SnapGlow.TV: Modern Gems Galore! KIDNAPPED AND robbed by drug dealers in 2004, party planner Rian Thal turned mum after her release, refusing to identify her captors.
The 34-year-old blonde's silence spurred her rise "from hanger-on to one of the players," a law-enforcement source said.
She became a "big-time drug dealer," supplying heavy quantities of her specialty, powder cocaine, to other dealers, and at least once sold Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer known as "Special K," another source said.
The revelations about her secret life emerged yesterday during Daily News interviews with law-enforcement and other sources familiar with her drug dealing and other activities.
Homicide Capt. James Clark released surveillance videos of the well-orchestrated murders of Thal and Timothy Gilmore, a Detroit firefighter who was on disability, outside her seventh-floor apartment in the trendy Piazza at Schmidts in Northern Liberties on Saturday.
Now, "some of her customers are suspects in setting up her death," a law-enforcement source said.
Listening to the fatal gunshots from inside her apartment was Gilmore's unidentified friend,who came from Canal Winchester, Ohio, where Gilmore lived.
After waiting for an extended silence, the friend calmly stepped over the bodies to escape, just as the killers had done only minutes earlier, police sources said.
Gilmore's friend was being sought by police.
Clark narrated the action in the surveillance video, which started about 5 p.m. Saturday and ran 15 to 20 minutes.
The first gunman - a medium-built black man in a white T-shirt, jeans and dark baseball cap - followed a woman into the lobby of the Navona apartment building - one of three in the complex - and then into an elevator.
Clark said the man got off on the second floor, walked around briefly, and then returned to the lobby to let in two other gunmen - a heavyset black man in a long white T-shirt, and a tall, thin black man in an orange polo shirt. Both men also wore dark baseball caps.
The three men climbed the stairs to the seventh floor, where Thal's apartment was. They were soon joined by a fourth black man, who wore light-colored shorts and a T-shirt.
"He's not a shooter," Clark said. "He's the lookout."
Two of the men then hid in the seventh-floor stairwell. One staked out a spot near Thal's apartment. The fourth man went to the sixth floor and yelled up the staircase to alert his cohorts when Thal and Gilmore were on their way.
Thal and Gilmore stepped out of the elevator on the seventh floor, walked a few steps and stopped suddenly.
"You notice they're looking behind them. They almost seem to think something may be up," Clark said.
The footage shows Thal and Gilmore walk near the door to the staircase - where two of the gunmen were lying in wait - look out a window, then head toward Thal's apartment.
Clark said Thal and Gilmore were then surrounded by the three gunmen. "Some words were exchanged, and at that point, she was shot and killed."
Gilmore was shot several times and died near the elevator, he added.
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