Colorado – from www.chieftain.com – Colorado Springs police say there was a lot of hanky-panky going on this summer at the Golden Cue, a strip bar and pool hall on the south side of town.
Exotic dancers groped each other and a female patron and also performed tawdry lap dances on customers on stage, including an undercover officer from the Police Department’s Metro Vice, Narcotics and Intelligence Division, police reports state.
The indiscretions came at a price. Steven Knost, who owns the bar at 2790 S. Hancock Expressway, was fined $1,000 last week for violating his city-issued sexually oriented business license. The city’s liquor board also suspended his liquor license for five days, although the suspension is being held in abeyance for a year and will be dismissed if the Golden Cue stays out of trouble.
The city’s sexually oriented business license requires topless dancers to perform on a stage at least three feet high and three feet from patron seating. It also prohibits patrons from coming onto the stage. The city’s liquor ordinance prohibits “touching, caressing or fondling the breasts.”
Despite admitting to the violations in agreements signed with the city last week, Knost said Tuesday the accusations are false and that police have an ax to grind.
“The city does not want a (sexually oriented business) license within the city limits,” he said.
“They’ve made it known. They’ve made it difficult for companies that have been here in this business for years. They made it difficult on a club called Baby Dolls. They made it difficult here when it used to be Jerry McNasty’s. Both owners of both of these clubs told me lots of stories about how undercovers would come in here and try to give money to the dancers to try to — I guess you could say — entrap them to do illegal acts,” he said.
Efforts to reach a representative for Baby Dolls, a strip club on East Platte Avenue, were unsuccessful Tuesday.
Police, however, say it was the exotic dancers at the Golden Cue, not the undercover officers, who initiated the violations.
According to police reports:
On June 26, detectives “conducted an audit at various liquor licensed establishments,” including the Golden Cue, which had been the subject of anonymous complaints about exotic dancers “performing off stage while disrobed.”
Two unidentified men in the bar were led to a couch on a stage by “a white female with dirty blonde hair wearing a pink low-cut dress.”
Each man paid the woman $20 and received a sensual lap dance.
The woman didn’t take off her clothes “but took turns sitting on and grinding on the laps” of both men.
The next month, a female customer celebrating her birthday was “escorted onto the stage by two female dancers,” who proceeded to fondle each other. The female customer groped the two dancers, and they rubbed her breasts over her shirt.
The same night, an undercover officer was also taken to the stage to get a lap dance.
The officer “did not touch, fondle or caress the dancer he was with but did provide payment with a twenty-dollar bill from official Metro VNI buy funds directly to the dancer while she was seated on his lap.”