LA HABRA, Calif. - After almost a decade-long fight with a local strip club, the city will pay the club’s owner $5.2 million to close its doors. The city of La Habra chose to settle the ongoing lawsuit, filed in 1998, after attorneys for Badi "Bill" Gammoh, owner of the Taboo Gentlemen's Club, offered the deal.
The city will purchase the property now occupied by Taboo for $3 million and dole out an additional $2.2 million for business compensation, as part of the settlement.
“This is a man who stood up for his rights and refused to cave in,” Gammoh’s attorney, Stuart Miller, told the Los Angeles Times. “The city figured they could just wait him out. They were wrong.”
The long, litigious history between La Habra and Gammoh has included at least five court battles. Gammoh’s initial victory was in 1998, when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the city could not ban Taboo from opening its doors.
La Habra passed an ordinance in 1998 requiring dancers to be at least six feet from club patrons, effectively banning lap dances. Gammoh succeeded in overturning that ordinance, but the city countered with in 2003 with a revised law setting the dancer/patron distance at two feet. Gammoh challenged that ordinance as well, but lost.
Gammoh then filed the current suit for damages incurred between 1998 and 2003. He claimed that the constant restrictions had thinned out his business considerably.
The city had maintained that the club was a center of illegal activity, but Miller told the Los Angeles Times that in the nine years Taboo was open there were only two prostitution arrests and none for assault.
