1 Party, 13 Officers Add Up to Conflict

Boys just want to have fun. What follows, however, is a tale of what can happen when they want to have too much.

Not to kill the suspense, but wouldn’t you agree a party loses much of its appeal when armed police burst in?

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Chester Ringwood was entertaining about 20 guys in his modest Huntington Beach home two Saturday nights ago, offering the usual party fare of drinks, music and shooting pool. And then there were the not-so-usual offerings of four knockout babes offering lap dances and a variety of X-rated party games. Not to mention them dancing around a pole on a small strobe-lighted platform in the 500-square-foot room that Ringwood converted to resemble a mini-nightclub.

You may go to parties like that, but most of us don’t. Then again, Ringwood is a different breed of host.

He lives with two of the knockouts and makes adult videos with them. They have a videocam website that features the women at home, and they also put on what Ringwood calls “high-end adult shows” in Las Vegas for guys who rent out a room or a suite to watch his roommates cavort.

But in what he now ruefully calls “my dumb genius idea,” Ringwood agreed to host some parties to augment the women’s income while he recovered from surgery and couldn’t make videos. Doing that meant charging the partygoers. So in recent months, he says, he hosted several parties and charged $50 a person.

We now cut to around 11 p.m. on May 21. With the party in full swing, no one heard a group of Huntington Beach police outside with a battering ram trying to crash Ringwood’s wooden gate. Thwarted, officers then climbed over a stone wall to gain access. Once on the other side, they bashed part of the gate in from the other side to let other officers in.

“They come running around the corner into the house with their guns drawn and their vests on,” Ringwood says. “They scared the [heck] out of everybody.”

Police herded the partygoers outside, and other officers in the house arrested Ringwood, the four young women and his bodyguard.

Ringwood says at least a dozen officers stormed the house. Police spokesman Craig Junginger says 13 officers were in on the bust but that only eight entered the house.

I ask why so many were necessary and if guns needed to be drawn. “There were two dozen people inside,” Junginger says, “so we’re obviously going to go in and do whatever is necessary for their safety and the safety of all the people inside.”

Guns? “Guns may have been out, but according to our investigating officer, they weren’t pointed at people,” Junginger says.

Paid to ask the tough questions, I ask if that many cops went because they knew they’d encounter four nude lap dancers. In a word, Junginger’s answer is no.

The big picture, Junginger says, is that Ringwood “was basically running a striptease club in the middle of a residential area. That’s a concern for us.”

“I did the wrong thing, I admit it, and I’ll pay whatever the fines are,” Ringwood says. “I just didn’t understand the need for breaking down the gate, running in with guns and scaring all my friends.”

I ask Ringwood what the officers saw. “They saw the girls giving lap dances on the couches.” He won’t bite when I ask if he’s skeptical about the numbers.

“Honestly,” he says, “I believe Huntington Beach doesn’t have that much going on and they had a chance to get all suited up and cowboy up. That’s not being sarcastic, that’s being honest.”

A dozen officers? “That’s legit, I guess,” he says. “What are they going to do? You’ve got 20 guys at a party, the cops never know what they’re getting themselves into. I understand that from their perspective. A lot of people don’t like police. I don’t blame them for the number of guys. I just wish they could have come and talked to me. We could have settled this so easily.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.