Former Strip Club Manager Sentenced to 41 Months in Prison for Racketeering Conviction
Las Vegas, Nev. – Former Las Vegas strip club manager, Robert D'Apice, 53, was sentenced on Tuesday, February 13, 2007, to 41 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $5,000 fine, for extorting monies from patrons at the Crazy Horse Too strip club in Las Vegas through force and violence, announced Daniel G. Bogden, United States Attorney for the District of Nevada.
D'Apice pleaded guilty last year to Conspiracy to Participate in an Enterprise Engaged in Racketeering Activity. From 1998 to 2006, D'Apice was a shift manager at The Crazy Horse Too, a strip club in Las Vegas. Dancers usually collected payments from patrons of the club for dances or other services the dancers provided. If a patron refused to pay a dancer, or if a patron disputed the charges claimed by a dancer, the dancer typically followed the procedure of initially contacting the shift manager, or other male employees at the club. On at least two occasions the defendant D'Apice sought to extort payment from patrons through explicit or implicit threats of violence, and through actual use of force and physical violence against patrons in which various degrees of bodily injury were caused. In the initial indictment in this case in January 2005, the grand jury charged D'Apice with participating in an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering made up of multiple violent acts of extortion, including D'Apice's physical attack upon patron Kirk Henry in September 2001. This attack left Kirk Henry a permanent quadriplegic. While D'Apice in reaching the plea agreement in this case did not specifically admit to the Kirk Henry beating, he did concede that for purposes of sentencing the Government could prove that one of his extortions caused permanent and life-threatening injury on a patron and another extortion resulted in serious bodily harm.
The parent owner of the club, The Power Company, Inc., pleaded guilty last year to Conspiracy to Participate in an Enterprise Engaged in Racketeering Activity, and was sentenced in January to five years probation and a $500,000 fine.
The individual owner of the club, Frederick "Rick" Rizzolo, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to defraud the government of taxes, and was sentenced in January to one year and one day in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine.
The Power Company, Inc. was also ordered to pay $10 million in restitution to Kirk and Amy Henry for injuries and damages to Kirk Henry caused at the Crazy Horse Too in September 2001, and to forfeit $4.25 million, acquired unlawfully from racketeering activity or unlawful debt collection at club. Kirk Henry, a customer of the Crazy Horse Too from Kansas, was left a quadriplegic as a result of his injuries at the Crazy Horse Too. The Power Company, Inc. and Rizzolo were also ordered to pay approximately $1.73 million in restitution to the IRS.
Fourteen other defendants, most former or current employees at the club, pleaded guilty to tax-related offenses, and one pleaded guilty to making a false statement before a federal grand jury.
The Court ruled that Robert D'Apice could have 90 days to self-surrender to the Federal Bureau of Prisons to begin service of his sentence of imprisonment.
The cases were investigated by the FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Eric Johnson andTimothy Vasquez.
