CHAPTER 26

Hard Currency

“In the ’90s, with the exception of maybe Bangkok, Moscow was where you saw the most decadent behavior on the face of the earth,” says my friend Brett Forrest, an American correspondent who spent years reporting from Moscow and Kiev. We are discussing how erotic commerce, after 1989, began to corrode certain sectors of society in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc as Communist governments disintegrated, one by one.

“The ’90s,” he insists, “were a particularly dark time for the Russian people, who have a dark history anyway, and who by then had had their instincts repressed since the 1917 revolution. In darker times, people are given over to vice. And vice came on with a vengeance. You’re talking about the A-1 bad behaviors: murder, theft, violence, sexual violence. Total lawlessness. Important officials, as a matter of course, were being gunned down on the street. And when that’s going on, sex ranks far down on the list of social ills. People thought they could get away with anything: ‘You’re telling me I can’t have sex with three fourteen-year-olds?’”

There were rumblings in the 1980s. That’s when glasnost—the cultural and social “openness” campaign introduced by the reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev—had, among other things, brought about a loosening of sexual mores, a public airing of sensually charged topics, and a glamorization of Western-style disinhibition in a land that for generations had suppressed such expression. Films became more risqué and socially provocative. Russians, especially Russian youth, became more sexually adventurous. And, as the business consultant and Slavic studies expert Katherine Avgerinos has described, it became acceptable, among certain peers, given the challenges of day-to-day survival, to accept alcohol or lodging or money for what in less dire times might have been considered “casual sex.”

Soon all bets were off. The Berlin Wall was torn down in November 1989. The Iron Curtain opened. Regimes toppled. In December 1991, the Soviet government was officially dissolved and there was no dominant ideology to replace Communism. Into that vacuum swept a system of economic thuggery. Even as dwellings were privatized and people suddenly owned the apartments they lived in, the bulwarks of the economy (the state-owned industries, such as oil and metals) were sold at auction. “Very often the guys who ran the auctions won the auctions,” explains Forrest, over drinks in Manhattan and then in phone interviews during his travels between Kiev and Istanbul. “It was a dark swindle: state-sponsored theft, all through the ’90s.” And a new class of spectacularly wealthy individuals—the oligarchs—became the central force in a Mafia-style racket with the Kremlin at its pinnacle. “It created a pervading mind-set,” he adds. “‘Okay, anything goes. If these guys are just stealing everything—and these guys are the government—I will too.’ The decadence [that resulted] was fundamentally about exerting one’s power.

“An aspirational attitude sprang up,” Forrest remembers. “The United States is number one, and we want that—all these things that for years we were told were better and we couldn’t have. When Russians finally got the chance to experience Western culture, they largely took the worst parts: conspicuous consumption, the emphasis on the individual, and boundless promiscuity, without recognizing the greater underpinnings of a stable, civil society. All behavior became permissible. You saw an upswing in drug use, partying, wild orgies. Out-and-out sexual excess was the order of the day, and largely still is. People were going after anything and everything, all in the greatest amounts. The ethos was, ‘Push it further and harder, until I fall down.’ And then, ‘Get up from your stupor and do it all over again.’1

“In the ’90s in Russia and Eastern Europe, things were hard on everybody,” he says. “But at times like that, they’re harder on women. Women, barred from professions of longevity, were reduced to relying on more base instincts for short-end money, propelling them into a spiral and perpetuating a system that ultimately worked against them.” Slavic women by the thousands, often sold into sexual servitude under false pretenses, would be smuggled out by gangs in Kiev, Belarus, and Moscow, ending up in brothels from Germany to Turkey, Israel to Japan. By 1998, journalist Michael Specter would write in a New York Times exposé that “as many as 400,000 women under 30 [had left Ukraine] over a ten-year period,” many having become ensnared in the sex trade.

The trafficking was the result of “a perfect confluence of circumstances,” contends Forrest, who has written about the region’s prostitution syndicates. “First, Slavic women are considered by many cultures as being, by and large, exceptionally beautiful. Secondly, in the first dozen post-Soviet years, women outside of the major population centers had zero professional, educational, or economic outlets. So they were readily available and easily preyed upon. Thirdly, there was a market for newly available [young women], which an extraordinarily ruthless syndicate could exploit. These gangsters had superior girls, at a cheaper rate, and they were more violent than the competition. It’s pretty easy to see the profit margins. [To] a Russian guy in this business, a ‘quality’ girl from the Eastern Bloc would cost five times less than other prostitutes who might appeal to discriminating johns in the so-called First World. The business model? Bring these girls over to Belgium, put them up in a slave house, take care of the cops, rotate new girls in every month, and you have clients out the door.”

Tragically, a similar formula was being applied around the globe by networks seeking to meet the needs of the local population—and to satisfy an ever more migratory executive class that, in the global economy, had come to expect five-star amenities.

The world was flush with new capital, new jobs, new economic opportunities2—and new ways to profit from sex.

Excess capital, to be clear, had always been a stalking horse for the carnal. And as the world’s financial health got rosier in the ’90s, there was an expanding market for wanton commodities and services. In the upheaval that followed the collapse of regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the U.S.S.R., democratic initiatives flourished, as did broad-brush capitalism. According to the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, virtually every economy in the world moved to a capitalist system, which eventually made the world awash with money looking for investments.” In China, despite the bloody crackdown on the student-led democracy movement (also in 1989), the nation had already begun its transition to a market economy. Indeed, a new term—“globalization”—came into wide use, denoting how the interdependence of world trade, markets, communications networks, and economic development had begun to exert profound cross-cultural, political, and social shifts across borders and oceans.

So where, in all of this, was erotic commerce? During this period of convulsive economic change, more new methods were devised to profit from illegal sexual practices than at any time in human history.

As mentioned, trafficking was on the rise. Women, often escaping economic hardship, fled overseas from Africa and Asia, from the Balkans and across Eastern Europe. Many would be promised legitimate jobs but then end up forced to become sex workers. The situation in the Pacific had its own dynamic. As a result of the 1980s recession in Japan, followed by the Asian financial crisis of 1997, so many regional women lost traditional means of employment—according to Siddharth Kara, the author of Sex Trafficking, and the Pulitzer Center’s Deena Guzder—there was “a mass migration from the villages of rural Thailand, Burma, Laos and Cambodia into urban centers such as Bangkok and Chiang Mai… [where] destitute migrants were exploited in factories and brothels.”

Ukraine, meanwhile, “replaced Thailand and the Philippines as the epicenter of global business in trafficking women,” Michael Specter would report. “In Milan a week before Christmas, the police broke up a ring that was holding auctions in which women abducted from the countries of the former Soviet Union were put on blocks, partially naked, and sold at an average price of just under $1000.”

It was not just “over there.” U.S. law enforcement agencies, according to the Times’ Nicholas Kristof—who would go on to become a standard-bearer for reporting on sex trafficking—saw an influx of sex workers from Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. The worst spike of all, though, in Kristof’s view, involved the American runaway: “Typically, she’s a 13-year-old girl of color from a troubled home who is on bad terms with her mother. Then her mom’s boyfriend hits on her, and she runs away to the bus station, where the only person on the lookout for girls like her is a pimp.”

During the same period, the phenomenon of sex tourism took insidious root. Tour operators sold foreign “packages” that promised travelers a safe way to pay for sex or to watch sexually explicit performances that were often humiliating and sometimes vile. (“Reducing impoverished women’s sexuality to a spectator sport is inherently degrading,” writes Guzder.) Anthropologist Kathleen Nadeau would find that as American military bases in Asia were decommissioned or cut back, endangering nearby clubs and houses of prostitution, “sex tourism began to be promoted instead… [to the point where] loans offered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as a strategy for economic development [in Thailand and the Philippines]” were in effect supporting sex-holiday destinations. “Young women, gay men, and even children,” Nadeau has noted, “[were] lured by often illicit recruiters to work in the teeming array of brothels, massage parlors, and sex bars that service mainly males from the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Gulf states.”3

Meanwhile, pornographers would push ever farther afield. Czech-born journalist Iva Roze Skoch, who divides her time between New York and Prague, has studied how the Eastern Bloc’s breakup led to a surge in hardcore producers trying to enlist young models, performers, and cinematographers—people who would agree to work for lower wages than their stateside counterparts. Czech culture enjoyed its libertine reputation,4 and porn was not “specifically illegal” under Communist rule, says Skoch. “But the production of it was. Camcorders and good camera [gear] were banned because the government didn’t want people using them on the street to document civil unrest. So after 1989 there was a flood of electronic equipment [from] Austria and Germany. It was just a matter of time before people realized that there would be a huge market for pornography.

“Talk about cultural imperialism,” Skoch remarks. Local and foreign producers and directors set up shop in Eastern Europe “because it was easy to recruit men and because [many] American gay customers like seeing straight men in porn.” Budapest (already a center for cinematic talent) and Prague, Skoch recalls, became hubs for the production of straight and gay porn. In an article she would publish on GlobalPost.com, Skoch wrote about one director who told her he liked to “recruit men who have typically never done porn or had sex with men before and market their inexperience as an asset.… He enjoys filming the first-timers, especially if they don’t really like it. He zooms in on their faces clenched in pain.”

Eros and economics do not necessarily correlate. Recession or depression or political unrest can contribute to an environment ripe for sexual openness, abandon, or decadence. And yet supercharged economies—or societies going through periods of wide income disparity—can be similarly focused on leisure interests that overvalue the erotic. And fin de siècle America was such a society.

For much of the ’80s and ’90s, the so-called New Economy was at a gallop, continuing, off and on, late into 2008. During Bill Clinton’s time in office, “jobs were being created at an unprecedented pace,” economist Joseph Stiglitz would point out in his book The Roaring Nineties. “By April 2000, [unemployment fell] below 4 percent for the first time in three decades.… For the first time in a quarter century, those at the bottom saw their incomes begin to grow, with the greatest ever reduction in welfare rolls (more than 50 percent in six years).” Bill Clinton had been at the controls for the country’s broadest and most bounteous economic expansion in peacetime, and when he exited the Oval in the winter of 2001, America’s ledgers were graced with an estimated budget surplus of $256 billion—projected to expand over the next decade to between $1 and $2 trillion. At the same time, small fortunes accumulated in the hands of a younger, tech-connected elite in ways that echoed the Gilded Age of a century before.

Yet these new riches allowed more people to devote more discretionary funds to leisure pursuits—often sexual (and illegal) pursuits. And such spending was often most visible among newly affluent men, many of whom believed that their wealth had earned them a rightful dominance (sometimes erotically charged dominance) over other human beings.

So-called massage parlors and men’s spas—fronts for sexual favors—spread out from American cities to the suburbs. (They would become ubiquitous in the 2000s.) It was not uncommon for an upstanding fellow to plunk down a modest fee for a late-night, weekend, or after-work “happy ending”—a handjob administered perfunctorily to a prone patron after his full-body massage. “A rub-and-a-tug became an underground sexual phenomenon,” says a friend of mine from the Midwest who sampled these establishments in the period between his two marriages. “There’s a ‘happy ending’ place on every [other] corner in every [major] city. It became socially accepted.”

But the most aboveboard expression of America’s erotic economy was the rise of the strip club. Rebranded as “gentlemen’s clubs,” the establishments—between twenty-five hundred and five thousand of them, coast to coast—experienced exponential growth in the ’80s and ’90s. While the less savory strip joints still operated in smaller towns, metro areas opened spacious upscale clubs that offered nude or seminude dancers. In these nightspots a handful of performers could be found disrobing on a central dance floor; others would do the same on satellite stages; still others would circulate among the customers, dispensing intimate dances, sometimes with “friction” contact.

The women in slinky dresses, the mirrors, the flashing lights and throbbing music—interrupted every now and then by an emcee’s directions (“Orchidea to the main stage”)—gave the enterprise the feel of a forbidden theme park. Adding to the ambiance were clubs with dining areas, ATMs and fax machines, big-screen TVs tuned to sporting events, and bathrooms with attendants in black tie offering baskets of breath mints.

“What topless is doing is replacing disco,” the writer D. Keith Mano told the New York Times in 1992 after the publication of his novel Topless.5 The next year, novelist Carl Hiaasen came out with his own contribution to the genre: Strip Tease, a raucous tale about the lives and crimes inside the Florida strip-club scene. Its most notable passage described how clubgoers would pay top dollar to spar with a topless model in a wrestling tub piled high with creamed corn. To wit: “Erin remained baffled by the success of the nude wrestling exhibitions, which had become a red-hot fad in upscale strip joints. There was nothing erotic about grappling with a topless woman in a vat of cold vegetables, although the sodden realization came too late for most customers.”

Stripper-themed films opened at the neighborhood multiplex. In 1995 came Showgirls, with Elizabeth Berkley, face glitter galore, and cartoonish maxims (“In America, everyone’s a gynecologist”). It was followed by Striptease—based on Hiaasen’s book—with Demi Moore (in lace-up boots and a rhinestone choker) taking it all off, and then taking down a corrupt congressman and his sugar baron chums.

Don Waitt, the publisher of ED, is one of the arbiters of the adult entertainment business. (The leading trade publication for the adult nightclub industry—ED, which launched in 1992, stands for Exotic Dancer, not “erectile dysfunction.”) In Waitt’s view, the ’90s were a turning point. “It’s a long way from the go-go lounges of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s,” he tells me. “The clubs evolved as the culture changed. They [began to] have steak restaurants and valet parking and champagne. We reflect mainstream society more so than the porn industry and video and the Internet. We’re really not porn. We’re real. The Internet changed everything”—meaning that customers had come to expect their sexually charged performances in settings that were up-close, convenient, and quasi-private. And yet, Waitt says, the Web experience was virtual. Exotic dancers, in contrast, smiled and asked you your name. “The clubs have thrived in this period. You actually touch a girl and feel the sweat on her arms.”

Strip clubs were touted as a relatively hygienic way to play out one’s own safe-sex fantasy. But they were also about abundance. And no hassle. And creating the illusion that each and every customer, for that moment, was magically affluent, and actually appealing to the woman passing by. The kinder, gentler, gentrified clubs made the little guy feel at home next to the big spender. With their stages and hidden rooms and tempting choices, they had become topless Target stores: clean and consumer-friendly, stylish and garish. “The ’90s,” says Waitt, were a sort of new erotic dawn when “the asymmetry of supply” met the needs of “the lone, lustful, demanding man.”

The critics, of course, were legion. Such establishments perpetuated sexual stereotypes. They exploited women, many of whom were economically and socially disadvantaged to begin with, and often the victims of abuse. They closed more career paths for dancers than they opened. They brought a criminal element to their neighborhoods. They eroded real estate values. They sent the wrong message within their communities.

But the recriminations did little to dissuade the crowds. At the higher-end clubs, movie, rock, and sports stars became regulars and their visits were chronicled in the local gossip pages, as promoters and owners sought to shine the celebrities’ reflected luster onto a hitherto murky activity. Salesmen and clients, as well as employees who worked in team settings, white-collar or blue, would visit topless bars with colleagues on their lunch hours or at the end of a busy workweek, sometimes charging the tab to their employers.6 Women were frequenting the clubs in greater numbers, often in groups, and sometimes at nightspots that offered nude male dancers. Many recording artists, encountering fewer traditional outlets for their music, were funneling their songs, especially hip-hop tracks, to DJs at gentlemen’s clubs. Some strippers themselves were outspoken in the press (and in a number of memoirs) about how the economics of exotic dancing had handed them the levers of financial and sexual power in their transactions with their clientele.

If there was a banner period when live adult entertainment had arrived, it was the fall of 1991, the season New York City became home to two new megaclubs, both of which became legendary: the soon-infamous Scores and the more-than-a-mouthful Stringfellows Presents Pure Platinum. The latter was operated by a man named Michael J. Peter, who today calls it the era’s most profitable American nightclub, by square foot. “Within three weeks,” Peter recalls, “I’m making $250,000 a week. The money in New York versus everyplace else [was astronomical], especially when you’re catering to Wall Street, which is breaking your doors down. Every day, for every guy that’s lost his ass in the market, there’s somebody that made a killing—celebrating.… We had a waiting line every single night from Wall Street. You couldn’t get in.

“Girls were dancing on a low table—like a cocktail table—and the chairs were around it. The customers would fight over ’em. I remember this one night, this guy saying, ‘Com’ere and dance for me’ to this hot girl. He’s sitting there with his four buddies. He goes, ‘Here’s a hundred dollars.’ The guy next to him goes, ‘Here’s five hundred dollars. Step six inches to the side. Focus on me.’ The next guy goes, ‘Here’s a thousand.’ The next guy goes, ‘Here’s five thousand.’ The next guy goes, ‘Here’s the keys to my Corvette.’ He gave her the car. ‘You’re with me. Screw them.’ That’s how it went.”

It was Peter, in fact, whom many credit with conceiving, or at least shaping and formalizing, the idea of the high-end gentlemen’s club in the United States. A compact former wrestling champ with a deep, oil-drum voice, he tells me the creation tale as we sit in his office in Oakland Park, Florida—a cross between a Burt Reynolds man cave and the gold-lacquered lair of a ’70s record exec. (I spot signed photos of Don Ho—and Rob Lowe.)

In 1975, he says, he had a hotel-and-restaurant-management master’s from Cornell, and was running his first disco, in Orlando. One day he was chastened to see that the parking lot of a local topless dive, the Booby Trap, was always jammed—at three in the afternoon. Curious, he paid a visit. Before entering the place (twin domes with nipples on the top, he recalls), he locked his wallet in his trunk, fearful of being rolled. Once inside, Peter shuddered at the scene, which he could barely make out through the darkness: dancers with tattoos (and one or two with missing teeth), dancers who appeared not to have showered, “table girls” who would sit down next to customers and then wheedle them into buying them drinks. “Every seat was full and it was businessmen, nicely dressed,” he says, shaking his head. “And I said [to myself], ‘These people are in this dump availing themselves of this kind of hustle?’” He wondered, as he took it all in: What if I created my own strip club where the lighting was inviting, the women were “10s,” and the customers were welcomed and made to feel inclined to part with their money?

By the time he’d returned to his car, so he says today, a vision had crystalized. In his club, the dancers would wear evening gowns. The male staffers would sport tuxedos. Soon, he realized, there should be a runway and a stage. He would junk the standard jukebox for a female DJ.

He immediately shut down his disco and built a club from scratch. “I had a dressing room, a makeup artist, a woman who did your hair—and it was required. They couldn’t cuss. They had to have manicures, pedicures. We gave them lessons in how to perform. We talked about eye contact and selling the fantasy. These guys had to believe that they could take you home to Mother.” The format clicked, and he was soon in twenty cities.

Come the mid-’90s, he had opened clubs around the world, under three main banners: Thee DollHouse, Solid Gold, and Pure Platinum.7 Against great opposition from an array of family-values groups, Michael J. Peter had helped perfect the swankier, Boomer-approved gentlemen’s club. And he had managed, in the process, to commandeer a private jet, a yacht, several homes, and a fleet of luxury cars. “I had a $100 million company and ten thousand employees in the early ’90s, at the height,” he says, “before the government started going after me.”⁸ (Peter would be hounded by the Feds and did time for mail fraud. His conviction would be reversed and tossed out in 2002.)

But all that is champagne under the dam. I ask Peter if there was a single moment, looking back, that he cherishes most. He tells me about the time one of his dancers, in the late ’70s, approached him with a request. “I met my fiancé here,” she told him. “We’ve been engaged for two years. I want to get married in your club. You can [spread the word that dancers] are real people, that we fall in love.” Peter came up with a plan. She would get married topless. The justice of the peace would be topless. The wedding party would drive in six topless cars—convertibles. Pure catnip for the local press.

The coup de grâce, he says, would come thirty years later. “I’m going up to my home in Orlando from the airport—in a yellow cab. I have a big set of gates, [with a sign] that says ‘M. J. Peter Estate.’ We pull up to the gates. She sees that sign and turns around. ‘Michael, is that you?’ She says, ‘Do you remember me? You put on my wedding. I want you to know that I’m still married to that gentleman. My daughter has worked in one of your clubs for a number of years. And my granddaughter is getting ready to be old enough to audition. You’re gonna have three generations.”

Ah, the family that strips together.

Gentlemen’s clubs advertised themselves as sites for adult entertainment, implying a passive audience. But many venues pushed the boundaries into active engagement. The lap dance, in which a partly or fully disrobed performer gyrates and then grinds into a seated customer’s groin, had made headlines in 1994 after a Canadian judge declared that the activity was not illegal.9

Meanwhile, many clubs offered “VIP” or “champagne” rooms. These were dark, private sanctums, often separated by a divider or a curtain, in which customers paid large sums, ostensibly for a bottle of bubbly to be consumed in an agreed-upon time period. A fully clothed client—male or female—would sit or recline on a couch or chair. A preselected exotic dancer (or two) would strip, then commence to slither, caress, and body hump. In many such rooms, sex acts were hardly uncommon, though illegal if the client paid for them.¹⁰ “From Sapporo to Zurich,” says a friend who survived dozens of lap dances, “every VIP room in the ’90s had a corner for a handjob and the promise of more. There was lots of ‘wiggle room’ [for sex play]—and lots of wiggle rooms.” And after-hours hookups between performers and patrons, while nominally discouraged, were a convenient way for dancers to make extra cash.

As the Clinton economy continued heading nosebleed north, things got looniest in the big cities. A buddy of mine in finance explains. He takes out a piece of paper one night at the bar in New York’s Algonquin Hotel and sketches out his theory about the impetus behind the boob-club boom in Manhattan and, by extension, the rest of the country. In his view, there was a small stratum at the top of a pyramid: “The Elite.” Its subcategories were “The Private Equity Guys,” “M&As11 and Bankers,” and “The Hedge Funds and the True Money Guys.” At the bottom of the pyramid were regular working-class New Yorkers. But in the middle of the pyramid were the ones who made things tick: the salesmen who relentlessly pursued the wealthiest tier at the top.

My friend continues scribbling: “Bond salesmen, currency salesmen, buyers and traders, currency traders in ‘the pits.’” The crazy money spent at adult entertainment clubs, he theorizes, was fueled by these “guys with tags” around their necks during the day—“the thousands of salesmen from Queens and Staten Island making two to three million dollars a year. The middle of the pyramid is where the bulk of this was happening: the numb-nuts. There were so many firms selling shit, what was the [only] way they get that banker to buy their shit? Coke ’em up and get ’em girls [and write it off as] client entertainment.” As he sees it, “salesmen ordering marked-up bottles of vodka” were the ones who were driving everyone else in New York to go to pricey restaurants, dance clubs, and strip clubs.

Manhattan, of course, was not alone. Many cities vied for the title of the nation’s strip-club mecca: Las Vegas, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, “Sin”-cinnati, and Central and South Florida, especially Tampa (where Joe Redner’s Mons Venus club had given birth to the nude lap dance). But the ’90s metropolis of men’s clubs was Atlanta, a city, as Anne Berryman would report in Time, that was home to over forty strip joints. Conventioneers would flock there—some five and a half million a year—many of them not unaware of the fact that local ordinances allowed what Berryman would call a “rare combination of full nudity and alcohol, a mix of pleasure not offered in many other towns.”

The center of Atlanta’s scene, says a former sports executive who requests anonymity, was a venue called the Gold Club, considered by many connoisseurs to have been lap-dance Valhalla. “The reason it was the über strip club of the time,” he says, “is that Atlanta was the convention capital in the ’90s, before Vegas turned from being family-centric to being its dirty old self.” Every year, the Gold Club (and, to a lesser degree, the nearby Cheetah Lounge) hit max frenzy during the Super Show, run by what was then called the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. My executive source describes it this way: “The SGMA had companies like Nike, Reebok, and Adidas. It had all of the leagues’ representatives. It had athletes. In essence, this was the annual meeting place for the sporting industry in the 1990s. But the nightly meeting place was the Gold Club. Could you imagine a confluence of male salesmen, buyers, jocks, and women [that was] a more combustible situation? There were so many guys raging with testosterone and money in their pockets that the clubs would fly girls in from around the country, just for the Super Show.” (Many pro athletes steered clear, of course. But others came to expect such treatment when they breezed into town for away games, events, or corporate-sponsored functions. My contact remembers finding himself in a closed-off VIP area of a gentlemen’s club in the Midwest. Next to him, he says, was a star quarterback of the day, “now a Pro Football Hall of Famer, and [I was] watching him with his hand, which had disappeared—up to the wrist—in the nether region of a dancer.” He doesn’t recall if it was the QB’s throwing arm.)12

Art Harris, the reporter and TV producer, was based in Atlanta for the Washington Post and CNN during the 1990s. “The Gold Club,” he recalls, “was considered the Taj Mahal. It was also the first time that a Yankee, Steve Kaplan”—who was indicted, though eventually cleared, on charges of paying protection fees to the Gambino family—“had come south and really made an impact in this field. It was brilliant marketing. The idea was to bring in and comp celebrities so the big spenders would follow [and take clients] to hang out at the same strip club and tip the same women who the stars were tipping.… Kaplan knew his demo: upper-crust frat boys, jock-sniffers, super-CEOs, the guys who love to hang out with each other and brag about who they had seen, whether it was Shaq or Mutombo or Rodman or players on other ball teams who came through town.”

And then, in 1999, the jig was up. Kaplan and several cohorts were charged with prostitution, racketeering, fraud, and more. Witnesses spoke of a pattern of handouts given to strippers—at the direction of Gold Club bigwigs—as payment for pleasuring pro athletes right there in the back rooms. (NBA legend Patrick Ewing testified in court to having received a blowjob or two, gratis, while Kaplan allegedly watched.) VIP-room visitors, under oath, told of exorbitant charges that would materialize on their credit card statements. (One sorry customer testified that he’d been stiffed with a $28,000 tab—accumulated over a scant six hours.) Kaplan, while denying most of the accusations, accepted a plea bargain, paying $5 million in fines and spending more than a year in the slammer. The club itself was summarily shuttered.

There was one man who was not about to take all of this lap-dance madness lying down. His name was Rudy Giuliani, and he was the mayor of New York City.

Giuliani—already a successful U.S. attorney and a crimefighting mayor (not to mention a future presidential contender and adviser to Donald Trump)—continued with his plan to power wash the five boroughs. He was periodically up in arms about decadent art exhibits. He helped sanitize (some said “Disney-fy”) Times Square. He cracked down on “quality of life” offenses such as squeegee-wielders who approached cars and forcibly cleaned drivers’ windshields in exchange for pocket change. He sought to thin the ranks of the city’s homeless. (“Streets do not exist in civilized societies,” he proclaimed, “for the purpose of people sleeping there.”) He quashed crime in Gotham, which hit a three-decade low.

Soon the man whom many considered a closet liberal (he was pro-choice, a supporter of domestic partnerships, and, as journalists liked to note, had roomed for a time with a gay couple),13 was choosing to make an example of his city’s XXX establishments. Sex business, said Giuliani, “destroys the character of the city.” The city council rewrote the zoning laws in an attempt to push out strip clubs, porn stores, and peep parlors by forbidding them to operate around schools, daycare centers, or places of worship, or in largely residential areas. When proprietors fought back in court, the city cooked up its “60/40” provision. Under the decree, businesses would be padlocked and shut down if 40 percent or more of their operations or inventory were explicitly sexual in nature.

It was a war of attrition. Randy Mastro, the deputy mayor for operations, appeared at a press conference armed with a baseball bat, announcing that his enforcers would fan out across the city to check on compliance: “This is the last dance for sex shops.” In response, porn store clerks reshelved their inventory and strip club owners had their performers don bikinis. Next, Giuliani would encourage law-abiding citizens to take out their cameras and photograph patrons going into triple-X hangouts. Striking back, near-naked protestors marched; civil liberties lawyers filed countless motions; New York’s VIP Club, to get around the new rules, converted some of its space to what was touted as “the world’s first nude sushi restaurant.” Back and forth they volleyed.

In other cities, local laws were comparably baroque. As of 1997, for example, it was forbidden to lap dance in Houston (a) while topless, (b) while closer than three feet to the said recipient’s lap, or (c) under illumination greater than “one footcandle as measured at four feet above floor level.” Many clubs and dancers found legal loopholes. New York City forced the closure of a spate of playpens. But for the most part the DJ played on.

Sunny Mindel, Giuliani’s press secretary in the late ’90s and into the next decade, agrees to have lunch with me at Aretsky’s Patroon, in midtown. She explains some of the reasoning behind the crackdown. “Porn shops reduce real estate values,” she suggests. “They are not a land-enhancement program. Even in neighborhoods where you might think they were welcome—the Village—people weren’t 100 percent in love with having them around.”

But it wasn’t really about real estate values. It was about values. “He worked on enforcement,” Mindel says. “New York was cleaner and more livable. Most people would say that this was a good thing.… In Manhattan it was very easy to take a very narrow view. You had people like [columnist] Jimmy Breslin saying that [Giuliani] had ruined the cultural fabric of Times Square—ruined it.… Talk about ‘defining deviancy down.’14 At one point, back in the ’90s, people had ceded their city to the point that they had put those ‘No Radio’ signs on their cars’ [dashboards to dissuade people from breaking in]. It was a sense of a loss of the city, ‘We are no longer in control.’ And certainly Times Square became emblematic of that.”

New York City, however, as Mindel points out, “is a lot more than Manhattan. It’s a very narrow view to think that any of this [crackdown on porn] was a bad thing. Once a month for eight years [the mayor] held ‘town hall’ meetings. Ninety-six, all over the city. Wherever we went we heard the same issue: We’d like more police. They’re selling drugs on my block. That porn shop—when is that going to go away? It’s what New Yorkers wanted.… [The mayor] got to the point, I think, where he thought, ‘This is crazy. How low can you set the bar? What are we talking about, Divine Comedy? “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here?”’”¹⁵

Giuliani had his way for a time. But in the end, it was the owners of strip clubs and porn stores—and the civil libertarians—whose rights eventually outflanked those asserted by elected officials, civic leaders, and municipalities. Erotic commerce prevailed. And the banners of free speech and safe sex would fly, unmolested, above Lapland.