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4/30/06

Jay Allen writes on Carnal Comics Yahoo group:

Jamie [Ralph Gardner] kindly sent me an updated draft of this article, which I'd lost in a computer crash - here's another excerpt from a lengthy piece I wrote about the period when I ran the San Diego strip club Jolar in the mid-80s. The Harry Mohney referred to is the head of the Deja Vu club chain, as well as running the Hustler Clubs, etc:

One of my worst days was when about a half dozen FBI guys showed up in my office. It seemed Harry Mohney was in some kind of tax situation, as well being in legal hot water that affected Jolar once the feds discovered Harry’s company, not Jackie Hagerman, was the true owner. When feds saw the monitoring switch and speaker on my desk that eavesdropped on the private talk show booth phones (something Lee Bickel had set up to keep women from entering into illegal transactions with customers), I was handcuffed and arrested for “installing or maintaining an illegal surveillance system.” When they found a UPS box of porn vids addressed from the Michigan office, they threatened to file federal charges, against me personally, for “interstate transportation of pornography,” which they claimed could earn me twenty years in prison.

I sat there with my mouth shut (a Company edict I followed religiously) while they tore my office apart and took away all the files, bankbooks and records, even my own school notebook from a night class I was taking in graphic arts. The charges against me were later dropped but the FBI visited me a few other times. Most of their questions were about Harry, particularly about his and the Company’s various home properties maintained in and around La Costa. I didn’t know at the time that his ex, Gail Palmer had filed suit against Harry in February ‘85, claiming the house at 2520 La Costa Avenue as an asset she thought she co-owned (“I later discovered it was placed in the name of Caribbean Films, Inc.” she wrote in her court declaration). I was surprised to find out the FBI knew I’d house-sat a few weekends in a couple of those La Costa homes (one periodically occupied by Jackie, not Harry).

That’s about when I first started noticing black cars with no license plates following me as I drove to our various bank deposit drops (we maintained several, I knew better than to ask why). When they didn’t turn out to be robbers, I assumed them to be feds. I wondered if someone had been following me up to La Costa, perhaps on occasions when I was asked to prepare Company houses for Company guests to visit. I’d be sent off by Jackie or Harry with a shopping list of snacks, fridge drinks, wine, condom boxes and other stuff that I was to sprinkle around for impending guests.

I was occasionally instructed to introduce a “fun loving” dancer or three to male Company associates, with the girls making their own deals with Harry, Jackie and/or the visitor if there was to be monetary compensation for their time and efforts. I know, I know…weird fucken gig. The house Jackie frequented had all white carpets and furniture downstairs, furthering that “Yoko-esque” association for me. She liked my girlfriend and invited us to spend evenings and weekends there by ourselves, though usually slotting in some shopping, dry cleaning or car-delivery errands for me to do while up there (she had a new Mercedes with a gold hood ornament that always needed to be moved from some airport or another, she didn’t want her expensive oft-replaced ornament stolen from any more airport lots).

One of my oddest experiences at Company homes took place at the Yoko house. After spending the night, my girl and I awoke to the sound of multiple voices coming from the backyard. Imagine our surprise to find about a dozen guys setting up cameras and lights around the pool and deck, for a morning video shoot, and I don’t mean the wedding type.

I found this was common and in fact I soon began recognizing Company houses as backdrops in porn vids screened at Jolar.

Just as we were relaxing to the notion of what would soon be happening around us before we even ate breakfast, the director informed that Harry Mohney had commissioned this to be a “golden shower” video. (“Orange juice? Um, no thanks.”)

Harry attended one of my early attempts to market Jolar to a growing, more affluent customer base when I began bringing porn stars to the club to do weekend personal appearances. The women signed autographs and posed for Poloroids with fans ($10 a pop, $20 nude) and even performed one-on-one shows in the Private Talk Show booths for $20 per three-minute “show” (split between star and club).

Patti Petite was the first, a small bottled blonde with a Joan Rivers voice but sexy features and a reputation for doing anything, anywhere, anytime. We ran one of her movies on a screen in the background while she met fans and I recall being uncomfortable the first time one of her sex scenes came on while I was sitting right there next to her. “My mouth hurt for days after that,” she said after one particularly frenetic scene and I laughed, tension somewhat relieved.

I’d never met a porn star and I had no idea what kind of freak show to expect. She was a perfectly nice young lady with a rather dirty mouth. Harry was impressed with the line of men waiting to meet her and leading out the front doors all night long - we grossed an additional $10,000 for the weekend, above and beyond the increased take in the booths with local ladies and video decks.

I got a fat bonus and the Company began paying other porn stars to fly in and stay at Harry’s homes to do these lucrative personal appearances, which were advertised in local zines, military papers and via old fashioned flyering of rock show parking lots and even at other dance clubs. Most women were doing videos for Harry too, though I’m not sure if Traci Lords was working for Caribbean when we booked her. She was due to appear on the following month when news hit about her underage status. I was among the merchants scurrying to empty her dozens of videos off the shelves and return to the main office (which presumably destroyed them all). A lot of people still showed up to see Lords, even after we put up signs announcing her appearance had been cancelled.

Harry (or rather the Company) bought an adult bookstore on 827 National City Boulevard and Jackie and I began converting it to be setup like Jolar, with live dancer booths. However, there was some doubt about whether the city would allow us to even open the doors, given new zoning laws, cloudy property purchase records and the questionable adult-boutique license transfer. Harry wasn’t a legal county resident, I was told, or perhaps he was merely unwilling to apply his name to the license. Lord knows in-house paper trails regarding his many business interests were treated like top-secret documents – “need to know” prioritized, arcanely coded and promptly shredded (we were only allowed to refer to him as “Our Friend” in company correspondences and reports).

I was once nearly fired for accidentally opening a Fed-Ex envelope addressed to Jackie containing fictitious name applications signed by company employees, whose address-specific histories needed to be confirmed (or created?) to obtain new operational permits in various southwest cities.

In a meeting with Jackie and Harry, I was approached to front as owner of the Nat’l City shop, at least temporarily, until the permits cleared and the business could re-open. I considered the nearly six-figure offer to put my name on the business license as “owner” and on incorporation paperwork as “president and controlling officer” of the “new” corporation while we remodeled the building’s cavernous interior.

We opened the front section as a bookstore only, with a Jolar part-timer named Tom Gray “managing” who’d later go to federal prison in Boron for dealing meth. The only reason the doors were opened was to stave off a threat of condemnation by the city.

In what is in hindsight a rare wise decision, I declined to become a part-owner of the National City store.

Sure enough, it was shut down a few weeks later without the remodeling ever being finished and neither Jackie nor Harry ever referred to it again. Harry was eyeing other San Diego locales for what would eventually become his Déjà Vu clubs.

Downtown was seeing the death of its peep show population. At the same time, the city was becoming a hot spot for both porn producers and resident stars, with more and more videos being produced (and sold) within city limits. We briefly carried, on consignment, a few vids literally hand made by locals who’d bring them in shopping bags, with photocopied covers and an occasional pasted-on photo print of a lady who may or may not appear on the tape.

Some of the Jolar girls appeared in Harry’s porn mags, given away on site, and others made their own X-rated tapes which they sold in the shop (minus a commission for the house, of course). The Company saw the future was clearly in “Live Nude Girls,” especially those industrious enough to market themselves with trinkets like handmade vids, Poloroids, and even worn undergarments (which we briefly offered to customers free as a “happy hour” promotion, part of a paid booth “Talk Booth” show and given right off the ladies’ backs, as it were).

The Company opened new stores patterned after Jolar, like Pandora’s Box on 6th Avenue in Tucson, Arizona. Similar shops were started in Phoenix, Galveston, Las Vegas and elsewhere, and Jackie and I trained some of the new managers in Tucson or at Jolar. Porn star events continued to be more popular, with occasional media coverage. Not always positive coverage (“You’ll be shocked to hear what’s happening in YOUR neighborhood!”), but anything that mentioned us was considered good press and inevitably resulted in a rush of new and often devotional patrons (note to guys trying to impress strippers – you ALL bring f----- flowers to the club, it’s not charming, it’s not original, the ladies AND their boyfriends/girlfriends are laughing at you and it’s not gonna get you laid – “once a john, always a john,” just bring cash).

The dancers were making far too much money for Jackie’s liking. She came to visit for a week (her gold Mercedes hood ornament stolen twice while parked out front, I suspect by angry dancers) and revamped the whole system. She rebooked each girl as an “independent contractor” and rented them booth space at the club to perform! We charged $75 off the top of anything they made, and then took 50% of their tips, all of which went into lockboxes between them and the customers. The women never got to handle their own money until the end of the week, when we’d deduct our booth rental fees and our half of her week’s tips.

This pissed off a lot of dancers but none that I recall quit. In fact competition became fierce to rent booths on the best weekend nights, with women paying days in advance to keep their preferred booth and shift. Rent soon went up to $100 per booth shift.

After only a few weeks of this system, the state department of equalization came down on us over the girls’ benefit-less non-employee status. I was visited June 26, 1985, by Deputy Labor Commissioner Victor Rojas, who brought with him several vice cops and a fire inspector, Captain Marion Stillwell. Stillwell kept me busy with eight cited violations while Rojas and vice grilled the dancers. The labor board then informed us that dancers had to be treated as employees from that point forward, threatening us with years’ worth of dancers’ back taxes if we challenged the decree. Jackie chose not to fight and put all the dancers on the payroll, requiring them to clock in (I had to buy a time-clock) and paying them a minimum hourly wage. All their tips went into lockboxes which the Company kept for each woman until the end of the week. Then Jolar would cut them a check for 50% of their total tip earnings, which still netted the average girl a couple thousand dollars a week for only a few nights’ work.

It wasn’t just vice and the city campaigning to erase the pornographic blight on College Grove’s landscape. There were also occasional protestors to deal with. The twenty or so matronly ladies carrying “Jolar Exploits Women” signs around the building for four consecutive weekends (10am to 2am, same shifts as the dancers), during summer 1986, were my favorite. They actually listened to the dancers when they went outside to inform that they weren’t being sold into slavery and that the lowest wage earner among them took home more cash per night than the club manager. “Who’s exploiting who?” they posited. The protest signs didn’t come down but it was entirely enjoyable and amusing to see such very disparate women, leading such unrelated lives, having a lively discussion in the front parking lot about a woman’s right to buy a condo off wages legally earned while nude.

The club was raided again, this time by vice cops holding warrants for the arrest of several dancers and myself. One of the dancers, “Angie,” had solicited an undercover cop and others had been caught performing “forbidden acts” in private booth shows for secret Sheriff shoppers (many of whom, the dancers insisted to me, exposed themselves and masturbated).

POLICE REPORT against Ellwest, excerpt: “The window in booth permitted each side to view the other, and customers were asked to expose their penises and masturbate to show that they were not police. Each officer made excuses, however, and the performers did not insist. Officers saw defendant perform twice, each time with another woman. Each time, the performers fondled and licked each others' breasts and masturbated. One performer also squeezed milk from her breasts. Officers who watched other performances testified that women other than defendant fondled and licked each other vaginally as well…manager arrested for operating or maintaining a house of prostitution and pandering, class 5 felonies.”

I’d never spent more than a couple of hours in jail for the Company, someone always bailed me out while the handcuffs were still warm and took care of virtually all my court appearances. I can’t recall ever being in an actual courtroom for them despite being arrested (by local authorities) four times, over dancer infractions (in addition to the unnerving if never-pressed FBI bust). Charges, against ME anyways, were always eventually dropped, if ever filed at all. For some reason, this time I had to spend the entire night in a downtown holding cell, and I was rather unhappy about this, as you can imagine. Besides, there were still those unmarked black cars I kept seeing…