Portland, Oregon- Adult entertainment mogul Frank Faillace is profiled in the Portland Tribune. The 38-year-old Faillace is the principal owner of the nightclub Dante’s, which has become a big-time player on the downtown nightlife scene.

Faillace also owns Devil’s Point, a strip club on Southeast Foster Road, and co-owns the Boom Boom Room, another strip club. Faillace also publishes an adult entertainment guide called Exotica Magazine that basically provides a venue for nude dancing and escort services.

Faillace’s mother, father, and 18-year-old son are comfortable with his line of work. But his grandparents wouldn’t approve, he says. One of Faillace’s outspoken critics is Patricia Barrera, co-founder of a Portland group named the Lola Greene Baldwin Foundation that helps women leave prostitution.

Says Barrera: “Exotica Magazine is a means for pimps to traffic in women and children. If Frank is such a talented man, why does he still want to buy and sell women?”

“The problem with the adult industry,” Faillace tells the Tribune, “is that you get the liberals that don’t like you and you get the conservatives that don’t like you. It doesn’t feel wrong to me.”

Faillace got into the nightclub business when he and partners opened the Cobalt Lounge in 1997, but it didn’t really take off until Faillace introduced Exotica Go-Go, a weekly, tongue-in-cheek throwback to ’60s discotheque culture. Many of the performers in that review were dancers recruited from strip clubs. The club’s popularity grew and that to Faillace signalled a trend.

“There’s a lot more open-mindedness about strippers and strip clubs and sex in general.” Faillace says he likes challenges and is recent one was opening Dante’s which features the “Sinferno Cabaret” that has acts such as English quintet British Sea Power, and a dancer named Siren who gets topless to the Pink Panther Theme.

“I’ve always sort of had a romantic thing about old-fashioned burlesque theater,” says Faillace. “It’s all about the entertainment. I like putting together a cool show and watching people being entertained.”

Faillace hardly seemed like the kind of guy that would wind up in adult entertainment. His oldest sister Lainy describes him as a nerd and bookworm with an SAT score of 1,420. Faillace who had the the highest marks in his high school class, was encouraged to enroll at the prestigious California Institute of Technology but a high school romance left him with a child and a divorce and he stayed in Oregon to be near his son.

In 1985, he moved to Portland to go to school but ended up designing computer software. On hindsight, Faillace said he should have probably stuck with that, but, instead, hooked up with David Bentley to publish a magazine called Face Value.

Faillace, who handled the publication’s finances also began writing and shooting pictures. “I’ve always been into magazines,” he says. Faillace eventually fell in with the strip club crowd, sold his ’66 Ford Mustang and bankrolled a publication called X, the forerunner to Exotica, which followed a year later. Faillace quickly found that ads for adult-oriented businesses scared away more conventional revenue.

“Basically, once you have strip clubs, the mainstream goes away,” he says. “I may have deluded myself thinking I could do more.”

Exotica magazine distributes, 30,000 free copies monthly and does as much as $60,000 per issue in ad sales. “I’m not getting rich,” says Faillace, who drives a 10-year-old company van and owns a modest home in Southeast Portland. “But it allowed me to open some clubs.”

Sgt. Mike Stevenson, supervisor of vice detail for the Portland Police says strip club owners like Faillace push the limits of rules established by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission governing the interaction between entertainers and customers, creating a perpetual dance between proprietors and authorities at the margins of legality.

“People who own these businesses allow their employees to walk right up to that line,” he says. “It doesn’t make them criminals. I’m not sure it makes them nice guys.”

“Pimps are the most charming men you’ll ever meet,” says Barrera, a Chicago native. “These people are good at what they do.” Barrera says pimps and johns depend on Exotica Magazine, calling it a rag.

“Women without opportunities will be channeled into prostitution. Frank [Faillace] is sitting right there waiting for them. Frank can laugh all the way to the bank. People do not want to look carefully because it will expose an industry that is chewing people up and spitting them out. Women are dying out there. I’d rather have my daughter shot in the head in Iraq.”

Law enforcement officials say there are elements of organized crime in the local adult industry, though it more likely involves lingerie modeling businesses, whose cash-oriented nature lends itself to prostitution and money laundering. Faillace says he is unaware of any mob presence in the industry and points out that some escort services that appear in his magazine also advertise in the Yellow Pages. “We sell ad space,” he says. “We can’t put everybody through a psychiatric test. They just advertise with us.”

Faillace attracted media attention last year when two men with him at a Northeast Portland strip club were arrested on weapons charges. One of the men worked for Faillace at the time. No charges were filed against him, but Faillace admits he was there to discuss collecting an unpaid debt with the club’s owner. He says he was unaware that his associates were armed.