"Any male without a female, you have to go back a block," the security guy said. I was standing in line with a couple dozen kids outside Limelight, having just arrived at the NO ID event two Mondays ago. I’d written up NO ID in my recent "Since When?" column; they’re the biggest 18-plus party promotion company in the nation. They stage alcohol-free events in Manhattan every few months, for underage kids. The people in line were 16, 15, 14. In front of me, a velvet rope was drawn back for those who had brought dates; behind me, stag males milled around on the sidewalk, cursing the venue.

It got to be my turn and I walked into the club with two female friends. We passed the cash registers–$35 a head at this party–and got our tickets free for being members of the press. Then we went through a turnstile and met with the president of NO ID: 18-year-old party promoter Stav Vaisman.

"Come this way, it’s just getting started!" he told me.

Stav was tall and all smiles. We walked through a tight doorway into the main room of Limelight–the refurbished nave of a church. It was filled with dancing kids, in brightly colored glittery fabric, hooting and waving their arms to house music. Looked like a nice party. I pushed up to the stage and started grooving.

A rap act came on: Jadakiss. He had a support guy to his right and some young boys (one was Li’l Bow Wow, I kept thinking, but it wasn’t him) to either side, dancing in oversized basketball jerseys. He plowed through one song and then quickly got offstage, with the crowd roaring. I wrote in my notebook: "looks like people have hell of time."

Then a funny thing happened. The house lights came on. Kids groaned but kept dancing. I saw a cameraman onstage packing his equipment very quickly and mumbling to a security guard as he hurried off. At that point the music stopped.

"Whaaaaat," the crowd seemed to say in unison; some of them were saying "Fuuuuuck" and some just "Awwwww." The girl next to me smacked her lips and started in: "What is this bullshit? They better start that music back up!"

I checked my watch. It was 12:30. The NO ID flier said this party would last until 9 a.m.

"I’m sure it’s just a temporary thing," I told the girl. She had shoulder-length hair and a computer-science-looking boyfriend behind her.

"It better be," she said. "Because I paid 35 dollars for this shit."

A few kids were moving toward the coat-check area. I thought they were idiots–why leave now?–when a guy got onstage with a megaphone: "Sorry, everyone, but due to the activities of the NYPD, this party is being shut down. We can’t help it. The police are shutting it down–"

"What the fuck?" the girl next to me stomped her foot. Groans, curses and laughter erupted from the crowd as everyone began to crush toward the coat check, with timid people being pushed aside, girls holding hands to keep together. I stayed by the stage, thinking it had to be a joke; any minute the music would start up again and the party would continue.

I saw Stav walking with the other reporter covering the event, the one from The New York Observer.

"You should go," he told me. "Go now. The cops are shutting us down. I can’t believe this."

I started chuckling and got in with the crowd. We were all moving downstairs to get our coats, and we were pissed.

"Now see, I just took my hit of E. I just took it!" the guy behind me yelled. "And now I’m leaving? What the fuck? That’s not how it’s supposed to work. It’s supposed to work while I’m in here."

"I could be rolling, I could be tripping, I could have a bag of weed," the girl on my left explained to her friend over and over again. "I could do a lot with that money."

I asked a few kids whom they blamed for the shutdown. The police? The venue? Nas–the rapper who was supposed to appear? Or NO ID, the people who actually ran the party?

"I blame the cops," could-be-rolling, could-be-tripping girl said. "This is bullshit."

"I blame Limelight–this place sucks!" the lip-smacker added.

No one blamed NO ID.

A half-hour later, when I’d gotten my coat and made my way onto the cold sidewalk, I talked to a guy named Mike who frequented these events (he called them "training grounds" for cute girls).

"Well, you can’t expect Nas to show up. I mean, the rapper who has number-one billing on the flier never appears; that’s just the way it works. If you think he’s going to show, you’re an idiot. But usually they’ll put on more than one crappy rapper before shutting the whole thing down."

"Do you think the cops really shut it down?" I asked.

"Yeah, guess so." Mike pointed to the cop van parked in front of Limelight. "Everyone on the second floor in there was tripping balls. I mean, they weren’t searching kids when they came in. So kids were carrying and the cops shut it down."

But there were no police walking around, no police on radios, no police busting kids for ecstasy or acid, no arrests being made, nothing to indicate that anything was happening to Limelight. Just a cop van parked on 6th Ave.

The next day I called the 13th Precinct to see if the NO ID party had indeed been stopped by police. Here’s what I got, from an officer named Patrick:

"Checked our phone records. No one called 911 to report an emergency at that club. Also, checked the radio records. No one is on radio talking about a disturbance at that club. So we didn’t shut it down, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t shut down by an outside authority."

An "outside authority" meant the New York State Liquor Authority or the State Dept. of Health. I called both agencies and they flatly denied any involvement. Limelight itself? The people there claim they didn’t shut down NO ID and they don’t know who did. Vice, narcotics, some sort of special nightlife police force? NYPD headquarters says no.

I tried to get in touch with Stav Vaisman. He had left for Florida for a couple of days and his cellphone was out of service. When he got back to me, this is what he said:

"The cops did shut it down. They just didn’t do it publicly–they went to [NO ID owner] Uriel and quietly told him to stop it. But those cops had to be directed by an outside force, another nightclub owner who is famous for his nefarious ways."

Someone shut the thing down, and someone ended up with a lot of cash from the few thousand kids who paid $35. But from what I gathered outside Limelight that Monday, NO ID’s reputation as a primo party operation remains intact. They’ll be feting more youngsters soon.