Man Among Boobs
“How does her ability to be truthful get affected by whether or not she danced in her underwear?”
Strippergate was far from over, however. An ethics commission review continued, and county prosecutor Norm Maleng was studying the campaign contributions for possible felony violations. Frank Colacurcio was also dealing with the death of his sister Frances Schmitz, sixty-eight, who was fatally burned in a natural gas explosion at her Bellevue home in September 2004—the gas company would eventually pay $8 million to Frances’s family to settle a lawsuit over a corroded pipe. And Frank had a new criminal case on his hands. He’d been charged in municipal court with groping one of Rick’s waitresses.
The waitress, Lauren Luttrell, twenty-three, claimed she was pressured by Rick’s managers to dance in her underwear and had altogether refused demands to dance topless or nude, therein putting her waitressing job at risk. She was also sexually assaulted by a customer, she claims, but management took no corrective action. Then, on the day after New Year’s 2004, she said, she was sexually propositioned and assaulted by old man Frank, who offered her money in exchange for sex. He also “grabbed her breast and rubbed her nipple” and had “on numerous occasions in the past sexually harassed female employees,” she said.
The aging Frank—who wore a hearing aid for Luttrell’s testimony—argued through his attorney that her claims were suspect because she was experienced in the field of sin. She had taken human sexuality courses in college and had, after all, danced in bra and panties. It was a sort of she-wanted-it defense. To that, Assistant City Attorney Derek Smith responded: “How does her ability to be truthful get affected by whether or not she danced in her underwear? It cannot be, any more than Tom Cruise could be impeached with his Risky Business dance if he was the victim of an assault.” As for the college courses, Smith added, “So what? How does the existence of this fact make the assault less likely? Does it impeach the victim’s credibility? Does it show that the victim is biased? Worked at a law firm in college? That the victim read the book Disclosure by Michael Crichton? How is that offer of proof relevant to the charge of assault?”
The name-dropping seemed to help: Frank was convicted of misdemeanor assault.
He quickly filed an appeal, and Luttrell then filed a civil suit in superior court, seeking damages from Frank and Frankie and their hiring agency, Talents West. Frank almost welcomed Luttrell’s suit. The then-eighty-seven-year-old godfather of nude dancing maintained during the municipal court trial that the ex-waitress had set him up, pursuing criminal and human-rights complaints just so she could eventually lodge a civil lawsuit and seek damages. In part because that scenario was merely theoretical, the city court excluded some evidence and testimony that might have helped Frank defend himself. With the civil claim, Luttrell might have helped him make his case for a new criminal trial.
Frank’s attorney Gil Levy, in an appeal of the city conviction, wrote in court papers that “the defense theory of the [criminal] case was that the complaining witness falsely accused Mr. Colacurcio of sexual assault in order to get money from him in a civil lawsuit.” The trial court would not allow Frank to introduce such supporting evidence as his claim that Luttrell socialized with him and accepted monetary gifts and “never once” complained to managers about his conduct. Attorney Smith said that, throughout the criminal case, “Gil did argue that she was just doing this for the money a civil case would bring, and it didn’t seem to have any impact on the jury’s verdict. I don’t see how the fact that she did file a civil case now changes anything.”
The elderly stripper king—who likely never thought he’d live long enough to see a sexual harassment claim filed by a strip-club worker—received a stay in his sentence during the appeal. He was facing ninety days of home detention for the assault on Luttrell and—what is thought to pain Colacurcio the most—was banned from Rick’s nudie club for two years. Levy said his client considered that penalty “draconian.”
Frank quietly settled the lawsuit with Luttrell, however, and though he got a new assault trial, he was convicted again and given a lighter sentence, six months’ probation. The city attorney agreed to the lesser term, he said, due to Frank’s poor health.
Not that everyone thought he deserved mercy. Quietly moving along in the background then was a new federal investigation. Or maybe a continuation of the probe dating to the seventies, when the feds realized the best way to get Frank was to follow his money. Indeed, they were doing that. Investigators tailed Frank’s associate and money-delivery man, Gil Conte, who was being paid $50,000 a year to oversee Sugar’s and also drive to the clubs, pick up cash and receipts, then drive to the Talents West office, and later, to an apartment rented in his name about two miles away. Investigators set up video cameras to watch the apartment and tagged along on other occasions. As an investigator recounted:
On July 20, 2004, Conte exited the apartment building carrying a medium-sized package. He placed the package in the trunk of his black 2001 Lincoln Town Car, bearing Washington State license plate 795-XPJ, and then reentered the apartment building. Approximately one minute later, Conte walked out of the building and drove away in the Town Car.
Frank may not have known, but surely suspected, he was being watched, as usual. Now and then, he dropped hints during phone calls recorded by the feds that “they” were likely out there trying to make a big crime out of a little sin. But by then, Frank had other things to worry about, and, with Frankie, another trial to go to.