Palm Beach, Florida – from www.palmbeachpost.com – An entrepreneur with a history of shady dealings in the nightclub industry capitalized on a state regulator’s lackluster oversight to open bars and a strip club in Palm Beach County, The Palm Beach Post found.
The nightspots, concentrated along a stretch of Military Trail between Forest Hill Boulevard and Lake Worth Road, long have been associated with violence, crime and controversy.
The latest lurid story to unfold at a club run by Anthony Genovese [pictured], 33, turns on the suffering of two sisters who were smuggled here from Honduras, pressed into sex slavery and forced to dance for men at the El Rancho Sports Bar and Restaurant.
The El Rancho never would have opened if officials at the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco had discovered that Genovese, a felon who denies owning the clubs, had an interest in the business.
Florida law prohibits felons from obtaining liquor licenses sooner than 15 years after a conviction. Records show the El Rancho application omitted obvious references to Genovese.
ABT’s reviewers failed to make the connection.
The Palm Beach Post conducted interviews and reviewed hundreds of records — including business applications, lease agreements, corporate filings, law enforcement reports and utilities statements — and found a pattern of omission and regulatory failure that extended to at least four liquor license applications submitted by companies affiliated with Genovese.
“All of the applications submitted to ABT met state requirements for licensure. On all of the documentation submitted to ABT for licensure, Mr. Genovese was not listed as having an interest in the establishments, nor was he listed as an interested party in the Division of Corporations’ files,” spokeswoman Alexis Lambert said last week in a written statement. “Mr. Genovese was not an interested party on any applications, and the license was issued. All disclosed interested parties were fingerprinted for background checks and passed.”
But documents kept in ABT’s own files indicate Genovese was intimately involved with the businesses. In the most glaring example, a promissory note for $50,000 attached to an application for Senoritas Cabaret, a strip club on Belvedere Road, lists Genovese’s name in describing the company that runs the club, suggesting he had an interest in the business. The application’s disclosure section, however, lists the company’s sole shareholder as Giancarlo Dibattista, Genovese’s cousin.
Lambert said the note wasn’t submitted with the initial application but was forwarded to ABT with a request to put a lien on the club’s liquor license.
ABT denied the request but didn’t investigate the inconsistency in the records.
ABT’s files are peppered with subtler indicators of Genovese’s involvement in clubs. The scrawled initials “A.G.” appear 26 times in a working copy of a lease agreement attached to the El Rancho application, and the final version of the lease kept by the landlord bears Genovese’s name as a tenant.
Three of four applications list the same telephone number regardless of shareholders named in the disclosure section, a number that calls a cellphone carried by Genovese.
A copy of a check signed by an attorney representing El Toro Loco 1 in an ABT enforcement case lists the client as “Anthony Genovese.”
Presented with The Post’s findings last week, ABT officials pledged to investigate.
Genovese, who in 2000 was convicted of fraud and conspiracy for his role in a purported mob-style takeover of a West Palm Beach nightclub, told The Post he owned El Rancho and the other clubs but backtracked when asked about liquor license applications.
He added that he never met Veronica Martinez, a suburban West Palm Beach woman accused of forcing the Honduran sisters to dance at his club. Martinez reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors and is slated for sentencing in September.
Investigators never approached Genovese or any other club representative during the trafficking probe.
Sex slavery wasn’t the only crime alleged to have occurred in or near Genovese’s clubs. In the past 20 months, authorities have linked the nightspots to three murders and one shooting.
In January 2009, 17-year-old Maciel Martin Videla was kidnapped from El Toro Loco 1 at 2928 S. Military Trail by drug dealers who cut his throat with a butterfly knife and dumped his body in a canal, authorities said. Eight months later, a man who looked no older than 20 was found shot to death in the same club’s parking lot, a crime that remains unsolved.
Records kept by ABT list Genovese’s older brother, Michael J. Quinn, as 100 percent owner of the venue, which closed last month after a protracted fight with county officials.
Nearly every record associated with the business points to Genovese, however, from applications to hire off-duty sheriff’s deputies to sheriff’s incident reports to water utility statements. Information about the club’s true ownership even was accessible on Facebook.com, where a profile created by Genovese advertised, until recently, his ownership of El Rancho, El Toro Loco 1, and El Toro Loco 2, at 1999 S. Military Trail.
Outside that club in June, Amanda DeJesus, a 17-year-old Lake Worth High School student with a megawatt smile and ambitions of becoming a veterinarian, was shot to death in what authorities called a random act of violence.
If regulators had determined that Genovese had an interest in the club, it never would have opened. Instead, ABT approved the application in March 2009, handed the company a license to sell alcohol and cleared the way to open its doors.
So far as the state was concerned, the Latin hotspot’s sole owner was a mild-mannered woman named Maria — Genovese’s 61-year-old mother.