Compromising Positions : Torrance Steamed Up Over Tales About Strippers, Businessman and Police

Ken Jeter considers himself a friend of the Torrance police. The owner of a nude-entertainment business, Jeter has advertised in a police publication, donated to the baseball team, hired an off-duty patrolman to do painting, and sold cellular telephones to officers at rock-bottom prices.

Some Torrance police officers also think quite a lot of Jeter--or at least they did until recently.

For the better part of a year, neighbors say, patrolmen made a habit of dropping by Jeter’s home--day and night--to see the Louisiana native and his strippers, some of whom visit between jobs to play cards and dip in the Jacuzzi.

Squad cars were so commonplace outside the tidy house on 242nd Street that the neighborhood postal carrier said she believed Torrance officers lived there.

“The cops came by after duty, and only now and then,” says Jeter, 36. “It is nothing illegal. It is good, clean fun.”

Just how friendly relations were among Jeter, his visiting nude dancers and the police has become a steamy subject in Torrance. In this normally sedate South Bay city of 130,000, where one of the most eagerly anticipated events is the annual Armed Forces Day Parade, Jeter’s Ten Plus Entertainment is a one-of-a-kind--and not particularly welcome--enterprise. Each month, Jeter says, he dispatches about 25 female and male strippers to several hundred bachelor and other private parties across Los Angeles--including, over the years, several for Torrance police officers.

“(The officers) would come, go into the house and laugh and carry on with the girls,” said Ray Dracoules, a next-door neighbor who has reported several loud parties to police, only to see the responding officers join the fray. “What are you going to do, call the police on the police?”

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The parade of officers has trailed off over the past few weeks, neighbors say, thanks to the unusually public unraveling of relations between Jeter and two former business colleagues--both of whom have had troubles with the law--and the bandwagon effect it has had among Jeter’s critics.

The messy breakups have cast an unflattering light on Jeter’s sometimes bizarre business dealings, and have exposed the comings and goings of the Torrance officers from his home. The revelations have so embarrassed the police that the department has launched investigations into the activities of its patrolmen.

Jeter’s two former associates--a onetime partner now in jail awaiting trial on charges of kidnaping his ex-wife, and a stripper arrested in February on suspicion of prostitution--have made a wide range of allegations to investigators. The local newspaper, the Daily Breeze, has splashed their allegations, along with those of several unidentified former Ten Plus employees, atop its front page on several occasions.

The stripper, Leanna Rasmussen, had a falling out with Jeter after she and another stripper were arrested on suspicion of prostitution during a Ten Plus job at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton. Undercover Los Angeles police broke up a bachelor party at the hotel when the two women allegedly began touching each other in a sexual manner, police said.

Rasmussen was never charged in the case, but when Jeter refused to provide her with an attorney, the stripper sued him for breach of contract. She says she was never told the act, which involved the use of vibrators, was illegal. Jeter said she was an independent contractor responsible for her own actions.

The former business partner, Felix de la Cruz, parted with Jeter last year after going through an unfriendly divorce from his wife. Jeter sided with the wife, and De La Cruz blamed him for the breakup, Jeter said. De La Cruz was arrested last month in the kidnaping of his ex-wife after police found her being held by an armed guard in Mexicali, Mexico.

Several months before the kidnaping, police say, De La Cruz called police to report that Torrance officers were acting as escorts for Jeter’s strippers. Allegations by De La Cruz, Rasmussen and other former Ten Plus employees also included charges that two unidentified officers regularly had sex with a stripper at Jeter’s home and that several on-duty officers monitored dispatch calls on portable radios from inside the Jeter home.

The allegations, coupled with complaints by neighbors, have led to two internal affairs investigations by Torrance police and a raid of the Ten Plus Entertainment office on Hawthorne Boulevard, a two-room suite where parties are booked and customers peruse picture books of strippers.

“You’d like to think police officers have more of a moral fiber than that,” said Jeter’s neighbor, Nancy Wolfram, who has watched squad cars pull up outside his home.

The first internal police investigation, conducted with the help of the Los Angeles Police Department, found no officer misconduct, according to department spokesman Sgt. Dave Smith. As part of the investigation, four people--including Rasmussen--were arrested in the undercover sting operation and office raid, but none was charged with a crime, Smith said.

The second inquiry, which focuses on the police visits to Jeter’s home, will not be completed for several weeks.

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Through it all, Ten Plus Entertainment remains open and has even enjoyed a boomlet in business because of the publicity. Smith said police are reviewing the company’s business license application for possible irregularities, but neither Jeter nor Ten Plus is under criminal investigation, he said.

That is not to say life has not changed dramatically for Jeter, a former car salesman who moved to Los Angeles from an oil job in Texas seven years ago. His relations with the Torrance Police Department turned cool after the February undercover operation and then plunged into a deep-freeze when his former associates began talking publicly about his coziness with the department.

“The police look the other way when they see me now,” Jeter said from an overstuffed couch in the living room of his two-story home, which he shares with his 11-year-old son and longtime girlfriend, Debbie, a retired stripper who uses Jeter’s last name. “I saw two of them the other night at the grocery store and they went in the other direction.”

Over the past two years, Jeter says, his company has booked half a dozen parties for Torrance officers, and he gradually got to know a handful of patrolmen who worked his neighborhood or attended the parties. Jeter said even the officer who oversees the department’s intelligence operations and participated in the February sting operation, Detective Steve Carr, has attended one of his bachelor parties. Carr denies it.

“I don’t see anything wrong in what they have done, but I guess it can be embarrassing for them,” said Jeter in the thick accent of his native Louisiana, rattling off the names of his strippers who say they’ve seen Carr.

Bryan Brannan, Jeter’s attorney and partner in a Las Vegas nude-dancing business, said Torrance police seem bent on covering their tracks by coming down hard on Jeter and Ten Plus. He said officers who stopped by Jeter’s home were visiting Ken and Debbie, or responding to neighbors’ complaints about loud parties at Jeter’s--or simply handling routine crime calls.

Besides, Brannan added, even if police came to Jeter’s home looking for strippers, there is no reason for outrage.

“If you were in the Torrance Police Department and you knew this guy who was in the nude-entertainment business had an open-door policy, you might be tempted to stop by and go sightseeing. I think that is a human male reaction, not a reaction that would be unique to the Torrance Police Department,” Brannan said. “Being a vice cop in Torrance must be the law enforcement equivalent of being a Maytag repairman.”

Jeter’s notoriety has also soured relations with neighbors in his 242nd Street neighborhood.

Jeter has rented a three-bedroom house with a small front yard for about two years, one of five nearly identical models near Walteria Park. He says he has gotten along with most of his neighbors, but since his woes became public, has listened in disbelief as some neighbors bad-mouth him.

Jeter’s most vocal critics, next-door neighbors Ray and Susan Dracoules, relate a different version of events. They say Jeter became widely unpopular when he began holding loud parties with scantily clad girls shortly after arriving in the neighborhood. Some neighbors forbade their children to go to the Jeter house, they said, because they disapproved of Jeter’s business and lifestyle.

“One time we looked down and there were four women wearing nothing more than high heels and a patch doing everything imaginable to the (deck) pole,” said Susan Dracoules, who has a bird’s-eye view of Jeter’s side-yard deck and Jacuzzi from a second-story window. “One morning I woke up when a woman in a pink Miata was screaming at a policeman outside. I think she got attached to him, and they were having a lovers’ quarrel.”

Jeter acknowledges that police officers have dated strippers who work for him, and some may even have socialized at his home. But he said it was not his place to dictate the private lives of his employees or the police. He said the Dracouleses are nosy neighbors who should mind their own business.

Undaunted, the Dracouleses have written to Jeter’s landlord asking to have him evicted, and have reported him to Torrance building inspectors for installing the deck and Jacuzzi without a permit. Jeter in turn has asked the city’s animal control board to revoke the Dracoules’ special permit allowing three dogs on their property, one more than permitted under city code.

All this makes Jeter feel like he is trapped in a bad cartoon.

“I feel like one of those where Elmer Fudd is always chasing Bugs Bunny--and I am Bugs Bunny,” he said.