Jo Weldon, a former employee of Atlanta's Gold Club writes: "I worked there on and off for years when it first opened (1987?). I also worked there very briefly as a bartender about four years ago.
"In Atlanta bitching about how there are so many hookers at a strip joint at which one was not working was standard catty practice, both among the dancers and the managers and owners. However, there weren't very many hookers at ANY of them.
I love strip joints but I generally detest the management and owners...just based on experience. I used to work at the Gold Club, incidentally, but it was before the current owners. At that time it was as clean as most of the clubs in Atlanta were at the time (which is to say pretty darn clean). As I recall before it opened there was some kind of huge struggle about its location, because the area in which it opened was developing rapidly and certain people didn't want it there. Also, it was the first strip joint opened in Atlanta with big money during that era--the Cheetah and Tattletales were built up from little hole-in-the-wall establishments - when hole-in-the-wall was the only kind of strip joint there was in Atlanta, to large upscale clubs (somewhat like Scores in NY, but even more so). Because the Gold Club seemed to come out of nowhere, there was a lot of speculation about where the money was coming from. There was suspicion of "mob money" even then, over ten years ago and with different owners. Later, when I was working at another club, a policeman friend of mine told me that the police were working on the case described in this article."
