Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (12 page)

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owned a dying beer joint. They reopened it as the Night Gallery in 1976,

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making it Tampa’s first all-nude strip club. As Joe says, “That’s when

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the crap hit the fan.”

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What followed sounds like an X-rated Looney Tunes series.

Within a week, Tampa vice cops began hauling Joe’s dancers to jail.

Just as he would later do, Joe posted antagonistic signs out front such

as: “Come and watch your local vice squad at work.” Joe explains, “I

wanted to draw customers to what they were doing. I would just de-

vise ways of combating them. People got interested in it because they

wanted to see what would happen next.”

Joe’s partner, the bondsman, stationed at the jail. He bailed out

dancers as fast as they came in so they could get back to work. Even so,

the raids left the club temporarily without dancers. Joe caught on to

the cops’ modus operandi; the undercover officer would watch through

a rotation of dancers and then arrest them all. “Once I figured out their

M.O. I would just rotate three girls, and keep six to the side. When they

would arrest those three and take them downtown, I would put up the

next three. They would go downtown. By this point the first ones would

be bonding out. It worked out perfectly. By the time they arrested the

last three, the first three were back.”

“This would happen three or four times a day except on Sundays and

Mondays because the vice squad didn’t work on Sundays and Mon-

days.” He laughs. “They are such funny people. They just can’t think

outside the box. Today it’s the same.”

proof

Joe and his partner were making so much money at the Night Gal-

lery that his former boss Bobby Rodriguez financially backed him in a

larger all-nude club on Tampa Bay that they named the Tanga Lounge.

The club became so legendary that when it was damaged by fire, the

sportswriters who followed the Detroit Lions held a moment of silence.

Police raided the Tanga, too. But Joe says they were forced to change

their tactics after they had used every undercover officer, thus making

them immediately recognizable.

The cops became more direct. Joe went covert. “When they saw I

had that figured out and it was just a waste of time, five or six of them

would rush in at once,” Joe recalls. Officers showed up throughout the

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day to snatch a nude dancer off the stage and whisk her to jail.

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Joe says he devised a guerilla wiring system to warn dancers of ap-

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proaching police. He ran a line underneath the carpet from the stage

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to a button outside the front door. When the doorman saw the police

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coming he would push the button and the light over the stage would

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come on. The nude dancer would hide and one wearing a bikini would

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quickly take her place. “The police would rush in and the girl would be

dressed,” he says. “They’d come back a few hours later. They’d rush in

again and the girl would be dressed.”

This ruse worked until one of the dancers ratted to police about the

button. “The next time they came I’m standing outside,” Joe says. “The

cop looked at me and rushed up and said, ‘step on that button and I’m

going to shoot you.’ ‘I said, ‘you idiot.’ I pushed on the button and that

was the end of that.”

Joe was arrested thirty-six times that first year, though he was never

convicted. There was so much money rolling in that the hassle of arrest

was worth it. And he even enjoyed the drama. “People go to movies for

action. I was living it,” he recalled years later to
Tampa
Tribune
reporter

Ellen Gedalius.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen other all-nude clubs opened. City

leaders were frantic to come up with a way to outlaw nudity that would

hold up in court. By the time a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court ruling de-

livered local governments an option, Tampa had twenty-two all-nude

clubs.

The high court ruling allowed the city to ban the sale of liquor in

businesses with nudity. Most clubs went back to having the danc-

ers wear G-strings and pasties. One chose to show dancers nude on

film and clothed on stage. Joe took a risk and kept all-nude dancers.

proof

He charged for mixers, gave away liquor, and allowed BYOB. The city

quickly put the kibosh on all of that. To make up for the loss in alco-

hol sales, Joe increased his entry fee from one dollar to five. “Actually

what I thought was going to happen, didn’t,” he says. “I didn’t get more

people, but I made more money because I charged more.” Such is the

allure of a totally nude woman, especially one willing to touch you and

let you touch her.

“When they took away my liquor license, the lap dance just kind of

happened. The girls would be dancing in front of the customer and they

would be touching them.” Joe is careful not to say the obvious: With-

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out alcohol sales, dancers had to offer an additional incentive to keep

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customers coming back. Joe says he doesn’t require dancers to allow

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touching. “My only rule is they have to get naked on stage, and they

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can’t be touched between their legs. Otherwise the customer can touch

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anywhere the girl will agree to be touched, on the breasts wherever. It’s

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fine with me. I studied the statutes. Anything beyond that is a felony.

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So I took it up to the limit of the state statutes.”

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Emboldened by his success at the Tanga, Joe virtually flipped off

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City Hall by opening another all-nude club and naming it City Council

Follies. The Follies couldn’t sell booze, but customers only had to walk

across the parking lot to get a drink at Joe’s Tanga Lounge, where danc-

ers wore string bikinis.

Virtues of Jail

Joe’s battles with the city are well-documented, but he’s rarely spoken

publicly about how he managed to keep out the mob, which had its

fingers in all types of Tampa cash businesses when he started. It’s a

touchy question and the only one he hesitates to answer. “It didn’t hap-

pen right away,” Joe says of mob’s overtures. “Well, I say that, but let

me tell you the guy that had the jukebox in the Night Gallery; I think

he was mobbed up. Frank Diecidue (pronounced De-ce-du). People say

‘the mob,’” Joe says, fingering quotation marks. “I don’t really know.

Actually I had a big problem with him because he didn’t service the

jukebox and I told him if he didn’t, I would put him out. He didn’t, so I

did, I threw him out. And then they threatened to kill me.”

He rushes on with his tale, as if the death threat was no more than a

bluff of a schoolyard bully. “I put someone else in there, and then they

decided not to go after to me, but they threatened him. He pulled the

proof

jukebox out.” Joe laughs. “They scared him.”

After that, Joe says, someone arranged a meeting, and Frank Dieci-

due promised to do a better job. “We resolved the problem,” he says,

not elaborating. “I didn’t care as long as he serviced the jukebox prop-

erly. So, he did, and we got along just fine.”

Given that nobody broke Joe’s legs, you might think that the juke-

box operator was a minor-league thug. Later I discover from Scott Di-

etache, author of multiple books on the Tampa Mafia, that the feds

coined Diecidue a made-man in the Trafficante crime family, an under-

boss to Santo Trafficante Jr. himself. His jukebox business closed in

the mid-1980s. Although Joe’s laughing about the death threats thirty

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years later, upon reflection, I question if he was then.

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Later, other reputed mobsters wanted to operate valet parking at

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the Mons. Joe recalls telling them: “No, it’s not going to happen . . .

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You’re going to have to kill me first.” Mons has never had valet parking.

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Joe suggests mobsters have always backed off because they saw him

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as a kindred spirit. “I think they respected me because I was fighting

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the government, and I was just fighting and fighting and fighting. I

think they saw that, and they kind of liked it.”

He adds: “I guess having [Diecidue’s] jukebox in there was kind of a

protection for me from the others while he was there.”

When Joe opened Mons Venus, it actually was an upgrade from the

building’s previous tenant. The Huddle House Inn—opened by home-

town celebrity Rick Cassaris who was a running back for the Chicago

Bears—had evolved into a house of ill repute. Its horseshoe-shaped

booths were numbered and equipped with telephones. Prostitutes

would sit in a booth and Johns would dial up ones they liked. The city

was shutting it down, and the owner was desperate to sell. Joe bought

the building in 1982, ripped out the booths, and opened what would

become the world-famous Mons Venus.

With the Mons and the Tanga bringing in thousands per week, the

high-school dropout and former carnie was living large. He started

looking more like a strip-club owner, sporting a thick gold chain, pinky

ring, and a Burt Reynolds mustache. He bought a five-bedroom house

on the Hillsborough River and 26-foot luxury cruiser. There was weed,

cocaine, and all the stereotypical traps of a nightclub lifestyle. He was

caught snorting at a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game in 1983. Not long af-

ter that felony arrest, he decided to get healthy. His alcoholism was so

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bad his skin was yellow and his hangovers put him in bed for two weeks

at a time. He claims he gave up all his poisons at once, including booze

and cigarettes. (He later confessed that he had continued smoking pot

until he was diagnosed with lung cancer.)

Sober, his world got bigger. He and his full-time lawyer, Luke Lirot,

started a public-access show called
Voice
of
Freedom
. Although billed as a place to debate free-speech issues, Joe used it to blast opponents of

adult entertainment. He relished debating callers, exchanging insults

and cussing with abandon, confrontations that would never be allowed

on network television.

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Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, he expanded his strip-

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club enterprises, opening clubs in Ybor City, Clearwater, St. Peters-

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burg, and Homosassa and battling local governments in court.
St.
Pe-

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tersburg
Times
writer Jeff Klinkenberg reported in 1991 that Joe had

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at least thirty-one cases pending in county, state, and federal courts.

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Although unsuccessful in many, he won more than $600,000 in judg-

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ments the following year.

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The bulk of the damages were paid by the City of Homosassa, where

he had attempted to operate another nude club. He spent two months

in jail there for operating the club against a court order. He used the

time to get his GED diploma and study law.

Legacy of Skin

Since the end of the lap dance war, the Mons isn’t even Joe’s primary

source of income, although he says it’s a nice chunk of it. He doesn’t

plan on selling the Mons. “There’s no retirement. My life is doing this.”

The bulk of his income these days comes from real estate invest-

ments. He’s a landlord of more than a dozen homes and several com-

mercial properties, including an old Ybor City building retrofitted with

the latest green technology and a massive office building he rents to

the IRS, an irony that he relishes. He has a film-production studio and

is invested in his son’s brewery.

He sold his other strip-club properties. He got a sweet $7 million

for the former City Council Follies and two adjoining properties after

beating the Florida Department of Transportation in court in 2005.

The state had originally offered $3.4 million. It was the largest eminent-

domain settlement for an adult business property in Florida’s history.

proof

What does someone do with all that money? Joe has given chunks

of it away. He financed a new city park in a rundown neighborhood and

gave generously to children’s charities.

Joe has let his hair grow and restarted his weekly public-access show,

now espousing broader political views. He argues for a cleaner environ-

ment, development that pays for itself, high-speed rail, and healthier

school lunches. He rants that Wall Street stole American’s home equity.

He rails against Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott.

Despite his populist appeal, public office eludes him. Joe has run for

office nine times and counting.

His best showing was in a 2007 city council primary. He beat out

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four candidates to make the runoff. He lost to the incumbent, garner-

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ing only 44 percent of the vote.

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He laments that many people see him only as the nude-lap-dance

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king and says the local media perpetuates it. “They just don’t listen to

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me. My campaign slogan was ‘My name is Joe Redner and I’m NOT