Inside the Dead Girl's Wild Nightclub

One month after rich suburban girl-turned-drug-trafficker Rian Thal was murdered in her luxury apartment building, Jeff Deeney goes inside Plush, the Philly hip-hop club where she was a rising star.

It’s midnight and I’m standing in line outside of Plush, the Philadelphia hip-hop nightclub where Rian Thal worked before she was shot dead last month in the stairwell of her luxury apartment building.

The line, comprised entirely of young black men and women, is stared down by bulky private security officers in black SWAT-style uniforms, prominent handguns and billy clubs holstered at their hips. One of the hard-faced officers explains that the security here is provided mostly by off-duty cops and correctional officers. Usually there’s also a police car or two parked directly in front, but not tonight.

The same way a black kid at a rich white prep school can become a star because he looks different, so too could Thal coast upward on her head-turning “who’s that?” celebrity.

It’s nearly impossible to believe, but before she was murdered, this was the territory of Rian Thal, a young blonde with a slight frame and pixie smile who grew up in a wealthy suburb a world away from this nightspot. When police found Thal’s body on June 27, they also found four kilos of cocaine and $100,000 in her apartment, to the astonishment of many who knew her. Last week, police charged 40-year-old drug dealer Will “Pooh” Hook with orchestrating Thal’s murder.

Rian Thal in an undated photo. The case, still unfolding, becomes more cryptic by the day, partly because of the wildly varying reports of who Thal really was—everyone you ask seems to think she was somebody different.

Ask the police, and they’ll tell you she was a big-time drug trafficker who was neck deep in the game for years before finally getting in over her head. Ask her friends and work associates, and they’ll swear up and down she was a self-made mogul whose honest work ethic helped her rise through the ranks of the entertainment world, from bartender to trendsetting socialite.

Her parents knew her as their popular daughter who had attended a good Jewish private school in the wealthy Philadelphia suburb where they lived. And years later, a judge would meet her as the young woman who complained that her house-arrest ankle monitor, earned after a drug possession charge, was interfering with her work at a gentlemen’s club.

But perhaps the answer to the question of who Thal really was at the end of her tragically short life is known best to a group of people who aren’t talking: the clubgoers of the Philly hip-hop scene. For these people, in the gray space where the entertainment world and the drug world intersect, the life of Rian Thal is a closely guarded secret when outsiders like this reporter come nosing around for clues.

Plush Nightclub, which Thal promoted for, is not what one would call upscale. It does not recall the lush imagery of MTV rap videos, where elite profilers sip Champagne and whisper sweet nothings to supermodels while money rains down from above. The crowd at Plush tonight is rough around the edges; there are a lot of tattoos signifying corner-drug-crew affiliations, low-drawn, flat-brimmed baseball caps, and oversize undershirts. And just maybe, that’s the reason Rian Thal was brought on board—her RiGirl Productions party-planning company was known for attracting the cream of the entertainment crop to unlikely places.