THE LADY AND THE MOB

PROVIDENCE — If there’s anything the Foxy Lady strip club knows, it’s how to put on a good show.

So when the city shut the club down after prostitution arrests there in December, that’s just what it did.

A toy drive for members of the “Foxy family” who were now out of work around Christmas. An impromptu rally underneath the club’s still-shining lights. “Foxy Strong” sloganeering and a social-media blitz.

But the PR campaign and the successful court fight that led to the club’s reopening in January have obscured two questions at the heart of what the Foxy Lady is really all about.

Who’s making the money?

And what are they selling?

Interviews, court documents and city records reveal what liquor-license applications do not: Two members of the family that runs the Foxy Lady have connections to organized crime and convictions for organized criminal gambling.

The Angell family’s 83-year-old patriarch, Gaythorne “Poochie” Angell Jr. — whose friends range from Smith Hill politicians to Federal Hill wiseguys — has long denied he’s anything but a consultant. But a 2009 court document signed by a Foxy Lady lawyer showed that Angell had a previously undisclosed financial interest in the club, raising questions about the city’s oversight of its liquor-licensing laws.

And the question of what the club is selling — and whether it’s paying a price — is a continuing focus of law enforcement.

Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven M. Paré said that since the prostitution investigation, “we have developed information that there is protection money that they pay.”

He added: “I’m confident they get protection.”

The club’s manager, Angell’s son Richard, denies the protection-money allegation. But the practice of paying up to keep on the right side of the city’s criminal underbelly has a long history in Providence, where top mobsters have gone to prison for shaking down the Foxy Lady and other clubs. Poochie Angell himself is currently under indictment, charged with lying about those shakedowns. His lawyer in that case also represents the Foxy Lady.

The story of the Foxy Lady reveals the complicated, decades-long intersection of politics, policing and the city’s sex industry. Since 1979, “The Foxy” has been part of the Rhode Island story — the “Crimetown” side.

Bottom line, said retired state police Superintendent Brendan Doherty: “It’s always been a family business.”

Richard Angell winces at the phrase “family business.” Angell, the Foxy Lady’s operations manager, doesn’t want people to get the wrong idea. The Foxy Lady, he said, has nothing to do with organized crime. And he has insisted that the club had no idea about prostitution going on there.

But as far as family goes, it’s true that his father, Poochie Angell, has been involved in the club since its founding about four decades ago — as a consultant, not an owner, he insists.

"He comes every day. It’s good therapy for him,” Richard Angell said of his father. “He’s a consultant. He comes every day and checks on his business.”

It’s true that Richard and his own son, Pucci, run the place day to day, and that his sister, Lori Savickas, is in charge of many tasks behind the scenes, and that the property used to belong to the Angell family.

And it’s also true that Richard and Poochie Angell both pleaded no contest in a 1993 bookmaking probe that ended with a raid on the Foxy Lady and netted two Mafia members with whom they were associating. Richard Angell pleaded no contest to bookmaking again in 2006.

But that, Richard Angell says, is history, despite the slings and arrows of the club’s critics.

“No one’s going to say anything nice about us,” Angell said. “That’s just the industry we’re in. We call ourselves a gentleman’s club; they call us a strip club. We call our floor hosts ‘floor hosts’; they call them bouncers. We call our girls ‘entertainers’; they call them strippers.”

After a dip in business following an undercover police investigation there on Dec. 11 that resulted in three of its dancers being charged with prostitution, the Angells are focused on bringing the Foxy Lady back. No funny business. Just people selling a good time, Angell said, whether that’s steak tips or lap dances.

Prostitution? “To link us up with prostitution is an awful thing, because it means me and my son are pimps,” Angell said. His son, Pucci, 27, nodded. “This means I’m a human trafficker.”

Shakedowns? “I’m shocked,” Angell said. “I don’t know who would be paying somebody.”

Paperwork spills over the unglamorous office desks where Richard and Pucci Angell welcomed two Journal reporters for an interview in January. Teleconference phones sit on the marble conference room table. A poster on the wall has the Foxy Lady logo, along with the quote, “Quality means doing it right when nobody is looking.”

“We portray ourselves as the World Famous Foxy Lady,” Richard Angell said. “We’re a brand, like Coca-Cola.”

A brand, a landmark, maybe more like an institution — an institution, however, that is wrapped up in the strip-club industry’s long association with organized crime.

“The Foxy Lady has always attracted traditional organized crime for decades,” said Steven O’Donnell, a retired state police colonel and longtime mob investigator, “as we have seen through various prosecutions and the court record.”

Robert DeLuca, a squat man who is said to favor long cigars, looked a bit indifferent in the Boston courtroom as he went over his criminal record.

Robberies? Yes. Gambling? Sure. Conspiracy to murder? That, too. Anything that's down on that paper you have there is probably right, DeLuca, a Mafia caporegime turned prosecution witness, told the lawyer cross-examining him in May 2018.

Strip-club shakedowns? Yes, that too.

DeLuca testified that the Foxy Lady was one of the places where he collected protection payments to kick up to Francis P. “Cadillac Frank” Salemme Sr., the former mob boss who that day was on trial for murdering a Providence man.

Strip-club owners would pay the city’s crime family because they and their customers did not want to attract the sort of police attention that a rowdy gang of mob thugs could bring with the swing of a fist or the toss of a booze bottle.

“Sometimes, there’s fights in their places and stuff,” DeLuca said. “You know.”

He’d known Poochie Angell for years, DeLuca testified.

“He’s one of the biggest bookmakers around,” DeLuca testified, according to a court transcript, “and he owns a strip club ... The Foxy Lady.”

At first glance, it’s a straightforward question. Who owns the Foxy Lady?

Not the Angells, Richard Angell said. Never have. Richard Angell is an employee, and his father, Poochie, is just a consultant, as he’s been for decades, Richard Angell said.

“Growing up on the streets, I found out everyone owns the Foxy Lady,” Angell said.

But, Angell said, in reality, the owners are two Massachusetts residents, Thomas and Patricia Tsoumas, and Dawn DeRentiis, of Florida.

“It’s a wonderful business, and we’re just trying to do the right thing,” Patricia Tsoumas said via telephone before deferring comment to the club’s lawyers, who did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The club is currently in court-ordered mediation with the city of Providence over its future.

"It's inappropriate for any party to comment during the ongoing mediation process,” said Artin Coloian, who represents DeRentiis.

Ask people in the strip-club industry, though, and a different name comes up: Poochie Angell. That’s the answer you’ll get from not just DeLuca, but also from the owner of another club and longtime Foxy Lady employees.

Their confusion is understandable: Now nearing his 84th birthday, Poochie Angell has been there since the beginning, from the club’s early days about 40 years ago in downtown Providence to its move to Chalkstone Avenue. Thomas Tsoumas once denied to The Providence Journal that Poochie was a fellow owner, but he admitted that he valued his friend’s advice so much that “I wouldn’t sneeze without talking to him.”

Unlike the Tsoumases or DeRentiis, Poochie Angell still goes to the club just about every day, even as the daily management of the Foxy Lady is passed on to the next generation of Angells.

Poochie Angell “built that place,” said Paré, the public safety commissioner. “That place is his in every which way.”

Paré demurred when asked if he thought Angell had a secret ownership interest in the club. But a 2009 court document aligns more with the word on the street than with the official corporate documents, and shows a role for Poochie Angell that goes beyond just employee and consultant.

The document came in response to a 2009 lawsuit from another company after a failed buyout of the Foxy Lady. The Florida-based suitor, VCG FL LLC, sued the club and its owners, and Poochie Angell, after the Foxy Lady allegedly backed out of the deal.

Angell countersued VCG. In his counterclaim, his attorney, Dean Robinson, wrote that Angell was one of three people who were the “owners of all the shares and rights to acquire the shares of stock of Gulliver’s.” Gulliver’s Tavern is the corporate name of the Foxy Lady.

The document shows that Angell at the very least had a financial interest in the club and was not merely an employee, as he has maintained for years. Robinson, who is representing Patricia Tsoumas in the state Supreme Court case, did not respond to requests for comment.

Other city records, meanwhile, show the extensive managerial involvement of the Angell family in the Foxy Lady. For example, when the club reapplied for its business licenses in 2014, it had to pay $3,200 in fees. Richard Angell cut a personal check to the City of Providence, according to records obtained by The Providence Journal.

In 2016, the club wanted to use an outside patio. The Foxy, under legal name Gulliver’s Tavern, had to submit an application with the city, along with permission from the landlord, a legally separate entity called Solid Gold Properties. Richard Angell asked the city on behalf of Gulliver’s Tavern for use of the patio. Fortunately, he already had permission from Solid Gold Properties, granted by the landlord’s representative — Richard Angell.

“I’m just a rank-and-file manager,” insisted Angell. “They could fire me at any time.”

Mayor Jorge Elorza declined to be interviewed for this story.

Dylan Conley, who chairs the Providence Board of Licenses, said the board was not aware of any ownership interest or deep managerial role held by the Angell family, and can only go by what’s on the applications themselves or what’s brought to the board’s attention.

The Foxy Lady, in legal papers, argued that it had a sterling record of following the city’s rules, and that the board went much easier on clubs that had done much worse, from gunplay to bribery. That argument so far has won out in court and in the state bureaucracy.

The criminal backgrounds of people who have day-to-day management of clubs would certainly play a part in decisions about the fitness of licensees, Conley said.

So, too, would an indication that someone owns shares or rights to buy shares in a club, he said. When shown the 2009 court document asserting Poochie Angell’s financial stake in Gulliver’s Tavern, and asked if he considered it important, Conley said: “Very.”

“If what they presented to us is distinct from reality, that’s an issue,” Conley said.

The mob’s decline in Rhode Island is well-known. The last generation of people who took protection money from the strip clubs, the likes of Frank Salemme and Robert DeLuca, are sitting in jail.

But organized crime has continued to create problems, especially in the strip-club industry. So in 2011, federal prosecutors asked someone they thought would know about it.

Poochie Angell.

On June 3, 2011, Angell appeared under oath before a federal grand jury. A prosecutor asked Angell whether Eddie Lato, a capo in the New England La Cosa Nostra, was receiving payments from the Foxy Lady.

“No,” Angell said.

Did he ever direct someone to pay Lato? Never. He had no knowledge of the club paying any money to members of organized crime, he testified.

That was a lie, prosecutors said. Angell was indicted on a perjury charge in 2016. He “knew that he was paying money or caused money to be paid to Edward C. Lato, on behalf of his adult entertainment venue, the Foxy Lady,” the indictment said.

Richard Angell described Lato as “nothing but a gentleman” and said he knew nothing of any shakedowns at the club, ever. Lato was released from federal prison in January for his role in the shakedowns of Providence strip clubs.

Dick Shappy, the owner of the Cadillac Lounge, said that strip clubs in Providence simply aren’t shaken down anymore. In 2010, mobsters were on the Caddy’s payroll. But the 2011 case changed everything, he said.

“That will never happen,” Shappy said. “Never again.”

The federal case against Poochie Angell remains open, but his attorney, Anthony Traini, has asked several times that a trial be delayed. Traini now has an even more active case to deal with this winter: He is also representing the Foxy Lady as it fights its case before the state Supreme Court.

Poochie Angell is not a member of the Mafia. But investigators have long contended that his club couldn’t have survived without paying the sort of tributes DeLuca described with a shrug in federal court.

“Poochie was a major player back then, well respected by the old-school La Cosa Nostra,” said Doherty, the retired state police colonel, who was involved with the 1993 gambling investigation.

“He was able to navigate the organization all those years without interruption, other than jail,” Doherty said. “That’s because he was an earner — and he knew how to share.”

Even among law-enforcement officials who long pursued him, though, Poochie Angell is spoken of as a man who’s charismatic and even a bit flamboyant.

It’s not just the mobsters who have gravitated toward Poochie Angell, but also people in business and government. His second marriage was to Diane Cardegna-Angell, who for 10 years had been a state prosecutor in the attorney general’s office. She died in 2007.

“He’s basically a nice guy,” said state Sen. Frank A. Ciccone III, who said he’s been friends with Poochie Angell and his family since the 1970s, back when Ciccone played on a recreational softball team called “Poochie’s.” (Angell sponsored the team.)

Ciccone still sees Angell for dinner from time to time. Decades later, Ciccone is now in the State House, and the donations go the other way: Ciccone’s campaign committee from 2011 to 2015 paid to help sponsor an annual Foxy Lady cancer-charity golf fundraiser.

The campaign of state Sen. Dominick Ruggerio, a Democrat like Ciccone and now the Senate president, also sponsored a tee at the 2013 golf event, according to campaign-finance reports. (Ruggerio’s father was the late Mario “Charlie” Ruggerio, a mobster in the North End and close associate of Mafia boss Raymond Patriarca Sr.)

Ruggerio did not respond to requests for an interview. Instead, Senate spokesman Greg Paré said in an email: “The Senate President has purchased tee signs at dozens of charity golf tournaments over the years to support causes such as cancer research and treatment.”

The spokesman said Ruggerio “does not really have a relationship” with Poochie Angell.

Ruggerio’s campaign has spent thousands of dollars on food, beverages and meals at another establishment that the Angell family is involved with, the sports bar Ladder 133, a hot spot for political fundraisers. Ruggerio hasn’t held a fundraiser there, Greg Paré said, adding that he believed it was a popular spot for politicians because of its proximity to the State House, its function room and its ample parking.

Ciccone said he’s only been to the Foxy Lady to visit Poochie Angell in the downstairs offices, where the Foxy’s problems are far from view.

The atmosphere outside the Foxy Lady was tense the morning of Jan. 4. The day before, the state Supreme Court had ruled that the club could reopen while it pursues its appeals to the state Department of Business Regulation and the Supreme Court, but the downstairs VIP room where police said prostitution was taking place had to remain closed. A final decision could still be months away and private mediation with the city is continuing.

Reporters milled around on a cold sidewalk. Longtime employees arrived toting coffee cups, ready to get back to work. A TV truck deployed an antenna to broadcast one of the city’s biggest news stories of the winter live from the scene.

But first the club and the city had a few things to sort out. How would the Foxy Lady operate under new rules and new scrutiny?

The people sitting down to figure it out were no strangers. Richard Angell was there for the club, along with several Foxy Lady lawyers, including Traini.

Steven Paré, the public safety commissioner who believes the club is still paying protection money, was inside on behalf of the city. The last time Paré visited the Foxy, he had a warrant.

Flash back to January 1993, when Paré was a detective corporal with the Rhode Island State Police and part of a team that had been listening in for months on the Angell family’s telephone calls. The calls involved millions of dollars in illegal bets, but the Foxy Lady was a looming presence.

In the months leading up to the raid, the state police had listened as Richard Angell talked to mobster Robert DeLuca. The months of wiretaps included the Angells talking about “Santa” — their code name for Anthony St. Laurent, a made member of La Cosa Nostra, who had exclusive control of all organized crime activity in Providence's Silver Lake section. St. Laurent also had managerial power over bookmaking operations in Providence, according to court records on the wiretap.

The Foxy Lady came up in the wiretap. At one point, Michael Angell, Richard Angell’s brother and Poochie’s son, bragged to someone on a recorded call that he was going to pick up some beer at the Foxy Lady. How was he going to get beer from there? Well, Michael Angell said, he owned the place. (Michael Angell died in 2018.)

Business was good: One bookmaker said in an intercepted phone call that “Richard [Angell] is disgusted if he doesn’t win $100,000 this afternoon.”

It was dubbed the “Foxy Lady wiretap,” even though the club itself wasn’t bugged. It was, however, raided on Jan. 26, 1993. Swarms of state police officers, Paré among them, let patrons leave and let dancers get dressed. The police were not after the women, but the Angells and their associates.

An archive photograph in The Providence Journal shows four defendants sitting together in court after their arrests: Poochie Angell, his two sons, and DeLuca.

The state police were looking at the Foxy Lady as a place for money laundering, Doherty said, and the Internal Revenue Service got involved.

Authorities had considered seizing the business as a racketeering enterprise, Paré said. But it was difficult to prove, because it’s a cash business.

“There was no doubt in my mind that gambling proceeds and prostitution kept them afloat,” Paré said.

What about now?

“I don’t believe all 140 of the dancers are prostituting, but a good majority do,” Paré said. “And they’re all afraid if they cooperate [with police], they’ll never get hired.”

The dancers pay the club for the privilege to work there, making their money off tips for all types of performances. “And if you hustle as a dancer, you make more money,” Paré said.

After a dancer told police that a customer sexually assaulted her in a VIP booth last fall, the Providence police launched an investigation. They found that some of the strippers were offering more than just dances — and the city shut the club down.

Paré dismissed the Angells’ protestations that they didn’t know what was happening between the dancers and the customers in the darkened VIP booths.

“It’s preposterous for them to say they didn’t know it was going on,” Paré said. “It was blatant. It was overt. And we’re trying to stamp that out.”

Of the three women charged in the prostitution sting at the Foxy Lady, one had been arrested in a trafficking case in Connecticut. Another is now charged with stealing a gun from a Boston police officer who she said paid her and another woman $2,500 for sex.

The sexual assault case, meanwhile, is at the attorney general’s office.

Paré said he doesn’t want to prosecute the women for prostitution — he’d rather have them talk about the conditions they’re working under. “The women who are involved in prostitution, most of them are not doing it because they want to,” he said. “Some of them are trapped in this profession.”

So, now there’s a movement to decriminalize prostitution. Providence Rep. Anastasia Williams has submitted a bill for a commission to study the impact of legalizing prostitution.

Doherty, who as state police superintendent had pushed to close a loophole in the law and make indoor prostitution illegal, is dismayed.

“I can understand some people think if you decriminalize, you take out the unlawful act, but there are a whole host of other issues they’re not considering — sex trafficking, domestic violence, brutality that often doesn’t get reported, and the character of people involved in that environment,” Doherty said.

“It just comes down to, is that the message we want to give some young lady down on their luck?” he said. “I feel bad for all of those folks who have found themselves in that situation. It’s a horrible lifestyle.”

In the meantime, the state has legalized another vice that got the Angells into trouble — sports betting.

Richard Angell acknowledges pleading no contest in the 1993 gambling case, and again in 2006. The 2006 case centered on a bar across the street that he’s also involved with, Danny’s Place, named for an old friend of the Angells. Richard Angell was indicted along with his brother-in-law, the mob associate Raymond “Scarface” Jenkins.

What should people think about that? Angell has a ready response: Didn’t the state just legalize sports betting at casinos? And, he points out, nobody got hurt. This was not the broken-kneecap, dangling-people-off-bridges type of operation that’s often depicted in TV shows and movies about organized crime. The Foxy Lady is no Bada Bing, the fictional strip club in “The Sopranos.”

“It was a clean-cut business,” Angell said recently of his bookmaking days, a business that he said he doesn’t engage in anymore.

In January 1993, Paré and the team of state police officers left the Foxy Lady with reams of records and ended up indicting 26 people. Poochie Angell, Michael Angell and DeLuca also pleaded no contest, according to court records.

In the prostitution investigation of January 2019, Paré left empty-handed, with few answers about what would come next.

What came next was this: The Foxy Lady reopened, to the cheers of its biggest fans, the relief of people who were going back to work, and the dismay of the city. At 11:30 a.m., the club thrummed with the sound of the Aerosmith song “Back in the Saddle.”

Indeed it was. But these are still uncertain times for the club. State legislators — including Ciccone, a longtime personal friend of the people who run the place — are considering a new tax on strip clubs in Rhode Island. Police are continuing to scrutinize its operations. The legal battle with the city over its business licenses is still not resolved. With the harsh light of public scrutiny and the cold air of winter, some patrons have stayed away.

But if history is any indication, the people who love the Foxy Lady can count on one thing: the Angell family. Poochie will be downstairs, doing a crossword puzzle or reading the paper or having lunch, keeping up morale. Richard and Pucci will be upstairs, toting walkie-talkies and making the place hum.

Through requests relayed through his lawyer and son, Poochie Angell declined to be interviewed for this story. Richard Angell said his father is becoming forgetful. He’s a “hell of a guy” who could offer good advice on life, Richard Angell said of his father, but he wouldn’t be able to comment about the Foxy Lady’s troubles.

“He’s made this place what it is,” Richard Angell said.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, the 83-year-old man synonymous with the Foxy Lady walked to his Mercedes in the club’s parking lot and left before a reporter in the lobby could try to speak with him.

On another recent weekday, one woman danced for one patron, who seemed to be in a world of his own, a huge grin on his face. A handful of people sat at the bar.

After the club’s brush with closure, people might be confused about its status. To set the record straight: The Foxy Lady is up and running, even as it continues to meet with the city over its future. It’s the same Foxy Lady it has always has been, Richard Angell said. They will survive by doing what they have always done: putting on a good show.

“We’re still here,” Richard Angell said, “still doing the right thing.”

— Brian Amaral can be reached at bamaral@providencejournal.com