Nude Club, La Habra Battle On

It’s 10 p.m. and no one is in the audience, so the dancers at La Habra’s only strip club hunker down for a game of poker.

The music doesn’t stop, though, because at any moment, someone could walk through the door. These days, it could be a customer eager to plunk down cash for a lap dance, or an undercover police officer trying to catch a dancer doing just that.

Owner Bill Gammoh is convinced he knows why the place is empty. “It’s the city, man. They think they can just drive me out of business.”

The city of La Habra, he says, continues to harass his business even though he has won the last few rounds in court. Gammoh, sitting in an office whose walls are covered by court exhibits of blueprints and neighborhood maps, says layer upon layer of regulations has been imposed to make it difficult to operate.

City officials, however, say they are prosecuting and citing someone who chronically breaks the rules, including allowing lap dancing with patrons and failing to get a permit to install plumbing for “shower dances” in the spacious former bank building on Imperial Highway.

For five years, the city and the nude juice bar have fought it out in council chambers, behind picket lines and in the courts.

During this election year, Gammoh, a 37-year-old former gas station owner, passed out fliers, attended City Council meetings and candidate forums, and questioned why the city was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to shut him down.

“They’re totally abusing the system,” Gammoh said. “I used to have 150 customers a day.”

City Atty. Richard D. Jones said the city has indeed spent more than $400,000 fighting the Pelican Theater but that most of it has been covered by insurance.

Two years ago, Gammoh opened the Pelican after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the city couldn’t ban a club just because it offered nude dancing. Instead, the city has hired undercover police officers from neighboring Anaheim and Fullerton to spot illegal activity and dispatched building inspectors who have hit the owner with fines and more.

Gammoh has filed for bankruptcy and is feuding with his former partners. The courts still seem to be on his side, though. A judge recently denied the city’s bid to force Gammoh to pay $117,000 in attorney fees.

“They lost in the court,” said the Jordanian-born businessman who sold three gas stations to get into the adult-entertainment business, figuring he could rake in at least $50,000 a month.

The bottom line, the city attorney said, is that the Pelican Theater has been found to have a right to be in La Habra, but the city has a right to regulate the business.

“Follow the law. It’s really that simple,” Jones said. “They have a right to exist, but it’s a question of them complying with the terms of their approval.”

Mention the Pelican Theater in government offices, supermarkets, senior complexes or restaurants in this city of 60,000, and you’ll likely get a pregnant pause, a sigh or a suppressed giggle. Then come the condemnations or the defenses over whether such an establishment should be allowed to exist in La Habra.

Few people want an adult business in their backyard. There are fears that crime will ripple into surrounding neighborhoods and worries that the city will get a seedy reputation. There are those who think the place and the activities inside are immoral and should be banned. Others have grudging respect for Gammoh’s persistence, if not for the club itself.

“Frankly, I think people are intrigued that the place has been able to survive,” said Jane Williams, editor of the La Habra Journal, a community newspaper.

It all started in 1995, when Gammoh applied for an operating permit for the Pelican Theater and was denied. City planners demanded that Gammoh pay a $256,304 traffic fee, a sum that dwarfs what any business in the city has ever paid.

Powered by popular support and residents’ protests, the city scored early victories over the adult business, and it was forced to shut down. Gammoh and his then-partners sued. Early court decisions supported the city.

Then, in November 1998, the federal appeals court ordered the city to allow the nude juice bar to open and in its ruling raised “serious questions concerning the constitutionality” of La Habra’s tactics against the Pelican.

The three-judge panel ordered the city to pay $118,697 to Gammoh in restitution.

La Habra gave Gammoh his long-awaited permit, but the council also passed 39 new ordinances, stricter than the old ones.

Under federal law, cities cannot ban adult businesses but can restrict them to certain parts of town and impose rules on their operation. In La Habra, adult businesses cannot be within 275 feet of any church, park or school. The Pelican meets those requirements.

Since the Pelican Theater reopened, Gammoh has been cited for dozens of misdemeanor code violations, such as not having wheelchair access to the stage for handicapped dancers and not meeting fire regulations. He’s also been cited for allowing lap dancing and has been taken to jail twice.

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City officials say it’s simple--Gammoh must follow the law.

“He is upset that the city has had the resolve to challenge him,” La Habra Police Sgt. Phil Stufflebean said.

“He allows activity that is detrimental and that is a magnet to people who are not good for the community. . . . If he followed the rules, we would leave him alone.”

But Roger Jon Diamond, Gammoh’s former attorney, noted that police are rarely if ever called to the Pelican Theater because of crime or disturbances, an assertion confirmed by Stufflebean.

Still, police are often there. That’s because, according to Stufflebean, Gammoh routinely lets his dancers perform lap dances despite an amended city ordinance that requires performers to be at least six feet from customers.

Gammoh doesn’t deny it. In fact, he said he won’t stop lap dancing because it’s one of the only ways his performers can make extra money.

In addition to modifying plumbing without a permit, Stufflebean said, Gammoh has lighted candles--illegal “open flames”--in an establishment whose curtains don’t carry the state fire marshal’s “fire retardant” label.

Stufflebean said Gammoh and his security guards have tried to intimidate customers into paying more for lap dances, but those charges later were dropped.

Maida Kimes, 79, said she sometimes wonders “what’s really going on in that place.”

Kimes was a member of Citizens for a Better La Habra, a group formed to fight the Pelican. Once, its members routinely picketed the building.

After the 9th Circuit decision, members met less frequently.

“I was going to find a man to go with me with a camera,” Kimes said. “But we decided to stay out of that.”

From a purely legal or zoning standpoint, moving into the La Habra property should not have been a big hassle, said Diamond, a Santa Monica attorney with a reputation for winning cases for adult business clients.

“The property was perfectly zoned,” Diamond said. “But this was such a great issue for the politicians. . . . It gave them a chance to show they were against sin and immorality.”

The city’s actions against the Pelican Theater are an example of “an abuse of the process,” Diamond said.

“Any inspector worth his salt can go to any building and find a violation,” he said. “In this case, they’ve been relentless. I doubt whether the same resources would be brought to bear on any other business.”

Then there’s the new ordinance prohibiting the Pelican Theater from serving food, despite an approval from the county health department.

“That’s totally arbitrary and mean-spirited. And it doesn’t make any sense,” Diamond said.

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The question, said UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, is whether a city enforces ordinances equitably or arbitrarily; whether an ordinance is meant simply to regulate or to punish.

“An important point is whether a city is discriminating against a business for exercising it’s 1st Amendment right,” Volokh said.

But Gammoh would have to reopen matters in court. He actually tried opening a nude juice bar in Anaheim first. Only recently, he won the right to open his Taboo Theater there later in the year.

Whether similar restrictive ordinances would follow there is uncertain. But in La Habra, staying open is an uphill battle.

Gammoh calls it payback. “They’re saying, ‘OK, you can open your business, but [see] if you ever make any money.’ ”