Text by Sarah Phelan
Funny as the title of this blog post may sound, it’s actually directly taken from a press release that the City Attorney’s office issued today, noting that Dennis Herrera has moved to shutter a North Beach strip club named Heaven at 1045 Kearny Street.
According to Herrera’s press release, the club has continued to operate in defiance of repeated notices of violation, cease and desist orders, and police citations for prostitution, dating back more than a year.
Heaven was allegedly also implicated in a April 9 shooting, in which a witness claims that an alleged Heaven employee was the gunman who shot two doormen, Ian Heibel and Rodger Mac, at the Broadway Showgirls Nightclub in apparent retaliation for a physical altercation the previous week.
“Naming a business ‘Heaven’ doesn’t place it beyond earthly laws and regulations, but that appears to be exactly what operators of this illicit enterprise think,” Herrera stated.
Police declarations included with court filings detail a March 12 sting in which an undercover officer entered the club and was solicited for oral copulation and sexual intercourse.
“As the arrest team entered Heaven Mini Theater, with our stars visible on our outermost clothing, I saw [a Heaven employee] running down the hallways yelling, ‘police, police!’ [The employee] was also knocking on the closed room doors to notify everyone of our presence,” Sgt. K. Delaney stated, recalling how he immediately went to the room where the undercover officer had gone and saw another Heaven employee standing there in a thong and attempting to cover her naked breasts with her bra.”
While Herrera may be right in wanting to declare Heaven “a public nuisance” for operating in violation of state and local laws, and to try and close down the enterprise, the episode makes me wonder why, in a city that has led the way in attempting to legalize gay marriage, we, as a city, have not been able to figure out a way to legalize prostitution, which everyone knows is happening every single day in every big city in the world.
Meanwhile, to read more about behind the scenes doings in the sex industry, check out our coverage of the Mitchell Brothers’ family saga, here, here and here.