Date: October 23rd, 2022 12:09 PM Author: Histrionic Hyperactive Rigor
The daughter of Iranian-born Mr. Ghahramani, an investment research firm founder, and Lily Ann Marden, a real estate finance executive, Ms. Ghahramani made a vow in high school to somehow change the world. She helped give pro bono legal advice to immigrants and advocated for gun control. She spoke on the steps of City Hall as a main organizer of a “March for Our Lives” attended by 150,000 following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in February 2018.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 3:07 PM Author: Dull concupiscible love of her life school cafeteria
Jesus the Volcker Rule
The trader’s prowess showed in a roughly $100 million gain Mr. Mtangi and his team made for Bank of America from a brief volatility spike shortly before he left for Credit Suisse, according to former colleagues and a media report at the time.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 8:37 AM Author: Hairraiser Locale
Ive stopped doing coke after reading some of these articles. I used to partake every 2 or 3 weeks at parties. Too worried it will be mixed with some deadly bullshit now. Why did China have to ruin drugs for me
Date: October 23rd, 2022 8:42 AM Author: irate lemon fortuitous meteor garrison
when i was a full on raging addict, i always laughed off this concern but now i'm really grateful this never happened to me.
i have a few friends who still do coke and they're still like "lmao fuck it". playing with fire. a guy we knew from hs was found dead in his car two years ago. bought a bag of coke and died instantly after the first hit. dat fentanyl.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 8:45 AM Author: Hairraiser Locale
I mean realistically the chances are probably very low, but even a 1 percent chance of dying is kind of insane, and of course that goes up if youre using all the time
Date: October 23rd, 2022 8:48 AM Author: Vengeful Demanding Stag Film Tattoo
Julia was a driven professional with everything to live for. Never in a billion years would she have touched anything with fentanyl,” he said. “This is like putting bullets in people’s brains.”
Date: October 23rd, 2022 9:33 AM Author: Gold home
“Ms. Ghahramani made a vow in high school to somehow change the world. She helped give pro bono legal advice to immigrants and advocated for gun control. She spoke on the steps of City Hall as a main organizer of a “March for Our Lives” attended by 150,000 following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in February 2018.”
Well at least she isn’t doing any damage to the world anymore. Advocating for a poverty-stricken police state under the guise of safety and humanitarianism while enriching and incentivizing drug cartels: what a hypocrite.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 10:05 AM Author: lascivious school marketing idea
Social worker Amanda Scher, 38, did the same. She died in the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her Chihuahua-Corgi rescue dog. It was a stone’s throw from where she had received her master’s degree at New York University.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 10:49 PM Author: Gold home
It’s sad to see the empty remnants of these peoples lives, standing like tiny memorials to what they were. I wonder what they would change on these if they knew the ignoble end they would meet.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 11:20 AM Author: Translucent marvelous locus crotch
Been saying this for a while, but you have to be a retard to do coke in this day and age. Drug dealers have every incentive in the world to cut the product. LJL @ killing yourself over a biglaw homework assignment.
the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the dealers also sell heroin, which is cut with fentanyl, and there is cross contamination. i've heard this can occur even if the C and H are on separate tables in the same room - a small gust of wind can blow some fent over onto the coke and there you go, and it barely takes any to kill you.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 9:14 PM Author: Beady-eyed Karate
I know that sometimes drug dealers cut their coke with opioids or benzos because it apparently makes the comedown less severe. It's possible that the dealer got a batch like that and didn't know it. Or cross contamination is another possibility.
But yeah the idea that drug dealers are deliberately killing their customers is idiotic. Aside from the fact that losing a customer is bad for business, law enforcement is far more likely to come after you if a customer dies. You can catch a murder charge for that in some states.
Date: October 24th, 2022 12:18 AM Author: grizzly piazza rigpig
Put your life in the hands of the lab skills of a degenerate felon, and hope that although he is not smart enough or careful enough to have a better job than retail drug dealer, his fear of going to prison for 20 years instead of 10 years will motivate him to perform chemistry experiments correctly for your safety. Seems prudent.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 11:33 AM Author: black forum
Why is everyone itt calling them addicts? Do you realize normal people do a little coke sometimes? Especially people fresh out of law school. It's only in the last few years that this has gotten dangerous.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 11:45 AM Author: Translucent marvelous locus crotch
When there's a dozen news headlines about hot coke loads leading to people croaking and u still rely on ur mongrel dealer to get your fix, perhaps you are an addict.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 11:45 AM Author: Vengeful Demanding Stag Film Tattoo
Its one thing to do it at a party when you stumble upon it. Its another to reserve a hotel room to go run off and do coke when you are supposed to be somewhere else.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 11:08 PM Author: flirting hominid
Got an STD scare. Put things into perspective as I was really just chasing the high of getting some hooker/street walker. It wan't even the sex but the thrill of going,
"Phew. So she wasn't a cop. Ok, now I am diamond hard, let me bust this nut."
Married now with kids. I go on work trips every now and then. jizzing into a fist full of kleenex typically gets rid of the urge to go on Eros, etc. I got close once but just couldn't pull the trigger.
I don't follow HVAC too closesly but I get the impression he is chasing something else other than the thrill. Maybe I'd say he should take a look at what high he is after and focus on that. He doesn't seem to engage in yhr crappy stuff I did. I picked up drug addicted chicks off the street. Picked up a hooker once that was black and blue from her pimp. I felt os bad that I gave her $50 and told her I ddin't need anything. She chirped (back in the Nextel days),
Date: October 24th, 2022 2:10 PM Author: flirting hominid
I am. It was risk taking behavior. I recall when I first got the urge after watching Cinemax after dark, when they would do some streetwalker edition. I got so hard and fapped to it. I recall some john asking for "no teeth." Chick responded with, "Ok baby. Just a sec. *Sound of her pulling out her dentures*"
I remember the first time I picked up a hooker. John Paul II had just died and aleveryone was talking about it on the radio. I was driving down a well known hooker road and saw a smoking hot black chick. I pulled into a fast food joint and she walked past me. I pulled through the drive thru (without ordering) and was able to get her attention. She signaled for me to park across the street at a bank. My heart was pounding. I was nervous. I saw her cross the street and get into the passanger side. I had unknowingly parked next to a van with a Mexican family inside. I was a bit embarrassed, but her sweet honey smell and her grabbing my dick asking, "what do you want?" got me so fucking hard. I said I wanted a BJ. She told me it was $60, and I was fine with that.
We pulled out and drove to a spot behind some apartment buildings. I parked the car and she pulled out a rubber from her lil hand bag. I unzipped. I had so much precum that she asked if I came already. I said, no. She then placed the condom on her lips and slid it onto my cock with her mouth. To this day, it was the best head I ever received. She gave me her number and said she only walks a few times a month but that I could see her by calling.
We cleaned up. I pulled out of the spot and drove her to a Mexican fast food joint a block away. She got out in her lil skirt and wife beater. I then proceeded to sleep with like 50+ hookers. I took every call back opportunity in NY during OCI recruitment to see multiple hookers.
cr, people always tell their family they're going to the office but instead they're actually in a hotel room using schedule A narcotics alone. dude above must be a CHINK! lol
Date: October 23rd, 2022 12:14 PM Author: Gold home
On that March day, Ms. Scher texted a number stored in her phone as “Jason Melissa.” Prosecutors said Mr. Ortega sometimes used the name Jason.
“Question first,” Ms. Scher wrote.
“Is it the same as it was Sunday? Because that was not good lol, had to get rid of it.” “No new...Batch,” came the reply.
Mr. Rainey appeared on a video camera near her apartment.
“Def better,” Ms. Scher texted about two hours after the delivery.
She counseled a patient online from 8 p.m. to around 9 p.m. that night, according to a calendar on her desk. She sat down on the sofa and turned on the television.
Texts came in from the delivery-service number:
“Hey try not to do too much because it’s really strong”
.
.
This woman apparently regularly does the stuff and knows the good stuff from the bad. She is a discerning enough customer to inquire about a new batch.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 1:23 PM Author: yapping french chef
So what? She probably made more money than you. If someone can keep their job and don’t become a ward of the state or antisocial bum, do all the drugs you like.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 4:58 PM Author: Gold home
The question was, “why are poasters calling these people addicted?”
I pointed out the evidence in the article that one victim was clearly a regular user and was actively seeking out a strong product. She was also a social worker – a career that is famously not lucrative – which implies that her habit constituted a significant monetary expense. These are hallmarks of a problem, not a recreational habit.
I couldn’t care less if people do drugs, regardless of whether they are productive or not. All drugs should be legalized. But drugs are well known to be dangerous substances, especially the entirely unregulated street drugs people are forced to take today. Don’t act surprised when the inevitable happens.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 5:07 PM Author: yapping french chef
I’m no more surprised these days about someone getting a spiked batch of cocaine than any other random terrible thing happening to someone in a country of 300 million. Never my point. But there’s a clear contingent of the mentally ill who fancy that these people deserved it and are taking pleasure in their depths for an activity that I guarantee that most of their own loved ones have dabbled in if not themselves directly.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 5:26 PM Author: Gold home
Yeah, it’s a tragedy, but Schadenfreude has existed forever. This particular instance makes people particularly glib because the victims aren’t particularly sympathetic. A 26yo big law associate who called for open border and gun control revealed to be supporting violent, human rights-abusing drug cartels. A “family man” who lied to his wife about work in order to rent a hotel room a couple blocks away to do cocaine and bang hookers.
The social worker who I quoted above is by far the most sympathetic figure.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 3:38 PM Author: mauve insane menage
i'm sure dipshit junkies back then were drinking pure methanol and dying. it's kind of an analog to dipshit junkies today knowing that every street drug is likely laced with fentanyl and deciding that it's fine to roll the dice anyway because that doesn't happen to "people like us"
Date: October 23rd, 2022 4:03 PM Author: yapping french chef
The gleeful Xo responses to these posts about normal people tragically dying from minor and common vices are always a good reminder that a critical mass of posters here are true malcontent sociopaths who have very sad lives and deserve no respect.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 4:11 PM Author: mauve insane menage
daily consumption of cocaine is not a "minor and common vice" outside of a few city blocks of the country's largest cities
social workers aren't typically known for their ability to distinguish low-quality drugs based on scent and quality of high
also lol at "normal people" as the protective qualifier here. the difference between them and the homeless guy with the tent in the park is that they have money from daddy
Date: October 23rd, 2022 4:30 PM Author: yapping french chef
There’s literally nothing to evidence “daily” use of cocaine for anyone. Lots of young people do cocaine on many if not most weekends. And no they are not getting money from “daddy,” you have a big law associate and a banker here who pays more taxes in one year than your average pumo does in five. Even if they did cocaine daily, so what if they can keep their jobs.
And we all know drug use is actually a much worse problem among ARE country losers in any event.
Date: October 24th, 2022 7:31 AM Author: spruce digit ratio hospital
These people were calling coke dealers on a random Wednesday night and were obviously more into coke than a casual user who partakes from someone else’s bag at a party. The lawyer had bought earlier in the week and the banker got a hotel room for the night and did several bags before he died. They didn’t deserve to die, but Coke is a hard drug and normal people don’t do it. The irony is also that coke makes people so self-centered, arrogant, and unlikable.
Date: October 26th, 2022 7:45 PM Author: racy low-t place of business idiot
we get it, you're a junkie.
i don't take any pleasure in their deaths, but i can't conjure up much more than a shrug when people die while partaking in risky and illegal behaviors for the sake of pure hedonism.
Date: October 23rd, 2022 4:13 PM Author: Crimson boiling water
NEW YORK—Ross Mtangi, a trading executive at Credit Suisse Group AG, left his Manhattan penthouse in March 2021 with his laptop and told his pregnant partner he was going to work.
He checked into a nearby hotel and tuned in to work calls. Later, he texted for cocaine from a drug delivery service. A man wearing a baseball cap, cross-body bag and face mask appeared on hotel surveillance.
Mr. Mtangi, 40 years old, missed a follow up meeting. His sister and her partner found him dead at the hotel the next day. Police found on a table translucent black baggies that contained lethal fentanyl mixed in with the cocaine.
In the East Village, first-year lawyer Julia Ghahramani, 26, texted the same delivery service the same day. She also died. She had just started her career remotely at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP.
Social worker Amanda Scher, 38, did the same. She died in the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her Chihuahua-Corgi rescue dog. It was a stone’s throw from where she had received her master’s degree at New York University.
The three high-achieving New Yorkers had texted the DoorDash-style cocaine delivery service on a late winter Wednesday. They all died from the illicit fentanyl that had been mixed into it.
Fentanyl is a powerful legal opioid, prescribed for cancer patients and others with severe pain. Traffickers have found it is easy and inexpensive to make. The illicit form has spread throughout the illegal drug market, turning up in heroin as well as pills stamped out to look like oxycodone or Adderall and other drugs.
Dealers also cut it into cocaine, a stimulant, to be more potent and addictive, introducing the drug to unsuspecting buyers. A tiny amount of fentanyl can kill unseasoned users.
“Hey try not to do too much because it’s really strong,” read a text sent to Ms. Scher later that night from the delivery number. Ms. Ghahramani missed seven calls from the number.
Sassan Ghahramani, Ms. Ghahramani’s father, said the fentanyl in his daughter’s cocaine was like having cyanide appear in an alcoholic drink during Prohibition.
“Julia was a driven professional with everything to live for. Never in a billion years would she have touched anything with fentanyl,” he said. “This is like putting bullets in people’s brains.”
Mr. Mtangi's graduation photo from Harvard; Ms. Ghahramani's father shows her law degree diploma from Columbia; Ms. Scher's diplomas, playbills, yearbooks and other memorabilia of her life in New York.
MTANGI FAMILY, NATALIE KEYSSAR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)
‘Can u come thru?’
March 17 in New York City is usually festive for St. Patrick’s Day. In 2021, the parade was canceled for a second year and most big company offices were shut. Only around 30% of adults in the city had received at least a first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
In the East Village, Ms. Ghahramani, the litigation associate, was one of millions of young Americans starting their career outside of a workplace. She had graduated virtually from Columbia Law School in May 2020 while her parents snapped photos of her and the screen in their Greenwich, Conn., living room.
The daughter of Iranian-born Mr. Ghahramani, an investment research firm founder, and Lily Ann Marden, a real estate finance executive, Ms. Ghahramani made a vow in high school to somehow change the world. She helped give pro bono legal advice to immigrants and advocated for gun control. She spoke on the steps of City Hall as a main organizer of a “March for Our Lives” attended by 150,000 following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in February 2018.
For much of the pandemic, Ms. Ghahramani retreated to her family’s home to work remotely and spend time with her parents and younger twin siblings.
Ms. Ghahramani's parents Sassan Ghahramani and Lily Ann Marden, and a family photo.
Her final week, Ms. Ghahramani headed back to her Avenue B apartment, saying she had work to do before a family trip the next weekend to celebrate the Persian new year. Ms. Ghahramani told friends and family the workload was intense but that she was loving her first job.
On Wednesday, Ms. Ghahramani sent a text to a phone that prosecutors said belonged to the alleged dispatcher for the drug delivery service, Billy Ortega.
According to his lawyer, Mr. Ortega was a stay-at-home dad in a house in rural New Jersey. According to prosecutors, Mr. Ortega arranged drug deals from the house. He pleaded not guilty to causing the three deaths and distributing drugs and is awaiting trial.
“Can u come thru?,” Ms. Ghahramani wrote.
“I’ll send them right now if you want.”
“That would be great thank you really appreciate it.”
“No worries we family.”
After getting the text, prosecutors said, Mr. Ortega asked a courier, Kaylen Rainey, to handle the day’s deliveries. Mr. Ortega sent him Ms. Ghahramani’s address and instructions to collect $200, prosecutors said, citing texts on their phones.
Prosecutors said Mr. Rainey lived in an apartment registered to Mr. Ortega’s family in public housing in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
The alleged drug courier Kaylen Rainey at Ms. Ghahramani’s apartment building.
PHOTO: NYPD
He and another courier rented Zipcars to deliver drugs to neighborhoods across Manhattan, prosecutors alleged, collecting up to thousands of dollars a stop. Mr. Rainey pleaded not guilty to causing the deaths and distributing drugs and is awaiting trial.
Nine minutes after the texts, according to police and surveillance footage, Mr. Rainey buzzed Ms. Ghahramani’s apartment bell.
Around six hours after the delivery, her phone pinged.
“Hey”
“Hey you there”
Seven calls came in that night and the next morning from the delivery-service number.
Ms. Marden woke that morning in Connecticut knowing something was wrong because she hadn’t heard from her daughter. A friend of Ms. Ghahramani went to the apartment and found her dead, holding her phone. Persian pastries she had ordered for the weekend were in the refrigerator.
“She made a mistake,” Mr. Ghahramani said. “She had a hit of coke and unbeknownst to her it was loaded with fentanyl and it killed her.”
Derailed lives
Cocaine has long had allure in New York City, where in the 1980s it became associated with jet setting clubbers and elite professionals. Usage estimates in the city remain higher than the roughly 2% national rate of Americans taking the drug annually for the past two decades.
The addition of fentanyl into supplies in the past decade has tripled the yearly number of New Yorkers dying. Of 980 cocaine deaths in 2020, 81% involved fentanyl, according to the most recent New York City health department data. The number of people dying from cocaine alone has held steady in the low hundreds.
Drug use overall rose during the pandemic, which derailed work routines and social lives. Fentanyl helped drive total drug fatalities higher. Deaths hit an annual high of 107,521 people in 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up 51% since 2019. Three-quarters of the 2021 deaths involved fentanyl, the CDC said.
Three New Yorkers ordered cocaine from a delivery service on the same day; all died.
NEW JERSEY
Ross Mtangi
(Place of death
and home)
Kaylen Rainey
Alleged drug courier
MANHATTAN
Billy Ortega
Alleged drug
dispatcher
Amanda
Scher
Julia
Ghahramani
NEW YORK CITY
CONN.
N.Y.
N.J.
Area of
detail
1 mile
1 km
Sources: Victims’ families, public records,
prosecutors’ filings
Camille Bressange/The Wall Street Journal
New York City authorities have been warning of the risks of unknowingly taking fentanyl in cocaine and of its increased presence in cocaine seized by police. Health officials put up posters and sent drink coasters to clubs warning cocaine users to start with a small dose and to have naloxone, an opioid reversal drug, on hand to counter an overdose. They are handing out fentanyl testing strips that can be used to test cocaine and other drugs for fentanyl’s presence.
Multiple people died within hours from tainted cocaine in Long Island, N.Y., and in Newport Beach, Calif., last year. Nine were killed in Washington, D.C., in January. Law-enforcement officials said dealers often use coffee grinders or other basic equipment to cut drugs and prepare them for sale, which can result in deadly batches.
New batch
Amanda Scher texted her order just before 5 p.m. that Wednesday. Through the pandemic, she commuted by subway to work with cancer patients at a Bronx hospital network, Montefiore Health System. Early on, she sent a photo to her parents of refrigerated trucks storing Covid victims.
“She didn’t complain about it. That’s what commitment to her profession required,” said her father, Bruce Scher, who with his wife, Fran, raised Ms. Scher and a younger brother on Long Island. Ms. Scher made easy connections and doted on her elderly rescue dog, Ziva, her parents said. One of her friends later said that when Ms. Scher was out walking Ziva, six people would stop to say hello.
Greenwich Village’s streets emptied in the pandemic. Ms. Scher’s roommate left the city. To fight isolation, Ms. Scher started counseling private patients online in the evenings. “Being home alone, I think that got to her,” her father said.
Ms. Scher's parents Bruce and Fran Scher, and a photo of Ms. Scher with her mother at a protest.
On that March day, Ms. Scher texted a number stored in her phone as “Jason Melissa.” Prosecutors said Mr. Ortega sometimes used the name Jason.
“Question first,” Ms. Scher wrote.
“Is it the same as it was Sunday? Because that was not good lol, had to get rid of it.”
“No new…Batch,” came the reply.
Mr. Rainey appeared on a video camera near her apartment.
“Def better,” Ms. Scher texted about two hours after the delivery.
She counseled a patient online from 8 p.m. to around 9 p.m. that night, according to a calendar on her desk. She sat down on the sofa and turned on the television.
Texts came in from the delivery-service number:
“Hey try not to do too much because it’s really strong”
“Hey boss lady you heard”
“Lol”
Three FaceTime audio calls to her phone went unanswered. A text the next morning:
“Hey can you give me a call back I need to ask you something real fast”
Text messages between Ms. Scher and the delivery-service number.
Ms. Scher’s dog walker found her dead on the sofa that day.
Prosecutors said the texts and calls to Ms. Ghahramani and Ms. Scher after the deliveries showed a consciousness of guilt that something was wrong with the drugs.
The day after the deliveries, Mr. Rainey sent Mr. Ortega screenshots of home drug testing kits, and Mr. Ortega switched to a different phone to take drug orders, prosecutors alleged. They said the men continued selling drugs until their arrests.
A lawyer for Mr. Rainey declined to comment; one for Mr. Ortega didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Wall Street success
At his 29th floor penthouse in the East 30s with views across Manhattan, Mr. Mtangi was stressed about work. He had been cooped up at home instead of on the trading floor for most of the pandemic.
Mr. Mtangi’s Irish-Italian American mother, Lauren Lackey, raised him and a younger sister in subsidized housing in East Providence, R.I. His mother had met his father, Stanlake Mtangi, a chemist who was born in Zimbabwe, at a Newport disco in the late 1970s, and Mr. Mtangi became closer to him as an adult.
Credit Suisse’s New York offices, where Mr. Mtangi worked.
Mr. Mtangi went to Harvard University and was drawn to the high stakes of Wall Street. He traded derivatives for JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America, and at Credit Suisse ran a group handling complex trades in company stocks and share indexes.
He was athletic, running 5 miles through Manhattan or biking to visit his sister in Brooklyn. Humor and a cool demeanor powered Mr. Mtangi over social and racial divides, people close to him said. He played pickup basketball on city courts and was nodded in by doormen at exclusive clubs in the Meatpacking District.
The trader’s prowess showed in a roughly $100 million gain Mr. Mtangi and his team made for Bank of America from a brief volatility spike shortly before he left for Credit Suisse, according to former colleagues and a media report at the time.
Impending fatherhood presented a new path. On his 40th birthday, his partner took a photo of him holding a cake, shirtless and tattooed, a view of Manhattan behind him.
On his final week, Mr. Mtangi stuffed his computer in a bag at his apartment and told his partner he was going to the office.
It was Tuesday, and he checked into a hotel down the street and stayed there overnight, texting his partner and other family the next morning to say that he was OK but needed some time alone.
Mr. Mtangi with his mother, Lauren Lackey, and holding baby books ahead of the birth of his child.
MTANGI FAMILY
On Wednesday, Mr. Rainey, the alleged drug courier, appeared on hotel surveillance, stopping to check his phone.
Mr. Mtangi was on a call that evening with his boss, Michael Ebert. He didn’t make a follow-up call later that night.
Mr. Mtangi’s partner called his family the next morning, and separately, Mr. Ebert got in touch with his sister to say he was trying to reach him. The credit card charge at the hotel eventually tracked him down.
Mr. Mtangi’s sister and her partner rushed to the hotel, where he was dead. His son was born three weeks later.