Board shuts strip club pending hearing

PROVIDENCE — The Foxy Lady strip club was ordered closed until Thursday after three employees were arrested on solicitation of prostitution charges Tuesday night.

The decision was made Wednesday afternoon by the Providence Board of Licenses after city police said they believed the establishment was aware of what was happening in the private "VIP" lounge.

“This is a prostitution parlor,” Maj. David Lapatin said after the emergency hearing on the fifth floor of Providence City Hall. “We’re not going to allow it.”

Melissa McNeely, 32, of Madison, Connecticut; Lindsay Hoffmann, 30, of Waterbury, Connecticut; and Neish Rivera, 25, of Providence, were charged in the prostitution investigation Tuesday night, the police said.

Lapatin said the investigation at the Chalkstone Avenue club was an undercover operation by intelligence and narcotics officers. It started after a sexual assault was reported there last month. In that case, a male patron was arrested Nov. 9 after a dancer told police she was sexually assaulted in a private room, police said. Police said they have not charged the man, but the case is going to a grand jury.

Police investigating the reported sexual assault became suspicious about what else was happening at the Foxy Lady, Lapatin said. Lapatin said the woman who was assaulted was not charged.

According to redacted police reports that led to the three prostitution arrests Tuesday, all three Foxy Lady workers asked undercover officers if they wanted to go downstairs to the private “VIP” room. Rivera and Hoffmann told the undercover officers that for $300, they would get “anything you want” for half an hour, the report said.

Rivera groped an undercover officer and then said for another $100, they could have sex, the report said.

McNeely told the undercover officer that for $300, the officer could perform oral sex on her, the report said.

The emergency closure order will last until the Board of Licenses meets again Thursday at 5 p.m. and decides what to do next.

The Foxy Lady is a longtime Providence establishment known for its neon-hued contributions to city nightlife and its Friday morning "Leggs 'n' Eggs" breakfast buffet.

The self-described “gentleman’s club” allegedly was also one of the Providence strip clubs that mob figures shook down for protection payments, as prosecutors detailed in a 2011 indictment. Luigi “Baby Shacks” Manocchio and Anthony L. DiNunzio were among the high-profile mob figures who served time for their roles in the scheme.

And in 1993, a state grand jury indicted 26 people, including mobster Robert P. DeLuca and bookmaker Gaythorne "Poochie" Angell Jr., on charges of running an illegal gambling operation based at the Foxy Lady.

A man who identified himself as Foxy Lady's manager, Richard Angell, attended Wednesday’s emergency hearing, and denied accusations that the club was aware of prostitution happening there.

“That’s not the way we run our business,” Angell said.

The owners, identified in legal and corporate documents as Thomas and Patricia Tsoumas, could not be reached for comment on Wednesday through their lawyers or via a message left in person at the club. The documents also show Florida resident Dawn DeRentiis as director of the club. DeRentiis couldn’t be reached for comment. The Foxy Lady has been in business for 38 years, according to its website.

A story in The Providence Journal examining the Foxy Lady after the gambling charges in 1993 drew protests for what some readers considered its lurid indecency. The newspaper was flooded with enraged letters to the editor. One subscriber was arrested for burning a copy of the newspaper outside the newspaper's Fountain Street offices.

Listeners of the podcast series “Crimetown,” which chronicled Providence’s illicit underbelly, heard the story of Michelle, a Foxy Lady dancer of yesteryear who crossed paths with the celebrities, professionals and professional criminals — like Charles “The Ghost” Kennedy — who went there.

But the club’s owners have faced a different sort of legal trouble lately: A class-action lawsuit filed in 2015 alleging that the Foxy Lady wasn’t paying its exotic dancers in line with federal and state laws. The club, the suit said, improperly charged its dancers fees and failed to pay the federal minimum wage.

The case is still being litigated, but the dancers have won a series of legal victories, including a ruling from federal District Judge William E. Smith earlier this year that they are employees, not independent contractors. (Employees generally have more labor rights than independent contractors.)

They were also allowed to fight the case as a class action, a big legal victory. Companies strenuously resist having their aggrieved workers band together as classes in part because people in the class — Foxy Lady exotic dancers, in this case — don’t have to file suit to recover damages if the suit is successful.

Lapatin, the police major, said authorities likely will seek to permanently close the Foxy Lady.

City officials said that the Foxy Lady had not been under scrutiny for prostitution before the report of a sexual assault last month. But Lapatin said similarities in the three prostitution arrests led investigators to believe that management was aware of what was happening.

“Everything about that showed a routine that had probably been going on for a long time,” Lapatin said.