Rave Promoter Was Buying Desert Site

Apparently Stanley Edward McCullum couldn’t wait for escrow to close on the 28 acres of scrub land he was buying near Lake Los Angeles.

He was already planning a party.

Actually, he was planning a huge rave with as many as 20,000 guests and big-name deejays, according to B3Cande Productions, which was organizing the festivities.

The property’s sellers, Dorothy Powelson, 84, and her son Robert, were alerted last weekend by sheriff’s deputies that the desolate property the family had owned since the 1960s apparently was being groomed for the rave.

On Thursday, deputies arrested McCullum, 42, on suspicion of grading and irrigating property he didn’t own, Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Harbeson said.

McCullum, of Quartz Hill, is in the process of buying the Powelson land, but escrow has not closed, Harbeson said.

Robert Powelson, 59, said that when his mother learned about McCullum’s plan, she didn’t know what a rave was. He tried a simple explanation: “Kids, lots of music and lots of drugs.”

“She totally panicked. The thinking of an 84-year-old is, ‘If there’s drugs, there are guns.’ She didn’t want me going up there.”

The party would have been the fourth installment of what B3Cande calls Jujubeats--a nationally known rave that has been held yearly in remote locations around Southern California.

On the Huntington Beach-based company’s promotional Web site, a medallion-wearing bee invites visitors to read about the Aug. 18 Antelope Valley party that was to feature four separate dance rooms and famous deejays.

The Web site also accepted orders for a promotional CD of the throbbing music and listed record stores from San Diego to San Francisco selling tickets for about $30 to this year’s rave.

Brian Alper, one of the B3Cande founders, said his company met McCullum only recently and decided to hold the next rave on the property he was buying.

Alper said he believes someone tipped off authorities in order to prevent the rave.

“Something was pulled over on us,” said the 27-year-old Huntington Beach resident. “We’re giving everybody their money back and moving on to other shows.” The company also posted a notice on its Web site about the cancellation.

In recent years, the mass parties have drawn public criticism because a number of young people have been treated for drug overdoses and some have died.

At a 1999 Jujubeats event in Angeles National Forest, five teenagers with drugs in their systems died when their car plunged down a mountain.

Paramedics at the mountainside event, attended by 5,000, also treated three others for overdoses. Other Jujubeats raves have been held at Lake Perris in Riverside County and Santa’s Village in the San Bernardino Mountains.

The attraction of these mass parties, as explained by former rave fan Justin Reynolds, was the music and “the adrenaline rush from the energy of the sound waves.”

For the price of a nice dinner, he said he could spend hours listening to internationally famous deejays from as far away as London. But, in the past five years the scene has changed, said the professional skateboarder.

“It’s basically chaos of underage kids staying out all night and doing Ecstasy,” the illegal, but easily obtained drug that’s growing in popularity with young people. “You see kids from 13 to 25 . . . little kids giving massages and inhaling Vicks VapoRub to enhance their high.”

The Powelsons said when McCullum offered last month to buy the property, “everything seemed legitimate.” They went into escrow, and when they asked him what he planned to do with the property, he said he was going to build some hotels and turn it into a park.

But, even before the deal closed, McCullum dubbed the parcel “McCullum Park” and advertised the desert patch as a picturesque Alpine Village nestled among trees and a bubbling brook--the perfect place for Jujubeats 2001.

He finally attracted the attention of local authorities, who were tipped off about all the water being trucked to the site. Authorities notified Robert Powelson, who, along with a dozen sheriff’s deputies in a half-dozen police cars, headed for the remote location about 30 miles from Palmdale.

When they arrived, it looked as if someone was setting up a circus in the middle of nowhere. Workers were operating a grader, a bulldozer, a front-end loader and three water trucks, clearing the land. There was even a motor home, Powelson said.

Workers “were startled, to say the least,” and quickly began clearing out, Powelson said. “When I met [one of the organizers] it was like, ‘I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout nothin’ . . . I’m just promoting.”

As news spread Friday that the event had been shut down, organizers were scrambling to tell ticket sellers to return customers’ money.

Jason Bentley, host of the music show “Metropolis” on KCRW-FM (89.9), was to be one of the featured deejays. “They were really trying to create a paradise,” he said, “. . . a place where young people can come together in diversity and music . . . a utopian world of one night of music and dance.”

Despite assurances from organizers that the rave has been canceled, authorities are taking no chances with the possibility of thousands of young people descending on the Antelope Valley. Deputies are preparing tactical operations in case an alternative site is advertised there at the last minute, Harbeson said.