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.