After City Attorney Dennis Herrera asked the city to shutdown Heaven Mini Theatre for performing lapdances without the proper permits (not to mention allowing prostitution inside its doors, just like every other SF hoochie-coochie establishment), the club owner is crying foul. Peter Lambertson claims that his North Beach club is being targeted since they're not playing ball with supposed SFPD blackmailing tactics and city-sanctioned kickback requests.
Soon after Heaven Mini Theatre opened on Broadway in October 2007, police officers told owner Peter Lambertson "we can make things easy for you if you make things easy for us," Lambertson wrote in a sworn declaration filed recently in San Francisco Superior Court."We understood this to mean that he was asking to be paid," Lambertson wrote.
On several other occasions, "patrons who identified themselves as off-duty officers asked to be 'comped' on 'extras,' which is slang for receiving sex for free," Lambertson wrote. "They were told those services were not available and were asked to leave."
Herrera dismissed Lambertson's allegations as "baseless and irrelevant," with the morally-chaste SFPD saying that this is simply the club's last stab at staying open.
But this does raise an interesting point. Why aren't other clubs closed down for their relatively open policy on prostitution? From the tiny massage parlors that dot the Tenderloin to the Nob Hill Adult Theater, all of those esteemed venues are hunky-dory with pay-for-play action. Why aren't they being shut down too? Strange.
