a brief history of Atlanta's famous Gold Club.

Interesting read. She told the story like she wasn't fucking anybody though. I'm calling SS on those numbers though, call me crazy but I would hard pass on this 20k Champagne room stripper girl. And Idk even know if I'd be doing Atlanta style $10 dances.

Muddy, it was a different era back then, guys had expense accounts that were rarely questioned especially if they owned the company, were on the board or brought in a lot of revenue. I was on the tail end of that when I first started working out of college in my 20s. Nobody was watching anything back then in a lot of places. Today I get questioned for why I have 2 ink cartridges for my printer on my company credit card! I’ve been with a small group of guys (I think 4 of us) and we managed to spend $7k in a club one night, and we’re small fries. You get some guys that earn good money away from their wife and kids and they go nuts. Still, I’m sure “Diva” must have been charming and probably had a great body, but was the guy that gave her $50k blind? She has the face of a boxer.

Muddy remember, this was late 90s, dotcom bubble had not yet burst, 9/11 had not yet happened, it was kind of like 1929 in a way.

I only went in there once and it was after the raid. The handwriting was on the wall that it was probably going to close but I thought it would be cool to go there because it was so famous. I was barely 21. It did feel different. It was more upscale and some of the prices quoted were high. I was always under the impression though that the case against them was overly dramatic. Prosecutors were trying to make a name for themselves.

She hit the nail on the head with the comparison to Studio 54. It's almost irrelevant that it was a strip club. If you own a business that's known to be patronized by celebs, celeb-obsessed types will spend their last dime, and max out their credit, to be you customer.

In late 1998, I moved to the East Coast and started making semi-regular trips to Atlanta for business. The following year, I began hitting many of the ATL strip clubs whenever I could -- a practice of mine that continues to this day. Somehow, though, I must have missed this famous club. Does anyone here know where it was located? Just curious...

Some of those dancers pictured are hot. The lady that wrote this story was not one of them.

It’ was near the current Lindbergh Marta station on Piedmont. It was in BuckheD maybe a mile from Tattletales.

The building is still there, vacant. I think most recently it was an event facility. I knew a dancer there in real life. She was very religious and I doubt she was doing extras. Also much better looking than Diva. One of the Rolling Stones and the CEO of a local Fortune 500 were two of her regulars. She also told me if one of them showed up she could make $2K to $3K a night 30+ years ago. Long before the raid. The numbers the article quotes are a bit dubious. That said, I was the guest of a sales exec once. He tipped $500 to skip the hour-long line. He then tipped another $500 and the floorman moved someone off a table for us. And this is just downstairs where they were they only do table dances. The money flowing in that place was unbelievable. But again, I think Diva's numbers are questionable.

I googled a little bit a saw a Page 2 article by Bill Simmons. Pretty interesting stuff. I used to read page 2 all the time back in the day on espn.com before espn would call everybody racist. https://www.espn.com/espn/page2/story?id=1237371

I was there once and watched the end of the Cincinnati Reds winning the World Series in 1990! I remember it being extremely crowded and pretty much all the girls being knockouts. And this was before the Kaplan guy bought it apparently.

Episode referenced in the article is playing Tues and Wed (1/23&24) on Vice. Visited GC a few times before it closed and know a group that once spent $10K in one of the upstairs rooms. Plenty of alcohol and girls dancing but nothing more. Also, am I the only one who thinks that the girl in the article isn’t worth anywhere close to $5K an hour. There were way hotter dancers working there when I visited.

She's good looking but not to the point that she'd be worth the amounts she was talking about in today's money let alone in 90s money.

Come guys, like people never lie about how much money they make.

Good article, thanks for sharing! I spent a lot of time in ATL back then (most of my time in fact). Her story borders plausible if she was lucky, but that 5k would have been attached to NDAs she would have needed to sign. I know some stuff went down there because I was there for some of it. Don't recognize her tho. I'll never forget, through a quirk of fate, ending up hanging with a well-known rock band one evening after a show and that's the club we all ended up at. How the hell I managed to make it through that night (much less the hundreds of other nights) without getting shot, arrested, or infected with something is beyond me. That place was never my favorite, but it's where I took "high rollers" if they wanted to have some fun. Good times, good memories. Hadn't thought of that place in years.