SEATTLE — from www.king5.com – Longtime strip-club owner Frank Colacurcio and five others have been indicted on racketeering charges.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office says the 92-year-old strip club mogul and his son, Frank Colacurcio, Jr. and their associates are charged with a scheme to promote prostitution at the strip clubs they operate in the greater Seattle area.

The indictment follows the restraining order filed just over a year ago, preventing the transfer of various Colacurcio properties pending the investigation of criminal activity at the strip clubs.

“With the indictment unsealed today, we take an important step in this racketeering investigation,” said Jeffrey C. Sullivan, United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington. “Our trial team has interviewed more than 200 witnesses, reviewed thousands of pages of reports, transcripts of wire taps, and video surveillance of activities at the clubs. We look forward to proving the RICO conspiracy in court.”

The 25 page indictment lays out the actions members of the conspiracy took to promote prostitution at the clubs and their failure to stop prostitution when it was reported to them.

The Attorney’s Office says in various recorded conversations, the Colacurcios and their associates dissuaded dancers and managers from reporting acts of prostitution and repeatedly returned dancers who were arrested for and caught in acts of prostitution back to the clubs.

The indictment further details how credit card machines and ATMs were used to facilitate prostitution and how the proceeds of prostitution were laundered through various bank accounts.

The mail fraud counts allege that the Colacurcio organization mailed false reports to the City of Seattle regarding the number of people who entered the clubs and paid a cover charge. The indictment alleges those numbers were purposefully under-reported to evade the admissions tax and to enable the defendants to retain for themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars of unreported income per year.