Another city pays a lot for its public dance with club owner

This Bill Gammoh has quite a head for business. He has a plan that ought to be taught in America’s finest business schools under the course heading, “How To Annoy City Hall and Still Make Them Pay.”

It’s worked twice in Orange County in the last three years, most recently this week when La Habra agreed to pay him $5.2 million to settle a lawsuit. In 2004, Anaheim paid him $2 million.

The plan: Open a strip club and wait for indignant city officials to get their underwear in a bunch.

Great strategy, I say as deadpan as I can to Stuart Miller, attorney for Gammoh.

“That’s not his strategy,” Miller says, noting that the legal fights over the Taboo Gentlemen’s Clubs in the two cities took years to wend their way through the courts and took their toll on Gammoh. Part of the La Habra case history, Miller says, is that Gammoh spent 17 days in solitary confinement in county jail after being cited for contempt.

“This is a guy who doesn’t back down,” Miller says. “When he thinks he’s right, nothing will stand in his way.”

More often than not, a city, perhaps hearing a clarion call from the public that isn’t really there, decides that making life miserable for a strip club owner is all part of its public duty.

In one way or another, La Habra has been fighting with Gammoh for 12 years, Miller says. The case that was settled this week started in 1998 after Gammoh sued to recover business losses.

The settlement covers potential lost profits during the time the city’s ordinance kept dancers 6 feet from customers during one-on-one encounters. Gammoh successfully sued to overturn the ordinance, later replaced by one with a 2-foot restriction that remains in place.

Miller says he and fellow attorney Scott Wellman consider the settlement a “great victory” for Gammoh. “After 12 years of litigation, to get $5 million for a business that the city ruined that can’t really be resuscitated, that’s great,” Miller says. “A tremendous victory.”

Such is the going rate, I guess, of enforcing a city’s sense of morality, although officials everywhere typically frame these cases as curbing crimes spawned by men leering at young women in various stages of dress or undress.

Jennifer Cervantez, the La Habra official handling its public relations on the case, says the city doesn’t consider the payout a setback. The city had wearied of the litigation, and redevelopment plans in the works made this a good time to settle the Taboo case, she says. Buying the property as part of the settlement gives the city a chance to redevelop the site, she says.

For 5 million bucks, I might have waited till after I made my argument in court -- which La Habra didn’t do -- but I’m sure the city knows what it’s doing. What I’m less sure of is how many residents feel strongly enough about a gentleman’s club to sign off on paying its owner a few million dollars just to quit operating.

Cervantez concedes that the club wasn’t generating ongoing citizen complaints, but says the city considered it a source of unwelcome criminal activity. Miller scoffs at that.

And round and round it goes.

Your morning newspaper isn’t the place to debate the merits of gentlemen’s clubs. Men in Gammoh’s clubs go to watch women dance in the nude and then pay for personal encounters with them offstage but in public view. Those sessions include dances or conversation with the women wearing bikinis. The private time is what drives the business side of the club’s operation, and Miller says they aren’t the sexual encounters that the public might imagine them to be.

“The men are looking for attention, flattery, fantasy, or they want to unwind,” he says. “It’s a cheap form of psychotherapy. There are some clubs where you can have a fully nude woman climbing all over you. That’s not what happens here.”

The public is smart enough to know that sometimes there are violations of those rules. We also know that even when everyone obeys the rules, some in our midst just don’t want clubs like that in their town, even when court after court has ruled them legal.

In short, it’s not exactly breaking news to say this country has a history of culture clashes over strip clubs.

La Habra citizens can decide for themselves if this is how they want City Hall spending its money. Anaheim thought it got a good deal in 2004 when it only paid Gammoh $2 million in lost profits. However, the club still operates there.

As for Gammoh, he reportedly is traveling abroad this week. If I were him, part of my days would be spent reviewing my Thomas Guide and deciding which Orange County city would be next on my list for a new gentlemen’s club.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. 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.