From Flesh to Faith

SAN BERNARDINO - When Raquel "Rockie" Gomez spotted a newspaper headline declaring the notorious Flesh Club shut down by court order, she was transported in memory to a time and place she never wants to revisit.
Nearly a decade ago, Gomez ruled the stage and the private VIP rooms at the Hospitality Lane strip club.

"When I saw that newspaper, with the picture of that girl coming out of the club, I almost started crying right there outside of a store," Gomez said, her voice cracking with emotion. "That was me seven years ago!"

Today, Gomez is a 37-year-old mother and a self-proclaimed servant of God. Her mission, she said, is to help young women escape the adult entertainment industry.

In court documents, including testimony in 2004 and synopses of undercover investigations funded by the city in the late 1990s, Gomez appears to have been among the most aggressively provocative of the dancers at the Flesh Club.

The image is a far cry from the woman she is today, a fact she credits to God's intervention and a West Covina church she began attending after giving up the business in 2000.

Gomez was born into a Catholic family in Baldwin Park. She was molested while a child by a family friend, an all-too-familiar back story for women like her, she says.

"I'm not saying that's why I did what I did," she said. "But ... it's like we try to punish ourselves for being punished."

After high school, Gomez moved into an

Ontario apartment and got a job as a waitress at Deja Vu, a nude club nearby.
She had a child in tow, and money was a constant concern.

"I remember I was working a night shift, and the manager said they were short," she recalled. "He said, `Hey, I need you to dance.' I was like, no way, it's not going to happen."

Her resistance was short-lived.

THE CLUB

The city of San Bernardino has spent more than $600,000 over the past decade-plus doing battle with the Flesh Club, which City Attorney James F. Penman maintains is a de-facto brothel.

From its high-profile spot on the city's prized restaurant row, the all-nude cabaret for years used its marquee and billboards to entice customers with innuendo and make political statements to boot, sneering at the city that tried for years to shut it down.

Randy Welty opened the club as a topless bar in 1994, but it was shut down a year later by the city, which cited a local zoning ordinance.

But the club reopened in 1999 after a court found the ordinance to be illegal. In 2004, a jury awarded the club's owners $1.4 million from the city for lost profits.

The city didn't pay. Instead it appealed the ruling, and also initiated a series of undercover operations to build its case against the club.

The Nov. 14 closure of the Flesh Club marked a victory in Penman's 13-year campaign against the business.

Fifteen days prior, on Oct. 30, San Bernardino Superior Court Judge Donald Alvarez ruled that the club routinely provided sanctuary for paid sex and other unlawful lewd conduct.

Roger Jon Diamond, the attorney for Manta Management, which runs the Flesh Club and a host of other Southern California clubs, argued that no arrests ever have been made and that activity in the club is protected by the First Amendment.

Alvarez disagreed, siding with the city and remarking at the hearing that what went on at the club amounted to an "ongoing, pervasive business climate" of unlawful behavior.

Diamond was unable to get a stay of the order, pending appeal, and the club was closed by Penman and a dozen police in a midnight visit.

SCARRED PAST

While the legal wrangling dragged on and spy games - including undercover agents posing as customers in wheelchairs - were played, Gomez kept working.

She covered all the shifts at the Flesh Club - days, nights, whenever money was to be made.

And it was a lot of money for her, often $1,000 per night or more. In many of the investigation files submitted to court during the years she worked there, Gomez was described as a particularly aggressive dancer, willing to do anything.

Writhing naked in a patron's lap was about as intimate as a handshake, she now says.

"It was like I walked around dead, emotionally and physically, while I was working there," Gomez said. "Just like numb, totally focused on getting as much money from each man as possible. That was the only way to survive."

Ryan Welty, Randy Welty's son and the current manager of Flesh Club and other Manta Management clubs, said he listened to Gomez's testimony in Superior Court in 2004, but couldn't say whether she was telling the truth - about sex acts, price lists or sanctioned prostitution.

"I'm never shocked by anything that people who have, quote unquote, found religion say," Welty said.

Joseph Arias, the attorney hired by the city to prosecute the Flesh Club in 2004 and 2007, says he remembers clearly how Gomez, his witness, testified about how she went from a low-paid 22-year-old waitress in the early '90s to a money-stacking 30-year-old sex machine by 2000.

"I watched a woman who had gone from being a naive young gal to someone who literally advertised every sex act for a price," Arias said.

The atmosphere in the club was coldly competitive, Gomez said.

"It was real catty in there, a lot of drama," she said. "Which, I guess, shouldn't be surprising, because you've got a whole bunch of girls who are killing themselves inside to claw and scratch for as much money as they can."

Arias saw something similar, first during hours of courtroom testimony, then when he tailed police during the midnight raid that officially closed the club last month.

"It's tragic," Arias said. "When the place closed down, I saw these little gals packing their bags. I thought they looked so young and had so much potential, and it makes you wonder how they got caught up in all this."

TRANSFORMATION

One summer day in 2000, Gomez called work and said she wouldn't be in.

"I didn't feel like having men grab me that day," she said.

She later got a call from a friend who worked across the street, saying the club had been raided by police. She later learned that her name was on the police list.

Gomez didn't go to work there ever again.

"It was God that pulled me from this life," she said. "I was ready for him."

But it took more to help her shake the emotional and financial ruin she'd wrought on her life. Gomez had failed to save much of the thousands she had earned and had no mainstream work skills, she said.

Soon, she'd sold her house in Hesperia. Her truck, a big, flashy customized Chevy, was repossessed.

Gomez filed for bankruptcy within a few months, and was fortunate to get a job at the Wal-Mart in Pomona. "I went from making more than $1,000 per day to (getting) $100-per-week paychecks," she said.

A spiritual awakening broke her steep fall, she said. She went to Faith Community Church in West Covina, the ministry she credits with giving her a new direction in life.

"They kissed me," she said, describing how church members welcomed her.

Now living in Victorville, she runs a nonprofit ministry for women called Beyond Broken Hearted, mostly for former strippers and sex-industry workers.

"Women never wake up one day and say they want to be a stripper," Gomez said. "These are usually girls with deep-seated problems and scars, and they all just get worse when they start selling their bodies."

Her past life - the strobe lights and deafening music, the pole dancing, the lap dancing, a deep pain she never could ease with money or men - is still with her, though more distant, she says.

Gomez recently drove down from Victorville to visit the place she left behind seven years ago.

She parked her compact car on the street, staying off the Flesh Club property. Then she meekly padded around the sidewalk of the brick-red building.

The marquee was still up, still defiant, declaring the club "The pride of San Bernardino."

But the doors were shuttered, the parking lot empty, no heavy bass rumbling from inside.

Her hands shook. Her voice quivered.

"Oh, my God," she said. "It hasn't changed. But I've changed."