♪
-We went to Scores, my favorite strip club.
-In the '90s, Scores becomes
the most successful gentleman's club in the country.
-I had the most beautiful girls in the country.
-I was treated like a star.
-It was the marquee place to go.
-The club attracts the famous.
-I had a lot of celebrities come see me.
-And where there's fame...
Demi Moore was spotted here at Score
studying for her new lead role as a stripper.
-...there's fortune. -Scores nightclub
during its peak was making a lot of money.
-$20 million, $25 million a year, something like that.
-But huge money from women stripping down...
-The high end can be $20,000.
-...soon leads to a shakedown.
-You're opening up this type of a business,
you're going to pay.
-The Gambino crime family was probably one
of the most powerful families in New York City.
I [bleep] beat him so bad.
-But the Gambinos are small time crooks compared
to the swindlers who own Scores.
-I told the FBI the mob guys are not your criminals here.
-This was an enormous fraud.
-And when the feds cast a net,
everyone is at risk of getting caught.
-They're going to tell on everyone.
-[ Whistles ]
♪
[ Dial-up modems screeching ]
♪
-Life after dark in New York City
in the '90s is in transition.
The artsy, drug fueled clubs of the '70s and '80s are gone,
victims of AIDS in Wall Street.
The newly minted masters of the universe
are searching for their next new thing.
They find it inside a gentlemen's club
on the Upper East Side.
-Scores was a playground for the elite.
It was the marquee place to go.
You know, studio 54. I'd already gone.
That was the new studio 54.
It encompassed anything that anybody
that was anybody would want to come there.
-Charlie Sheen and Motley Crue.
-Kate Moss, Leonardo DiCaprio.
-Sting came a lot with his wife.
-Vince Neil, Madonna.
-A lot of politicians were in there.
-You know, whoever was in town would always stop by.
-But what these famous patrons may not know is
that the club is financed with dirty money,
and its ongoing ties to organized crime
will soon make the FBI the club's most vigilant visitor.
-At the height, which lasted a really long time.
I was taken anywhere between $40,000
and $50,000 a week out of the place.
I'm Steven Sergio, and I extorted
Scores Gentleman's Club.
It just wasn't another strip club.
Had it been another strip club,
I would never be here talking to you right now.
-Scores is the creation
of an ethically challenged attorney turned
entrepreneur named Michael Blutrich.
-He was Georgetown Law School.
Michael Blutrich was a highly educated guy.
-Michael Blutrich was a corporate lawyer.
He was also a boxing promoter.
He had his own boxing promotion company.
He was involved in a nightclub in New Rochelle.
My name is William Ready.
I'm a retired special agent with the FBI.
I was the case agent for the Scores investigation.
-Michael Blutrich's idea is to build an upscale club
for Wall Street traders,
with female strippers as an added attraction.
-They built it basically as a sports bar.
A lot of green basketball courts,
high tables for people to drink and eat burgers.
They just built it all wrong.
-Blutrich also builds it in the wrong place.
-That particular block that they were on
was a Gambino controlled block. -In the early '90s,
the Gambinos, led by the dapper Don John Gotti,
are the most powerful of the five crime families in New York,
profiting off drugs, gambling,
prostitution and the extortion of legitimate businesses.
-They control the garbage industry.
They control the Fulton Fish Market.
They controlled a lot of construction unions.
They controlled the Teamsters in New York.
So their foothold in Manhattan and the boroughs was --
was solid, very solid.
-When Michael Blutrich decided to open up in this location,
and it was just a natural evolution,
that anything that went on there
had to be approved by the family.
-If you're opening up this type of a business in New York,
you're going to pay.
You're paying for the peace of mind
that nobody else is going to come here
and wreck this whole place.
-It's extortion in the guise of providing a service.
But Steven Sergio isn't a so-called
made man in the Gambino family,
and claims he didn't have John Gotti's permission
to force Scores to buy protection
when he shows up to the club's grand opening on Halloween 1991.
-I walked into the place totally on my own.
I was in financial duress.
I was dead broke.
It was two free drinks and free admission.
-And there's no other Gambino wiseguy
there extorting the club.
Maybe because in 1991 they were a little distracted.
-Chuck Gomez is covering John Gotti's trial,
and he reports that...
-The Gambino family was in an upheaval
at that particular time. -The upheaval begins
when John Gotti orchestrates the assassination
of Gambino boss Paul Castellano.
Gotti takes his place.
That prompts an FBI investigation
that sends Gotti to prison soon after Scores opens.
-So that means the investigation was heated up.
Nobody's paying attention to the strip club
that opened in Manhattan.
Now no one's even talking to anybody anymore.
-So at the Scores opening party,
Steven Sergio makes a move on the club's owner.
-I pulled Michael Blutrich on the side
at the end of the night.
I asked Michael, "who do you go to
if you have a problem here?"
He didn't even know what I was talking about.
As soon as he said that, I knew that they
had not already approached him.
So I'm at least going to get my foot in the door.
Now, what's going to happen after I get my foot in the door?
I don't know. I just took a chance.
-What happens is Michael Blutrich agrees
to pay Steven $1,000 a week as head of security,
mistakenly believing Scores is now under the protection
of the Gambino family.
-What Michael Blutrich believed,
they believed the mob got nothing.
-But Steven Sergio isn't the only Sergio extracting money
from Michael Blutrich.
It turns out his dad, Mike, is already extorting Blutrich
before Steven first visits Scores.
-Mike Sergio dropped the Gotti name in order
to extort money out of the owners of Scores.
Steven Sergio has an explanation
and how this father and son routine works.
-I'll clear up your confusion. Okay?
I didn't know that my father knew Michael Blutrich.
Michael is not putting two and two together
that that's my father. -Whether that's true or not,
the Sergio's are now eating with two hands
without giving a taste to the Gambinos --
Mike from Scores corporate office and Steven
from the nightclub itself.
-You know, he did his thing and I did my thing.
The only person that could have told
the Gambino family what was going on
was Michael Blutrich.
And Michael Blutrich didn't even know that to talk to them.
-But while Michael Blutrich is paying out to the Sergio's,
his new club isn't bringing in like he expected.
So after 12 months,
when Blutrich's original partner gives up,
Blue Chick recruits a business associate named Lyle Pfeffer.
-Lyle Pfeffer was a mortgage broker.
Uh, he was a finance guy.
-Pfeffer shows up with a strategy --
find someone with clever ideas on
how Scores can finally score some customers.
-Lyle Pfeffer brings in a guy named Craig Carlino
to be the general manager of the club.
-What should I say?
I made Scores famous? I created Scores.
My name is Craig Carlino,
and I had the management contract to make Scores famous.
-Carlino, a New Yorker,
is down in Florida building family pizza stores
when he stumbles into a strip club
and discovers his true calling.
-I just had never seen beautiful girls
like that walking around naked.
Then I bought a beer and it was $4.50,
which was a lot of money for a beer then.
I was selling ravioli dinners with salad
and garlic bread for $4.50. I said, you know what?
I gotta stop working with my relatives
that basically look like cavemen
and go work with these pretty girls,
because this seems to be where the money was.
-Carlino ditches pizzas
and works his way up to managing Florida's
top strip clubs before moving back to New York City in 1993.
When he interviews for the Scores job,
he makes them an offer they can't refuse.
-I said, you know what?
Don't pay me until we do $80,000 a week,
which is a lot of business back then.
So I really kind of bet on myself.
-It's a big gamble because Scores is only bringing
in about 20 grand a week.
So Carlino gets to work, starting with a remodel.
-They didn't understand the science
of having the girls or entertainers walking around.
No main stage. They had a game room.
You know, you don't want to have a game room
and a strip club is ridiculous.
You want the guys spending their money on the girls.
I put in a main stage.
I moved the champagne room down to the main floor.
I closed the game room, made it a dressing room.
I got rid of the basketball court,
made it a VIP bar to create revenue.
We put marble in the entrance.
I did everything as close to Vegas as I can get it.
-He also goes on a stripper talent search.
-There are sets of girls that came in from out of state,
you know, out of the country, you know, to dance at Scores.
My name is Gina LaMarca.
I was an adult entertainer in the '90s.
I've been in every adult magazine known to man,
but dancing for Scores was the best time that I've ever had.
The average night for a dancer
in Scores, the low end would be $1,000 night.
It was the most money. It had the best clientele.
The girls were treated like royalty.
-Soon after revamping the club, Carlino's bet on himself
pays off.
I went over $80,000, probably after eight or nine weeks.
-But to transform Scores into the king of all strip clubs
and a destination for Hollywood A-listers
and sports stars alike,
Carlino will need to enlist the breast obsessed
king of all media.
-The two of you are great, I swear to God you're great.
-In the '90s, the greed and corruption of Wall Street
hits new heights thanks to a fresh batch
of overwhelmingly White male stockbrokers.
-It's actually going to be the biggest month we ever had.
-Their hedonistic behavior gets later memorialized
in films like "Boiler Room" and "The Wolf of Wall Street."
-25 grand for the first cocksucker to nail a bull's eye!
-And that's exactly the clientele
that Scores strip club targets.
-Wall Street guys and Wall Street's in New York,
and that's where the money is.
So we focused a lot of our marketing towards that.
So, you know, even four 25-year-old guys,
between the four of them, they're working together,
they make $50,000 in one day. Between the four of them,
they'd come out and drop $20,000, $25,000 a night.
-But Scores is an equal opportunity provider
of male sexual stimulation.
-So what we used to say was 21 to 80.
Anyone with testicles is our customer.
That's what we kind of focused on.
I mean, that's just really what it was.
-To wring every drop out of his clientele,
Craig Carlino comes up with the clever way
to boost the club's profit margins.
-I called it Funny Money.
They would be like Scores dollars
or whatever they called it back then.
-I called it Diamond Dollars.
So basically we printed up our own monopoly money,
so to speak, in $20 increments.
-And it had their logo on it or their name on it.
-The money could only be used for tipping.
It could not be used for food or beverage or anything.
The guys would order 500 or 1,000 at a time,
and we put a 20% markup on it.
So the 1,200 on his credit card.
And the girls to cash it in,
at the end of the night, we charged them 20%.
So we, you know,
making 40% a day on the money is pretty profitable.
The second year I was there,
in '94, we sold close to $16 million in that funny money.
-That's over $6 million in profit
from a trip down to Kinko's.
But Carlino has a new problem he can't buy himself out of
with funny money.
A city ordinance that prevents topless dancers
from showing their nipples in a business
where alcohol is served.
-The legal definition is the areola had to be covered
with an opaque cover.
-Instead of using traditional pasties,
which date back to the late 1800s,
Carlino finds a more subtle way
to comply using translucent theater makeup.
-It was a liquid latex which was put on the nipple
with a little sponge, and then it dried.
-To help supervise the dancers
and monitor their nipple coverings,
Craig Carlino hires his own mother
in the role of house mom.
You just covered the nipple, and then half the night
was over, it would come off, you know?
So they'd have to come back into the dressing room
and I would just do it and say, it's going to stick.
Don't worry. Look at me, I'm going like this.
I'm Marsha Carlino, and I was the house mom at Scores.
I just would have to make sure that they look presentable
when they walked outside on the stage,
that they were in a fairly decent mood to party
and have some fun with their guy.
-Along with covering their nipples,
the dancers have to cover the rest of themselves
pursuant to a dress code.
-So they had to basically wear a dress.
I didn't want them in those little short,
tight little hooker skirts I used to call them.
-The way we had to dress was top notch.
I had a sequins emerald green gown from Bob Mackie.
Everybody's dress made a statement.
Everybody looked like movie stars.
-The statement dresses keep things classy,
but Scores is still a strip club
that caters to men desperate to see the dancers nipples
without the required latex coverings.
So Blutrich hires a team of lawyers to fight the nipple law.
-The lawyers were in court.
They went in there with some kind of evidence.
Can you tell the girls wearing something or not?
It really made no difference.
It just got thrown out somehow and said
we don't need the latex anymore.
-Now that Carlino can honestly boast beautiful topless dancers,
he sets out to attract the who's who of New York City.
-So the idea was to get into the Gossips and Page Six.
-In the '90s, Page Six is a must read
in the New York Post tabloid.
So it's valuable free advertising
if you can get your strip club mentioned in it.
-So, how can we do that?
-The answer just strolls in and grabs a table at Scores.
-One day I see a couple of young guys in the club
that were hanging out with a press agent at the time.
I said, who are these guys?
He goes, listen,
these are interns at the Howard Stern Show.
So eventually they're going to get his ear.
So I said, okay, lay it on him.
These guys didn't have a penny, but we put girls on them.
I mean, everything, you know?
'Cause the objective was to tell Howard what
a great time they were having.
-Carlino even agrees to host a bachelor party
for one of Stern's staffers,
Fred Norris, hoping the guest of honor will be Howard Stern.
-Howard showed up at the club with everybody.
I had about 30 girls there.
-After being wined and dined for free,
the Stern crew wants more.
-And then I just started hearing chants -- funny money,
funny money, funny money,
I didn't want to say no to Howard.
I mean, just to get him there was a miracle.
So they went through about 30,000 bucks in funny money
in about two or three hours.
They had a great time until Fred kind of passed out
and opened up his chin on the floor,
and then the two owners called me.
That's a lot of money, $30,000.
It's coming out of your end, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I said, "Listen, let's just see what happens."
-Fred emptied out the whole bachelor party.
Where was it? -Alright.
We went to Scores, which is my favorite strip club.
-The next morning, Howard got on at 6:00 in the morning,
and it was a four-hour Score's commercial.
"So, let me tell you what I did yesterday."
And he kind of went through the whole thing.
-It's an upscale strip club
because the girls are really good looking.
-Gorgeous. -Gorgeous.
-Howard doesn't just talk about Scores that morning,
the club becomes a regular topic of conversation.
At that time, his audience in New York
is around three million listeners,
most of them 21 to 80 with testicles,
the prime Scores customer.
-I had heard he got $30,000 a minute
for national advertising on his radio show,
and he gave us hours and hours and hours and hours.
-He was the hottest DJ in the country,
and he didn't talk about it once a month.
He talked about it every day.
-Howard even starts booking his
favorite Scores dancers for the show.
-As being a dancer at Scores
the greatest thing a girl can do?
-Yes. -It is.
-Howard loved strippers, dancers,
exotic entertainers, porn stars.
That was his thing back then.
-The two of you were great. I swear to God you're great.
-For Howard Stern to promote that
you're going to be at Scores, you were guaranteed
that you were going to have a packed house.
-Everybody came there.
I mean, George Clooney, John Daly, Mark Wahlberg.
-Madonna came in because she had a boyfriend
that was a basketball player,
and she wanted to see him on the screen.
-We had to get it in the newspaper somehow.
So we kind of staged the photographer coming in,
taking a picture and then us throwing him out.
Whether she knew or not, I don't know.
It was on the page two of the Daily News.
-Although cameras are mostly forbidden inside Scores,
Carlino and his promotions team tip off the paparazzi
whenever a celebrity is coming in or out of the club.
-If you came to Scores,
we used to call it getting a suntan,
but they come for that because they want to get recognized,
all of them, and then that kind of snowballs
and grows and grows.
-The waiting is over!
The New York Rangers are the Stanley Cup champions!
-On June 14, 1994,
after winning the NHL championship,
the New York Rangers celebrate at Scores
where they learned you can lose more than just your money.
-Maybe 15 or 20 of the Rangers
actually came there with the Stanley Cup.
They got completely trashed and they left the Stanley Cup there.
They forgot the Stanley Cup.
I had to do everything in my fiber not to take it.
I would have gave it back,
but I just wanted to take it for the night.
-The notoriety is good for business, and the dancers
at Scores become some of the highest paid in the country.
-I was a featured entertainer.
$20,000 was my highest paid night.
I don't think I ever had $1,000 a night.
They were all $5,000 and up.
-Yeah, so I mentioned that to my daughter.
I mean, when I saw some of the money that they were making,
I thought to myself, Oh, my God, if you just do it for a year,
you could buy an apartment in New York City
and have it for the rest of your life.
-And while Scores Diamond Dollars
helped the dancers earn those huge sums, the club,
even with Mike and Steven Sergio
skimming cash off the top, it's still like
a printing press for real money.
Scores Nightclub, during its peak in the mid '90s,
was making about 400 to $500,000 a week.
-$20 million, $25 million a year, something like that.
-Back then, that was tremendous.
-But all that money won't be enough to save the Scores'
owners when a shady business deal from their past
threatens to send them both to prison.
-Michael Blutrich and Lyle Pfeffer
were part of a large scale fraud that occurred in Florida.
The total loss was in excess of $400 million.
-That was the largest insurance fraud in the history
of the United States back then. -And when the FBI shows up,
what Blutrich and Pfeffer say they know about
the Gambino crime family's involvement in Scores
is the only thing they have to trade.
-They're going to tell on everyone.
-In the mid '90s, Hollywood falls in love with strippers.
-It's made for 17 and up. That's all I can say about it.
-This love affair includes "Showgirls."
-I want to see you dance and I want
to see you smile. -And "Striptease,"
starring Demi Moore.
It's while researching her role in the film
that Moore visits America's most celebrated gentleman's club.
-Just the other night Demi Moore
was spotted here at Scores holding hands
with hubby Bruce Willis
studying for her new lead role as a stripper.
-So Demi Moore started to come there
and I was able to, like, clear out a section for her,
make sure the right people were taking care of her.
Lovely person, really, really down to earth,
um, really, really nice person.
-On the same night that Demi Moore gets photographed,
Ethan Hawke is also pictured in the club.
-They came to get recognized and get press themselves,
which is what you want.
-But as Scores celebrity and revenues grow,
Mike and Steven Sergio will seek a bigger share,
while they say continuing to freeze out the Gambinos,
which are now being led by John Gotti's son John Jr.
For Steven, making more money comes from shaking
down the club's employees.
-One of the things that I discovered was this.
It wasn't advantageous for a girl to be on stage.
It was advantageous to avoid going on stage
so you could be on the floor to make the money.
-Since the DJs send dancers to the stage,
Sergio suspects the dancers are bribing them
to stay on the floor.
So Sergio confronts one DJ.
-He came clean, told me how much money he was making,
which was in excess of $15,000, $17,000 a week.
So I took almost 75% of that money.
And he was happy and I was happy.
He's still making a ton of money.
That was just one of 10 different things
that I was doing inside the place to make money for myself.
-Steven was stealing everything
that wasn't nailed down inside the club.
He was stealing the cover charge at the door.
He ran the coat room concession
so they would force people to check their coats for a fee,
whether you wanted to check your coat or not.
And if the person didn't want to do it,
they would either be thrown out or just given a beating.
-I said, you know, that's kind of bad for business.
When you beat up customers and stuff, it's not good.
-Even the security staff run by Steven Sergio
are skimming off the top.
-The bouncers of the security guys
were basically taking funny money out of the safe
and then cashing it in through the girls.
We had a night auditor there, but they were manipulating him.
They were scaring him.
-At the height, which lasted a really long time,
I was taken anywhere between $40,000 and $50,000 a week
out of the place.
-That's roughly 10% of the club's
annual $25 million in revenues.
But Sergio boasts he only ever stole from the employees,
never from the club's bottom line.
-My relationship stayed good with Michael Blutrich
because I wasn't in his pocket, I was in their pockets,
which he didn't care about.
-Not sure that's better,
but according to the FBI, his dad, Mike Sergio,
had no problem reaching into the club owner's pockets,
forcefully if necessary.
-Mike Sergio would often carry a gun
and often would carry it on his person.
I believe there was one time
where he actually took it out of his waistband
and put it on the table, just for an effect.
If Blutrich and Pfeffer didn't comply,
he said that the club would be wrecked
or it would be firebombed, destroyed.
and nobody would make a penny,
There was not an option to say no.
-Mike Sergio even tried to extort money from Craig Carlino.
-He tried to talk me to give him $5,000 a week
out of my money, which I wasn't going to do.
-In 1995, Agent Ready receives a tip about what the Sergio's
are up to at Scores.
-I had a source. He had a code name.
His code name was Hot Tub.
Hot Tub seemed to have a nose for trouble.
He can sniff out trouble and find trouble anywhere.
And he started talking about what was going on at Scores
and who was receiving money protection payments.
So I basically directed him to find out more.
-While Hot Tub goes to work gathering more evidence,
Agent Ready learns there's already an FBI file open
on Scores owners Michael Blutrich
and Lyle Pfeffer.
-I found out through our internal systems
that Blutrich and Pfeffer were being investigated in Florida,
Orlando, Florida by the FBI down there.
-Back in 1993, while renovating Scores, Michael Blutrich
and Lyle Pfeffer, along with their co-conspirators,
defraud customers of the National Heritage
Life Insurance Company in Orlando.
-Michael Blutrich and Lyle Pfeffer
were just such horrible human beings.
You know, one was a lawyer, one was a mortgage broker,
and they did this massive insurance scam.
-They defrauded the company
through nominee loans, fake mortgages
and just looted it and caused it to go bankrupt.
-The total fraud is $450 million,
one of the largest in U.S. history,
which even shocks the conscience
of fellow criminal Steven Sergio.
-This was no, hey, listen, you know,
we misappropriated, you know, $50,000.
This was an enormous fraud.
-Blutrich and Pfeffer are now both confronting
a minimum 25-year sentence in prison.
-What do you think they're going to do?
Someone that knows nothing about nothing
has to have the common sense to say
they're going to tell on everyone.
-They knew the noose was tightening in Florida.
They were going to more than likely go to jail.
-They are in so much trouble.
They only got one bargaining chip,
and that's the extortion that Scores.
-They got caught.
And in order to get themselves off, they said,
we will give you organized crime.
We will give you mobsters. -Despite what Steven Sergio
says about the Gambinos not being involved at Scores,
the FBI believes Blutrich and Pfeffer
can help them gather evidence about high ranking members
of the crime family, including John Gotti's son John Jr.
-They think they're going to get big targets
because they think
that we're giving those big targets the money,
but we weren't.
-Agent Ready isn't so sure,
and he's willing to work from the bottom up to find out.
-When I started the case,
it was really directed at the guys receiving payments out
of Scores, Steven Sergio and Michael Sergio.
But the ultimate goal is to -- is to get to
the hierarchy of the family.
And the way you do that
is you want to try to flip
or get the lower echelon individuals to cooperate
with you so that they can provide evidence
against the individuals above them in the organization.
-To gather evidence against Steven and Mike Sergio,
the FBI installs recording devices
inside both the nightclub and at the Scores corporate office.
[ Indistinct conversation ]
-They also get Blutrich and Pfeffer to each
wear what they call an FBIRD.
-It's an acronym that stands for FBI Recording Device,
and it was the size of one of the cellphones
they carry around today, like an iPhone.
If Michael Sergio found that body wire,
he'd probably set him up to be killed.
-So the FBI gives the duo something
to say to alert them that they're in danger.
-We came up with a code word when they would say,
I think I'm getting sick.
I have to puke.
That was a signal for us to come inside
and, you know, rescue them and prevent them from getting hurt.
-They did. They did.
-It's Blutrich's partner, Lyle Pfeffer,
who almost blows up the case. -They met with Michael Sergio,
and they went to a fancy restaurant.
And so they ate a lot of food.
And Lyle ended up feeling legitimately sick.
So he starts saying the code word.
He ain't so much he has to puke.
All of a sudden we hear that
and we get -- you get the adrenaline rush, you know?
-Just as William Ready and his partner
are gearing up to stage an armed extraction,
they realize it's a false alarm. After that incident,
they switched the code word to something slightly more direct.
-I believe it changed to just a very simple help, help, help.
-But Lyle Pfeffer isn't cut out to be an FBI informant.
-Lyle Pfeifer was really afraid to wear a body wire.
But Michael Blutrich had a history of being a child actor,
so he kind of, I think,
brought out those reserves when he was wearing an FBIRD for us.
-But it will take all of Blutrich's performance skills
to act his way out of a confrontation
with the suspicious and dangerous gangster Mike Sergio.
-One time, Sergio took him into the bathroom
and had him undress.
-The reputation of New York City is something
that is of concern to all of us.
-Times Square, once known as dangerous, filthy and lewd,
is today touted as the most dramatic transformation in town.
-In 1995, a year after he was sworn in as mayor,
Rudy Giuliani cleans up Times Square
by shutting down the peep shows
and mercilessly evicting its low-income residents.
Giuliani also targets the extortion rackets being run
by organized crime.
-Right on the heels of a city order reform
at the Fulton Fish Market.
Mayor Giuliani today announced plans for a commission
that would rid the private sanitation industry
of corruption, namely mob influence.
-But there's one popular place in town full of corruption
that seems protected from Giuliani's crackdown on vice.
-Scores was a high end strip club.
You had celebrities that went there
and people that would spend a lot of money.
-By about 1995,
it was probably one of the highest class clubs
in the industry at that time.
All their women were top notch
and all their clientele was top notch.
-Scores becomes an escape for well-off men willing
to spend lots of money
to be entertained
and sexually aroused by women paid to do both.
-I would say the common fantasy is definitely guys,
like, when two girls are dancing together
and sensually touching each other.
Also a girl that's dominant
that maybe they didn't have outside of those doors,
but most of the time it was girl on girl.
-Only a man is dumb enough
to spend $2,000 to $5,000 to $30,000
to $40,000 in a strip club.
Women are not dumb enough
to spend their money like that.
Only a man would do that. It's just the truth.
-All that dumb money attracts criminals looking
to make some easy cash
and law enforcement looking to make arrests.
FBI agent Bill Ready is using Score's owner
Michael Blutrich to record the Gambino mob associate
Mike Sergio in the hope he leads him to the Gambino leadership.
-Michael Blutrich was a lawyer,
so he understood that we need them to come out
with the other elements that were missing to the crime.
He would ask open ended questions,
and then he would sit back and let Michael Sergio talk.
-But one night over dinner, Blutrich sits back
and listens a bit too much for Mike Sergio's taste,
so Sergio orders him to the bathroom for a strip search.
-Fortunately, Michael Blutrich was able to pull the wires down
before he got into the bathroom and was able to evade detection.
Very skillfully done.
Had Michael Sergio found the wires on him,
he could have hurt him right there in the bathroom
and then later on set him up to be killed.
-The body wires and FBI surveillance camera
in the Scores corporate office will eventually implicate
both Mike and his son, Steven Sergio,
for racketeering and extortion.
-I warned my father a million times.
I told him, I know Michael Blutrich's a rat.
Before he got in trouble, he was one person.
Then after he got in trouble, he was another person.
He was more inquisitive,
and I was asked this question much later on.
They said, well, if you knew Michael Blutrich was a rat,
why didn't you walk away?
The answer to that question is very simple.
Why would I walk away? I'm already trapped.
I'm going to take all the rest of the money
and then I'm going to go to jail.
-The FBI also doesn't walk away.
They want the Gambino crime family, including its leader,
John Gotti Jr.
So even after they get evidence
against the Sergios, they keep watching and listening.
Her opportunity arise when Blutrich and the Sergios
decide to fire the club's manager, Craig Carlino.
-Craig Carlino, he was making during the height of the club
between $10,000 and $14,000 a week,
so that was probably close to three quarters
of $1 million a year he was making.
-They were just paying me too much.
They just never wanted to pay me.
-The owners of Scores did not like the fact
that Craig Carlino was making more money
than they were from their own club,
so that was a real source of a contention for them.
-The bottom line is they did not want to pay him no more.
-They fired me when my father was dying in the hospital.
They knew it. He had about a week to live.
-Then Carlino does something you don't often hear
when talking about disputes involving
mob influence businesses -- He lawyers up.
-I have a contract. I'm suing it.
I know these mob guys. They just don't like lawsuits.
They were sending guys to threaten me to drop the lawsuit,
and I wasn't going to drop the lawsuit.
My thing was to get paid.
-In the discovery of documents for that lawsuit,
one of the requests he makes
is they want to learn about all the payments
that are going out through the Scores bookkeeper,
and that would reveal all the payments going to the Sergios
and also other made members of the Gambino crime family.
-That's a big problem,
and the FBI is watching and listening
as Carlito's lawsuit leads made members of the Gambino family
to commit illegal acts that will help bring New York's
most powerful crime family to its knees.
-Everybody's got to stop giving these people more credit
than they deserve.
They're not the sharpest pencils in the box,
and most of them are morons.
-The ongoing celebrity appeal of Scores
during the mid '90s isn't trouble free.
-You got drunk people, you got women, you got rich guys.
Yeah, were there fights in the place?
Yeah, there was a lot of fights in the place.
-The most famous is the one between action star
Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Zito,
a celebrity bodyguard
and the former leader of the New York City Hell's Angels.
Days after the altercation, Zito shares.
What happened with Howard Stern.
-But you're friends. You actually bodyguarded
him or something, right?
-Well, yeah, but he --
seemed the bigger you got, the bigger swelled head he got.
-Zito claims Van Damme gets in his face
and insults him multiple times.
-So then you pop him with a right,
and then you smash him with a left?
-Right hand left hook. -Ah.
-So, how many times did you hit him?
-I hit him enough to go down and stay down.
-Yeah. You know, Van Damme looks like, you know, a karate master.
You watch all those movies, but it was no match for Chuck.
-And John Claude claims... -Yeah.
-...that he was doing a defensive karate move.
He flipped. By the summer of '96,
there's a better show at Scores than celebrity fistfights.
The FBI's hidden camera inside the corporate office
is capturing Gambino associates
taking payoffs and bragging about past crimes.
-Mike Sergio would constantly talk about killing rats
or displaying guns to these guys,
just to let them know that he was dangerous.
-Started running, right?
-The footage also captures a Gambino enforcer
describing a shocking act of violence.
Those surveillance tapes are used to indict
six associates of the Gambino Crime Network,
but the FBI still has nothing
to connect Scores to Gambino boss John Gotti Jr.
Steven Sergio says the reason for that is simple.
-John Gotti Jr. never got a monthly payment from Scores.
It just never happened. -But for John Jr.,
that's all about to change
when he learns Carlino has been fired and filed a lawsuit.
He sees an opportunity to finally profit
from the highly lucrative strip club
that opened during his father's reign as crime boss.
-When they fired me, I went to a friend of mine.
I don't want to mention his name,
but he was friends with John Gotti Jr.
-For John Jr., the simplest way to maintain the peace,
keep the club profitable
and get Craig Carlino to drop the lawsuit
is to just give him his job back.
-My friend said, "You're not fired.
John said you're not fired."
And I was like, "Okay, how do you work that out?"
He says he's above Mike Sergio,
who's not a made guy and he's the boss, basically.
So if he says you're not fired, you're not fired.
-But you don't manage strip clubs without learning
what it means when a mobster offers to help you out.
-You know, if you go with these guys,
they're going to be involved in everything you do.
I was just a little uncomfortable.
Maybe if I had met John I would have felt better,
but I had never met him.
To this day, I have never met him.
-When Carlino turns down the offer,
John Jr. decides
that he's going to make Blutrich and Pfeffer pay for
all the trouble they've caused.
-John Gotti Jr. decides that,
okay, we'll let you fire Craig Carlino,
but you have to pay us a lump sum of $200,000.
The fee gets negotiated down to $100,000.
The owners of Scores are told that,
and they end up generating the cash.
-For the money to change hands from Blutrich
to John Jr., it'll need to go through a money laundering ring
that's already being monitored by the FBI.
-John Gotti Jr. facilitated it through his guys
and thought he wasn't going to get exposed, but he did.
-It becomes an important part of an even bigger case.
The FBI has been building against Gotti.
-John A. Gotti, or Junior as he's known,
got a taste of what it's like to be a reputed mob boss today.
He got locked up, and he could be headed
for a long family reunion with his dapper dad
who's doing life in federal prison.
-The FBI played their cards pretty good.
-John Gotti Jr. was charged with RICO conspiracy,
and then there were a bunch of underlying predicate acts.
-The indictment was not all about Scores.
They call it a Christmas tree indictment.
In other words, everything.
-Junior was indicted on federal charges of extortion,
robbery, labor racketeering, loan sharking,
gambling and bribery.
He's also charged with conspiring to take
over Scores, and Upper East Side strip club.
-I think just the pressure overall became too much for him.
-Junior Gotti pleaded guilty to part of a federal indictment.
The judge sentenced Junior to 77 months.
That's about six and a half years in prison.
-He was guilty of being greedy at the very end of a ship
that was sinking.
-Sergios, Mike and Steven,
are reminded that crime may pay, but it exacts a cost.
-Michael Sergio was was charged with conspiracy
to engage in racketeering.
When he was in jail, his life was threatened
and then he ended up cooperating with us
after spending three to five months in jail.
-Steven, who turned Scores into a personal ATM machine,
is sentenced to five years in federal prison.
-That's such a difficult question.
It was life changing money.
It was exhilarating.
But I do have a lot of regrets.
-As for Michael Blutrich and Lyle Pfeffer,
becoming informants for the FBI
isn't the get out of jail free card
they may have expected for their $450 million
life insurance fraud. -Blutrich and Pfeffer
ended up getting sentenced to more time than any
of the Mafia individuals that they cooperated against.
It didn't work out, I think, the way they wanted
in the end.
-I told the FBI, I said,
the mob guys are not your criminals here.
Pfeffer and Blutrich are your criminals here.
The club was the only clean thing they had.
-The government sells Scores off to a new owner
and uses the money to pay back
the insurance fraud victims in Florida.
Then in the 2000s,
Scores change his ownership a few times
before turning into a franchise
and opening a half dozen sister clubs around the country.
But the Upper East Side location never regains
its former glory as the country's top gentlemen's club.
-After I left, they never really got the PR
or the publicity that the original club received.
-To tell you the truth, no, not that I know of.
Not that I know of.
I mean, I didn't work in every club.
-To me, the whole industry has gone downhill.
At Scores, I was treated like a star.
Back then, they couldn't touch you.
They couldn't smack your butt, grab your breasts.
Now, if you're not doing any of that,
you're not getting any money at all.
-Scores was a special place, you know?
You could never recreate that scene.
All the stars were aligned with that place.
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