April 29, 2025 • 46 mins
In this episode, we dive into the infamous Gold Club, Atlanta's premiere strip club in the 1990s. It’s the story of some of the most beautiful and clever women in the world, and the men who manipulated them to become accomplices in wide scale, mafia-funded fraud.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Mary Kay McBrayer
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth, and Jacob Bronstein
Associate Producer is Leo Culp
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman and Emma DeMuth
Special thanks to:
Carter, Stephen L.. Invisible. Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Pre-order Mary Kay's forthcoming true crime book 'Madame Queen: The The Life and Crimes of Harlem’s Underground Racketeer, Stephanie St. Clair' here
Check out 'Investigating America's Most Notorious Strip Club: The FBI, The Gold Club, and The Mafia' by Mark Sewell at Rowman and Littlefield
Dive into the documentary 'Sex in the Champagne Room' at VICE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Diversion Audio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
A note this episode contains mature content and quite graphic
descriptions of violence and sex that may be disturbing for
some listeners. Please take care in listening. It's nineteen ninety eight.
(00:38):
You're in Atlanta for a convention. Let's say it's for
investment banking or something lucrative but not all that glamorous.
When your taxi drops you off at the downtown Marriott Marquis,
there are a few beautiful, charming women standing by the valet.
They're promoting their club. The hands you a business card
(01:01):
that gets you free admission to the Gold Club. You've
heard about this place. It's a strip club. It's an
Atlanta strip club. Unlike in your hometown, let's say Milwaukee,
Atlanta strip clubs.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Are full nudity.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
And you've also heard that this is the club where
the celebrities go, not just any celebrities. Sure you've heard
of big name actors and singers frequenting there, but dan
Aykroyd and Madonna they don't have the star power some
of their other guests have. And there are definitely the
(01:40):
Atlanta celebrities who turn up anytime they please. Too Short
Jermaine Dupree, Andrew Jones.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
But you know, the.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Gold Club doesn't just cater to hip hop clientele like
some of the Atlanta spots. You've also heard that some
celebrities come to Atlanta just to go to the Gold Club.
You've heard Dennis Rodman goes to the Gold Club, Patrick
Ewing goes to the Gold Club, Michael Jordan goes to
(02:13):
the Gold Club. It's professional athlete mecca. The more you
think about it, the more you have to go. When
your town car pulls into the drive off of Lindbergh,
two gold lions pose by a fountain under a Neon Stegn.
The doorman opens your door, checks your ID the inside
(02:36):
delivers the girl standing at the front desk, smile and
strike up a friendly conversation. They ask you what you're
interested in doing tonight. They're just so easy to talk to,
not like most women who know how beautiful they are
you can't tell, but these girls are sizing you up.
(02:57):
They notice your watch, your shoe, what kind of glasses
you're wearing, and they especially notice what kind of credit
card you pass them. When they ask how many gold
Bucks you'd like to buy, you answer with something innocuous.
It feels like a champagne night. They agree. A point
(03:18):
man appears out of nowhere, which is surprising based on
his sheer size. He walks you past the main stage,
where other less well heeled patrons sit at tables on
the main floor, up the diverging staircases that lead to
a balcony lined with huge windows. If there weren't huge
(03:40):
security guards in front of every door, you could see
every bit of what was happening inside. As they stand,
you can only see silhouettes. Some rooms have just two
people sitting and talking, some have three in more precarious positions,
and some seem to have a whole mob. The point
(04:03):
man opens the door to Champagne Room number seven, the
biggest and darkest of the VIP rooms. By the time
you leave before they close, you can barely hail your
own cab. Your credit card company raised your spending limit
over the phone when you asked, and even though you're
(04:25):
tens of thousands of dollars lighter than you were just
six or seven hours ago, you'll have a hell of
a story to tell your colleagues if you can remember it.
(04:59):
Welcome the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary
Kay mcbraer. Today's episode, we're calling the Gold Club sex
in the Champagne Room. I thought this title was a
hilarious joke until I told it to my husband, who
is three years younger than I am, and he had
no idea what I was referencing. Normally, I'll just let
(05:23):
a joke die when it deserves too, but this one
is just so perfect that I need to explain it
in case you're under thirty five. In nineteen ninety nine,
Chris Rock released a spoof keynote graduating class speech set
to an R and B rhythm that went I thought viral.
(05:43):
The key piece of advice and the refrain of this
slow jam is this, no matter what a stripper tells you,
there is no sex in the champagne room. None. So
imagine my surprise when a few years later, a more
mature friend of mine revealed that actually, there's only sex
(06:06):
in the champagne room.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
At least.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
That's the story behind the Gold Club, which was, for
most of the nineteen nineties the gold standard of strip clubs,
and it was in Atlanta, which was the strip club
oasis of the South. It's the story of some of
the most beautiful and clever women in the world and
the men who manipulated them to become accomplices in a
(06:30):
wide scale mafia funded fraud. I'll tell you all about
it after this quick break. While I was researching for
(06:56):
this episode, I found myself growing frustrated, so I thought
I'd start off by giving a public service announcement, one
that I find hard to believe anyone needs to hear.
But here it is. Anyway, when you walk into a
strip club, you are tacitly agreeing to getting hustled. That is,
(07:18):
and let me really emphasize this, the whole business model.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Like I said, I find.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
It difficult to accept that anyone would try to deny
this fact. I mean, what do you think these girls
are doing here? This is their job. If they're being
nice to you and they're making you feel like they
really actually like you, that means only one thing. They
are good at their job. And for the people in
(07:47):
the back or the people not really listening, I want
to overstate here, when you walk into a strip club,
you are accepting that whatever services you ask for cost
what they cost. There's no negotiation. You already said yes
by asking for it. That said, there are some sketchy
(08:08):
side hustles, but again you asked for it, and the
Gold Club was the best in the business. Whenever I
researched a story that's local to me or that I
have a very hazy memory of in the news, I
ask my parents. My mom was a cocktail waitress at
the R and R Hotels nightclub in the early nineties.
(08:32):
She never went to the Gold Club herself, but she
remembers when it was a big deal. She remembers it
because that's where her customers went after the nightclub, and
it had a reputation for being the best, classiest, cleanest
gentleman's club in Atlanta, but it was still a hustle.
(08:54):
For example, one Gold Club hustle was their hourly rate.
So remember from the hypothetical story at the beginning, when
you were escorted up to the champagne room and a
girl waited for you there. Renting that champagne room cost
an hourly rate of five hundred two one thousand dollars,
(09:15):
and you also had the hourly rate of that dancer's time,
so you were effectively paying two hourly rates. An hour
with her in the champagne room cost you at least
two hundred and fifty dollars, although she could name her price,
and that's if it was just a one on one situation,
(09:35):
which it often was not. So the meter has started,
and whether you knew the sticker price or not, any
fool knows there is a price. Like I said before,
(10:00):
this is a classy place. So the girl who's keeping
you company, she's drinking champagne or maybe Kangnac, but it
ain't the cheap shit. One bottle of champagne costs three
hundred and fifty dollars, and that was if it was
on the low end. If she wanted Jerebone, that could
have been thousands per bottle. And you probably wouldn't get
(10:23):
out of the place with just one bottle. I mean
that's only about four glasses, and you're not going to
be in the champagne room for less than an hour, right,
I mean think about the implications. Anyway, So these girls,
they're hustlers and they don't drink that champagne. They get
(10:43):
a kickback for every bottle they sell you. They take
a sip and they pour the rest into a potted
plant or straight into the carpet. The documentary about the
Gold Club, which is also titled Sex in the Champagne Room,
has several of the women who worked at the Gold
Club saying flat out that they did this and that
(11:04):
they had those carpets cleaned constantly. They laugh when they
admit that it was the most expensive carpet in Atlanta.
So while these girls are running the game on you,
you're matching them drink for drink, which means you're getting drunker,
but they are staying the same. All of this is
(11:25):
completely legal. It's part of the game which you agreed
to play the moment you walked in, and it promptly
does really feel like a game. Everyone who talks about
having gone to the Gold Club says what a fun
time it was. Even the women who worked there say
it was fun. Well, the women who were at the
(11:47):
top of the employees' hierarchy said so. The others were
less unanimous in having a fun time, But we'll come
to that. One of the best dancers was Jacqueline Bush
stage name was Diva. In the documentary, she talks about
her customers taking champagne shots out of her butt crack,
(12:08):
or the time she made two thousand dollars in one
night by just letting someone stare at her feet. Another
star dancer, Baby said she was really nervous to do
her routine to like a virgin with Madonna actually in
the audience, But afterward Madonna praised her so much for
(12:28):
her performance that she'll never forget it. Even the waitresses
had a good time. They had a game they played
with each other called name that dancer. They'd imitate a
dancer's style and make the others guess who it was,
a sort of sexy charades. The waitresses always wanted to
serve the champagne room with the highest earners, because if
(12:49):
the dancer was getting paid, that meant she was getting
paid too. Because on top of the hourly rate and
the marked up alcohol, you had to tip, and you
tipped for every service. Every time they brought a tray
of shots, every time they converted some of your cash
to gold bucks, that was another service. But the girls
(13:13):
who made the most money, they weren't really taking off
their clothes, at least not for a long time. They
were good conversationalists. Baby says that part was most of
the job, sitting with their girlfriends and listening to the
(13:33):
customer talk. Can you believe he did that? That's amazing,
or I can't believe your wife treats you like that.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
That's so wrong.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
That's what they'd say, anything to make them feel better,
because that was the job. See fun or at least funny,
and time flies. When you're having fun, you're running up
a tab lightning quick. Well, if you're a regular rich guy,
(14:08):
you're running up a tab. If you're a celebrity or
a name with any star power, you don't pay a dime.
It's kind of genius. That was the owner's idea. Steve
Kaplan recognized the star power and he capitalized on it.
What better way to get celebrities to frequent your place
(14:28):
than to make it free for them. Steve would pay
the dancer's rates himself. And if you're wondering whether the
intake from the regular rich guys was enough, Steve made
it enough. This is where our story veers from completely legal,
consensual hustle into straight up fraud. You might be so
(14:49):
drunk that you're not able to sign your own name,
so they'd sign it for you. Naturally, that didn't fly
for long. Soon credit card companies required not only a signature,
but a thumb print to prove identity as well. And
this was on those old school card readers, the non
electric kind, where you'd have to make an imprint with
(15:10):
that slide over imprinter thing to supply the carbon copy.
In the documentary, one waitress admitted to the fraud outright.
She said, basically, it was a way for the entertainers
to get paid via credit card. So you come in,
you buy ten thousand dollars in gold bugs. You have
(15:30):
a surcharge for the gold bugs, and then you have
your beautiful gold bugs ladies who want at least twenty
percent as well, So everybody was making money. It was
just crazy. And then you'd take back the card, scan
the credit card, and then there was a camera you
had to sign in front of and you had to
do a thumb print.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
She laughs.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
I remember I had one friend and she would actually
on some of them. If the guys were too drunk
to sign their credit card, she would actually sign their
credit card and put her toe print on the She
can't finish her sentence for laughing. And this is what
the club owner, Steve, instructed them to do. He didn't
instruct every employee to do that though. These directives were
(16:12):
reserved for a select few and if he found out
what you did, you'd go into the coded book of violations.
The violations were always listed under the employee's stage name,
and next the book listed the offense that was committed,
but they never used incriminating words. They used code names
(16:34):
to indicate acts of prostitution. Weirdly, they used the names
of professional basketball players to distinguish between oral sex, intercourse
and lesbian sex.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
They also used.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Code words to describe illegal drug activity, so the violation's
book entries read like this charity was caught by Dakota
committing a Scottie Pippen in gold Room too. The book
also typically listed how the club punished the dancer's offense
if they did. Steve often find his employees for these offenses.
(17:09):
Sometimes he fired them outright. He would rehire them, but
then the employee would be subjected to a fine maybe again.
The last thing the book listed was what management did
with the drugs and whether their police officers were on duty.
It also listed which gold room the officers were camped,
(17:30):
and if the policemen were given free services. That's when
the business became not so fun, both for the customers
and the staff. Sure, you could get paid a lot
if you were at the top, but if you weren't,
you could actually come out at a deficit. If you
(17:52):
failed to earn two hundred dollars dancing for tips, then
you actually owed Steve at the end of the night.
And if you didn't sling enough bottles of champagne, any
bottles below your quota came out of your paycheck. Naturally,
the rules were not the same for everyone in the
strip club hierarchy. Steve's Girls operated on a completely different
(18:16):
set of rules. The term Steve's Girls wasn't necessarily a
term of endearment. Some employees used the term in a
derogatory way and some were just matter of fact about it,
but the definition was the same. Steve's Girls were the
group of employees who were allowed to commit prostitution, used drugs,
(18:37):
and inflate credit card expenses. Rather than being punished, Steve
rewarded them. It meant that you were on call. Steve
would call you into a celebrity's gold room, and you
would do whatever that celebrity suggested, and then Steve would
pay you based on what you did and for how long.
(18:59):
Even the leader of Steve's Girls, Jacqueline Bush, whose stage
name was Diva admits in that documentary that quote lines
were crossed. According to Mark Sewell's memoir about investigating the case,
Jacqueline quote unofficially handled, manipulated, and assigned approximately twelve dancers
(19:21):
and waitresses during the night shift to the best and
most lucrative Gold rooms. But from the beginning, the federal
prosecuting attorney decided he did not want to charge any
of the dancers with prostitution. He viewed the club employees
who participated in prostitution as victims, not offenders. They were
(19:43):
quote victims of a strip club caste system that allowed
wealthy club owners to become wealthier. The whole organized crime
squad agreed unanimously with his decision, which I think is
pretty cool even progress. That solidarity is probably how the
FBI team converted so many employees into informants. I should
(20:09):
remind our listeners that sex work is and was very
much illegal in Georgia, and everyone knew it. Yet prostitution
at the Gold Club occurred in four different ways. Here's
what Mark Sewell says in his memoir of the investigation. One,
the prostitution was arranged, endorsed, and financed by Steve Kaplan,
(20:30):
or the club management. Two club management allowed big spenders
to pay for prostitution. Three Steve's girls were allowed to
commit prostitution without caplain's approval and with impunity. Four employees
committed prostitution of their own volition, but without the approval
(20:53):
of the club's management. If caught, the employee would likely
be fired, re hired, and find in short, every time
an employee engaged in prostitution, the club profited. Of course,
the customers equivocated. In the documentary, one employee says the
(21:16):
game was to convince a high roller or baller to
go to a gold room with you, buy a bottle
of champagne, spend hours and hours with you in there,
without regard for his family or his credit card bill.
And then they'd go into a private room and they
just bought a dance. But if sex happens, they thought
that's because she liked me. Now, listeners, we know that's
(21:38):
not true. But people tell themselves what they want to hear.
And you're probably wondering, on top of prostitution and credit
card fraud, how was the mafia involved. I'll tell you
all about it right after the break. It was the
(22:13):
mafia involvement that got the attention of the FBI. Atlanta
law enforcement knew that Steve Kaplan was suspected of having
mafia ties. Specifically, Steve bought protection from the Gambino crime family,
including John Gottie. The FBI couldn't figure out how much
money Steve was actually making, even though it was recognized
(22:35):
as the highest grossing strip club in Atlanta. But in
order to build the case, the FBI needed information, so
they had to develop some informants. Much of the time,
the FBI would place an undercover agent in the mix.
This wasn't really an option for this case though. They
couldn't have a woman undercover agent employed at a strip club,
(22:59):
and they couldn't have a man undercover agent posing as
a goalroom client because of the illegal, unethical activities so
many big spenders engaged in, and if a man was
employed at the club, he'd likely be a low level
higher and he wouldn't get them anything juicy. So they
targeted the current employees, specifically the dancers. A significant minority
(23:24):
of the employees had priors, so they looked for the
dancers with the felonies. They did this because a lack
of cooperation with law enforcement can be viewed as a
violation of probation. Of course, the investigators needed help finding
those employees. One employee, whose pseudonym was Heidi, worked at
(23:47):
the club's front desk doing administrative work. She called the
Atlanta FBI switchboard on her own just after she quit
her job to report numerous crimes. Listed crimes she had
witnessed as tax fraud, credit card fraud, public corruption, and prostitution.
(24:08):
She'd be a great informant, but the FBI had to
convince her to return to her job. It took some
doing to convince her, but she was hired back almost immediately.
So now Heidi was drawing two paychecks, one from the
Gold Club itself and one from the FBI as an informant.
I just thought you might want to recognize the hustle
(24:31):
here too. Heidi smuggled out a list of current employees,
and the agents listed the new names, as well as
other identifying data about the employees. What they really needed, though,
one of their informants said, was the house mom's binder.
Pretty Much everyone knows that strippers use stripper names. They
(24:52):
do this both to increase their sex appeal, because apparently,
Dakota is a sexier name than Beth and to protect
their identities against talkers. Not to mention, the Gold Club
was becoming known in Atlanta as a mob owned brothel,
so even though a dancer might be proud of her profession,
(25:13):
some were growing embarrassed to say that they worked there.
What the FBI needed to develop their informants were their
real names, and what they needed for that was the
(25:34):
house mom's binder. Typically, a house mother is a former
dancer who is past her dancing prime, and she's usually
between forty and sixty years old. She knows the game, though,
and her expertise is put to work hiring new dancers
and making sure they have the right permits. She also
(25:55):
makes the schedule for dancers, shooter girls, and waitresses, and
in her binder, the house mom writes the employee's stage
name on the front of their work permit. On March eighteenth,
nineteen ninety nine, the FBI rated the club. At four am,
it was closing time, but that didn't mean anything. The
(26:19):
club never booted higher rollers just because their shift was ending,
which meant customers, dancers, and managers were all still present.
Some of the waitresses and shooter girls were still cashing out,
and much of the time, the Gold Club didn't actually
close their doors till six am. That raid is when
(26:41):
the FBI confirmed that the Gold Club was probably the
highest earner for the Gambino family. I always thought the
raid happened at the end of an investigation to cinch
the case, but it seems like this one happened right
in the middle. The raid allowed the FBI to confiscate
the house mom's binder as well as boxes of waitress tickets.
(27:04):
They were the receipts of every credit card transaction that
happened at the Gold Club for the past three years.
This hard evidence would later be used to prove that
quote the credit card fraud was not simply the work
of renegade employees, but a team effort between select dancers,
(27:25):
select waitresses, and most of the club management. The handwritten
notes on the waitresses tickets also included the names of
celebrities and frequent customers along with their Gold Room locations.
Other tickets included the word compt and the names of
police officers. And while the raid proved a success as
(27:48):
far as document reconnaissance, what proved even more important was
the search of Steve Kaplan's corporate warehouse. Seventy five banker's
box is full of financial records were seized in New
York and driven back to Georgia to be used as
court evidence. They set about combing through evidence, both on
(28:22):
paper and trying to develop informants. While the agents were
tracking down the girls on felony probation, they came across
women all across the lifestyle spectrum. They ranged from women
who lived in trailer parks with bruised faces to residents
of four hundred thousand dollars upper middle class homes. As
(28:44):
I mentioned earlier, people on probation have to comply with
law enforcement. When asked, one woman who was in between
those two socioeconomic statuses, said that she saw her friend
giving an athlete oral sex and one the Gold Rooms.
The agent asked her how she could be sure that's
(29:05):
what she saw. She looked at him incredulously and said,
I have given enough blowjobs in the Gold Club to
know what one looks like. The FBI doesn't prosecute prostitution.
It's a state crime unless it's an interstate trafficking situation,
which would qualify it as FBI jurisdiction. But that's not
(29:27):
what happened here. As Mark Sewell states in his memoir,
as expected, most athletes do not willingly cooperate with investigations
that may criminally implicate or publicly embarrass them. With large
sums of money come the ability and proclivity to hire
the best attorneys to help mitigate in athlete's criminal exposure
(29:52):
and embarrassment. They offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for
truthful testimony, and they interviewed many athletes Jalen Rose, Larry Johnson,
Charles Oakley, Terrell Davis, Antonio Davis to Kim Bab Mutombo.
(30:15):
There were many more. The one that I was personally
surprised and the most disappointed to see on the list
was my beloved five time All Star center fielder Andrew Jones.
I mean that sweetie Pie signed my Atlanta Braves hat
outside my doctor's office when I was a kid. This
is completely irrelevant, but Andrew Jones was one of my
(30:37):
very first crushes who was not a fictional character. I mean,
how could you not love a baseball player who played
dance hall music as his walk up and grinned that
boyish smile every time he hit a home run. This
is when chipper Jones had been playing Crazy Train for
fourteen years or some shit, and it wasn't even a
clip of the guitar riff. Okay, after a quick google,
(30:58):
Andrew Jones is only eleven years older than me, so
it wasn't even that outrageous of a crush. I mean,
that was within my range of datability when I was dating.
I'm not saying we could have had a life together
in the year two thousand, but I mean logistically we
could have had a life together later. To be fair,
I'm very happy with my choices. No sliding doors, mischances,
(31:20):
nagging up my mind, etc. Unfortunately, for Patrick Ewing, he
became the face of the Gold Club athletes, and it
seems like that was the case, mostly because he was
seven feet tall and that made him quite memorable. The
FBI agent also said that every professional athlete he interviewed
(31:41):
during the investigation was quote humble and honest to a fault,
probably even embarrassed, every athlete except Dennis Rodman, surprising no
one anyway, I'm not sure why they thought it necessary
to pursue these testsmonies, unless it was just to get
(32:01):
more attention on the case from the press. Considering that
they couldn't or at least wouldn't prosecute on any of
these charges. At least the FBI wouldn't. The State of
Georgia could, but to my knowledge they did not. Professional
athletes also had everything comped as a rule, so that
seemed like a dead end too. The FBI also does
(32:25):
not investigate rape cases, and I'll tell you more about
that after this break. One important part of this trial
(32:52):
that didn't get much press then was the alleged rape
that occurred inside the Gold Club's limousine in nineteen ninety seven.
Tony Boutina was the limousine driver from nineteen ninety four
to ninety seven. He picked up VIP celebrities. They were
usually professional athletes, but sometimes they were Gambino family captains.
(33:19):
Two years later, Tony had left the Gold Club on
bad terms, which likely helped him decide that he'd work
with the FBI. On a night in September of nineteen
ninety seven, Tony picked up a dancer under the pseudonym Amy.
She was in good spirits when she arrived, but she
was reluctant to take the ride when she thought it
(33:40):
would be just The manager Russell Basil and her behind
the partition, and she didn't know that Russell had already
gotten a box of condoms from Tony, which Tony kept
on hand as part of the job. Russell told Amy
other people would be joining them, but they didn't. The
limousine rocked during the whole ride. When they returned to
(34:04):
the club, Amy was very upset. As she got out
of the limousine, she told her house mom that Russell
had raped her. Then she got her boyfriend to pick
her up from the club. Russell had the gall to
talk to the boyfriend as he was leaving the parking lot, saying,
we like to see our girls taken care of. Meanwhile,
(34:26):
Tony cleaned up the limo. It was a mess. The
carpet was soaked through with spilled champagne, the ice bucket
was overturned, and there was a used condom just outside
the limo's window. Amy told her boyfriend what happened, and
he immediately called nine to one one. The responding officer
(34:47):
asked them to return to the club, where they interviewed
her in the parking lot. The police could not find
Russell Baseil. He had taken an immediate flight to New
York on Delta Airlines. Amy completed a rape exam, and
the officer issued an arrest warrant for Basil. It was
(35:09):
never executed. The FBI does not investigate rape allegations because
that's a state violation. The one exception is if the
rape occurs on federal land, like a Native American reservation
or a National park. I understand fundamentally the difference between
(35:33):
state law enforcement and the FBI. A key distinction is
that FBI cases have to cross state lines. By the
time of the actual hearing. In two thousand and one,
the judge had ruled the prostitution charges admissible because Steve
Kaplan sent a crew of girls to Charleston, South Carolina
(35:55):
when the Knicks were visiting for an exhibition game as
a sex Apart to my knowledge, they did not pursue
the rape charge. Again, I understand that distinction between state
law enforcement and FBI, and I assume the FBI kind
of struck that offense from their official case because it
(36:17):
would be thrown out on those grounds. I get that,
and yet it does not sit well with me because
it seems like the crimes against women were just not
important enough to try, no matter how much I look
at the reasoning why that wasn't included. I'm still left
(36:38):
with the facts that credit card fraud and money laundering
were legally more important than the exploitation of hundreds of women.
The thing that made the rape allegation eligible in this
case is that Steve Kaplan and Officer Jack Redlinger of
the Atlanta Police could be charged on obstruction of justice
(37:01):
by thwarting complaints of rape and not conducting basic due
diligence on the report. Steve Caplan met with Tony Bottino
and told him to concoct a story to state that
Russell was never in the limo that night. That obstruction
of justice by Steve Caplan and Officer Jack Redlinger was
(37:23):
a chief point in the prosecution's case. That and the
Delta Airlines issue. Steve Caplan had converted two Delta employees,
Red Coats, into essentially being his lackeys. They could get
anyone he wanted on any flight he asked for, and
(37:44):
while Steve Caplan did pay for that privilege, he essentially
bribed the red Coats, so I don't think Delta saw
any of that money, and in getting them on the flights,
the red Coats certainly didn't go through the standard operating procedures.
They just marched Steve's people onto the plane, sometimes getting
(38:04):
other passengers to move from their assigned seats. This whole
delta racket resulted in another charge of fraud. The route
that prosecutors ultimately chose to pursue was the RICO Act
because it would lend itself to further investigation in one
of the biggest crime families in New York, the Gambinos.
(38:34):
If you need a refresher on how the RICO Act works,
let me give you a quick summation. The Racketeer Influenced
and Corrupt Organizations Act was enacted on October fifteenth, nineteen seventy.
It's a federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties
performed as a part of an ongoing criminal organization. Without
(38:59):
going into too much detail, it's a way to snowball
a bunch of individual charges into a bigger, more serious
charge of racketeering. One important detail for this case, though,
is that those found guilty of racketeering must forfeit all
ill gotten gains and interest from the racketeering activity. To
(39:21):
be sure, some interesting mafia testimonies came out in court
For example, one of the defendants was Michael de Leonardo
or Mikey Scars. Mikey was a longtime mobster and racketeer,
and John Gibbons, one of the prosecution's witnesses, was a
confessed torturer and involved in numerous hit missions. But that
(39:46):
forfeiture of profits is the most relevant aspect of the
Gold Club trial. Steve Kaplan was a high earning mafia associate.
He was looking at fifty million dollars in orfeiture if
they convicted him on a rico charge. And you're not
going to believe what actually scared the mafia associates into
(40:07):
copying a plea. It was a statement from a rube,
as they called him. In the man's testimony, he told
a story of blatant credit card fraud in which the
waitress or dancer continually told him something had gone wrong
(40:30):
with his credit card transaction, but every charge had gone through.
He got charged for a tray of shots that the
waitress spilled, and then they charged him for an upgrade
when they moved his room because she'd soaked the sofa.
And this guy was a big spender too. He had
expected a bill of about ten thousand dollars that night.
(40:53):
Instead it was twenty eight thousand. He placed numerous disputes
with the club and American Express. The card company eventually
paid the bill but closed his account, which I'm imagining
wrecked his credit since it took him two years to
get approved for another card. With them, fifteen defendants negotiated
(41:27):
a plea agreement. Most of them pled guilty to a
single felony misprision of a felony. Steve Kaplan himself, the owner,
pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy, which quote
included admission to credit card fraud, tax evasion, and prostitution.
(41:50):
Steve agreed to pay or forfeit all of the following
a five million dollar fine to the US government, two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars in restitution for credit card victims,
fifty thousand in reimbursement to Delta Airlines, thirty four thousand,
eight hundred dollars in moldy cash seized during the search.
(42:15):
But when he closed the Gold Club, Steve also lost
a guaranteed income of about nine million dollars over the
course of a year. He would also serve sixteen months
in prison. He did get to keep fifty million dollars,
which would be a nice jump start when he got discharged.
(42:37):
The policeman charged with obstruction of justice had the charges dropped,
they were only suspended from police duty for a few years.
Michael de Leonardo, one of the Gambino family's made men,
later became one of the most famous turncoats in mafia history.
(42:57):
He sang on the whole Gambino family, including all of
the newest Gody generation, after they refuse to help him
out of the charges he was facing in New York
in two thousand and one. He actually helped to convict
eighty mafia members during the course of his testimony, and
one of them was the infamous John Gotti. In his memoir,
(43:20):
FBI agent Mark Sewell says that quote, many mafia aficionados
consider Michael de Leonardo the last real mafia cappo. I
will leave that argument for others to debate, but what
I do know is that the FBI had the right
guy in the two thousand and one Gold Club trial.
(43:44):
This story about Atlanta's Gold Club is action packed with issues,
and there are a thousand ways of looking at the narrative,
But the one I choose to highlight. The one that
fits with the theme of our show is this beautiful
women hustling and Rubes were pushed to illegitimately overcharge their customers,
(44:05):
which led to the eventual exposure of credit card fraud,
and then that led into racketeering charges that, through the
Rico Act, eventually led to the downfall of the whole
Gambino crime family. So by the transitive property, one could
argue that women hustled better than the mafia, and underestimating
(44:29):
their wiles and taking their loyalty for granted led to
its demise. At least, the thesis that women run the
game better is the one I.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
Like to argue.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Join me next week on the greatest true crime stories
ever told for our episode, The Real Witches of Macbeth.
It's a thousand year old story. The trope of three
witches is ubiquitous throughout history and popular culture, from the
Three Muses and the Three Fates to the.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Three Sanderson Sisters. Shakespeare's Weird Sisters just happened to be
the most iconic, or at least my personal favorite trio
of magical women.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
I'd like to shout out a few key sources that
made it possible for me to tell this week's story,
especially Mark Sewell's memoir investigating America's most notorious strip club
and the Vice documentary Sex in the Champagne Room. Many
other sources helped me tell this story, though, so make
sure you check out our show notes for the full bibliography.
(46:05):
The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production
of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted
this episode. I also wrote this episode. Our show is
produced by Emma Demuth. Theme music by Tyler Cash. Executive
producer Scott Waxman.
Diversion Audio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
A note this episode contains mature content and quite graphic
descriptions of violence and sex that may be disturbing for
some listeners. Please take care in listening. It's nineteen ninety eight.
(00:38):
You're in Atlanta for a convention. Let's say it's for
investment banking or something lucrative but not all that glamorous.
When your taxi drops you off at the downtown Marriott Marquis,
there are a few beautiful, charming women standing by the valet.
They're promoting their club. The hands you a business card
(01:01):
that gets you free admission to the Gold Club. You've
heard about this place. It's a strip club. It's an
Atlanta strip club. Unlike in your hometown, let's say Milwaukee,
Atlanta strip clubs.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Are full nudity.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
And you've also heard that this is the club where
the celebrities go, not just any celebrities. Sure you've heard
of big name actors and singers frequenting there, but dan
Aykroyd and Madonna they don't have the star power some
of their other guests have. And there are definitely the
(01:40):
Atlanta celebrities who turn up anytime they please. Too Short
Jermaine Dupree, Andrew Jones.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
But you know, the.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Gold Club doesn't just cater to hip hop clientele like
some of the Atlanta spots. You've also heard that some
celebrities come to Atlanta just to go to the Gold Club.
You've heard Dennis Rodman goes to the Gold Club, Patrick
Ewing goes to the Gold Club, Michael Jordan goes to
(02:13):
the Gold Club. It's professional athlete mecca. The more you
think about it, the more you have to go. When
your town car pulls into the drive off of Lindbergh,
two gold lions pose by a fountain under a Neon Stegn.
The doorman opens your door, checks your ID the inside
(02:36):
delivers the girl standing at the front desk, smile and
strike up a friendly conversation. They ask you what you're
interested in doing tonight. They're just so easy to talk to,
not like most women who know how beautiful they are
you can't tell, but these girls are sizing you up.
(02:57):
They notice your watch, your shoe, what kind of glasses
you're wearing, and they especially notice what kind of credit
card you pass them. When they ask how many gold
Bucks you'd like to buy, you answer with something innocuous.
It feels like a champagne night. They agree. A point
(03:18):
man appears out of nowhere, which is surprising based on
his sheer size. He walks you past the main stage,
where other less well heeled patrons sit at tables on
the main floor, up the diverging staircases that lead to
a balcony lined with huge windows. If there weren't huge
(03:40):
security guards in front of every door, you could see
every bit of what was happening inside. As they stand,
you can only see silhouettes. Some rooms have just two
people sitting and talking, some have three in more precarious positions,
and some seem to have a whole mob. The point
(04:03):
man opens the door to Champagne Room number seven, the
biggest and darkest of the VIP rooms. By the time
you leave before they close, you can barely hail your
own cab. Your credit card company raised your spending limit
over the phone when you asked, and even though you're
(04:25):
tens of thousands of dollars lighter than you were just
six or seven hours ago, you'll have a hell of
a story to tell your colleagues if you can remember it.
(04:59):
Welcome the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary
Kay mcbraer. Today's episode, we're calling the Gold Club sex
in the Champagne Room. I thought this title was a
hilarious joke until I told it to my husband, who
is three years younger than I am, and he had
no idea what I was referencing. Normally, I'll just let
(05:23):
a joke die when it deserves too, but this one
is just so perfect that I need to explain it
in case you're under thirty five. In nineteen ninety nine,
Chris Rock released a spoof keynote graduating class speech set
to an R and B rhythm that went I thought viral.
(05:43):
The key piece of advice and the refrain of this
slow jam is this, no matter what a stripper tells you,
there is no sex in the champagne room. None. So
imagine my surprise when a few years later, a more
mature friend of mine revealed that actually, there's only sex
(06:06):
in the champagne room.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
At least.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
That's the story behind the Gold Club, which was, for
most of the nineteen nineties the gold standard of strip clubs,
and it was in Atlanta, which was the strip club
oasis of the South. It's the story of some of
the most beautiful and clever women in the world and
the men who manipulated them to become accomplices in a
(06:30):
wide scale mafia funded fraud. I'll tell you all about
it after this quick break. While I was researching for
(06:56):
this episode, I found myself growing frustrated, so I thought
I'd start off by giving a public service announcement, one
that I find hard to believe anyone needs to hear.
But here it is. Anyway, when you walk into a
strip club, you are tacitly agreeing to getting hustled. That is,
(07:18):
and let me really emphasize this, the whole business model.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Like I said, I find.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
It difficult to accept that anyone would try to deny
this fact. I mean, what do you think these girls
are doing here? This is their job. If they're being
nice to you and they're making you feel like they
really actually like you, that means only one thing. They
are good at their job. And for the people in
(07:47):
the back or the people not really listening, I want
to overstate here, when you walk into a strip club,
you are accepting that whatever services you ask for cost
what they cost. There's no negotiation. You already said yes
by asking for it. That said, there are some sketchy
(08:08):
side hustles, but again you asked for it, and the
Gold Club was the best in the business. Whenever I
researched a story that's local to me or that I
have a very hazy memory of in the news, I
ask my parents. My mom was a cocktail waitress at
the R and R Hotels nightclub in the early nineties.
(08:32):
She never went to the Gold Club herself, but she
remembers when it was a big deal. She remembers it
because that's where her customers went after the nightclub, and
it had a reputation for being the best, classiest, cleanest
gentleman's club in Atlanta, but it was still a hustle.
(08:54):
For example, one Gold Club hustle was their hourly rate.
So remember from the hypothetical story at the beginning, when
you were escorted up to the champagne room and a
girl waited for you there. Renting that champagne room cost
an hourly rate of five hundred two one thousand dollars,
(09:15):
and you also had the hourly rate of that dancer's time,
so you were effectively paying two hourly rates. An hour
with her in the champagne room cost you at least
two hundred and fifty dollars, although she could name her price,
and that's if it was just a one on one situation,
(09:35):
which it often was not. So the meter has started,
and whether you knew the sticker price or not, any
fool knows there is a price. Like I said before,
(10:00):
this is a classy place. So the girl who's keeping
you company, she's drinking champagne or maybe Kangnac, but it
ain't the cheap shit. One bottle of champagne costs three
hundred and fifty dollars, and that was if it was
on the low end. If she wanted Jerebone, that could
have been thousands per bottle. And you probably wouldn't get
(10:23):
out of the place with just one bottle. I mean
that's only about four glasses, and you're not going to
be in the champagne room for less than an hour, right,
I mean think about the implications. Anyway, So these girls,
they're hustlers and they don't drink that champagne. They get
(10:43):
a kickback for every bottle they sell you. They take
a sip and they pour the rest into a potted
plant or straight into the carpet. The documentary about the
Gold Club, which is also titled Sex in the Champagne Room,
has several of the women who worked at the Gold
Club saying flat out that they did this and that
(11:04):
they had those carpets cleaned constantly. They laugh when they
admit that it was the most expensive carpet in Atlanta.
So while these girls are running the game on you,
you're matching them drink for drink, which means you're getting drunker,
but they are staying the same. All of this is
(11:25):
completely legal. It's part of the game which you agreed
to play the moment you walked in, and it promptly
does really feel like a game. Everyone who talks about
having gone to the Gold Club says what a fun
time it was. Even the women who worked there say
it was fun. Well, the women who were at the
(11:47):
top of the employees' hierarchy said so. The others were
less unanimous in having a fun time, But we'll come
to that. One of the best dancers was Jacqueline Bush
stage name was Diva. In the documentary, she talks about
her customers taking champagne shots out of her butt crack,
(12:08):
or the time she made two thousand dollars in one
night by just letting someone stare at her feet. Another
star dancer, Baby said she was really nervous to do
her routine to like a virgin with Madonna actually in
the audience, But afterward Madonna praised her so much for
(12:28):
her performance that she'll never forget it. Even the waitresses
had a good time. They had a game they played
with each other called name that dancer. They'd imitate a
dancer's style and make the others guess who it was,
a sort of sexy charades. The waitresses always wanted to
serve the champagne room with the highest earners, because if
(12:49):
the dancer was getting paid, that meant she was getting
paid too. Because on top of the hourly rate and
the marked up alcohol, you had to tip, and you
tipped for every service. Every time they brought a tray
of shots, every time they converted some of your cash
to gold bucks, that was another service. But the girls
(13:13):
who made the most money, they weren't really taking off
their clothes, at least not for a long time. They
were good conversationalists. Baby says that part was most of
the job, sitting with their girlfriends and listening to the
(13:33):
customer talk. Can you believe he did that? That's amazing,
or I can't believe your wife treats you like that.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
That's so wrong.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
That's what they'd say, anything to make them feel better,
because that was the job. See fun or at least funny,
and time flies. When you're having fun, you're running up
a tab lightning quick. Well, if you're a regular rich guy,
(14:08):
you're running up a tab. If you're a celebrity or
a name with any star power, you don't pay a dime.
It's kind of genius. That was the owner's idea. Steve
Kaplan recognized the star power and he capitalized on it.
What better way to get celebrities to frequent your place
(14:28):
than to make it free for them. Steve would pay
the dancer's rates himself. And if you're wondering whether the
intake from the regular rich guys was enough, Steve made
it enough. This is where our story veers from completely legal,
consensual hustle into straight up fraud. You might be so
(14:49):
drunk that you're not able to sign your own name,
so they'd sign it for you. Naturally, that didn't fly
for long. Soon credit card companies required not only a signature,
but a thumb print to prove identity as well. And
this was on those old school card readers, the non
electric kind, where you'd have to make an imprint with
(15:10):
that slide over imprinter thing to supply the carbon copy.
In the documentary, one waitress admitted to the fraud outright.
She said, basically, it was a way for the entertainers
to get paid via credit card. So you come in,
you buy ten thousand dollars in gold bugs. You have
(15:30):
a surcharge for the gold bugs, and then you have
your beautiful gold bugs ladies who want at least twenty
percent as well, So everybody was making money. It was
just crazy. And then you'd take back the card, scan
the credit card, and then there was a camera you
had to sign in front of and you had to
do a thumb print.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
She laughs.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
I remember I had one friend and she would actually
on some of them. If the guys were too drunk
to sign their credit card, she would actually sign their
credit card and put her toe print on the She
can't finish her sentence for laughing. And this is what
the club owner, Steve, instructed them to do. He didn't
instruct every employee to do that though. These directives were
(16:12):
reserved for a select few and if he found out
what you did, you'd go into the coded book of violations.
The violations were always listed under the employee's stage name,
and next the book listed the offense that was committed,
but they never used incriminating words. They used code names
(16:34):
to indicate acts of prostitution. Weirdly, they used the names
of professional basketball players to distinguish between oral sex, intercourse
and lesbian sex.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
They also used.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Code words to describe illegal drug activity, so the violation's
book entries read like this charity was caught by Dakota
committing a Scottie Pippen in gold Room too. The book
also typically listed how the club punished the dancer's offense
if they did. Steve often find his employees for these offenses.
(17:09):
Sometimes he fired them outright. He would rehire them, but
then the employee would be subjected to a fine maybe again.
The last thing the book listed was what management did
with the drugs and whether their police officers were on duty.
It also listed which gold room the officers were camped,
(17:30):
and if the policemen were given free services. That's when
the business became not so fun, both for the customers
and the staff. Sure, you could get paid a lot
if you were at the top, but if you weren't,
you could actually come out at a deficit. If you
(17:52):
failed to earn two hundred dollars dancing for tips, then
you actually owed Steve at the end of the night.
And if you didn't sling enough bottles of champagne, any
bottles below your quota came out of your paycheck. Naturally,
the rules were not the same for everyone in the
strip club hierarchy. Steve's Girls operated on a completely different
(18:16):
set of rules. The term Steve's Girls wasn't necessarily a
term of endearment. Some employees used the term in a
derogatory way and some were just matter of fact about it,
but the definition was the same. Steve's Girls were the
group of employees who were allowed to commit prostitution, used drugs,
(18:37):
and inflate credit card expenses. Rather than being punished, Steve
rewarded them. It meant that you were on call. Steve
would call you into a celebrity's gold room, and you
would do whatever that celebrity suggested, and then Steve would
pay you based on what you did and for how long.
(18:59):
Even the leader of Steve's Girls, Jacqueline Bush, whose stage
name was Diva admits in that documentary that quote lines
were crossed. According to Mark Sewell's memoir about investigating the case,
Jacqueline quote unofficially handled, manipulated, and assigned approximately twelve dancers
(19:21):
and waitresses during the night shift to the best and
most lucrative Gold rooms. But from the beginning, the federal
prosecuting attorney decided he did not want to charge any
of the dancers with prostitution. He viewed the club employees
who participated in prostitution as victims, not offenders. They were
(19:43):
quote victims of a strip club caste system that allowed
wealthy club owners to become wealthier. The whole organized crime
squad agreed unanimously with his decision, which I think is
pretty cool even progress. That solidarity is probably how the
FBI team converted so many employees into informants. I should
(20:09):
remind our listeners that sex work is and was very
much illegal in Georgia, and everyone knew it. Yet prostitution
at the Gold Club occurred in four different ways. Here's
what Mark Sewell says in his memoir of the investigation. One,
the prostitution was arranged, endorsed, and financed by Steve Kaplan,
(20:30):
or the club management. Two club management allowed big spenders
to pay for prostitution. Three Steve's girls were allowed to
commit prostitution without caplain's approval and with impunity. Four employees
committed prostitution of their own volition, but without the approval
(20:53):
of the club's management. If caught, the employee would likely
be fired, re hired, and find in short, every time
an employee engaged in prostitution, the club profited. Of course,
the customers equivocated. In the documentary, one employee says the
(21:16):
game was to convince a high roller or baller to
go to a gold room with you, buy a bottle
of champagne, spend hours and hours with you in there,
without regard for his family or his credit card bill.
And then they'd go into a private room and they
just bought a dance. But if sex happens, they thought
that's because she liked me. Now, listeners, we know that's
(21:38):
not true. But people tell themselves what they want to hear.
And you're probably wondering, on top of prostitution and credit
card fraud, how was the mafia involved. I'll tell you
all about it right after the break. It was the
(22:13):
mafia involvement that got the attention of the FBI. Atlanta
law enforcement knew that Steve Kaplan was suspected of having
mafia ties. Specifically, Steve bought protection from the Gambino crime family,
including John Gottie. The FBI couldn't figure out how much
money Steve was actually making, even though it was recognized
(22:35):
as the highest grossing strip club in Atlanta. But in
order to build the case, the FBI needed information, so
they had to develop some informants. Much of the time,
the FBI would place an undercover agent in the mix.
This wasn't really an option for this case though. They
couldn't have a woman undercover agent employed at a strip club,
(22:59):
and they couldn't have a man undercover agent posing as
a goalroom client because of the illegal, unethical activities so
many big spenders engaged in, and if a man was
employed at the club, he'd likely be a low level
higher and he wouldn't get them anything juicy. So they
targeted the current employees, specifically the dancers. A significant minority
(23:24):
of the employees had priors, so they looked for the
dancers with the felonies. They did this because a lack
of cooperation with law enforcement can be viewed as a
violation of probation. Of course, the investigators needed help finding
those employees. One employee, whose pseudonym was Heidi, worked at
(23:47):
the club's front desk doing administrative work. She called the
Atlanta FBI switchboard on her own just after she quit
her job to report numerous crimes. Listed crimes she had
witnessed as tax fraud, credit card fraud, public corruption, and prostitution.
(24:08):
She'd be a great informant, but the FBI had to
convince her to return to her job. It took some
doing to convince her, but she was hired back almost immediately.
So now Heidi was drawing two paychecks, one from the
Gold Club itself and one from the FBI as an informant.
I just thought you might want to recognize the hustle
(24:31):
here too. Heidi smuggled out a list of current employees,
and the agents listed the new names, as well as
other identifying data about the employees. What they really needed, though,
one of their informants said, was the house mom's binder.
Pretty Much everyone knows that strippers use stripper names. They
(24:52):
do this both to increase their sex appeal, because apparently,
Dakota is a sexier name than Beth and to protect
their identities against talkers. Not to mention, the Gold Club
was becoming known in Atlanta as a mob owned brothel,
so even though a dancer might be proud of her profession,
(25:13):
some were growing embarrassed to say that they worked there.
What the FBI needed to develop their informants were their
real names, and what they needed for that was the
(25:34):
house mom's binder. Typically, a house mother is a former
dancer who is past her dancing prime, and she's usually
between forty and sixty years old. She knows the game, though,
and her expertise is put to work hiring new dancers
and making sure they have the right permits. She also
(25:55):
makes the schedule for dancers, shooter girls, and waitresses, and
in her binder, the house mom writes the employee's stage
name on the front of their work permit. On March eighteenth,
nineteen ninety nine, the FBI rated the club. At four am,
it was closing time, but that didn't mean anything. The
(26:19):
club never booted higher rollers just because their shift was ending,
which meant customers, dancers, and managers were all still present.
Some of the waitresses and shooter girls were still cashing out,
and much of the time, the Gold Club didn't actually
close their doors till six am. That raid is when
(26:41):
the FBI confirmed that the Gold Club was probably the
highest earner for the Gambino family. I always thought the
raid happened at the end of an investigation to cinch
the case, but it seems like this one happened right
in the middle. The raid allowed the FBI to confiscate
the house mom's binder as well as boxes of waitress tickets.
(27:04):
They were the receipts of every credit card transaction that
happened at the Gold Club for the past three years.
This hard evidence would later be used to prove that
quote the credit card fraud was not simply the work
of renegade employees, but a team effort between select dancers,
(27:25):
select waitresses, and most of the club management. The handwritten
notes on the waitresses tickets also included the names of
celebrities and frequent customers along with their Gold Room locations.
Other tickets included the word compt and the names of
police officers. And while the raid proved a success as
(27:48):
far as document reconnaissance, what proved even more important was
the search of Steve Kaplan's corporate warehouse. Seventy five banker's
box is full of financial records were seized in New
York and driven back to Georgia to be used as
court evidence. They set about combing through evidence, both on
(28:22):
paper and trying to develop informants. While the agents were
tracking down the girls on felony probation, they came across
women all across the lifestyle spectrum. They ranged from women
who lived in trailer parks with bruised faces to residents
of four hundred thousand dollars upper middle class homes. As
(28:44):
I mentioned earlier, people on probation have to comply with
law enforcement. When asked, one woman who was in between
those two socioeconomic statuses, said that she saw her friend
giving an athlete oral sex and one the Gold Rooms.
The agent asked her how she could be sure that's
(29:05):
what she saw. She looked at him incredulously and said,
I have given enough blowjobs in the Gold Club to
know what one looks like. The FBI doesn't prosecute prostitution.
It's a state crime unless it's an interstate trafficking situation,
which would qualify it as FBI jurisdiction. But that's not
(29:27):
what happened here. As Mark Sewell states in his memoir,
as expected, most athletes do not willingly cooperate with investigations
that may criminally implicate or publicly embarrass them. With large
sums of money come the ability and proclivity to hire
the best attorneys to help mitigate in athlete's criminal exposure
(29:52):
and embarrassment. They offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for
truthful testimony, and they interviewed many athletes Jalen Rose, Larry Johnson,
Charles Oakley, Terrell Davis, Antonio Davis to Kim Bab Mutombo.
(30:15):
There were many more. The one that I was personally
surprised and the most disappointed to see on the list
was my beloved five time All Star center fielder Andrew Jones.
I mean that sweetie Pie signed my Atlanta Braves hat
outside my doctor's office when I was a kid. This
is completely irrelevant, but Andrew Jones was one of my
(30:37):
very first crushes who was not a fictional character. I mean,
how could you not love a baseball player who played
dance hall music as his walk up and grinned that
boyish smile every time he hit a home run. This
is when chipper Jones had been playing Crazy Train for
fourteen years or some shit, and it wasn't even a
clip of the guitar riff. Okay, after a quick google,
(30:58):
Andrew Jones is only eleven years older than me, so
it wasn't even that outrageous of a crush. I mean,
that was within my range of datability when I was dating.
I'm not saying we could have had a life together
in the year two thousand, but I mean logistically we
could have had a life together later. To be fair,
I'm very happy with my choices. No sliding doors, mischances,
(31:20):
nagging up my mind, etc. Unfortunately, for Patrick Ewing, he
became the face of the Gold Club athletes, and it
seems like that was the case, mostly because he was
seven feet tall and that made him quite memorable. The
FBI agent also said that every professional athlete he interviewed
(31:41):
during the investigation was quote humble and honest to a fault,
probably even embarrassed, every athlete except Dennis Rodman, surprising no
one anyway, I'm not sure why they thought it necessary
to pursue these testsmonies, unless it was just to get
(32:01):
more attention on the case from the press. Considering that
they couldn't or at least wouldn't prosecute on any of
these charges. At least the FBI wouldn't. The State of
Georgia could, but to my knowledge they did not. Professional
athletes also had everything comped as a rule, so that
seemed like a dead end too. The FBI also does
(32:25):
not investigate rape cases, and I'll tell you more about
that after this break. One important part of this trial
(32:52):
that didn't get much press then was the alleged rape
that occurred inside the Gold Club's limousine in nineteen ninety seven.
Tony Boutina was the limousine driver from nineteen ninety four
to ninety seven. He picked up VIP celebrities. They were
usually professional athletes, but sometimes they were Gambino family captains.
(33:19):
Two years later, Tony had left the Gold Club on
bad terms, which likely helped him decide that he'd work
with the FBI. On a night in September of nineteen
ninety seven, Tony picked up a dancer under the pseudonym Amy.
She was in good spirits when she arrived, but she
was reluctant to take the ride when she thought it
(33:40):
would be just The manager Russell Basil and her behind
the partition, and she didn't know that Russell had already
gotten a box of condoms from Tony, which Tony kept
on hand as part of the job. Russell told Amy
other people would be joining them, but they didn't. The
limousine rocked during the whole ride. When they returned to
(34:04):
the club, Amy was very upset. As she got out
of the limousine, she told her house mom that Russell
had raped her. Then she got her boyfriend to pick
her up from the club. Russell had the gall to
talk to the boyfriend as he was leaving the parking lot, saying,
we like to see our girls taken care of. Meanwhile,
(34:26):
Tony cleaned up the limo. It was a mess. The
carpet was soaked through with spilled champagne, the ice bucket
was overturned, and there was a used condom just outside
the limo's window. Amy told her boyfriend what happened, and
he immediately called nine to one one. The responding officer
(34:47):
asked them to return to the club, where they interviewed
her in the parking lot. The police could not find
Russell Baseil. He had taken an immediate flight to New
York on Delta Airlines. Amy completed a rape exam, and
the officer issued an arrest warrant for Basil. It was
(35:09):
never executed. The FBI does not investigate rape allegations because
that's a state violation. The one exception is if the
rape occurs on federal land, like a Native American reservation
or a National park. I understand fundamentally the difference between
(35:33):
state law enforcement and the FBI. A key distinction is
that FBI cases have to cross state lines. By the
time of the actual hearing. In two thousand and one,
the judge had ruled the prostitution charges admissible because Steve
Kaplan sent a crew of girls to Charleston, South Carolina
(35:55):
when the Knicks were visiting for an exhibition game as
a sex Apart to my knowledge, they did not pursue
the rape charge. Again, I understand that distinction between state
law enforcement and FBI, and I assume the FBI kind
of struck that offense from their official case because it
(36:17):
would be thrown out on those grounds. I get that,
and yet it does not sit well with me because
it seems like the crimes against women were just not
important enough to try, no matter how much I look
at the reasoning why that wasn't included. I'm still left
(36:38):
with the facts that credit card fraud and money laundering
were legally more important than the exploitation of hundreds of women.
The thing that made the rape allegation eligible in this
case is that Steve Kaplan and Officer Jack Redlinger of
the Atlanta Police could be charged on obstruction of justice
(37:01):
by thwarting complaints of rape and not conducting basic due
diligence on the report. Steve Caplan met with Tony Bottino
and told him to concoct a story to state that
Russell was never in the limo that night. That obstruction
of justice by Steve Caplan and Officer Jack Redlinger was
(37:23):
a chief point in the prosecution's case. That and the
Delta Airlines issue. Steve Caplan had converted two Delta employees,
Red Coats, into essentially being his lackeys. They could get
anyone he wanted on any flight he asked for, and
(37:44):
while Steve Caplan did pay for that privilege, he essentially
bribed the red Coats, so I don't think Delta saw
any of that money, and in getting them on the flights,
the red Coats certainly didn't go through the standard operating procedures.
They just marched Steve's people onto the plane, sometimes getting
(38:04):
other passengers to move from their assigned seats. This whole
delta racket resulted in another charge of fraud. The route
that prosecutors ultimately chose to pursue was the RICO Act
because it would lend itself to further investigation in one
of the biggest crime families in New York, the Gambinos.
(38:34):
If you need a refresher on how the RICO Act works,
let me give you a quick summation. The Racketeer Influenced
and Corrupt Organizations Act was enacted on October fifteenth, nineteen seventy.
It's a federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties
performed as a part of an ongoing criminal organization. Without
(38:59):
going into too much detail, it's a way to snowball
a bunch of individual charges into a bigger, more serious
charge of racketeering. One important detail for this case, though,
is that those found guilty of racketeering must forfeit all
ill gotten gains and interest from the racketeering activity. To
(39:21):
be sure, some interesting mafia testimonies came out in court
For example, one of the defendants was Michael de Leonardo
or Mikey Scars. Mikey was a longtime mobster and racketeer,
and John Gibbons, one of the prosecution's witnesses, was a
confessed torturer and involved in numerous hit missions. But that
(39:46):
forfeiture of profits is the most relevant aspect of the
Gold Club trial. Steve Kaplan was a high earning mafia associate.
He was looking at fifty million dollars in orfeiture if
they convicted him on a rico charge. And you're not
going to believe what actually scared the mafia associates into
(40:07):
copying a plea. It was a statement from a rube,
as they called him. In the man's testimony, he told
a story of blatant credit card fraud in which the
waitress or dancer continually told him something had gone wrong
(40:30):
with his credit card transaction, but every charge had gone through.
He got charged for a tray of shots that the
waitress spilled, and then they charged him for an upgrade
when they moved his room because she'd soaked the sofa.
And this guy was a big spender too. He had
expected a bill of about ten thousand dollars that night.
(40:53):
Instead it was twenty eight thousand. He placed numerous disputes
with the club and American Express. The card company eventually
paid the bill but closed his account, which I'm imagining
wrecked his credit since it took him two years to
get approved for another card. With them, fifteen defendants negotiated
(41:27):
a plea agreement. Most of them pled guilty to a
single felony misprision of a felony. Steve Kaplan himself, the owner,
pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy, which quote
included admission to credit card fraud, tax evasion, and prostitution.
(41:50):
Steve agreed to pay or forfeit all of the following
a five million dollar fine to the US government, two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars in restitution for credit card victims,
fifty thousand in reimbursement to Delta Airlines, thirty four thousand,
eight hundred dollars in moldy cash seized during the search.
(42:15):
But when he closed the Gold Club, Steve also lost
a guaranteed income of about nine million dollars over the
course of a year. He would also serve sixteen months
in prison. He did get to keep fifty million dollars,
which would be a nice jump start when he got discharged.
(42:37):
The policeman charged with obstruction of justice had the charges dropped,
they were only suspended from police duty for a few years.
Michael de Leonardo, one of the Gambino family's made men,
later became one of the most famous turncoats in mafia history.
(42:57):
He sang on the whole Gambino family, including all of
the newest Gody generation, after they refuse to help him
out of the charges he was facing in New York
in two thousand and one. He actually helped to convict
eighty mafia members during the course of his testimony, and
one of them was the infamous John Gotti. In his memoir,
(43:20):
FBI agent Mark Sewell says that quote, many mafia aficionados
consider Michael de Leonardo the last real mafia cappo. I
will leave that argument for others to debate, but what
I do know is that the FBI had the right
guy in the two thousand and one Gold Club trial.
(43:44):
This story about Atlanta's Gold Club is action packed with issues,
and there are a thousand ways of looking at the narrative,
But the one I choose to highlight. The one that
fits with the theme of our show is this beautiful
women hustling and Rubes were pushed to illegitimately overcharge their customers,
(44:05):
which led to the eventual exposure of credit card fraud,
and then that led into racketeering charges that, through the
Rico Act, eventually led to the downfall of the whole
Gambino crime family. So by the transitive property, one could
argue that women hustled better than the mafia, and underestimating
(44:29):
their wiles and taking their loyalty for granted led to
its demise. At least, the thesis that women run the
game better is the one I.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
Like to argue.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Join me next week on the greatest true crime stories
ever told for our episode, The Real Witches of Macbeth.
It's a thousand year old story. The trope of three
witches is ubiquitous throughout history and popular culture, from the
Three Muses and the Three Fates to the.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Three Sanderson Sisters. Shakespeare's Weird Sisters just happened to be
the most iconic, or at least my personal favorite trio
of magical women.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
I'd like to shout out a few key sources that
made it possible for me to tell this week's story,
especially Mark Sewell's memoir investigating America's most notorious strip club
and the Vice documentary Sex in the Champagne Room. Many
other sources helped me tell this story, though, so make
sure you check out our show notes for the full bibliography.
(46:05):
The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production
of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted
this episode. I also wrote this episode. Our show is
produced by Emma Demuth. Theme music by Tyler Cash. Executive
producer Scott Waxman.
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