Sweet Cherry
"Hoy en el New York Times publicaron un reportaje sobre un bar nudista de Brooklyn llamado The Nine Lives of a Topless Bar: Complaints Hit a Wall of Law de Michael Brick. Se trata de un excelente trabajo periodístico que muestra el problema que representa ese tipo de establecimientos y la forma en que se amparan en la propia ley a pesar de que ahí se ha demostrado que se venden drogas, hay prostitución y violencia. Simultáneamente parece digna para hacer el gion de una película o una serie de television o bien un interesante libo. Sin duda un gran reportaje y ésta es una parte:
When the metal door bangs shut, the daylight is gone. Distorted guitars climb a mountainous drumbeat and a voice snarls Spanish. Thin strands of neon shine dim pink on women in worn lace and on the mirror, where the sign says, "Shut Up and Drink."
Outside, a cursive inscription promises 200 girls onstage at the Sweet Cherry, a corner bar the size of a railroad car on 42nd Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. All down the gravelly paved road, the husks of wasted dragsters and bashed police trucks await salvage or dissection.
In this corner of Brooklyn, where the corporate forces of business and tourism have banished the purveyors of seediness and smut, the last of the low-rent strip parlors have achieved something like indestructibility — even if they are routinely the scenes for crimes; even if their neighbors want them gone. Their tiny survival stories evoke the sometime futilities of a huge municipal force battling a small, notorious menace.
"I wish I could be more optimistic," said Felix W. Ortiz, an assemblyman from Sunset Park who has campaigned to close the Sweet Cherry, "and tell you that we're coming to closure."
But he can't.
In a matter of decades, New York has recast itself as a new American polestar, where crime rates are low, welfare is closely policed and smoking and honking carry fines. Long after Disney claimed Times Square, after the peep shows took to the side streets and stocked subtler offerings, the last of the dive strip parlors survive by keeping to the industrial zones and parrying in court.
Among them, Sweet Cherry is a great champion, brazen and near untouchable. The authorities have documented an in-house narcotics trade, pronounced the club a brothel and charged the manager with rape. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Once, patrons repeatedly stabbed an off-duty police officer, who lost partial use of his right hand. Once, a manager of bouncers for Sweet Cherry was shot dead in his apartment.
But despite two civil actions by the Police Department, voluminous criminal charges and neighborhood protests, the club has been closed for a total of just six days this year. Eleven days after its latest reopening, two dancers were charged with breaking a beer bottle over somebody's head.
In 1993, the city counted 68 topless bars. By 2000 there were 57. The Law Department now counts 21 that could be closed if certain zoning rules are approved in court. About 10 more — including Sweet Cherry — remain within the zoning bounds.
For all the city's efforts, these last clubs have the law on their side. Unable to use the zoning laws as a bludgeon, the city's various attempts to close Sweet Cherry for the crimes it says have occurred there have all failed.
"If they are in the right zone, they can have a girl or girls dancing in the club and not be shut down, because the United States Supreme Court has said you can't be shut down completely," said Herald Price Fahringer, a First Amendment lawyer who has represented many of the clubs. "They're abiding by the law."
But zoning laws aren't the city's only weapons. The police and district attorneys employ the tools of traditional law enforcement, alongside newer strategies, like civil nuisance-abatement lawsuits.
The survival of the Sweet Cherry, told in court documents, interviews, legislative correspondence, business reports and public hearings, traces the vestiges of a presumed bygone in New York: Down by the waterfront, an unreconstructed house of sex, drugs and violence fights City Hall. Its weapons are its obscure address and a decent Court Street lawyer.
A decade into the city's clean-living campaign, the metal door bangs open and shut long past midnight. Sales were $1.05 million last year.
Bucking the City's Plans
The Sweet Cherry counts as its chairman Louis Kapelow, a Manhattan Beach businessman whose court affairs have included an unpaid $10,000 promissory note and a disputed homeowner's liability policy, which Lloyd's of London claimed he obtained after his tree fell onto a neighbor's property. His company was registered on Aug. 10, 1995, and granted a liquor license Jan. 5, 1996.
That summer, Joseph and James DeNicola acquired the property at 202 42nd Street. The architecture, a two-story shotgun with a diagonal door frame to face 42nd Street and Second Avenue, was of the classic corner bar style more common to South Philadelphia than to South Brooklyn, and the certificate of occupancy called for an "eating and drinking place without restrictions on entertainment."
That description suited the Sweet Cherry, though the prospects for the venture were uncertain. New rules championed by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani set an October 1996 deadline to close peep shows, video stores and clubs within 500 feet of schools, homes, churches and one another. The altered landscape left room in tired manufacturing zones behind the barriers of expressways.
In Sunset Park, Club 37, Corrado's and Wild Wild West clustered inside a half-mile stretch. Entering this field, the Sweet Cherry made no pretense of grandeur. The club was outfitted with a D.J. booth, three amplifiers and an equalizer. The left side became a fully stocked bar, the right an elevated stage cordoned with strip poles and an arcade machine.
A walled section in back obscured a chamber for private dances and a storage space for beer. A staircase led to a basement dressing room for dancers like Diamond, whose real name was Jennifer, and Chastity, whose real name was Chastity.
The compacted striptease market sought a regional audience, but the city had other plans for the waterfront. An enormous Costco store opened beside the Gowanus Expressway on Nov. 21, 1996, with plans for an Ikea, a cruise ship port and luxury condominiums in nearby Red Hook to follow.
Trade was returning in the form of artisans' shops, and Chinese and Latino immigrants settled in Sunset Park a short walk from the former Brooklyn Army Terminal. A manufacturing wasteland was becoming a thriving industrial zone fringed by young families. The strip parlors began to draw complaints.
"It's a working-class community, a community with a lot of churches," said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park. "They're particularly incensed that there are so many of these facilities along Second and Third Avenues."
'Litigational Sumo'
The stranger waited by the bar. It was April 17, 1999, a mild, dry Saturday. After a while, two people brought a green Ziploc bag of cocaine from the back room and the stranger paid $20. The currency was recorded. The stranger, Undercover Officer 31931 of the Brooklyn South Narcotics Division, later repeated the transaction four times over the next three months.
In a sworn statement, the officer neither named nor described the drug dealers. The target was the setting, the Sweet Cherry. The police were documenting a pattern of crime, planning to seek sanctions under civil nuisance abatement laws.
"This is litigational sumo wrestling," said Robert F. Messner, assistant commissioner for the Civil Enforcement Unit of the department's Legal Bureau. "It's very quick, it's very fast, it's very brutal."
Three months after the first drug purchase, Detective Kurt Vikki entered the club with a search warrant and arrested 12 people on drug charges. The police sent a letter to Joseph DeNicola.
"You have an obligation," the letter said, "to ensure that your property is not used for criminal activity."
The club turned to a legal team including Lance G. Lazzaro, a St. John's School of Law graduate who keeps an office on Court Street in Brooklyn and shares the workload with Randy Lazzaro, his brother. The lawyers argued that management was not necessarily aware of the drugs.
The officer had visited on weekends, when as many as 70 people filled the 300-square-foot club. The music was usually loud. The undercover officer's behavior gave no cause for suspicion.
"Because one goes to a topless bar to observe semi-naked women," the lawyers wrote, "it is natural to assume that anyone sitting at the bar has his back to the employee or employees behind the bar."
