Managing a strip club is hard work: beer coolers break down and must be replaced, difficult employees need to be dismissed and bouncers need to be kept in line.
Managing a strip club is even harder when it’s technically your side gig and your main source of income comes from working for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Those two income streams just aren’t compatible.
An agent and an employee of the DEA were arrested Wednesday on charges of running a New Jersey strip club under the agency’s nose, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan.
David Polos, 51, and Glen Glover, 45, were each hit with a single count of making false statements for allegedly lying to the agency about their outside employment with “Twins Plus Go-Go Lounge” in South Hackensack, in which they each had an ownership interest.
Polos had joined the DEA in 1991 and supervised the New York Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Strike Force until late April, according to a criminal complaint. The complaint stated that Glover is a telecommunications specialist at the agency whom Polos once supervised.
An attorney for Glover, Cathy Fleming, told TPM that she believed her client would be exonerated at trial.
“He’s a well respected, highly decorated DEA employee with a lot of years of good service,” Fleming said. “I read their complaint for the first time this morning and I believe the appropriate place to try the case is in the court and not the press. We’re pretty comfortable that when there’s a trial and a full airing of the facts he’ll be exonerated.”
An attorney for Polos did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment from TPM.
The complaint laid out the mundane tasks, like replacing beer coolers and covering shifts, that prosecutors say prove Polos and Glover were actively involved in managing the club. But it also laid out some seedier allegations about the running of “Twins Plus,” from employing undocumented dancers to sending racially tinged emails.
Here are the most sordid details:
Many of the club’s dancers were undocumented
Most of the dancers at “Twins Plus” were originally from Brazil or Russia, according to the complaint. Their undocumented status was widely known among the club’s employees “in part because dancers spoke about it and in part because the dancers had to sign in using employee sign-in sheets that asked, among other things, whether the employees were United States citizens,” the complaint stated.
The owners of the club, including Polos, allegedly even arranged for one Brazilian woman identified in the complaint as “Dancer-1” to work double shifts in order to make enough money to pay back the smugglers who brought her into the U.S.
Polos also loaned the Brazilian dancer money to bail herself out of jail after she was arrested outside the club in an altercation with police, according to the complaint.
Dancers allegedly engaged in sex acts with patrons for money
An FBI agent who reviewed surveillance footage of the club, including from inside its lap-dance stalls, stated in the complaint that “there appear to be multiple instances of sexual contact between dancers and patrons, with money exchanged afterwards.”
The club’s managers allegedly sent racially charged emails about employees
The co-managers of “Twins Plus” sent emails to each other that referred to employees as “colored,” according to the complaint.
In one exchange outlined in the court documents, an unidentified co-manager sent an email to Polos, Glover and another manager about calling an exterminator to get rid of pillbugs in the club. The co-manager allegedly joked that maybe the exterminator could “get rid of some of the colored girls.” Glover, according to the documents, responded: “you can get rid of all the black girls if you want if you go find other ones first …”
Polos boasted about working in law enforcement at the club
The club’s co-managers, as well as two bouncers, were generally aware that Glover and Polos worked for the DEA, according to the complaint.
However, on occasion Polos allegedly would say that he worked for the FBI. The complaint also cited an incident in which Polos allegedly pointed at a gun strapped to his ankle during an argument with the wife of one of the club’s co-managers. “This is the boss. I am the boss,” Polos allegedly told the woman.
The complaint alleged that Glover wore a bulletproof vest to work at the club once. He apparently knew were to draw the line, though — the complaint cited a text message in which Glover informed one of the club’s co-managers “I’m with two state trooper [sic] they don’t know I own the bar.” The co-manager replied that he would inform another employee who was presumably working at the time, according to the complaint.
Read the full complaint below:
TPM illustration by Nick Martin.
