Even before its opening, Treasures, the upscale strip club off Sahara Avenue near I-15, was a second-class citizen among the city's nightclubs, since the agreement that got the club its liquor license included some conditions that no other club in Las Vegas had had to accept.
When the city council first issued the liquor license in September 2001 to the lavish club, which employs 125 staff members and hundreds of dancers, it imposed several conditions, one of which required the owners, Ali "David" Davari and Hassan Davari, to surrender the license if any of the dancers were convicted of sexual misconduct.
"Essentially, with the conditions, we had a target painted on our back," club attorney John Weston said, characterizing the situation. "It resulted in a two-tier system, of which we were a tier all to ourselves."
And sure enough, police did bust three dancers for solicitation, two of which were found not guilty, but a guilty verdict on the third caused the city council to revoke the club's liquor license while the case was being appealed.
"This was the most difficult case I have dealt with in my career," Weston assessed. "It was very much like a chess game. We filed a motion for preliminary injunction in federal court, arguing that the condition [in the license agreement] was clearly limited to physical activity, physical prostitution, physical misconduct, rather than simply solicitation. While we were waiting for the city's reply to our motion, the conviction which arguably triggered the pulling of the license was reversed, on Jan. 28, which gave the city attorney's office and our office an opportunity to re-examine the situation."
Trouble was, Treasures was "on the clock.” While the club could have operated as a "juice bar" even without its liquor license, unless the matter was cleared up quickly, it ran the risk of losing that license for good.
"Las Vegas has something called a special use permit," Weston explained, "which imposes a distance separation [similar to an adult zoning regulation] with respect to liquor establishments, and that has a kind of a sunset clause that runs out if your license is suspended or revoked for six months, so in addition to everything else, we were in a situation which would have jeopardized the ability of the location to sell liquor."
So Weston and the city's attorney worked out an agreement, which they filed with the federal court, which could allow the parties to settle their differences without a trial.
"Firstly, we filed a stipulation and order that remanded the matter to the city council for reconsideration of the order that pulled the license, in light of the changed fact circumstances," Weston said. "The court granted our request to dismiss the lawsuit without prejudice subject to our unilateral ability to reactivate the lawsuit and restore the litigation to its status at time of dismissal in the event that the city council A) did not grant us a permanent liquor license, and B) without conditions to which all parties had not agreed, which meant unless we agreed."
In other words, with no prostitution conviction on record against the club, the original reason for the license revocation no longer existed, and it deserved to have its liquor license restored – but this time, without the conditions that the club's original attorney had agreed to include in the license agreement.
But some council members had brought up allegations that the club's owners had had previous prostitution busts at clubs they owned in Houston.
"We came up with a theory [in our lawsuit] that when the city council in 2001 granted the club its license, what it granted was a permanent license which it could not deny in 2004," Weston explained. "What it was therefore required to do was to entertain a formal notice of revocation, which requires much greater due-process protection and notice and so forth. Revocation is a much harder thing for government to do than denial, and they didn't do any of those procedures; therefore, we reasoned, we were entitled to our license back, and at least a revocation hearing. And the other aspect of that is, if they were going to revoke, they could only use evidence in support of revocation which had developed after the grant of the license, so all of the Houston allegations were gone. It would have also given us an opportunity to have a new record and a new basis for judicial review, because we would have made that record."
But with the lawsuit on hold and the club back before the city council, Weston was, as he put it, "very emotional."
"It was hair-raising, because it got down to a very split vote," Weston recalled. "The motion to grant us the liquor license contained three conditions, and after conferring with the client – we had to take a brief recess – I went back and said, 'We have great respect for this council. We understand what the council is seeking. We assure you that we will do the things you seek to make us do by condition and we will continue to do them, but we cannot accept a condition requiring us to do them because that makes us a second-class citizen and it puts a big target on us, and we cannot be there.'"
"I had with me in my attaché case a signed notice of reactivation, ready to restore the case to the active [judicial] calendar, and we were ready to proceed," Weston continued. "Fortunately the mayor pro tem – the mayor had to recuse himself because his son had handled the reversal of the prostitution conviction – who had made the motion with the conditions, to his great credit, understood the problem and said, 'All right; well, if that's troublesome, I'll withdraw the motion with the conditions and just make the motion without'; that if the conditions were going to stand in the way, it wasn't that big a deal, and he would make the motion without, and we won 3-2."
And if that weren't enough, the council's vote-tallying computer malfunctioned, forcing the members to vote by hand.
"I would say it was about the most emotional moment that I have had in my nearly 35 years of practice of law," Weston said. "I was nearly in tears, and it's fortunate the press did not get their microphones and pads in front of us for about five minutes, because I could not have spoken."
"I don't think I have ever encountered as tricky a case," he summarized, "and Randy [Garrou, Weston's law partner] and I worked on it literally incessantly, particularly the last 60 days. It was just overwhelming, and I came to like the client and the people in the organization very much, and when we won, it was just really down to the wire. I mean, when a politician says to you in an open hearing, 'I'm going to give this to you with three conditions,' and you say, 'No,' it's a very tough call."
