The Naked and the Dead

It didn't matter that I was lying in my own blood, sweat and tears in a hospital bed. Nor did it matter that I was several hours removed from spinal surgery at New York Hospital--courtesy of an old football injury--and well into my umpteenth morphine-induced dream. All that mattered to my editors at the New York Daily News was that there had been a possible double homicide at Scores, the country's premiere strip club and the place I had made my home for the previous four years. When it came to Scores, I had an angle on everything--even murder. The phone call shook me awake, but not enough to grab the phone on the first ring. It's always like that when drugs are swimming through your blood--you need another ring or two to accept the duty of answering.

"Hello?"

"Benza? Good, you're out of surgery. Richie Rosen here. Listen, two employees were shot at Scores. One guy is dead, the other ain't gonna make it. He's in ICU at your hospital right now. You feel up to reporting this one out?"

"Richie, I don't need a byline tomorrow. I need more morphine."

"We really need you on this."

"I'll make some calls in a few hours," I said, squeezing my morphine button and beginning the cold fadeaway. "Richie, there's one more death you can add to this story."

"Who's that?"

"Scores. It's done. I don't think it can survive this."

The motionless bodies of waiter Jon Segal and bouncer Mike Greco lying in Scores' gaudy foyer were merely the club's blood and guts on display for the entire city to see. What was to come was the slow and painful hemorrhaging of a club that was nothing if not the fastest and most riotous ride the city had ever taken.

The gunshots that echoed throughout the glass and marble foyer announced the end of an era at the close of a century within a city to which I owned a set of keys. I never did get around to making those calls. I stayed comfortably numb. And I dreamed dreams of what used to be.

•

It didn't matter what your poison was, you could get it at Scores and the supply seemed endless. You want a couple of Cohibas and a nice single malt to take with your Bolivian stash? Want to bang out a muldoon? That's a stolen credit card, and drunken suits are famous for leaving them behind before they drive back to the Jersey suburbs. Well, you're in luck. One of the waiters glommed an Amex off some poor bastard just last night and he's moving more for a nickel a pop.

Want to get a peek at Madonna? It just so happens she's in the President's Club, Scores' own VIP room, with Tupac Shakur and his homies. Want to see who Dennis Rodman is fucking? She's the killer blonde on the stage. Want to check out the woman the diminutive billionaire was bringing to family functions? She's the towering Italian who used to work as Julia Roberts' body double. Need a blow job? Come back around 3:45. That's when Daisy drops her primo ecstasy and probably won't say no. Just don't count on getting to work on time in the morning.

Want a dose of publicity? A break from reality? An escape from your wife? Want a pretty girl to listen? Just pay your $20 at the door and slip Helter Skelter a fifty and he'll put your ass in the right seat.

Scores strung together what was arguably the best lineup of beautiful women in the country along with the richest men in the world. Why else would Texas honeys leave the Cabaret Royale, or Florida's cuties cut out of Pure Platinum or Atlanta's Southern belles bolt the Cheetah Lounge? They did, neatly packing their Frederick's (continued on page 138)Scores(continued from page 72) gowns and fuck-me pumps before boarding redeye flights into the City That Never Sleeps to dance for the men who stay up with it. The faces might have changed over the years, but the quality of the entertainment has always been measured in hard-ons. How long an erection is sustained is directly proportionate to the lines forming around the block. And that speaks mouthfuls of the beauties dropping their dresses on East 60th Street. After New Yorkers--and their most notable hometown sports heroes--made repeated forays to the club, it wasn't long before the rest of the country realized something special was going on at this particular Manhattan strip club. In what seemed like no time at all, Madonna and assorted bicurious pals dropped by. Demi Moore made frequent stops to prepare for her role in the film Striptease. Geraldo Rivera dragged in almost all of the tired O.J. Simpson gang to the club. Dennis Rodman made a leggy Texan named Stacy Yarborough his own. Steven Spielberg tugged his hat way down low and sat in the closed-door confines of the President's Club. And, of course, Howard Stern held court whenever he wanted with a soft-core massage party or poker game for those truly on the inside of cool.

Almost every scandalous person in the news found his way to the T and A palace: Dwight Gooden trudged in several hours before he was to be booted from baseball for the second time. John Wayne Bobbitt made the horrifying decision to flash some of the damage his slasher wife, Lorena, caused. Hugh Grant made several post-Divine Brown forays. Jerry Seinfeld stared into his drink after his breakup with Shoshanna Lonstein, because--let's face it--where else is the man going to go after love with a busty beauty like that goes bad? Even David Smith, husband of convicted child-killer Susan Smith, took in four hours of table dances almost immediately after he was through hawking his book on the death of his two young sons. And, in perhaps the most notorious visit by a professional sports team, the New York Rangers carried in the Stanley Cup and repeatedly filled it with bottles of champagne until every fan and dancer had taken a sip from it. However, somewhere in the revelry, not one of the players remembered to take the cup home.

It got to the point that some of the guys out front were fixing a line on how soon President Clinton would show up. Since the club hasn't closed down just yet, he might still do it. If a blow job isn't cheating, a lap dance must be like bringing Hillary flowers on her birthday. And the most beautiful part of it all is that Scores girls keep their mouths shut.

Legs open, mouths shut. You want better than that?

Let's talk about the girls for a minute. You can say all you want about service and ambience and location, location, location, but it was the girls that made Scores different from any other club. I remember watching Showgirls and wondering where the hell screenwriter Joe Eszterhas got his information. What club was he hanging around? Which girls did he chat up? With dialogue and a plot like that, Eszterhas couldn't get laid in the President's Club with a fistful of fifties and a promise to make every stripper a star. What Big Joe--and the makers of the equally horrible Striptease--don't understand is that the main story in a club like this one almost never takes place onstage. At Scores, the real drama started at the lowly valet stand--where ballsy drivers pulled quick pieces of work for local mafiosi with some poor schmuck's Mercedes while a selected peeler kept the guy occupied--and it weaved through the nightly bacchanalia and the parade of movie stars, models, millionaires and mobsters until it finally reached a climax with the "right" guys taking the "right" dancers home.

One night, when a Cy Young Award winning pitcher waltzed into the club, some of the boys took it upon themselves to get the ace nice and drunk past four A.M. so he couldn't possibly take the mound at Shea the next afternoon and beat the Mets. I watched as he vomited in the street before falling into a Town Car and heading to his hotel a mere seven hours before he was to pitch. And I watched as a dozen men immediately ran to the phone and placed large action against his team. "No doubt about this one," one tough guy barked to his bookie. But when there's never a doubt, there's always doubt. The pitcher ended up winning and costing a few of the tough guys some $40,000 in foolish wagering.

Whenever Howard Stern decided that it was time to let his hair down, he chose Scores. And on those days--call them "poker games" or "Super Bowl celebrations" or "massage parties"--the brass at Scores would simply shut the doors all day and let the wild man run wild. No questions asked, no answers given, no secrets told. And for the next few days Stern would go on and on about Scores to millions of his entranced listeners. (The club, to this day, has never paid for a single advertisement in any newspaper or for a television or radio spot.)

Then there was the time when Trudie Styler was swinging topless on a brass pole as her husband, Sting, proudly looked on. Not for one night. Not for two. But for three straight nights. True Scores drama unfolded with a drunken Charlie Sheen discarding $100 bills as if they were infectious, or with George Clooney mysteriously showing up with a quartet of the club's strippers while on vacation in South Beach, or with actor and Hell's Angel henchman Chuck Zito orchestrating closed-door knockouts with Mickey Rourke, Jean-Claude Van Damme and yours truly. Not for publicity's sake, mind you, but because all three of us were guilty of violating a street code that may no longer exist outside Scores. Chuck was just the man the Devil sent to make sure we understood. And two years after the fisticuffs, I have to respect the poetry of it all: The tough guy who found an empty room for Chuck to kick my ass in is the same guy who had comped me dinners and drinks for half a decade.

Sadly, few people know anything about this. Because of Hollywood's watered-down depiction of life inside a pulsing strip club, the public has no respect for the type of woman who stands between a man's legs and dances for a living. What's really sad is that Scores girls end up more maligned than the mobsters who shake them down every night for a little mad money, or the married millionaires who cut them checks at the table--with no questions asked.

The perception is that strippers are trampy, that they use sex--or even the possibility of it--as a means to money and influence. That they couldn't possibly have any morals when they charge a man an hourly fee for speaking to him while he eats his filet mignon and mulls over the ridiculous possibility of a love affair. While all of those allegations are partly true, they are no more prevalent at Scores than they are at your own workplace. Or at the White House, for that matter.

The truth is, most Scores girls--however surgically enhanced or cosmetically altered--drove themselves to the big city with dreams of becoming actresses or models and fell a few inches shy. They were too short for the runway and too busty for editorial, but they were just right to reap the rewards that awaited them at Scores. It was almost too easy: Several self-conscious minutes spent auditioning for a strip club manager in a sweaty back room, and they were one night away from the riches they had dreamed about in Podunk and Nowheresville. OK, so maybe some girls took a knee and went a bit further in their desire to impress the boss in the nine millimeter gray suit. What do you want me to say? A chain of power was established, and that was that.

Legs open, mouths shut. You want better than that?

The long and short of it is, before you could say last call, bedroom phones in all the tiny towns across America started ringing with the news of girls making upwards of $2000 a night. Heather Lynn called Krista and she called Tiffany, who was on the phone with Amber, who relayed the news to Tatiana, who had a friend named Zoe who flew in with Jazz. You get the picture.

Now put yourself in their stilettos: Some guy with money to burn, who just wants to have a lady listen to him, offers to pay for Issa's college education or buy Ally a Mercedes or secure Jade an apartment in Battery Park City or send Vanessa and a friend to Europe. Should the girls turn the man down, especially when he comes in every night and repeatedly makes the same offer--no questions asked?

Hell no. And most Scores girls didn't. They understood the cardinal rule of plying the flesh trade: Guys like girls who like them back. So it wasn't unusual to see a tall Texas beauty forcing laughter from her pretty little mouth even though the man paying her fee was a short, balding, fat banker staying at the Sheraton for a convention. The smart Scores girls learned to take that guy's money and run--or politely step off--and continue to do their jobs until Tommy Lee or George Clooney or Antonio Sabato Jr. or Charlie Sheen walked in later that evening with a pocket full of promises. But somehow the women are given the dumb-blonde label. I don't know many 23-year-old girls who can afford to buy their parents houses on both coasts or who come to own several horses, girls who support their out-of-work boyfriends and drive to work in Jaguar convertibles.

I can't do that.

Can you?

Perhaps what was most beautiful about a Scores girl, and what was once most respected about the club itself, was the girl's ability to watch a secret die in a crowded room. Of course there were times when publicity was at a premium and when calls to the proper gossip columnists and paparazzi had to be made. But by and large, the club--from the girls on up--had a sweet way of never ratting out anyone. It didn't matter that a famous basketball coach asked for Tammy's home number, or that the married action star took a peeler to an after-hours club three nights in a row, or that the female sitcom star is having a relationship with the dancer with the pierced tongue, or that the top movie hunk waits for his Florida honey at the Mark Hotel every time he's in town, with a bottle of champagne, a box of chocolates and a supply of condoms. What was comforting to the celebrities and athletes and diplomats and federal agents and politicians and cops and, yes, rabbis was that they could be confident that their Scores girls were not going to head for the tabloids. There was too much at stake and the fellows with the crooked noses up top made sure everyone walked the straight and narrow, even on the nights when they stumbled out of the club. Pray silence, baby.

How sad then that the candy store would start to lose its flavor because two of the owners, Michael Blutrich and Lyle Pfeffer, agreed to talk with authorities when crimes they had allegedly committed--having nothing to do with Scores--were uncovered. It turns out that along with slapping together a good strip joint, Blutrich and Pfeffer were good at embezzling millions through National Heritage Life, an insurance company they ran in Florida (whose eventual $400 million collapse was one of the largest failures of an insurer as a result of fraud in U.S. history). It was a nasty deal that enabled U.S. attorneys in Florida to piece together an impressive criminal case against the pair. Then the swindling duo, in an effort to reduce their sentences, decided to spill the beans on the history of the club.

Most of the city's adult entertainment clubs routinely pay a mob tax to one of New York's five families. Scores was "on record" with the Gambino crime family. A long-documented relationship between Gambino associate Michael "Mikey Hop" Sergio and Michael Blutrich guaranteed the Gambinos a weekly envelope. This tribute permitted Scores to operate freely, immune to the threats of unorganized crime. Sergio's son, Steve "Sigmund the Sea Monster" Sergio, was installed to oversee security for the club.

Not surprisingly, the shakedowns quickly began with almost every employee--from bathroom attendants to coat-check girl. When Blutrich and Pfeffer called for the ouster of Craig Carlino, the club's management consultant, who is widely credited with turning Scores into a mecca, things got even crazier. Blutrich and Pfeffer were unhappy paying Carlino his rumored $20,000 per week and asked Sergio to remove him. The dispute was resolved in classic Mafia fashion, with Sergio calling in his respected muscle--Greg and Craig DePalma--a father-and-son team connected with the Gambinos. The DePalmas' presence motivated Carlino to call on a top Genovese capo, Angelo Prisco, to vouch for his interests. Unfortunately, Prisco outranked the elder DePalma, so DePalma had to drop a name that would trump Carlino. The name DePalma uttered was John Gotti Jr.

It was the type of sordid mess you see in movies. The feds had bugged DePalma's house. Blutrich and Pfeffer began wearing wires. Eventually the government was able to make a case that John Gotti Jr. was shaking down the club. A sweeping RICO indictment followed, which included extortion, loan-sharking, fraud and gambling, and is set to go to trial early this year. And that's why everyone at Scores--notte macchia di tutti notte macchia (nightclub of nightclubs)--is in the mess they're in.

The feds also uncovered the names of the gunmen who shot Segal and Greco on the first night of summer several years ago. The killers are believed to be Simon and Victor Dedaj, Albanian brothers from the Bronx who frequented the club. The motive? An argument about wrestling that escalated beyond reason.

And so with all the talking and taping and a few squeezes of a trigger, the beautiful carousel that was Scores started to buck and throw some of the pretty and powerful people off their horses. They landed with a loud thud at the feet of Rudolph Giuliani, the most powerful and meddling mayor in New York City's history. Giuliani had decided it was time to improve Big Town's quality of life. So the guy with more vowels in his last name than anybody facing a RICO rap swept into office on a platform that he would direct an assault against businesses and practices that he found morally lacking.

His first task was to clean up the prostitution and pornography on display in Times Square with a city ordinance that prohibits the operation of any adult entertainment within 500 feet of a school, church or residential dwelling. The law further decrees that any business designating more than 40 percent of its floor space to adult entertainment also must comply with the legislation. Scores, along with the city's other popular strip clubs, Ten's and VIP's, was in direct violation of this policy. Its survival threatened, Scores headed a coalition that fervently worked to have the ordinance overturned, but after several years of legal wrangling, state and federal courts upheld the law. As a consequence, all topless establishments were relegated to Manhattan's West Side meatpacking district. This created a catch-22 for Scores. To relocate the club would require a huge financial investment, an unlikely occurrence given that the principal owners were running the nightspot from the confines of the Witness Protection Program. Furthermore, any change of address would require an abundance of new licensing, which, given the club's history, would never be granted.

Now we're left with a club that allows topless nudity in only 40 percent of its space and drapes a black felt curtain around the dance area to separate dancers from diners. Patronage isn't the same, either--there are fewer beautiful people, and their visits are no longer pasted all over the city's gossip columns. Even the mobsters are gone, casting an echo to the joint not heard since the days when it had pool tables in the back, sawdust on the floor and dancers with visible C-section scars.

Laugh all you want, but in terms of fun it was my generation's Ebbets Field and Studio 54 rolled into one. And it didn't have to die. In the end, it was all the talking that brought the club to its knees, and while the tough guys sang and the multimillionaire owners went into the Witness Protection Program, the girls kept dancing and never said a word.

It's as if they understood the code of silence better than the men who live by that code every day. It's almost as if the girls knew that Scores was the end of the line, a switching point, where everyone involved could have changed course or identities and moved on. All they had to do was play the game and pray silence along the way. If the people who once ruled Scores had taken a cue from girls who drop their dresses for a living, we all might be having a little more fun this evening.

Again--legs open, mouths shut. You want better than that?

Bedroom phones across America started ringing with news of girls making upwards of $2000 a night.