What sort of man runs a strip joint and finds himself in this sort of mess?
RAYMOND Bertram Bartlett is a big man but, as that other Raymond (Chandler, that is) once wrote about another colorful character, he’s ‘no taller than a two-storey building and no wider than a beer truck.’
Raymond Bartlett’s office matches the man himself. It covers most of the upstairs floor of a renovated warehouse and has enough room to park a beer truck. If it’s not the biggest office in Melbourne, it runs a close second.
Here, surrounded by a bank of closed circuit television screens, a hidden tape recorder and an intercom, Bartlett is master of his chosen business.
That business is running the sort of place God-fearing people used to call ‘a den of iniquity’ and is vulgarly known as a strip joint: a place that stays open until dawn where men drink and pay young women to shed flimsy costumes and dance naked.
But that all happens below decks, where the money changes hands. Up here, where it’s counted, the office has been set up to look like someone’s guess at how the library of a gentleman’s club might be. Sort of.
The oval antique boardroom table is big enough for a Little League football team to play on, with a heavy soda siphon where the centre square would be.
The walls are lined with french-polished bookcases loaded with Encyclopedia and other heavy-duty examples of the bookbinder’s craft, all in mint condition.
The desk is as big as the man behind it, its shiny surface as spotlessly tidy as everything else is in a place that would put some hospitals and most offices to shame. Some might say the business is sordid, but no-one can say it’s grubby.
Bartlett is the proprietor of what is, after a recent court case, probably one of Australia’s best-known tabletop dancing establishments. It is called Goldfingers and it’s the sort of place where, you might think, illegal drugs would be easily obtained and often used, probably in conjunction with prostitution.
Not so, says Bartlett. The Olympics might have a drug problem but Melbourne’s tabletop dancing venues do not, he insists. Nor do they condone any sexual contact on their premises. At least, his doesn’t, and he’s proud of it.
The fact is, there’s a practical reason for such strictness, he says. If anyone is caught offering sex for sale or dealing in drugs Goldfingers stands to lose a licence to print money … its liquor licence.
But, for the thousands of ordinary citizens who go past such places and wonder what goes on inside, it might come as a surprise to hear the big man’s solemn opposition to drugs and sex for sale.
This is just one of the surprising things about the former truckie who has become, by default, the public face of what is formally known as the ‘sexually explicit entertainment’ industry in Melbourne. Another surprise is that he doesn’t emerge as the violent ‘pimp’ figure many might have assumed he was after he was charged with assaulting one of his dancers. The case, which took more than two years to get to trial, ended in the county court in early 2000. He was fined $1000 – but had no conviction recorded against him.
For a man of his means, a $1000 fine seems little more than token punishment for a technical breach of the law. As he sees it, it’s vindication: proof that a judge and jury believed his version of events above that of the dancer who made allegations against him after an ugly scene in his club in late 1997.
Monique Meenks, then nineteen, had just started work at the club, which is housed in an extension of the historic Kilkenny Hotel on the corner of King and Lonsdale Streets in the city.
The prim Edwardian surrounds of the Kilkenny’s corner bar and dining room contrasts sharply with the dimly-lit luxury of Goldfingers, built in a converted store next door.
It was in here, shortly before midnight on 11 November, 1997, that there was a confrontation between the nightclub boss and the dancer that was to hit the headlines. About the only point both parties agree on is that Meenks had no idea that the 51-year-old man with the gold-rimmed glasses, the Falstaff figure and the cowboy boots, was her boss.
‘He was just another dollar bill walking around the club,’ she was to tell a court much later. Make that a fifty dollar bill, which was what Bartlett slipped her to dance for him – a deliberate overpayment, he was to say later, to test whether the new girl was breaking the rules by offering sexual favours, or trying to charge patrons more than the standard rate of ten dollars a song.
What happened next is still in dispute, although the jury made up its mind. Monique Meenks was to testify that Bartlett was drunk and that he groped her, then kicked her and spat on her. Bartlett was to deny this vehemently, insisting he had been forced to restrain the dancer by pinning her down when she had gone berserk, screaming and kicking him after he had accused her of trying to ‘rip off patrons, one of whom had complained earlier.
There was medical evidence – the dancer had bruises behind the knees and had sore ribs – injuries in keeping with Mr Bartlett’s version of events, the court was to hear later.
After being removed from the club and put in a taxi by security staff, the dancer went to the police. Her injuries were not serious enough for police to send her to a police surgeon for assessment. Instead, she went to a private doctor, who confirmed the sore ribs and bruises. The injuries did not prevent her dancing next night – and ever since – at the nearby Men’s Gallery, Goldfingers’ closest competition.
Police didn’t interview Raymond Bartlett until a fortnight later. In that interview, taped and later played in court, he stated firmly that he didn’t need a lawyer, he answered every question in detail and he never wavered from his story. And the jury of six women and six men, mostly middle-aged, appeared to agree largely with the defence portrayal of Meenks as an opportunist out for a cash settlement.
Which, of course, poses a parallel question: what sort of a man runs a strip joint and finds himself in this sort of mess? An opportunist out for cash, a cynic might say.
In the 1960s James Bond film, Goldfinger is a stock villain in the Teutonic mould – all buttoned-up menace, fake accent and Nazi war criminal overtones, worthy inspiration for an Austin Powers satire. Raymond Bartlett is also a creature of the 1960s, but Goldfinger he isn’t, bar a larger-than-life aura that comes with being a self-made millionaire whose belt buckle comes in the door a couple of seconds before he does.
The blue singlet was long ago replaced by the (open-necked) business shirt, but there’s still a lot of truck in the man whose ‘university’ was driving interstate rigs. And he can talk like the insurance salesman he was until he took on the hotel game.
The language is salty, the accent as broad as his shoulders, there’s a tattoo on his bicep and a temptation to say the two heavy gold rings he wears would pack a punch in a truckstop blue. But he’s more businessman than bruiser – always was. It’s true he left Prahran Tech at fourteen years old, but his father owned a bolt factory in Richmond and the young Bartlett grew up in the relative comfort of Armadale. But it didn’t stop him wanting to drive trucks.
Much to his father’s disgust, he worked in a service station and a factory for a while, then went to Adelaide when he turned sixteen so he could get a driver’s licence two years early.
He got the licence, then a job delivering cakes in a truck. At eighteen, he returned to Melbourne, inherited enough from his grandmother to buy a car, then sold it and bought his own truck – ‘an old International 180 semi-trailer’ – for five thousand dollars.
It was 1966. The truck was slow and Bartlett had never driven beyond the tram tracks. He went to a transport depot in Footscray and lied about his interstate driving experience. He got the job – and took twenty-four hours to drive to Sydney.
‘I was so tired I had a sleep at Seymour, the truck was so slow it would go backwards as soon as it saw a hill, and I was so nervous I stopped before I went down them. At Wodonga, I stopped at the Caltex roadhouse and asked how far Sydney was, and the waitress laughed and said I was only half way.’
After fifteen years at the wheel, he owned three trucks and employed two drivers, but he was no transport tycoon. Even then, he says, he hated drugs – refusing to take the ‘pep pills’ that others did to handle the endless hours on the road.
But he was articulate, and a shrewd negotiator. He became president of the Australian Transport Association and was a key figure – with the colorful Ted ‘Greendog’ Stevens – in setting up an interstate truck blockade in April 1979 to protest against the road tax that crippled owner-drivers.
The blockade took Bartlett on a week of living dangerously during which he flew from highway blockades to Parliament House by helicopter to negotiate a settlement with the then Premier, Rupert Hamer.
In one tense scene, he stood beside then Transport Minister, Rob Maclellan, in a Dynon Road truck depot and stared down a threat by angry fruit and vegetable market identities to blow up the place with high explosive if the trucks didn’t roll. ‘Maclellan’s not a bad bloke,’ he says warmly of a most unlikely ally, the refined Melbourne Grammar old boy and longtime Liberal politician.
As he reminisces, the big man slides a scrapbook across the desk. In it is every press clipping – and the original letter of agreement drafted and signed by the exasperated Premier after eight hours of argument.
The blockade was lifted, and road tax was repealed in every state. Soon after, Raymond Bartlett switched from driving trucks to insuring them, and got rich.
Along the way, in the early 1980s, he took a share in a Gold Coast nightclub and restaurant called Eliza’s. It was the start of his involvement with hotels. He borrowed $2 million to take over the Toorak Hotel – the famous ‘Tok H’ – in 1985, and borrowed twice that for the Sentimental Bloke hotel in Bulleen. He also took over Silvers nightclub in Toorak, then the Hampton Hotel.
What he doesn’t add, but others do, is that while at the Tok H, he donated use of the hotel to the police for a day to raise money for the families of Damien Eyre and Steve Tynan, the two young constables murdered in Walsh Street, South Yarra. Around three thousand police arrived and raised $53,000.
He sold all his hotel interests in 1991, and took a year off before taking over a big hotel in Dandenong for four years.
‘It was like running a war zone,’ he grimaces, and it made him want a quiet, respectable city hotel for a change. Enter the Kilkenny, which in late 1996 had been empty for months.
In theory, it would be a classy late-night venue for Crown Casino staff after they finished work. In practice, King Street’s nightclub image meant a conventional pub wouldn’t work. After losing money for months, the new publican on the block knew he had to compete with the Men’s Gallery and Bar 20 with strippers, or go out of business. Sex sells.
He enlisted Annette White, who runs the Miss Nude Australia contest, to organise the entertainment. Ms White and Helen Farrell, the club’s general manager, recruited the dancers, and still handle the day-to-day running of the club. No men are involved in recruiting or managing the ‘girls’, he says.
‘Any chick with half a brain can make it into a good business,’ he enthuses.
‘Of course, you get your scallywags, hence the vetting procedures. We don’t want junkies. We don’t want young kids just walking in off the street saying they want to be strippers. They’ve got to be eighteen, and we want contact numbers for next of kin to check that their parents know what they’re doing. We do proper ID checks and we ask about drugs, and if they are professional dancers we get a reference from other clubs.
’The general public would assume we’re exploiting the girls. The truth is we’re their accountants, drug counsellors and their psychologists. ‘Middle-class Australia would have no idea how it really is … it could be their own daughters working here. There are five thousand dancers in Australia and thousands around the world.
‘Most of them (Melbourne dancers) live in South Yarra, not shit suburbs, and they live well. I’ve got one here who’s training to be a doctor, and another that speaks five languages. There’s some brainy sheilas here.’
As he talks, the first shift of dancers files past the open office door from their dressing room – in their case, the undressing room – where they change from street clothes into very little. They wave and smile brightly and chorus ‘Hi Ray’ as they descend to where money waits to be made below.
Providing, of course, they stick to the ground rules for sanitising a dirty business: no touching by patrons, nothing closer than thirty centimetres to face or groin, one foot to be touching the floor at all times.
One young woman, wearing bleached blonde hair and a zebra-striped outfit, wiggles into the office pointing to a picture spread in a women’s magazine and chirping ‘I’m famous.’
She’s nineteen, looks younger, and is excited about the publicity, though not about the magazine’s statement that she earns $2000 a week. ‘I just said some dancers can make up to that much,’ she pouts.
The image the club wants, Bartlett says earnestly, is the ‘girl next door’. Upmarket, he says, not sleazy. ‘No sex,’ he says firmly. ‘We don’t want to step on the brothel toes. You’ve got the (brothels) Top of the Town, and the Boardroom – they’re all there.’ The message is that the brothels don’t serve alcohol, and Goldfingers and other tabletop venues don’t serve sex.
That way, everyone gets a fair share of the sex industry dollar. It’s called orderly marketing.
There’s a risk, he concedes, that if strippers are desperate for more money than they get from dancing, they might be tempted to offer sex. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate that the main motive for wanting extra money would be a drug habit.
That’s why the clubs don’t like hiring drug users, and why dancers with bruises from injecting themselves are ‘counselled’. As in, if you’re bruised, you don’t work.
He produces another exhibit from his files: a heartwarming before and after picture story of a pretty teenager whom the good folks at Goldfingers helped kick heroin addiction.
Time for delicate questions. What about the underworld?
Bartlett talks about the ‘Melbourne Safe City Accord’, a committee chaired by a senior policeman to hose down potential trouble spots. The bottom line, he says, is that Melbourne’s different.
Try to open a strip club in Brisbane and you’d get your legs shot off, he says. Sydney – you wouldn’t even try because it’s sewn up. In Perth, they’d kill you. Adelaide? Touch and go. Only in Melbourne is the ‘industry’ controlled so well, he says. No sir, there’s no crooks in tabletop dancing here.
On the computer screen next to him the screen-saver flickers past. It is not, as one might imagine, soft porn images of the sort being enacted in the flesh below. The pictures on the screen are of athletic young women, but they are tennis players, with their clothes on. No doubt it makes a change from work.
One more question. Did the assault charges affect you?
‘Look,’ he sighs, ‘that case cost the taxpayers probably $100,000 when it should have been solved in five minutes. I reckon it was only taken to court because it was me, because it was the sex industry. Now I go to joints and people who don’t know me say: ‘Aw, be careful of him, or he’ll have you offed.’ It’s fantasy. If I was such a big, bad crim what do you reckon would have happened to that Monique?’
One effect, he says, is that he’s now wary of being set up. He points to the closed circuit video monitors and opens a cupboard door to reveal sophisticated tape-recording gear.
And the club? Did the court case keep people away? ‘Nah,’ he grins, ‘the takings went up the week I was charged. Good publicity.’