Fall River, Massachusetts- Paul Viveros, who staged an eight-year fight against the city, may have earned a double-edged moniker as the father of adult entertainment in Fall River.

“I’m surprised it took so long for someone to smarten up and apply for a license,” said Viveros, reached recently by cell phone on a beach in Sarasota, Fla.

The owner of Oliver’s, a bar and entertainment venue in the Industrial Park, said, “The city, after eight years of legal battles, does not have any restrictions, any zones or any ordinances.”

Ultimately, he and his manager, Jose Mendoza, lost the long fight to convert Oliver’s into an adult entertainment venue. They did ensure, however, the failure of the city to restrict where strip clubs were located.

It’s been a couple of years since the end of his adult entertainment fight that began in 1997 and which resulted in Viveros being paid, by his calculations, $362,000 in legal fees.

Newly appointed Corporation Counsel Arthur D. Frank Jr. said the city paid $309,584.07 from its years of litigation fighting Viveros.

In March 2005, after the city succeeded in keeping adult entertainment out of Oliver’s, the Herald News reported payments of at least $58,513.75 to attorney Bruce Assad to defend the City Council ordinance passed in May 2004 and, ultimately, deemed illegal.

Frank said that was the sole case of using a lawyer outside the law department because of a conflict of interest for Thomas F. McGuire Jr., who had been corporation counsel for nearly 12 years until Mayor Edward M. Lambert Jr. left office.

McGuire said he declined defending the city because he had recommended against passage of the ordinance, which tightly restricted adult entertainment by setting up wholesale buffer zones.

Asked if there’s a market for city strip clubs, Viveros said: “I don’t know. Would you like to be the only gas station in a city of cars?

“There’s so much money to be made in it.”

In general, Viveros believes “the city is trying to ban it and make it impossible to come into the city, which is unconstitutional.”

Oliver’s never gained the two-part permission needed — a license and special permit from the Zoning Board — to bring adult entertainment into both the bar and the industrial park. The reason, Viveros and McGuire concurred, hinged on the latter.

The city had the right, the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2005, to decide if there was a discrepancy in the zoning to permit nude dancing, Viveros said.

Since he’d received an original variance from the Zoning Board to locate his restaurant in an industrial zone, the city had the authority to decide whether a strip club would be an appropriate use for granting a new variance, McGuire said.

“That’s what stopped it,” he said.

Regarding the Regatta proposal, Viveros said he believes “if the Regatta is in an area where it didn’t require a variance (for a restaurant/nightclub), the city is going to be hard-pressed” not to allow adult entertainment.

Oliver’s did, in fact, deliver nude dancing for a brief period in April 2001, when Mendoza and Oliver’s received a preliminary injunction to run the club and a Superior Court judge vacated the injunction.

“I always challenged the City Council to show me a better place (for adult entertainment) than the Industrial Park,” Viveros said, “and I’d drop my lawsuit.”