In the mid-1980s in Los Angeles, Somen “Steve” Banerjee and his friend Nick DeNoia pooled money to start a new kind of strip club: men baring it for women. Since they had no idea what they were doing, it didn’t go well. What finally helped was a couple of showmen from Las Vegas. Steve Merrit and his partner (professional and romantic) Mark Donnelly came aboard and hatched the idea of a Vegas-type song-and-dance show wrapped around the disrobing.

To find performers, they cruised the muscle beaches outside LA. They brought the guys back to a studio, applied some Village People–style outfits (policeman, fireman, construction worker, and so on), and ran the group through a line-dancing routine.

Their idea was simple but innovative: sex sells; but instead of making the show lustful, they made it entertaining. Drawing on their Las Vegas experience, Merrit and Donnelly understood how to do it, how to produce a fun theatrical fantasy instead of a crude flesh show. The general concept made sense and the execution was professional, but on opening night, no one knew what would happen.

Chippendales exploded. Women went crazy for the performances, first in the United States, then Europe, and then everywhere as Banerjee and DeNoia rushed to form multiple traveling versions of their production. The time they didn’t spend together mounting the shows they spent in court fighting over who was entitled to how much of the profits and who really owned the suddenly very valuable Chippendales name and concept. The dispute ended in 1987 after DeNoia was shot dead in his office.

One major problem Chippendales faced is that it wasn’t a hard show to copy. Get some muscled guys, some uniform-store costumes, a pop music soundtrack, and pound it all together into a dance routine with a little teasing; you don’t need a genius to do it. So others started.

Michael Fullington was a junior choreographer for Chippendales. He struck up a friendship with some of the showguys, and they split away into a group called Club Adonis. The original choreographers—Merrit and Donnelly—also got in on the act, forming their own traveling revue called Night Dreams.

Unhappy with these copycat acts, Banerjee hired a hit man to go around killing the whole bunch. The hit man, it turned out, was an FBI informant. Banerjee ended up in jail. The ensuing investigation led to more charges. There was arson (he’d burned down one of his own clubs for the insurance money some time back) and also another count of conspiracy to murder since it was Banerjee who’d arranged to have his original partner shot.

The case never got to trial. Banerjee agreed to plead guilty, absorb a twenty-six-year sentence, and give up his rights to Chippendales along with nearly all his money and real estate holdings.

While the lawyers worked out the details, Banerjee’s wife Irene worked feverishly to organize a group of character witnesses. By bringing a parade of people to testify about her husband’s good side at the sentencing hearing, she was hoping to get the jail time reduced a little bit. Or maybe she was hoping to hold on to more of the money and real estate they’d accumulated.

No one got the chance to testify. On the morning of the hearing, Banerjee hung himself in his cell.

Because the trial was never completed, the plea deal never went into effect. And because the guilty man was dead, there was no one left to charge with any crime. Chippendales and all the money and property associated with it went to Banerjee’s wife Irene.

On a real estate discussion board,“Ethical dilemma with submitting two offers at once? (contingency, clause, agent),” City-Data, accessed May 11, 2011, http://www.city-data.com/forum/real-estate/710433-ethical-dilemma-submitting-two-offers-once.html. someone with the sign-in name BriGuy23 asks, “Does anyone on here find any issue with submitting two offers to buy two different apartments at the same time? My friend thinks that it’s unfair due to the fact that one of the offers is definitely going to not go through which means they’re tying up the seller’s time (and money in a way). From a seller’s standpoint I think I would be annoyed but I really don’t see anything wrong with it from a buyer’s perspective. Thoughts?”

A response comes from middle-aged mom: “Sellers can negotiate multiple offers so there is no reason why a buyer could not make multiple offers on different places. Assuming you are represented by a buyer’s agent, I would use the same agent to make both offers. Make certain that your contract gives you an out in the unlikely event both are accepted.”

Dov Charney is an American immigrant success story, but he’s not exactly a “Give me your tired, your poor” kind of immigrant. He’s a Canadian who came to America to attend an expensive private university.

He ended up founding American Apparel (AA), a clothing manufacturer producing trendy t-shirts and basics selling mainly to a young, edgy crowd.

Based in Los Angeles, their factory is among the biggest clothes-making operations in the nation. It employs almost five thousand workers. Those workers are well known for a number of reasons:

• Just having workers sets AA apart. Nearly all US clothing manufacturers outsource their cutting and sewing to poor countries. From Mexico to China, you can find factories paying locals fifty cents an hour to do the same kind of work they do at AA. The difference is the sewers working in Los Angeles typically get around fifteen dollars an hour. That’s not a lot in Southern California, but it’s enough to make them—according to AA—the best paid garment workers in the world.
• The workers don’t report to bosses so much as each other. They organize as independent teams paid a base wage of eight dollars an hour. On top of that they receive a bonus depending on how much they produce. So they get together, set their own targets, and go for them. This liberating of the workforce led to nearly a tripling of output and was matched by about a doubling of wages.
• The company features a generous stock options program to help workers buy shares in the enterprise.
• On its own initiative, the company provides basic health-care services through a clinic tucked into a factory corner. It provides bikes to employees, helping them zip through the downtown traffic morass without adding pollution to the infamous city smog. There are free telephones in the factory for employees to use to call family members at home.
• Many of those employees’ family members are in other countries; AA has a very large immigrant workforce.
• Many of those immigrants are in the country illegally, which partially explains why the company has been on the forefront of amnesty campaigns, organizing public rallies and media events of all kinds for the undocumented. Called Legalize LA, the campaign’s title references the fact that a tremendous number of Southern Californians outside AA are also illegal immigrants.
• In 2009, the federal government indicated to AA that 1,800 of its workers were using Social Security numbers and other identifying documents that had been purchased, stolen, or just plain invented. In any case, they didn’t match up. The company was forced to fire the employees.

The following is from an online discussion:“My cd-burner wont let me copy the cd..why...,” Hardforum, accessed May 11, 2011, http://www.hardforum.com/archive/index.php/t-711331.html.

The headline from a local Oakland newspaper reported that a gun shop is closing due to unfair taxes.Alexandra J. Wall, “Jewish Gunshop Owner Closing Store; Cites Unfair Taxes,” Jweekly, July 21, 2000, accessed May 11, 2011, http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/13657/jewish-gunshop-owner-closing-store-cites-unfair-taxes. The gun shop’s name was Siegle’s Guns. Closing was inevitable, according to owner Mara Siegle, after Oakland residents passed Measure D, which levied a huge tax on gun dealers. They had to pay $24 for every $1,000 earned, in comparison to the $1.20 per $1,000 that all the other retailers in Oakland fork over. “No one can stay in business paying that kind of tax,” Siegle said while preparing her going-out-of-business sale. “And that’s exactly what Oakland wanted.”

No one disputes the point.

The disputes are about whether Oakland should want that and whether it’s fair for the city to use taxes as a weapon.

• Tracy Salkowitz says yes to both. “Except for hunting rifles, the sole purpose of weapons is to kill people.” Getting rid of gun shops, the logic follows, is a public welfare concern. And about the taxes that brought the store down? She’s “delighted” by them.
• Mara Siegle’s opinion is that people who don’t hunt and shoot for recreation don’t understand that guns are a legitimate pastime. “They don’t see this side,” she says, “because they don’t try to.” Further, she asserts, over the years gun owners have told her that they own guns to defend themselves.
• Outside the store, mingling customers agreed with Siegle. They said closing gun stores was the wrong way to fight crime and then cursed the city for the unjust taxes.

Amid the winners and losers, Mara Siegle certainly got the rottenest part of the deal. She has two sons, fifteen and seventeen, and she doesn’t know what she’ll do for income. “I need a job,” she said.

A hand-lettered sign posted in the store’s backroom for the benefit of Siegle’s five full-time employees displayed the phone number of the unemployment office. The sign said, “You paid for it, use it.”