Nothing but the Truth

by Tim McLoughlin

  Likewise in outer-borough locales like Sunset Park, sex joints, so to speak, had grandfather clauses. They might be on Mayor Giuliani’s radar, but they were still open and doing brisk business.

  Sweet Cherry opened in 1996. Joe and Jimmy DeNicola bought the property from a Manhattan Beach businessman named Louis Kapelow.

  It’s been said that drugs killed the Mafia. The original bent-noses despised drugs. Colombo, Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese—none of them wanted their soldiers trading in dope. It was bad for business.

  We all know what happened. As history tends to repeat itself, bad business came to Sweet Cherry.

  Jorge tells me about a spring night in 1999, when Sweet Cherry was home to dancers with names like Chastity (really) and Jennifer (ditto).

  “I liked it, you didn’t have to wear nothing fancy. No jackets,” explains Jorge. “I don’t own a jacket … My brother Manuel, he comes in with me. In like two minutes or something, Manuel’s off to the back room with a lap dancer. He comes out smiling about ten minutes later. Then this other guy comes in and walks up to the bar. He’s a gringo. He goes to the back with another gringo. Leaves about five minutes later. That’s when things started going wrong around here.”

  Later, I check out what Jorge was telling me. As the press reported at the time, the story goes something like this:

  A stranger walks up to the bar, a small baggie of cocaine is “exchanged with a patron” for twenty bucks. The stranger records the sale, and does so again on a number of successive nights. The stranger works for the NYPD Narcotics Division out of the Brooklyn South precinct.

  Counselor Lazzaro gives his client a warning along the lines of, They’re going after the club, Jimmy.

  Jimmy’s likely response? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

  It meant the cops never named an actual person or persons dealing drugs. They only named the place—Sweet Cherry. Narcs demonstrated a “pattern of activity,” as prescribed by statute. In this case, the activity at Sweet Cherry was drug dealing. Establish that in a court of law, and the judge will say drugs, booze, naked women—they don’t mix, so shut it down.

  Jimmy might have wanted a personal meeting with this stranger from Brooklyn South. In which case Lazzaro might have told Jimmy that hostility would be bad for business.

  Lazzaro’s final advice? Probably: Keep your mouth shut, don’t do anything stupid, and we’ll keep you open.

  An investigation proceeded, based on the narc’s account and his catalogue of illicit drug sales. The district attorney of Kings County brought the matter to state court.

  The argument Lazzaro and his cocounsels put up was simple: People in the club have their backs to the bar because they’re watching the stage—and who wouldn’t be when Chastity and Jennifer were performing? Consequently, house management was unaware of drug transactions since customers’ hands were not observable.

  On August 5, 1999, the judge ordered the temporary closure of Sweet Cherry and imposed a fine of $25,000. Big deal.

  No doubt Jimmy DeNicola proclaimed his lawyer a genius. No doubt the genius told Jimmy to cool it.

  Clients, a lawyer once told me, are the same as a doctor’s patients: They don’t listen to sound advice.

  Staring at the gated front door, Jorge leans back, then forward, as if looking for something. He tells me, “It was like the judge took my hangout away. Then I seen this big dude out front one day. It was real hot. He was cleaning the front of the store. He says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be back.’”

  That was August. Late in September, Sweet Cherry reopened.

  On December 8, 1999, nine-year veteran NYPD Detective Joe Continanzi double-parked his car on Second Avenue. It was well after midnight, moving toward dawn. The air that night was unusually mild for a New York awaiting Christmas. Later in the day, New Yorkers would gather in Central Park to celebrate the nineteenth anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. Continanzi’s girlfriend, Michele Miranda, was in the passenger seat next to him.

  I like to think that if they were listening to the radio, Lennon’s “Instant Karma” was playing.

  Michele slid out of the car to do what she came to do, which was to walk into Sweet Cherry and come back out with her friend, a dancer at the club. But when Michele returned alone, a group of loiterers in front of the club grabbed at her. Joe jumped out of the car. He didn’t get very far.

  At the hospital, Joe told his sergeant, They jumped me. The doctor told him to lie still.

  Lucky, the doctor said. The stab wounds missed Joe’s major organs. The doctor left and Joe finished telling his sergeant how he had been kicked, hit with bottles left and right, punched, and stabbed. The sergeant told Joe they nailed two of the droolers, and both had confessed.

  Jorge was there that night.

  “You spent a lot of time here, didn’t you?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I know, some people think me and my wife, we’re not good,” says Jorge. “But it’s okay. She knows I don’t do anything bad. I come home to her … But that night even I get scared. That was some fuckin’ fight. Bitches slapping bitches, bottles breaking everywhere. I got out in a hurry. See, I was alone that night. Manuel was at work. That cop took a beating.”

  Officer Continanzi’s lawsuit against the club failed. Lazzaro’s argument this time, that the bouncer’s responsibility ended at the door, prevailed. What happened outside the club, on the street, was not the club’s responsibility.

  Sweet Cherry, still alive.

  March 8, 2004. A cold rainy afternoon. A sixteen-year-old girl walks into the club. She lies about her age to the manager, Gabriel Bertonazzi. She needs work, she says, and she can dance, she says. She can dance real nice.

  At this, a grin may have found its way to Bertonazzi’s double-chinned face. Dance, he might have said. Dance for me. He lets her know that he is the sole judge of talent for the club.

  Inside, the smell of beer and liquor seeps from the floorboards in the heat and humidity of a place like Sweet Cherry, with its backlit mirror behind the bar revealing only the emptiness she feels as she removes her clothes.

  Outside, the skies are steel-gray and cold as big trucks rumble through the neighborhood across broken cobblestoned streets. In the distance, salsa music plays on a truck radio somewhere.

  Inside, a girl of sixteen shivers.

  The man wants her to dance. In the world of third-rate strip clubs, it’s the same old story. You have to show the man what you’ve got. She steps back and looks around. This is what I have to do. Fine, this is what I’ll do.

  Guitars rip through the silence of the bar. Like taking a bullwhip to a hummingbird, the guitar strings drown out the distant salsa. Stage music that twelve hours ago was in synch with the night is now out of sorts, like a bad suit at a black-tie affair.

  She dances. She takes off her shirt.

  She is alone in a room, with just this very large man watching her writhe to the music. In the same old story, she loses her dignity and whatever is left of her underage innocence as fast as she loses her clothes.

  She dances in nothing but her g-string and spike heels, moving wildly to the syncopated rhythm, pretending not to look at the man’s big eyes. Then the music stops. She turns her naked body, perspiring beneath hot stage lights, and there’s a drop of sweat on a nipple, other drops between her breasts.

  She’s hired. She gets what she wants, a job dancing, where a friend told her she’d make good money. It’s what she didn’t want that would haunt her, she would later tell the cops. She didn’t want him.

  She had no choice, really. It’s just part of that same old story.

  She kept dancing there, and she kept making money. She kept taking the pill too.

  And at Sweet Cherry, the beat went on.

  Then, in November, the raid came down.

  Vice detectives raid hard and fast. The music scratches to a halt. Patrons don’t run as hard as they do in the movies. They think about it, but the place is surrounded by cops and you can�
��t get away.

  The cops only wanted to check the IDs anyway. They checked everybody, including the dancers. Vice cops asked questions quick and fast, no time to think about answers, leaving the truth nearly as naked as the dancer: You’re only sixteen, were you here against your will, were you forced to have sex with anyone, were you raped … ?

  During the course of the next few hours, she told an avuncular detective a tale of how she had come to this unfortunate station stop in her life. A true tale of family dysfunction—and whose family isn’t dysfunctional? She told them about Bertonazzi, whom the detective was pleased to arrest on charges of rape and endangering the welfare of a minor.

  A quick search online tells me that Bertonazzi made his $5,000 bail and was back to work a few days later.

  I ask Jorge about the dancer. Jorge says that he remembers her. “She could dance. And let me tell you something, she had some pretty nice titties. They didn’t bounce that much. We all thought the tits were no good—not real, you know? But Manuel used some of his paycheck for a lap dance from her, and he touched them and said they were some real titties. Manuel don’t lie to me. He’d get smacked down if he did.”

  She was only sixteen, I think, just a girl.

  “You know something I don’t?” Jorge asks.

  This is when it dawns on me that Jorge isn’t just some local who used to drop by to watch girls dance. The guy is an informer for the cops and the D.A., and his name probably isn’t Jorge.

  “I think when you get into some sort of trouble, maybe you catch yourself and you make some changes,” says Jorge, or whatever. “Maybe you behave a little better and you keep the heat off. That’s how things work. Do your thing, just keep it quiet, keep the heat off. No one will bother you.”

  Logic evidently unheeded.

  I checked the court records. In March of 2005, the drugs charges came back again. The “pattern of activity” allegation was once more lodged against Sweet Cherry. Undercover cops bought two bags of cocaine and a bag of marijuana. Also, according to the cops, another trade started to surface: prostitution.

  “This guy starts working here,” Jorge tells me. “His name is Irving. We call him Irv. Anyhow, Irv runs the door. He says if I need a girl, talk to him.”

  Irving Matos was in his early forties and a respected man of his community. He was a member of HANC, the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County. Vice president of the board of directors, no less. He was also manager of the bouncers at Sweet Cherry. Some guys, you never know what they have under their fingernails.

  Irving had a friend in the club: Wayne Tyson, a run-ofthe-mill hustler and sometime bouncer who ran a small prostitution ring out of his apartment in Brownsville.

  Tyson was a frequent customer at Sweet Cherry. That’s where he met Matos. And that’s where the two of them met Stephen Sakai.

  “I didn’t like that guy Tyson. He dressed nice, but he never smiled,” says Jorge. “I don’t like him the first time I meet him. And he’s the new bouncer. Sometimes he worked the door. If he’s got some freaky vibe or something, maybe I go in but maybe I don’t.”

  Sakai, on the other hand, was a regular-looking guy, a tall black man, well-groomed. He got a bouncer job at Sweet Cherry through an agency that doled out that sort of work. The man who ran the agency was a guy called Eric Mojica.

  During the course of a year, Matos, Tyson, and Sakai had their own inside gig operating out of Sweet Cherry, according to investigators for the Brooklyn D.A.

  Bouncing at the door was their front, investigators claimed; steering patrons to prostitutes and skimming profits was the real action. The allegation went like this: Sakai got the nod from Matos and sent the patron his way; Matos sent him off to Tyson; Tyson got the john to the girl, collected the money afterward, and shared it with his partners.

  But Tyson had his very own inside-inside thing, investigators said. A few of the girls interested in moonlighting on top of their moonlighting were given his address in Brownsville. No sense in Tyson passing up ancillary profits.

  Somewhere along the line, it occurred to Sakai that he was getting burned. So say the investigators. He expressed his concerns to some of his Sweet Cherry colleagues and, as these things happen in the demimonde of bouncing, word got to the boss.

  Eric Mojica controlled many of the bouncing gigs in New York City. He never cared much for Sakai—too cool for his taste. And just to show his regard, Mojica fired him.

  After he lost his gig at Sweet Cherry, investigators said, Sakai was angry and took it out on Tyson—for reasons unclear to this day. He paid a visit to Brownsville, to a small apartment on Eastern Parkway, according to the investigators. He brought a knife, they said.

  Tyson opened his door to Sakai, who confirmed his presence during questioning by police. Tyson had no reason to fear anything was amiss. The door closed. Tyson couldn’t have anticipated Sakai’s rage, investigators posit. Blood flew from Tyson’s head and neck. He was left alive, but bleeding to death.

  A few days later, police visited Tyson’s neighbors in Brownsville to ask questions about the bloodied corpse they found in his apartment. Questions were also asked around the club, some of the replacement bouncers not seeming too disturbed that Tyson was gone. No one offered up anything. If you don’t say anything, you don’t know anything, and you don’t get in trouble with anyone.

  By November 2005, Matos had grown seriously worried. Tyson was dead. He hadn’t seen Stephen Sakai in weeks. And there was no word on the street either.

  For the time being, the johns kept coming to Sweet Cherry, and they kept getting what they were there for, and even if the business was slowing down, it now made up a trinity of sorts that was Sweet Cherry’s economy: dancing, drugs, and sex.

  And one regular patron dead—so far.

  Irving Matos went home one night to his basement apartment and did what his sort of mogul does: He eased himself into a lazy-boy lounger and watched television.

  There was a knock outside, and then an insistent doorbell. He got up to answer it. He saw it was Sakai, looking his usual cool. Matos invited him in. They sat there and watched the TV.

  After some brief catching up on the news about Sweet Cherry, Sakai said it was time for him to shove off. Don’t get up, he told Matos. I’ll show myself out.

  Then he pulled a pistol from his coat and fired into the rear of Matos’s skull.

  Sakai confessed as much to the police.

  After a week or so, the DeNicola brothers began wondering about Irving Matos. Maybe he got the flu bug or something.

  They called the police to investigate, after encountering an unbearable stench coming from his apartment. They found the decomposing body of Irving Matos, age forty-two, in front of the blinking television.

  Brooklyn police put the Matos murder together with the Tyson murder: Both were no-forced-entry jobs, both were connected to Sweet Cherry, and the name Stephen Sakai was on the list of known associates of both corpses.

  So was Eric Mojica.

  Sakai found Mojica before the cops could.

  A few weeks after Matos was found dead, Mojica turned up dead as well.

  It took three murders to put the police onto Sakai’s trail.

  On May 23, 2006, the 11 o’clock TV news helped the cops find Sakai.

  Stephen Sakai, with three alleged murders under his gun-holding belt, was working as a bouncer at Opus 22, a hip nightspot in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. A couple of drunkards got into a fight outside the club, and Sakai would have none of it. He pulled out his .45 caliber and fired away. After the mêlée was over, the cops found four men shot, one fatally.

  They picked up Sakai in Brooklyn a few hours later. He denied it all at first, but then a short time later, after some police persuasion, he admitted to being the gunman at Opus 22. He also admitted killing Matos, but denied killing Tyson. Still, they charged him with murdering Tyson and Matos— and Mojica.

  By June of 2006, the ire of the people of Sunset Park had reached a boiling point, and n
ow scorched the entire city.

  Another bouncer had been accused of murder, this time by the Manhattan district attorney. A young woman named Imette St. Guillen had disappeared from a nightspot called The Falls, located in Soho. She was found dead the next morning, the alleged victim of a bouncer named Darryl Littlejohn, an armed thug with a criminal record. Thus did the city commence a crackdown.

  Targets included the bouncers themselves and the hiring process clubs used—if any. The city urged greater background checks and tougher licensing procedures for both security and gun permits. Stephen Sakai had a security license, but not a gun permit.

  And for Sweet Cherry, Lazzaro’s streak of magic finally came to an end. With drug and solicitation charges pending against his client, the DeNicola brothers, Lazzaro cut a deal with the New York City Police Department, the Brooklyn D.A., and the New York State Attorney General’s Office.

  All felony charges were dropped and a civil suit was averted, while rape charges against Bertonazzi were also dismissed.

  Robert Messner, assistant commissioner for the Civil Enforcement Unit of the Police Department’s Legal Bureau, called the deal “a very good example of cooperation by multiple agencies.” Sweet Cherry ponied up $50,000 in fines. No jail sentences, no probation. The DeNicola brothers pled guilty to misdemeanor drug charges, and were barred from ever again operating a nightclub in Kings County. All other charges were dismissed.

  Stephen Sakai spent his nights on Rikers Island, awaiting trial in Brooklyn on three counts of murder in the second degree. He was later acquitted on one count and convicted on the other two; he now faces fifty years to life in prison. Meanwhile, he is still awaiting trial in connection with the fatal shooting at Opus 22.

  Darryl Littlejohn, meanwhile, is also locked up, awaiting his day in court on charges of murdering Imette St. Guillen.

  It was all over. The violence, the drugs, the sex—all of it over, just like that.