The Millenium Club in Columbus, Ohio, reopening under the new name Allure, was raided and closed. Weapons, drugs, & suspected prostitution. Headlines are:
I visited this club one time last year while the upstairs VIP area was still being rennovated. The owners had put a lot of money into this club and it looked good inside. Dancers were nice looking.
I always wonder about a club that gets built up with "legitimate" types of business expenses -- interior remodeling, mainstream newspaper advertising, etc. -- and then suddenly gets closed. I'll bet the drugs and prostitution were no more common at this particular club, than at most others in the neighborhood, but this club was run by adult-industry newbies who didn't know how to pay off, or NOT piss off, the appropriate members of the police, the mob, or whomever. Just some guys who got involved in something they love, and got screwed because it turned out to be a lot more complex than they thought it was.
On the other hand, when a club is going along great guns without much change, and has a very high volume, and then gets raided once or twice, and doesn't change anything, and then gets raided again, and just rides the raids out, and then REALLY gets raided and closed down? THEN I think that this particular club is a den of excessive prostitution, relative to other clubs in the area.
It's two different trajectories. This Columbus club doesn't seem to have been on the same path as Platinum Plus in Memphis was on.
Seems to me there are two ways to succeed in this business. One is to run a club that tries hard not to violate any laws or piss off the locals, which is the model followed by most of the small local clubs I used to go to. The other is to have sufficient political clout that you can bend the rules quite a bit but are dicreet about it, which seems to be what a lot of the larger glitzier clubs try to do. Seems to me that the clubs that get shut down are those that do neither.
Yeah, generally, a raid means NOT merely that you broke the rules, but more that you broke them and didn't know you were supposed to keep it hush-hush.
Well, Who the fuck wants to go to Columbus Oh? Annyway. We can always to go to Memphis to visit shut down strip clubs...