DETROIT — Self-avowed pornographer Larry Flynt won’t be opening Michigan’s largest strip club near Greektown after city council rejected by a 5-3 vote a license transfer that would have paved the way for the venue.
Council was voting to transfer ownership of a topless entertainment license from K & P Inc. to HDV-Greektown LLC, which would have opened the club at 415 E. Congress, currently the site of the Zoo Bar.
The city has a moratorium on new strip club licenses.
Voting against the license transfer were council members Brenda Jones, Kwame Kenyatta, Martha Reeves, JoAnn Watson and Monica Conyers; voting for the license transfer were councilmember Sheila Cockrel, Alberta Tinsley-Talabi and Ken Cockrel Jr. Councilwoman Barbara Rose Collins was absent.
Sheila Cockrel declined to discuss her vote, citing the possibility of litigation by Flynt’s group.
“This is deadly serious,” she said.
Kenyatta, however, said he voted against the license transfer because the current license is no longer in use and a transfer would be akin to violating the moratorium.
“This is not a small issue to the community or to council,” he said after the vote. “I think we’ve weathered the storm.”
City Council declined to act on a previous request to transfer the permits in 2003, prompting the owners to sue.
Representatives of HDV-Greektown said they planned to hire up to 125 people, and the club would be one of nine Hustler clubs around the globe.
The owners first asked for the transfer in June 2003 but the city council has refused to act on the request.
Both sets of bar owners first took the council to court when it tried to prevent the opening of the Deja Vu strip club at the same location but a judge in 2004 ruled against the city. At that time, owners also had contemplated opening as a Hustler club.
The ruling allowed the owners to open a Deja Vu nightclub, but the council never transferred the liquor license.
In March 2006, the owners re-filed their lawsuit, hoping to force the council to act on the transfer.
Council banned new strip bars from opening downtown in the late-1990s, but that didn’t affect the bar on Congress, which had been operating since 1994.