banktime.com

When Gerard Wall woke up after a raucous night at a famous New York gentleman’s club, he had a little more than just a hangover and the fuzzy memory of a good time. Wall, a native of Delaware, discovered that he’d been charged over twenty-one thousand dollars over two credit cards. Wall claims that the only charge he ever authorized was a three hundred dollar private lap dance from one of the club’s performers. Now, he’s filed suit against Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club for what he claims is fraud.

Wall admits that his memories of the December 12th visit to the Hustler Club are not the clearest. He’d been drinking when he handed a club employee his American Express credit card as payment for what a New York newspaper called a “topless bump-and-grind” in a private room, but he is quite sure that’s all he agreed to pay for. According to the suit filed by Wall in the Manhattan Supreme Court this week, Wall “submitted his American Express card for a $300 charge… [and] did not approve any other charges.” That may be an understatement. A Hustler Club employer reportedly had to drive wall home, because he was so intoxicated at the point when he was getting ready to leave. He only ordered two drinks during his reported ninety-minute stay at the club, which seems to indicate that he arrived there in an already-drunk condition.

When Wall got out of bed the next day – I can only assume it was at least early afternoon, given the headache he had to have been sporting – he was chagrined to notice eighty dollars in cash from his wallet, and that the American Express card and another of his cards (a Discover card) had been charged a combined amount of over twenty-one thousand six hundred dollars. For its part, the Hustler Club –owned by renowned smut peddler Larry Flynt, and named after the pornographic magazine with which it shares a title – is not commenting on the incident with wall that took place last month. Wall is also choosing to not comment on the story, but his torrid tale of Big Apple strip club hijinks gone awry puts him in good company.

Back in 2005, a high-ranking corporate executive in Missouri was very publicly stripped of his title and employment after charging a two hundred forty-one thousand dollar tab at the well-known Scores club to his company plastic. A year earlier, Scores was also in the news after the husband of a Bangladeshi diplomat filed suit against the establishment over a disputed credit card charge of almost one hundred thirty thousand dollars. Like Wall, that gentleman also claimed that he was charged more than he agreed to – in his case, a “mere” twenty-eight thousand dollars.

There’s a fairly obvious lesson here, fellows – be wary handing your plastic over to a stripper. Stick to cash when you hit the strip club (and keep a close eye on your greenbacks, at that), and leave the high-limit plastic safely at home. Seems to me like extreme levels of drunkenness plus abundant unclothed cleavage seems more like a formula for disaster than one for a night to remember!