← The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told
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DJ
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- [01:30]
Mary Kay McBrayer
You know that excitement that builds when the facts of a cold case start to heat up? Of course.
- [01:35]
Listener
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- [01:37]
Mary Kay McBrayer
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- [02:09]
Listener
Diversion Audio 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 1998. 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. One of them hands you a business card 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 are full nudity. 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 Atlanta celebrities who turn up anytime they please. Too short. Jermaine Dupri, Andrew Jones. But you know the 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 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 sign. The doorman opens your door, checks your id. The inside delivers. The girls 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. They notice your watch, your shoes, 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 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 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 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 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. Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode we're calling the Gold 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 a joke die when it deserves to, but this one is just so perfect that I need to explain it. In case you're under 35. In 1999, Chris Rock released a spoof keynote graduating class speech set to an R and B rhythm that went. I saw it viral. 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 in the Champagne Room. At least that's the story behind the Gold Club, which was for most of the 1990s, 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 wide scale mafia funded fraud. I'll tell you all about it after this quick break. While I was researching for 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, and let me really emphasize this, the whole business model. Like I said, I find 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 they are good at their job. And for the people in 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 side hustles. But again, you asked for it and the Gold Club was the best in the business. Whenever I research 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 90s. 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. 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 $500 to $1,000. 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 $250, although she could name her price. And that's if it was just a one on one situation, 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, this is a classy place. So the girl who's keeping you company, she's drinking champagne or maybe cognac, but it ain't the cheap shit. One bottle of champagne cost $350. And that was if it was on the low end. If she wanted Jeroboam, that could have been thousands per bottle. And you probably wouldn't get 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 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 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 completely legal. It's part of the game which you agreed to play the moment you walked in and it probably 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 top of the employees hierarchy said so. The others were less unanimous and having a fun time. But we'll come to that. One of the best dancers was Jacqueline Bush. Her stage name was Diva. In the documentary, she talks about her customers taking champagne shots out of her butt crack. Or the time she made $2,000 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 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 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 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 customer talk. Can you believe he did that? That's amazing. Or I can't believe your wife treats you like that. That's so wrong. 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. Well, if you're a regular rich guy, 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 than to make it free for them? Steve would pay the dancers 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 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 thumbprint 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 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 $10,000 in gold bucks, you have a surcharge for the gold bucks and then you have your beautiful gold bugs, ladies who want at least 20% as well. So everybody was making money, it was just crazy. And then you 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 thumbprint. SHE LAUGHS 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 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 to indicate acts of prostitution. Weirdly, they used the names of professional basketball players to distinguish between oral sex, intercourse and lesbian sex. They also used code words to describe illegal drug activity. So the violation's book entries read like charity was caught by Dakota committing a Scottie Pippen in Gold Room 2. The book also typically listed how the club punished the dancers offense if they did. Steve often fined his employees for these offenses. 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 comped 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 failed to earn $200 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 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, use drugs, 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. 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 12 dancers 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 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 progressive. That solidarity is probably how the FBI team converted so many employees into informants. I should 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 or the club management. Two, club management allowed big spenders to pay for prostitution. Three, Steve's girls were allowed to commit prostitution without Kaplan's approval and with impunity. Four, Employees committed prostitution of their own volition, but without the approval of the club's management. If caught, the employee would likely be fired, rehired and fined. In short, every time an employee engaged in prostitution, the club profited. Of course, the customers equivocated. In the documentary, one employee says the 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 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.
- [24:06]
Narrator
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- [25:38]
DJ
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- [26:06]
Mary Kay McBrayer
You know that excitement that builds when the facts of a cold case start to heat up. Of course.
- [26:11]
Listener
Are there new clues this month?
- [26:12]
Mary Kay McBrayer
Forget clues. There's huge savings this month@cheapcaribbean.com heats up.
- [26:18]
Listener
I get it.
- [26:19]
Mary Kay McBrayer
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- [26:46]
Listener
It was the 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 Gotti. The FBI couldn't figure out how much money Steve was actually making, even though it was recognized 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, and they couldn't have a man undercover agent posing as a Gold Room 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 hire and he wouldn't get them anything juicy. So they targeted the current employees, specifically the dancers. A significant minority 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 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. She listed crimes she had witnessed as tax fraud, credit card fraud, public corruption, and prostitution. 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 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 do this both to increase their sex appeal because apparently Dakota is a sexier name than Beth and to protect their identities against stalkers. 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, 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 house mom's binder. Typically, a house mother is a former dancer who is past her dancing prime, and she's usually between 40 and 60 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 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 18, 1999, the FBI raided the club at 4am it was closing time. But that didn't mean anything. The 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 6am that raid is when 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. 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 the credit card fraud was not simply the work of renegade employees, but a team effort between select dancers, select waitresses, and most of the club management. The handwritten notes on the waitress's 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 far as document reconnaissance, what proved even more important was the search of Steve Kaplan's corporate warehouse. 75 banker's boxes 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 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 $400,000 upper middle class homes. As 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 in one of the Gold rooms. The agent asked her how she could be sure that's 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 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 an athlete's criminal exposure to 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, Dikembe Mutombo. 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 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 14 years or some shit and it wasn't even a clip of the guitar riff. Okay, after a quick Google, Andrew Jones is only 11 years older than me, so it wasn't even that outrageous of a crush. I mean, that was within my range of dateability when I was dating. I'm not saying we could have had a life together in the year 2000, 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, missed chances, nagging at 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 7ft tall and that made him quite memorable. The FBI agent also said that every professional athlete he interviewed 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 testimonies unless it was just to get 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 not investigate rape cases, and I'll tell you more about that after this break.
- [37:16]
Ryan
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- [38:14]
Amica Insurance Representative
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- [38:49]
DJ
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- [39:15]
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- [39:55]
Listener
One important part of this trial that didn't get much press then was the alleged rape that occurred Inside the Gold Club's limousine in 1997. Tony Butina was the limousine driver. From 1994-97 he picked up VIP celebrities. They were usually professional athletes, but sometimes they were Gambino family captains. 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 1997, Toni 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 would be just the manager, Russell Basile, 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 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, 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 911. The responding officer asked them to return to the club where they interviewed her in the parking lot. The police could not find Russell Basile. He had taken an immediate flight to New York on Delta Air Lines. Amy completed a rape exam and the officer issued an arrest warrant for Basile it was 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 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 2001, the judge had ruled the prostitution charges admissible because Steve Kaplan sent a crew of girls to Charleston, South Carolina, when the Knicks were visiting for an exhibition game as a sex surprise. 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 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 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 by thwarting complaints of rape and not conducting basic due diligence on the report. Steve Kaplan met with Tony Butino and told him to concoct a story to state that Russell was never in the limo that night. That obstruction of justice by Steve Kaplan and Officer Jack Redlinger was a chief point in the prosecution's case. That and the Delta Air Lines issue. Steve Kaplan had converted two Delta employees, redcoats, into essentially being his lackeys. They could get anyone he wanted on any flight he asked for. And while Steve Kaplan did pay for that privilege, he essentially bribed the redcoats. So I don't think Delta saw any of that money. And in getting them on the flights, the redcoats certainly didn't go through the standard operating procedures. They just marched Steve's people onto the plane, sometimes getting 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 and. And one of the biggest crime families in New York, the Gambinos. 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 15, 1970, it's a federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties performed as a part of an ongoing criminal organization. Without 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 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 Givens, one of the prosecution's witnesses, was a confessed torturer and involved in numerous hit missions. But that 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 $50 million in forfeiture if they convicted him on a RICO charge. And you're not going to believe what actually scared the Mafia associates into 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 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 $10,000 that night. Instead, it was 28,000. 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, 15 defendants negotiated a plea 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. Steve agreed to pay or forfeit all of the following, a $5 million fine to the U.S. government, $250,000 in restitution for credit card victims, $50,000 in reimbursement to Delta Airlines, $34,800 in moldy cash seized during the search. But when he closed the Gold Club, Steve also lost a guaranteed income of about $9 million over the course of a year. He would also serve 16 months in prison. He did get to keep $50 million, which would be a nice jump start. When he got discharged, the policemen 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. He sang on the whole Gambino family, including all of the newest Gotti generation, after they refused to help him out of the charges he was facing in New York in 2001. He actually helped to convict 80 mafia members during the course of his testimony, and one of them was the infamous John Gotti. In his memoir, FBI agent Mark Sewell says that, quote, many Mafia aficionados consider Michael de Leonardo the last real Mafia capo. I will leave that argument for others to debate, but what I do know is that the FBI had the right guy in the 2001 Gold Club trial. 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 rubes were pushed to illegitimately overcharge their customers, 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 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 like to argue Foreign 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 three Sanderson Sisters. Shakespeare's weird sisters just happen to be the most iconic, or at least my personal favorite trio of magical women. 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 and 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. 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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Listener
Hey, Jenice Torres here and I'm Austin Hankwitz. We're the hosts of Mind the Business Small Business Success Stories produced by Ruby Studio and Intuit QuickBooks. Catch up on seasons one and two and join us for a brand new season of the podcast as we talk to small business owners about how they manage and grow their businesses with the help of platforms like Intuit QuickBooks.
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Amica Insurance Representative
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DJ
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Mary Kay McBrayer
You know that excitement that builds when the facts of a cold case start to heat up? Of course.
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