Strip clubs posing as bars targeted by Richland Sheriff Lott

Richland County authorities on Friday announced a crackdown on strip clubs that masquerade as bars.

The first target is Black Pearl, where two men were shot dead last week. The Broad River Road club was closed Thursday night under a stop-work order, Sheriff Leon Lott said.

“This club is operated on blood money,” Lott said during a news conference announcing an unusual use of the county’s zoning law. “We’re putting a stop to it.”

He has been complaining publicly that club owners game the system by appealing administrative enforcement efforts, which allows clubs to stay open and keep making money. Lott has called for stronger county laws.

“It’s the violence and crime that are associated with these clubs that concerns me most,” he said in an interview. “This is the first time to my knowledge that we’ve used a stop-work order on a sexually oriented business.”

Should they reopen, owners face a penalty of $500 and/or 30 days in jail for each day the club continues to operate, the sheriff said, citing a criminal provision in the zoning law. The zoning law bans sexually oriented businesses from opening within 1,000 feet of residences, churches or places where children congregate, including schools.

Next on the closure list is Mi Casita on Decker Boulevard and later Vault, both of which are connected to violent crimes, Lott said. A man was run over by a car in October in the Mi Casita parking lot, and a woman has been charged. Vault, also on Broad River Road, is tied to a mid-September gunfight between rival groups outside of Empire Supper Club in Columbia’s Vista entertainment district, police have said. Eight people were injured, but all survived.

The owner of Mi Casita, Dessi Morales, told The State newspaper Friday afternoon that she was unaware the sheriff is targeting her club. “I don’t know (that) they can shut my business,” she said. “For what?”

Told that Lott and the president of a nearby homeowners association have called Mi Casita a strip club, Morales said she did not own a strip club.

Club manager James E. Randolph told the newspaper that he is meeting next week with the sheriff’s department to learn what he can do to avoid being shuttered. Randolph also said he was waiting Friday afternoon in the office of the county’s zoning administrator for the same purpose.

“We need to find a medium (sic) ground to be where we’re in compliance,” Randolph said of county laws.

Filing charges in crimes that happen at such clubs often is impeded by victims or witnesses who won’t talk to investigators, Lott said. On Aug. 27, for example, someone was shot at Black Pearl and an ambulance was summoned, not deputies, he said.

Officers learned of the incident only because hospital workers notified the sheriff’s department, Lott said. An officer went to the hospital to interview the victim and encountered a silent victim, which, the sheriff said, is common with crimes at such clubs.

“They say, ‘We’re not cooperating – not giving you information, nothing,’” Lott said.

The stop-work order was arranged Thursday after the sheriff’s department attorney met with Richland Count attorney Larry Smith, Lott said.

The sheriff released Friday what he said was video taken inside Black Pearl on Dec. 20, the night that Torance Lamar Peoples, 26, and Trevonne Judge, 23, were killed outside after celebrating Peoples’ birthday.

The men, who were brothers, were involved in an exchange of gunfire that followed an argument between two groups over money and strippers, authorities have said.

Lott said the video, which was posted on Facebook, shows one of the deceased men getting a lap dance. The video was shot, investigators believe, by a girlfriend of one of the shooting victims, the sheriff said.

After he announced the crackdown on Friday, Lott said a woman called him to say she has worked at Black Pearl. “‘It is a strip club because I’m one of the people that stripped there,’” Lott said the woman told him.

The sheriff’s department also announced the arrest of a man who is accused of stealing money from a dancer. Jumaane Evins, 23, is charged with of petty larceny. No one has been charged in the double homicide.

A lawyer for Black Pearl, Mark Whitlark, said last week that club management had put a stop to women dancers earlier this year, though Whitlark disputed that they were nude.

Whitlark told The State newspaper last week that the club was being held responsible for violence it could not have anticipated or prevented.

“What is it we could do about this?” Whitlark said. “We didn’t spark this.”

Lott’s assertion that Mi Casita is next to face closure likely is music to the ears of Ron Huff, president of the Greater Woodfield Community Association near the club.

Huff and his neighbors have been frustrated in their efforts to close the place, which he said he had visited and witnessed strippers.

“How many people have to get killed at this sexually oriented business that is in my neighborhood before anyone other than my neighborhood association does anything about it?” Huff said last week.

This story was originally published December 29, 2017 at 2:13 PM with the headline "Strip clubs posing as bars targeted by Richland Sheriff Lott."