I Was the Highest-Paid Dancer at America's No. 1 Strip Club

At the turn of the millennium, the Gold was infamous. It was the number one strip club in the United States. Pro athletes treated it like their personal playground. In boom times, its owner Steve Kaplan was making around $30 million a year. And to top it off, the Gold was fully nude. At the time, most strip clubs in the United States were either topless or – in the rare cases where nudity was allowed – BYOB. In Atlanta, the rules were different: It was all on show and there were liquor licences to boot. 

In 1999, the FBI raided the club and, in a sweeping indictment, federal prosecutors alleged that the club was a front for prostitution, credit card fraud and money laundering. They also claimed that club owner Steve Kaplan and his associates were connected to the Gambino crime family. During the trial, the prosecution alleged that Kaplan and his employees paid club dancers to have sex with athletes and other celebrities. As part of a plea deal, Kaplan confessed to racketeering and agreed to close the club.

At the centre of the scandal, and one of the subjects of the new season of Sex Before the Internet on VICE TV, was Jackie “Diva” Cook (then Bush) – the Gold Club’s highest-paid dancer and one of Kaplan’s closest associates. Today, Cook is based in Nevada. When we speak over Zoom, she’s sporting a fuschia fleece and thick-rimmed glasses, and her dogs bark in the background. You probably wouldn’t guess that she once faced over 100 years in prison, but if anyone has had a life full of crazy highs and true-crime-style lows, it’s Cook.

In 2001, as part of a plea deal, Kaplan confessed to racketeering and agreed to close the club. For six brief months in 2004, it became a church, but its champagne-soaked reputation remains. We asked Cook to take us back to the Gold Club’s heyday. 

VICE: The Gold was synonymous with champagne, so I have to start by asking about some of the champagne tricks you did there.
Jackie “Diva” Cook: You try and spice things up when you're in that environment. And your goal is to make the most money you possibly can. One of the tricks we did was pouring it down your back – like the crease of your back – and the guy would be at the back of you drinking champagne from your butt.

Sometimes that champagne was about five grand a bottle, right?
The most expensive bottle is the Millennium Bottle, which is $20,000. It stands about four feet high, and about two feet around. It took two big floor men with pliers to get the cork out. For each bottle of champagne that you sold, you got $100. That's just regular size bottles. The bigger bottles, like if you sold a Millennium Bottle, you got $1,000.

Dom Perignon at one point had to cut us off because they couldn't keep us stocked. The way they distribute in the United States, each business, liquor store or club only gets a certain amount of bottles. Well, our orders were doubling and tripling and they were like, “we cannot keep you stocked”. So we replaced Dom with Perrier-Jouet.

Let’s wind it all back. How did you get started working at the Gold Club?
I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, originally, and I worked at a couple of the smaller strip clubs there. This book came out every year, the Entertainment Guide. It's all the strip clubs in the country. The Gold Club would always make the cover, because it was the best strip club in the United States – well, practically in the world. We would see this, me and a couple of the girls, and we were like, “Can you imagine if we ever got to go work there?”

At the time, my fiancé was visiting down in Atlanta. He flew me down so I could come and visit. I said, okay, I'm going to go audition. I went in there three times and walked out because I was just too nervous. Then the fourth time, my girlfriend drove me over there. She's like, “Now get in there and go get that job”.

When I walked in, I guess I looked lost. The manager Norby, he was like, “Can I help you? Do you have an appointment?” I said: “No, I just got up enough nerve to come do it”. He takes me back to the dressing room, introduces me to Rose, the house mom. She's like, “Just relax, sweetie, you're beautiful.” The manager walks up, he's like, “Okay, drop your sundress” – just straight in. I drop the dress. He's like, “Turn around”. He looked at me, he turned to Rose, and he goes, “Give her any night she wants”.

Can you paint a picture of the Gold in its heyday?
Mix Las Vegas with Studio 54 in New York, and the Copacabana from New York, and you had the Gold Club. The club was set up as a Vegas-style showroom. We had a huge stage. We had skits that we did throughout the night. There were four times a night where we all had to put on tuxedo jackets, our bow ties, and you do a full walk down so the men can see all of the women that work in the club that night.

At first it was a little overwhelming. But after I got acclimated, I realized this is no different from what I was doing back home. It's just on a grander scale. And once I got comfortable, the sky was the limit.

The club had a reputation for lots of celebrities coming in…
Anybody who's anybody has been through that club. And I'm talking senators, congressmen, singers. Michael Jordan. Just everybody. When people downstairs on the main floor would hear that Madonna, Dennis Rodman, the Lakers are upstairs [in the VIP rooms], then guys are like, “Ooh, I want to get a room. Maybe I could get close and I could see them there…”

How much were you earning when you started out, and how quickly did that change? I’ve heard a story about a guy who gave you 50k one night…
It was weird ‘cause when somebody gives you that type of money, you're still sitting there going, “Did that happen?” My first real night on the job, I made $900 and it blew my mind. Back in Milwaukee, I was lucky to make $150 in a night. 

But I realized the potential. So what I started doing was watching the VIP girls. I wanted to see how they were maneuvering, to get where they were. Once you can get a couple guys to take you up to VIP, you're allowed up there more often, just to walk around. Once I figured that out, I was like, see you guys! When I first started doing VIP rooms, my rate was $1,000 an hour. And that's just for me to walk in the door. That doesn't include buying a membership and buying champagne and food and other girls – that was my base.

By the time we got indicted, and I was done dancing, I was making between $2,000 and $5,000 an hour. That's a lot of money.

The club even had its own currency – how did you keep people willing to splash the “Gold Bucks”?
Guys could order that on their credit cards. It made it easier than having to go to the bank and get a large sum of cash to bring in with them. There were nights where a guy would call American Express to raise his limit on his credit card because he wasn't ready to leave yet. In one year, I sold $359,000 worth of champagne. I found that out in the courtroom when we were on trial. The prosecutor stood up and he's like, “Don't you think that's a little excessive? Don’t you think she’s manipulating people?” I'm thinking to myself, no. Like, what are you gonna do? It is what it is. 

The guy who gave you $50k wanted you to wear jeans with no underwear. What other kinds of requests would you get from bigwig clients?
I had an oil tycoon from Texas, and he liked me to dress like a librarian with my hair up in the bun, the glasses, and the sweater with the skirt. He didn't want me to take my clothes off, he just wanted me to dress like a librarian. I had another guy who liked me to dress up as a businesswoman, like I'm a lawyer or something with my briefcase and the slim pencil skirt with the suit coat.

Very Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi! Steve Kaplan took you under his wing, right? What was that like?
It was crazy, the night that Steve took me under him, and announced it to the entire club. He was like, “Walk with me”. So we go upstairs, we walk over to the DJ booth. Steve gets on the microphone and he's like: “Listen up! Diva is no longer just Diva. She can come and go when she pleases. Nobody can fire her. You can't tell her what to do. She can fire you.” The adrenaline and the ego boost was just ridiculous. I felt untouchable at that point.

Steve, for me, was the epitome of what a club owner should be. He was so empathetic. If you came to Steve and said, “Hey Steve, I didn't make enough money to pay my rent,” he gave it to you. He did that for me a few times, when I first started out. 

You've already mentioned the trial, but what happened on the night of the FBI raid? Did you know you'd been under investigation?
It was a strange night. It didn't feel right. I was like, “I'm going home”. I made a little bit of money. I was tired. I was drunk. I got to the edge of the parking lot to head out, and I look in the rear view mirror and all I see are men in black with these big AK-47s, gas masks on, storming the building.

I was like, “Oh my god, the club's being robbed”, because on a nightly basis we had over $150,000 in the safe. I came through my front door and my phones are blowing up. It was Steve. He's like: “The clubs being raided by the FBI right now. They're at the office in New York. They're headed to your house… But don't worry. We all have lawyers. Everything's good.”

The reason they came after me, is I was the closest to Steve. So they figured if they came after me, they would get him to fold faster and we'd be done. But the indictments were superseded three times. The charges were so wild, they were so ridiculous. They just kept adding more and more. I was looking at 177 years in prison.

All the phones had been tapped. Steve came to me one day, like, “I think we're being watched by the feds”. Every time I answered my phone it would click three times, and I would hear this weird noise, and then I could talk to whoever's calling me.

Well, there’s a clear sign that something's going on!
Steve’s like, you're not doing anything wrong. You legally work in a strip club. What are they going to do to you for that? But you have to prove that you're not guilty… And it's gut wrenching. They tried to say that I was a prostitute, and that I had people like Dennis Rodman paying for sex. Like, excuse me, I dated him for a whole year. 

How did it all end?
It went on for us for almost four months. Steve was paying everybody's lawyers fees, right? My lawyer alone, Bruce Harvey, was $2.4 million for those two years. [Steve] got to the point where he was just tired of everyday the same thing – people getting up there and lying, getting proven to be wrong. He paid a $5m restitution and he did 13 months in prison for us, so that everybody could walk away. I don't have a blemish on my record. You would never know that I was indicted.

But the Feds seized your assets – they took all your money?
I lost everything. I lived a good life, and I didn't ever anticipate anything like that happening. I was just talking to someone who asked: “How do you go from that lifestyle to a basic life?” It's called being humble, and the humility that you have to have within yourself to recognize, as quick as you can get it, you can lose it. But you can get it back again.

Clubs like the Gold don't really exist in the same way anymore. How did you feel when the club closed, and how do you feel about it looking back?
Walking in that last time was bittersweet. It was painful because you're looking at 400 people that just lost their jobs. Single moms like me, you know. It didn't just affect us. It affected our family. It was just a sad day. When we walked out, we went across the street and sat in the car.  And we watched them walk up with the chains, and chain the doors shut and put the sticker on the front door. It was surreal. 

So much has changed since then – the birth of social media, for starters. What do you think about the way the internet has changed the adult industry?
If we had had all that back then, it would have been a whole lot of men in trouble with their wives! It was the era of privacy. We had a back staircase that we used to bring some of the big celebrities up through. Everybody's been through there though, everybody. Keanu Reeves, Jerry Springer, just everybody. There'll never be another club like the Gold Club, ever.

The new season of Sex Before the Internet premieres Tuesday, January 23 at 9pm on VICE TV.