Rainbow Aurora Rotella, into the world on March 5.
Take that, Los Angeles.
Pasquale Rotella was a comer even when he was a
"16-year-old with a fake ID, just going out to the undergrounds," Tef
Foo, one of L.A.'s veteran rave promoters, recalls. Rotella says he went
to his first rave in 1990 and never looked back.
Growing up as a relatively poor kid in bucolic Pacific Palisades, he
was attracted to street life. His Italian immigrant parents were serial
entrepreneurs: Dad was a construction worker, which came in handy when
the couple opened its first eatery in Eagle Rock. Soon they had a deli,
La Rotella, in Venice.
But the family struggled. They even lived in a youth hostel near the
beach for a spell while Irene and Vincent Rotella "worked to get us back
into the Palisades," their son recalls. Young Pasquale bussed tables
and cleaned up at the Venice deli, but for the most part, he says, he
was "unsupervised on the Venice boardwalk," break-dancing as an eighth
grader, showing other kids "what's up" on the cardboard mats of Ocean
Front Walk. He also joined a tagging crew.
He was part of a lost generation of street-smart white kids —
including Venice's "Z-Boys" skate team and surfing's Strider Wasilewski —
who grew up on the Westside when it still had some grit.
"I used to wear Dickies pants and white T-shirts and Raiders' Starter
jackets," Rotella says. "My mom would give me a meatball in tinfoil for
lunch. I wasn't a bad kid at all, but I just couldn't pretend I had a
white picket fence. ... I was an outcast in the Palisades. The kids'
parents didn't let them come to my house."
But his success today is a real contrast to some of his wealthier
peers: "The families there were afraid of me, but a lot of their kids
ended up getting into heroin."
When early rave music hit Los Angeles at the dawn of the '90s, it was
an epiphany for Rotella. The sound captured the urban grit of electro
music (his break-dancing soundtrack), featured street art in its visuals
and adopted the neon smiley-face fashion of England's acid-house scene.
The 1960s psychedelia of Bill Graham's Grateful Dead concerts and Tom
Wolfe's literary accompaniment,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
were updated with new sounds and new drugs. Acts like Prodigy, Altern-8
and 2 Bad Mice mixed tough-guy breakbeats with futuristic synth sounds.
Rotella was all over it. "It was happy music," he says. "And it had some hip-hop culture behind it."
While Rotella is today a multimillionaire, he still brings the
swagger in a T-shirt, backpack and stiff-billed Edmonton Oilers baseball
cap — all black. He has the cold gaze of someone who has some street
experience. Which he does: As a teenager he ran with some tough Eastside
party crews, joining one called Latin Pride. His wasn't Bill Graham's
street-hustling, foster-kid Bronx childhood, but you can see the roots
of his egalitarian, for-the-people stance.
"The one thing people didn't appreciate about Bill, and the one thing
Pasquale admires, is [that they] care about the audience experience,"
Pollstar's Bongiovanni says. "Having worked with Bill in the early days,
I understood his passion to make sure the hot dogs were fresh and the
restrooms were clean. He was concerned with the environment he was
putting audiences in."
More often than not, a young Rotella would end up at an underground
party near downtown called La Casa, a venue in the 18th Street gang
territory.
 |
| Pasquale, Holly and their daughter |
"I remember getting patted on my head at La Casa one night," he says,
"and someone said, 'Shouldn't you be home by now, kid?' I would wear
top hats, giant overalls and Dr. Martens, fill my backpack with
lollipops, and go to the events and dance like crazy. It was the best
time of my life."
In 1992, as an 18-year-old, Rotella opened the doors to his own
party, Unity Groove. Reza Gerami, whose Go Ventures would later become
Insomniac's chief competition, remembers Rotella as a teenager "handing
out fliers in his little orange jacket with his sideburns and baggy rave
jeans." Promoter Foo recalls partnering up early on for a party with
Rotella — and Rotella putting his older sister on the cash register at
the door.
Rotella was getting his start even as the underground rave scene
looked to be winding down. By 1992, rave culture was on the front page
of the
Los Angeles Times but not for good reasons: In March
three young men were found dead in a parked pickup truck, victims of
nitrous oxide. Rave fliers were found in the vehicle.
Party crews and Eastside gangsters were starting to infiltrate the
scene and, in Rotella's words, turn things "dark." By the last day of
that year, when promoter Gary Richards brought the culture to new
heights by hosting a rave for more than 17,000 people at Knott's Berry
Farm, the bubble seemed to burst. The party was legendary, sure, but
people crashed the gates as police in riot gear tried to stop the
madness. Knott's would never again host a rave.
"The scene died," Rotella says. "Rave became a bad word."
But even as the Orange County white kids who kept the underground
afloat slunk home, Rotella decided to dive in, hosting weekly $5 events.
He called them Insomniac, and when 500 people started showing up, he
raised the price to $7. It was 1993.
His parties were a hit, and Rotella learned an important lesson he
carries with him today: It's all about the venue. A contact who worked
in real estate would give him the keys to unused spaces, allowing
Rotella to move Insomniac from week to week.
"I did some break-ins," too, he recalls. "I was arrested twice."
Police raided his parties countless times. But Insomniac quickly
became one of the only true, positive-vibe raves in town, drawing 1,200
people a week. At its one-year anniversary in 1994, Insomniac brought
4,000 people downtown to the old Shark Club.
Daniel Wherrett, better known as DJ Dan, met Rotella and started
spinning for him about that time. He says the promoter immediately
struck him as unusually passionate about the stages, lighting and
theatrics at his parties. Rotella would ask to come by Dan's studio to
talk party planning in the middle of the week.
"He never stopped thinking that the next one could be bigger than the last show," Wherrett says. "He is genuinely into it."
At other parties, methamphetamine was taking over. Gangsters were
invading wholesale. An event called Grape Ape 3 at Orange County's Wild
Rivers theme park concluded with fights, guns displayed and a van set on
fire. In 1994 the weekly party known as Sketchpad in Rampart Village
was so meth-crazed that people ended up strewn on the floor passed out
as the sun came up. "That was a nightmare scene," Rotella says,
"everything I was against." He saw his own lows. Someone he trusted swiped $3,000 in profits he had saved up, he says, to help his mom and dad pay rent.
But Rotella had found something positive in his life — rave's mix of
music, street art and huggy feelings — and he wasn't about to let go. In
February 1995, he organized a party billed as "Insomniac Presents
Nocturnal Wonderland" in East L.A. It sold out, becoming Insomniac's
signature, annual event.
Slowly, he was bringing raving back into fashion. Rotella helped
organize Organic '96 in the San Bernardino Mountains, a before-its-time
mix of Coachella-style crowds and European dance-music massives,
featuring the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Orbital and The Orb. It was
financially unsuccessful, he recalls, but still "sparked interest in
people who thought EDM didn't exist anymore."
That same year he took Nocturnal Wonderland to a venue that would, in
a few years' time, become the epicenter of American rock festivals —
the Empire Polo Club in the Coachella Valley.
By 1997 artists like Moby and Prodigy were being billed as the Next
Big Thing for a music industry looking to replace grunge. Raves from
Rotella's Insomniac — as well as Go Ventures, B3 Cande and Fresh Produce
— reached new heights by expanding to the National Orange Show
fairgrounds in San Bernardino, the desert and the San Bernardino
Mountains.
"I wasn't the only one doing raves anymore," Rotella says.
By the mid-aughts, electronic dance music wasn't
just back, it was huge. Daft Punk's performance at Coachella in 2006
introduced a new generation of alt-minded hipsters to the edgier side of
dance music, a side that would be reflected in the launch of the next
year's HARD festival.
EDM fests were starting to take over the biggest venues the West
Coast had to offer. Raving was now Bill Graham–level stadium rock. That made Rotella a hot commodity.
He'd gotten his foot in the door almost a decade before at the Los
Angeles Sports Arena. Both the arena and the L.A. Coliseum are
essentially owned jointly by the city, county and state. The Coliseum —
which hosted its last NFL game in 1994 — was eager to get in on its
sister venue's action.
"The Sports Arena was making money," Rotella says, "so the guy who ran it was, like, 'Can you do more of these?' "
That guy was Coliseum events manager Todd DeStefano, he said.
DeStefano was a well-paid football fan who came to the sister venues in
1998. He quickly saw raves' economic potential and worked closely with
the promoters to make them happen, beginning in his first year on the
job. By 2005, DeStefano, realizing millions could be made, wanted to do
the parties four times a year. He tapped Gerami, who muscled in on
Rotella's longtime Fourth of July Electric Daisy Carnival weekend with
an event of his own at the Coliseum, called Independance. It flopped. So two years later, Rotella says, DeStefano invited him to bring EDC
to the Coliseum instead. The party drew 29,000 people in 2007. By 2009
it was rocking 120,000. Raves now were bringing in 28 percent of the
taxpayer-owned venues' revenue.
That following year, EDC at the Coliseum was the national rave
champion, drawing 160,000 people over two days and featuring the cream
of electronic dance music at the biggest DJ stage America had ever seen.
Other festivals, including Ultra in Miami, Electric Zoo in New York,
Movement in Detroit and Love Festival (renamed LovEvolution) also had
gotten big, but Rotella's EDC was king.
Electric Daisy Carnival was so massive that Black Eyed Peas frontman
will.i.am
jokingly complained that he couldn't get a decent set time for his DJ
performance in 2010. So massive that chaos broke out as ravers
gate-crashed to get to a lower level. So massive that there were more
than 60 arrests, mostly for drug-related allegations, and 200-plus
"medical emergencies," officials said.
The idea of a government-owned venue hosting such huge parties, with
all the attendant risk of drug abuse, was always awkward. More than a
few ecstasy-overdose deaths have taken place following Insomniac and Go
Ventures events over the years, including a 20-year-old who died after a
rave at the Sports Arena in 2007. But the age of Sasha Rodriguez — 15 — shocked L.A.'s political
establishment. The 2010 EDC, held at the Coliseum, had been designated
for those 16 and older, but ID checks reportedly were lax. After
sneaking in, Rodriguez took ecstasy and fell into a coma. She died two days later.
The day after Rodriguez's death, L.A. County Supervisor and Coliseum
Commission member Zev Yaroslavsky called for a "moratorium" on raves at
the public venues. Then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa also questioned the
wisdom of holding the parties there. The whole rave program was about to
be wiped off the Coliseum's calendar.
Rotella could have moved the party somewhere else. But that wasn't
his way; he was a fighter, and determined to keep the events in L.A.
Instead, as part of its response, Insomniac vowed to strictly enforce an
18-and-older policy with ID scanners — which struck many critics as too
little, too late.
But to understand Rotella is to know that his festivals are
playgrounds for the faithful, and the faithful often are kids like he
once was, backpacks, baseball caps and all.
"For decades there were no piles of money in this," he says. "That's
why people abandoned ship. The only people who kept the scene alive was
other kids. I love them. I love my people."
Rotella hired a lobbyist, contributed to Councilman Bernard Parks'
re-election campaign, and soon found an ally in the former LAPD chief
and Coliseum Commission member, who argued that the parties were no
different from sporting events or Hollywood Bowl concerts. He was making
some headway.
Then the bomb dropped.
At a closed-door session of the Coliseum Commission on Feb. 2, 2011,
then-commissioner David Israel revealed what he'd recently learned:
Rotella and rival promoter Gerami had allegedly paid more than $1.8
million to DeStefano outside their Coliseum rent and concessions deals. The raves lost all support and were shut out of the venues that year.
Even worse, in March 2012, Rotella, Gerami, Coliseum events manager
DeStefano and Coliseum general manager Patrick Lynch were indicted as
part of a case that alleged corruption, bribery and embezzlement.
The charges are still pending. The case against Rotella relies on emails and a 2008 contract,
apparently drafted by DeStefano but never signed, that called for the
promoters to hand over 10 percent of event proceeds to him in exchange
for his work to minimize their costs at the venue. Payments then allegedly were made directly to side companies controlled by DeStefano. A civil suit filed by the Coliseum against the promoters alleged that
they had deprived the public venues, including the Sports Arena, of
cash from 37 raves organized there since 1998. But the suit was
dismissed last month, with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Terry Green
saying, "I just don't see the elements of a conspiracy."
Deputy district attorney Max Huntsman, who is prosecuting the
criminal case, admits the promoters "had some good results" when the
lawsuit was thrown out. But, he says, "The facts and the law are very
different in our case. "We have a piece of paper," Huntsman says, referring to the unsigned
contract, "where they agreed to rent the Coliseum from an employee. That
to me seems outrageous."
He says DeStefano "clearly discussed that he was working on their
behalf to get terms they wanted. That seems like bribery to me." As for Gerami, he has a conspiracy theory of his own: He thinks the
corruption case and lawsuit were about ridding the venues of moneymaking
events so USC would have an easier time taking over the Coliseum and
Sports Arena, which it has since done. He likens the USC takeover to a
backroom deal, with the people's property being handed to a wealthy
private university for nothing. Profitable raves would have pointed to
more market value for the venues and a better deal for the public,
Gerami says. "They just handed it over for free," he says of the Coliseum Commission. "They used me and Pasquale as a smoke screen for why."
The promoters' attorneys have argued that any money paid to DeStefano
was for his event-consulting work on his own time, and for his help
with their events' expansion to state-run parking lots that didn't
belong to the Coliseum.
Their best defense may well be one of timing. The payments to
DeStefano allegedly were in place for years before 2010's EDC
controversy. It doesn't make sense that the promoters would need to
bribe DeStefano "to continue to hold the events," as prosecutors allege,
at the Coliseum or the Sports Arena before the controversy erupted,
particularly since they were clearly a cash cow for the venues.
Prosecutor Huntsman, however, notes that ravers had died before 2010,
even if those deaths were more under-the-radar than Rodriguez's
shocking overdose, and says Gerami and Rotella needed DeStefano's
support to keep their events out of the political line of fire.
Indeed, the manager lobbied his bosses, the Coliseum Commission, to
keep the raves at the Coliseum and Sports Arena even after the teen's
death. In an email to the promoters, DeStefano said he was "working the
politics big-time behind the scenes."
If the judge grants Rotella's motion to dismiss next
week, he's home free. Otherwise, the criminal case against him could
take a year to wind its way through the court system.
The tough kid from the Palisades doesn't seem to be too worried.
He just married girlfriend Madison this week at Disneyland. A
reported $50 million richer as a result of selling 50 percent of his
company to Live Nation, Rotella has plans to move Insomniac's modern,
black-walled offices from the east end of Melrose Avenue to Beverly
Hills.
The nation's largest concert promoter is facing competition for the
lucrative and growing EDM festival market and, as such, has been staking
out turf with its checkbook.
With EDC now part of the Live Nation family, Rotella is officially in
bed with Gary Richards' HARD events, which was purchased last year by
the concert giant. (In February Richards tweeted to Rotella, "Wonder
twin powers activate.")
The buying spree pits Live Nation, the corporate grandchild of Bill
Graham Presents, against Robert Sillerman's SFX Entertainment, which has
snapped up rave company "Disco" Donnie Presents and European festival
promoter ID&T. (L.A.'s AEG Live also is an EDM player, with one-off
DJ concerts and a little thing called the Coachella Valley Music and
Arts Festival.)
Pollstar's Bongiovanni says living with a publicly traded company
could prove to be a challenge for an up-from-the-streets promoter like
Rotella. "There's always pressure to make money when you're working for a
public company," he says. "Before, it was just his wallet. Now he has
other people to answer to."
In the introduction to rock promoter Bill Graham's posthumous autobiography,
Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out,
co-author Robert Greenfield writes of Graham, "Rock was never a
business. It was an ongoing war in which he did battle each and every
day with not only egotistical rock stars and their self-centered
managers, agents and lawyers but also Hell's Angels and any city
official who dared stand in his way."
For Rotella, like his hero, music events can mean going to war.
That's clear in his fight with the Coliseum — but also in his
relationship with rival promoter (and fellow defendant in the Coliseum
kickback case) Reza Gerami. In 1998, when Rotella first got hard-earned access to the Sports
Arena, he thought he was on top. But then the Coliseum events manager
also offered a date at the venue to Gerami. Never mind that Gerami had
known Rotella since he was a teen raver; the way Rotella tells it,
Gerami elbowed Insomniac out of the Arena. Rotella retreated to the Inland Empire, where Insomniac found a home at the National Orange Show fairgrounds.
"I ended up owning the Orange Show and he ended up being the Sports Arena guy," Rotella says.
Three years later, the two kissed and made up and double-teamed for
one almighty New Year's Eve's party, aptly named Together As One. And
after Gerami allegedly flubbed his shot at the Coliseum in 2005 with
Independance, Rotella was in prime shape to take over that venue for
EDC.
Then, in 2011 Rotella pulled out of the partnership with Gerami that
was responsible for the annual Together As One. Soon, it seemed,
Gerami's Go Ventures was shut out of the market: unable to book top DJs,
unable to get decent venues, unable to cash in on the corporate gold
rush.
By 2012 Gerami's parties were essentially finished in L.A.
"Reza's demise was his own doing," Rotella says. "He wasn't able to find venues after the Sports Arena."
For his part, Gerami says, "I don't think it's personal, where he
elbowed me out. Business is business, and competition is competition."
In recent years, Rotella has embarked on a steady takeover of L.A.'s
EDM club scene, wringing its neck like a boa constrictor. The expansion
includes one-off DJ concerts at the Hollywood Palladium, a partnership
with SBE Entertainment Group's new super-club Create, and regular
weekend bookings at downtown club Exchange Los Angeles. One promoter,
who asked not to be identified for fear of invoking the wrath of EDM's
king, reports that the only way he can book big-name DJs is with
Rotella's blessing.
Another promoter, who also declined to be identified, says that
Rotella reached out to metaphorically slap his hand for handing out a
competitor's fliers at one of Insomniac's SoCal parties this summer. A
no-no in '92 is still a no-no in the corporate world of festivals today.
And Rotella is not afraid to be a micromanager.
"I don't like when people attack me," Rotella says. "I can be fierce."
He adds, "I don't like confrontation. But I am never going to stop
what I'm doing when my life is on the line. I do have business sense.
It's because of my upbringing. I wasn't given toys. I grew up with
parents who had nothing and wanted to start businesses. I'm very
strategic. I want to protect what I do."
Rotella denies any attempt to dominate the local market, saying he
only does the local shows because they "just kind of fall into my lap."
Underlings handle those bookings, Rotella says, while he focuses on EDC.
He describes his company's signature event as "fulfilling people's
fantasies." To that end, he says the Live Nation deal won't change his
events — he retains creative control. "I have some big things I want to
accomplish. I'm not even close yet."
For Rotella, the party is the attraction. Always was. Forget the
$250,000-per-gig superstar DJs and the same old lineups featuring
Avicii, Afrojack and Tiesto on a permanent loop. At this year's EDC in
Vegas, the stage was noticeably more concentrated, with DJs barely
discernible inside the belly of Rotella's hallmark, a massive, "wide
awake" night owl. (Insomniac's motto is "Wide Awake Since 1993," a nod
to the drug-fueled, party-till-dawn raving of the early days.)
The ideal party for Rotella would be "10 percent music, 10 percent DJ
names" — with a much bigger focus on the lighting, the costumed guests,
the art. For him, it's about the whole experience, not just the names
on the marquee: "I want to have the best theatrics and art and people
coming for many reasons. The biggest thing is trying to get people to
connect."
In Vegas for EDC, Rotella commands a motorcade of
golf carts that shuttles his retinue from the helicopter landing area to
his trailer next to the main stage. As the conga line reaches a gate,
however, an assistant refuses security's command to slow down. One of
the guards steps right in front of the first vehicle and is almost
flattened.
"Do you know who we're with?" doesn't seem to cut it. The security
guards, now aided by local police, grow suspicious and start searching
people. James Frey's backpack gets a worse reaming than Oprah ever gave
him, and even Madison's little clutch is not immune from the TSA
treatment.
Rotella and Madison, who's dressed in a long, butterfly-print skirt,
sit in back of the first cart, facing the rear. As the carts get the
green light and begin to meander through the crowds, with a sweating
bodyguard jogging on the ground behind the couple, ravers run up to say
hi and take pictures. Rotella gets recognized 2-to-1 over Madison, the
Playboy beauty, reality TV star and tabloid fave. The raver kids point and shout, "That's Pasquale!"
"That's the biggest success," Rotella says later. "I have the best, most loyal crowds in the world."
Later that night, Rotella meets up with his mom at his row of VIP
tables. She's wearing a sparkling black top hat and oversized,
heart-shaped sunglasses. As a way of greeting, she slaps a reporter's
cheeks as only an Italian grandmother could.
At Rotella's VIP corral above the main stage, vodka flows and
childhood friends who have never left his side enjoy the fruits of a
bro's labor.
Rotella is a true believer that raves are a force for good,
presenting a great equalizer in the form of the dance floor, even if he
now observes the festivities like royalty, from a couple stories above.
"There are people," he says, for whom "the rave scene was good. I'm one of them."
However, the growth to the top usually comes with a little falling here and there. Pasquale has never escaped this.It was at the 2012 EDC show in Las Vegas where trouble for Rotella first brewed.
Two people died after attending the festival in Vegas -- a
31-year-old Florida man who died after being hit by a truck when leaving
the festival and a 22-year-old University of Arizona student who fell
to her death from the 27th floor of her hotel room, the
Las Vegas Sun
reported. When Metro Police attempted to investigate Rotella's
Insomniac, standard operating procedure when issuing a carnival license
for a temporary event like EDC, they incurred some difficulty.
"According to an investigation report obtained by the
Sun,
Metro wrote requests to various law enforcement agencies, did a local
background check, a Department of Motor Vehicles inquiry and obtained
records from various public and private sources," wrote the
Las Vegas Sun's
Joe Schoenmann. "Metro summarized its findings: 'This investigation
also revealed multiple Areas of Concern, all surrounding the character
of Mr. Rotella and the business operations of Insomniac Inc.'"
This was not Rotella's first problem with the law, regarding his controversial raves.
In March, rave promoter Rotella and five others were indicted
on charges of conspiracy, embezzlement and bribery for allegedly
stealing millions of dollars from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and
Sports Arena, reported ABC News. Rotella and his associate allegedly
paid former Coliseum events manager Todd DeStefano almost $2 million to
limit payments due to the venue and to ensure the use of it for their
events.
Madison's 38-year-old boyfriend pled not guilty. He faces a potential 13-year-8-month jail sentence, according to
L.A. Weekly.
The 2010 EDC at the L.A. Coliseum came under such scrutiny after
15-year-old Sasha Rodriguez died of a drug overdose after attending the rave.
Although
the event was not included in the indictment, prosecutors claim the
Insomniac promoters were undeterred by the death and pushed for more
raves, offering bribes for access to the venue, The Associated Press
previously reported.
“We feel as though we are the safest festivals out there,” Rotella recently told The Huffington Post.
“Whenever anything tragic happens, whether it’s at the festival or even
hours after the festival and the attendee just came to the show, it’s
always suddenly about the genre of the music and about the style of the
event.”
If Rotella is convicted in the LA scandal,
EDC could lose its Vegas permit,
Weekly reported in June 2013. More than 300,000 three-day tickets were sold for the Sin City event this year, according to the
Village Voice. Madison attended the event with Rotella this year. Despite these legal woes, Rotella is thrilled about his growing family with Madison.
The former "Girls Next Door" star was previously romantically involved with Hugh Hefner. She broke up with the
Playboy honcho back in October 2008.
"I want to be with somebody I can have more of a future with eventually," Madison told "Extra!" about her breakup
with the 82-year-old. "Hef and I can't get married and have kids...so
it was fun while it lasted but it wasn't right for my old age. I got too
old for Hef." Ok, see? Ladies follow you with success. They need to know that they are bunking on someone who's responsible enough too for a family like my Role model here Pasquale!
Again, well done Pasquale!!!
