Moving In on New York Laps By MICHAEL BRICK Published: January 21, 2005 Paradise has a shuttered hoagie shop and a lottery dealer for neighbors, the Empire State Building for shade. Its name is done in neon cursive over fading jungle scenes, and Franklin Mint-style dinner plates with pictures of Marilyn Monroe fill the front window, which gives no view from Paradise to 33rd Street. The Texan has had designs on the place for years. He runs a chain of strip clubs in Houston, New Orleans and elsewhere called Rick's Cabaret. Like the man says, everybody goes there. Anna Nicole Smith met her sugar daddy at a Rick's, and a dozen and one future Penthouse Pets slipped into something a little less there, but the Texan speaks of buying the Paradise as if it were destiny. "We need to be in New York," said the Texan, Eric S. Langan, sitting on a balcony inside the club while young women in lacy black bra-and-panty numbers moved to the electronic drum beat throbbing off the dull green walls. "When you go to a New York club now, they don't greet you, they don't seat you. We do that. We say: 'Are you going to have dinner?' " His would-be competitors scoff and call him naïve, perhaps willfully so: They say New Yorkers know good and well how to run a classy strip club. "I'm trying not to be negative and confrontational," rasped Lonnie Hanover, the spokesman for Scores, which operates strip clubs on the East and West Sides of Manhattan. "It sounds like a sales pitch." And it is a sales pitch, one Mr. Langan plans to use to establish a flagship in New York, where his chain stands to win the attention of stock analysts and big-money investors. The trick is that in Manhattan, where a decade of aggressive enforcement of blue laws and zoning ordinances has scattered and battered Times Square peep shows and video booths, the competition in high-end strip clubs is stronger than ever. "There's a ton of places," Mark J. Alonso, a lawyer who represents Ten's World-Class Cabaret in Manhattan, said of the competition. "The question is: Are people going to want to go there and spend top dollar? I think New Yorkers are a bit jaded, so unless there's something startlingly new in the field of adult entertainment, they've got their work cut out for them." Even if it never makes a penny, a Rick's in Midtown Manhattan could serve other purposes. The people who run the big toy store with the indoor Ferris wheel in Times Square understand this way of thinking, as do the people who run the fish restaurant with the plastic lobster over the door. "Because they're a chain, they can market that they've got a location in Times Square," said Lynne B. Sagalyn, the author of "Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon" (The MIT Press, 2001). "If they're marketing it in Texas, they don't even need to know that 33rd Street is not Times Square." But Mr. Langan says he does indeed plan to make a profit in Manhattan, even after spending $7.6 million to buy the club in a deal that closed this week, plus $1.4 million to remake the Paradise in Rick's image. That means decorating the place like a restaurant where you might celebrate an anniversary, serving fine cuisine, taking credit cards and seating customers in what the Texan calls "three-hour chairs," in reference to how long you will be comfortable in them. It also means making the dancers comfortable. "You feel like they're on your side instead of trying to scam your money," said Anna Johnson, 20, a Rick's dancer who spoke by telephone from Minneapolis and who hopes to move to New York, which she has never seen, to work at the new Rick's. Crediting the chain's literal and metaphorical cleanliness and noting that she thinks you know what she means, Miss Johnson said, "there's a lot better-looking girls, higher-class women." And that, the Texan says, is his draw card, a little Southern hospitality. He has learned it through years of practice. Mr. Langan was raised in Euless, where the high school football team is called the Trojans and the motto is something about pride and responsibility. He collected baseball cards obsessively, Mickey Mantles and lots of others, and when he became a man he put away childish things. He started dating a dancer, and he came to think that her boss was not such a big deal and neither was his club. "It was a little bitty dump," he said. "They were making money hand over fist, and we were like: 'This guy's an idiot.' Around his 21st birthday, he sold his baseball card collection for $40,000, enough for his share of a ramshackle club in the Rosemont section of Fort Worth. The neighborhood association was powerful and displeased, and he was arrested 13 times on zoning violations. It was a strong inducement to find his way to the high-end side of the business. Fifteen years later, his company is publicly traded under the symbol RICK on the Nasdaq exchange. Still, the Texan looks younger than he is, and he is just 36. He wears a bright pressed T-shirt under a thin black scuba jacket, even in wintertime, combs his hair in a clean blond part, and talks with a twang. When he takes his dancers for a night out at a Houston restaurant, no one in town will let him pay for anything, not even parking. "We get a lot of thank-you's," he said, and he expects more of them. Mr. Langan may find there are fewer thank-you's to be had in New York City. To the contrary, it is some small wonder that he even stands a chance of entering the strip club business in the hometowns of Wiggles (which a DeCavalcante family soldier once testified was owned by an acting family boss) and of Scores (which prosecutors have said was a victim of extortion by a Mafia captain named Michael DiLeonardo, known as Mikey Scars to his peers in the Gambino crime family). The city has worked aggressively to discourage the strip-tease trade, but court tests of its zoning laws have left places like the Paradise Club - none too close to anybody's home, school or church - to operate unchecked. "We inspect them," said John Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator, "but we inspect them to make sure they're safe." While the Paradise Club has one of the few locations in Midtown that is out of the reach of city inspectors, its good fortune is not unique. The Penthouse Executive Club, Larry Flynt's Hustler Club and Scores all found locations immune to the zoning laws along the West Side of Manhattan, not too far from the site proposed for a new football stadium. And the club owners say they do not require any lessons in hospitality. "We are the gold standard in strip clubs: the celebrity clientele, the volume, the number of dancers that perform nightly," said Mr. Hanover of Scores, which opened a 10,000-square foot club on the West Side nine months ago. "If you glance to your left, you'll see an athlete from a New York team; if you glance to your right, you might just see a TV star." And Mr. Alonso, the lawyer, said that for drawing in customers, the southern part of Midtown was overrated anyhow. "You and I would know as New Yorkers, the hotels there are not conducive to high-end businessmen," he said. "And yeah, it's a transportation hub, but it's the Long Island Rail Road." The Texan is undeterred. He has a 20-year lease, the business and a liquor license, which has a dual meaning in New York: He can sell liquor, but his dancers have to keep their panties on. As he surveyed the club from the balcony, he pointed to jungle motifs he wants to paint over and disco balls and green lampshades he wants to rip out. He spoke of spiral staircases, framed mirrors, lots of maroon, curtains and leather, those comfortable chairs, too. He said he wanted to teach the dancers he hires in New York to act like the ones in Houston, to sit and smile and have a little conversation without any negotiations up front. And then he stopped, and he leaned forward and he smiled, for here was the part of the sales pitch that just might take Manhattan. "Nothing beats when she sits down and says, 'Hi, I'm Susie,' " the Texan said, "and she's interested in you." © The New York Times