Atlanta, Georgia- There’s Aspen, Cheyenne, Ashley, Candy.

Yes, Candy

They step and contort to thumping music and jumpy lights, perched atop platform heels better gauged in altitude than inches. They open three-song sets in lingerie and end them in a lot less.

The women, hundreds of them, parade across Jack Galardi-owned stages around the country like a strip-club translation of Dr. Seuss: tall ones, small ones, dark ones, blonde ones (lots of blonde ones). Some are thin and some are not. Some are very, very hot. Some have bellies like a … pot.

Doesn’t matter. Men slip bills into their garters and get a warm first-date kiss, or sit back like astronauts during liftoff for a table dance.

Welcome to Galardi Nation, a smoky, windowless empire that stretches like a plus-size G-string from Nevada to Florida to the Carolinas, at times numbering two dozen clubs. Five operate in metro Atlanta, including the just-opened Pink Pony South, in Forest Park, with its two-tier showroom and upstairs sushi bar.

While his dancers are on full display, the 76-year-old Galardi remains one of the most successful and controversial local moguls you’ve likely never heard of.

His residences include a sprawling Las Vegas estate near the Strip with pool fountains and nature trails, and a 500-acre ranch across from a Baptist church outside Flovilla, a no-stoplight hamlet 35 miles north of Macon. Horses, alpacas and peacocks roam the ranch amid fences painted bright primary colors.

He is flown between his 15 current clubs on his own jet but doesn’t carry a cellphone and tracks business with a pad and pen stashed in a shirt pocket or a pair of his favored Wrangler jeans.

He maintains a small army of lawyers, yet named one of his countless companies IHA — initials that stand for I Hate Attorneys. Asked during a deposition in a local lawsuit whether that sentiment applied to his own defense attorney, Galardi responded, “Yes. I dislike him. I tell him this quite frequently.”

Still, he has needed them.

Galardi was convicted in 1972 of stealing blank money orders and cashing them on the overseas black market. He served about six months in prison on a five-year sentence.

Since then, prosecutors and police investigators have claimed he was involved in drug trafficking with the head of a Nevada motorcycle gang, ignored prostitution at his clubs and associated with organized crime. But Galardi has never been charged with crimes related to those accusations.

His most infamous local incident involved a 1998 lawsuit filed by a contestant in a Miss Nude World International pageant held at a Galardi venue. Vanessa Steele-Inman claimed Galardi blackballed her after she refused to let him lick whipped cream off her bare chest at a pageant golf tournament.

A Fulton County jury awarded Steele-Inman $2.4 million. The Georgia Court of Appeals reversed the decision, leaving the exotic dancer with just $3,500 for attorney’s fees.

Galardi never attended the trial. Steele-Inman’s Atlanta lawyer, Mark Spix, calls him “the Buddha of the strip club industry.”

“Jack has been an enigma,” allows John L. Smith, a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist. “He’s a very sharp guy. He might not be a Phi Beta Kappa key holder, but he has a Ph.D. in a very tough business.

“That’s who he is.”

Who Galardi is depends on who you talk to.

He has been called “a low-budget Hugh Hefner” (author of a book about Las Vegas strip clubs), “a scary big deal” (attorney Spix), “a close associate of organized crime” (a Metro Las Vegas Police investigator) and “a shrewd businessman [who]… just wants to run his business and stay under the radar” (another investigator, same department).

He has also been called “top drawer” (a Nevada Republican bigwig), “a troll” (the strip club author), “Santa Claus” (a defense attorney during the stripper trial) and “a man with access to the entire world of female pulchritude” (same attorney, same trial).

“People respect him and fear him,” says Angelina Spencer, executive director of a trade group for adult-club executives. “He’s considered a maverick and a pioneer — one of the first to enter into adult entertainment as a serious nightclub venue and make good money.

“Some people consider him a legend, a real cowboy type,” she adds. “There’s always rumors flying around.”

Seated inside his second-floor office on an access road just off I-85, south of Clairmont Road, Galardi, in a rare interview, says he doesn’t worry much about what people think of him.

His gravelly voice is even gruffer since an operation three years ago for throat cancer. He’s bald but sports a goatee and has lost 70 pounds from his former roly-poly self.

On the wall behind his desk hangs a plaster relief of a woman reclining in the nude. Another wall is cluttered with family photos, including a sepia print of his immigrant grandparents and a daughter’s recent “cowboy wedding” in Las Vegas.

The opposite wall displays framed posters of Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack brethren. Sinatra’s an idol. “He’s Italian, why else?” he says.

Another memento hangs near the office door: a chunk of brick from the underground hotel vault that turned out, in a famously televised excavation, not to hold the loot of Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone.

“People that know me know I’m no mobster type,” says Galardi. “If you don’t, I can imagine the stories that go on about me. I can well imagine.”

Old-school hustle, part contemporary Western, part Vegas Strip meets Southern Gothic, Galardi’s story needs little enhancement.

He’s gone broke twice and amassed a large, if indeterminate, fortune (“I don’t have as much money as [Ted] Turner,” he smiles). He has four kids and two ex-wives. He’s run gay bars, country bars, biker bars. He hates partners and problems (a saying among his Flovilla ranch employees: “Whatever the old man wants.”). He seems to micromanage the big picture and keep a layer of managers and lawyers between himself and many details.

Galardi: “Opening clubs, that’s my thrill. Do I operate them? No.”

Spix, who took Galardi’s deposition: “I think there’s a deliberate attempt to be able to answer questions with, ‘I don’t know’.”

Galardi grew up in Trinidad, Colo., a foothill town near the New Mexico border filled with immigrant Italians who came for coal mining and railroad jobs. He joined the Navy, then moved to California, tended bar and found his calling. With a wife and two daughters, he opened a rock and roll club, then built other bars with varying success, including a Los Angeles nightspot that sometimes featured Ike and Tina Turner.

From 1967 through 1972, Galardi was either on the move or cooling behind bars.

He promoted an all-girl rock band on military bases across Vietnam (his one-word explanation: “Divorce”); opened a club in Alaska; and was convicted of stealing blank money orders from two U.S. post offices in California. The money orders were cashed, through someone else, for more than $160,000 on the black market in South Vietnam.

“He was an opportunistic person looking for something new and exciting,” recalls Dianne Reardon Cameron, drummer for the Pretty Kittens, the band he promoted.

Galardi moved to Las Vegas with a new wife and stepson and continued bar building. He got into strip clubs when he bought one that had been owned by a former nightclub partner of his in California. The club became available after the man’s severed head turned up in the desert.

Galardi learned “that if you had booze and you had naked women, you could get more business,” says “Buffalo” Jim Barrier, a Las Vegas wrestling promoter and auto repair shop owner.

His success swelled beyond the skin trade. He opened an upscale nightspot in the mid-’80s that lured the city’s social and political elite. He soon became a Republican Party go-to guy.

“He provided the hootch for every one of our events,” says Annabelle Stanford, then state GOP events chairwoman.

Galardi also held fund-raisers at his mansion, which he bought from comedian Shecky Greene, razed and rebuilt. One gala was chaired by a woman who headed a pro-family organization, Stanford said. Former city councilman Steve Miller, who attended, said devout Christians sat beside elegantly dressed strippers.

“Nobody had the bad manners not to show up,” Stanford said. “As a personality in Las Vegas in the ’80s, Mr. Galardi was top drawer.”

Nor did politicians have the bad manners to turn down his support.

“Around election time, you’d go to his catering service, where the secretary would present you with a check,” said Miller, who made the trip several times. “She’d usually say, ‘Wait, Jack wants to say hello,’ and then Jack would come out, shake your hand and you’d leave — usually with $5,000.” (Galardi says he never gave more than $500.)

Las Vegas was still a small town, and Galardi was wired. He was pals with Nevada Sen. Chic Hecht. His closest friend was late municipal court judge Seymour Brown. A photo of the two (“We’re drunk as skunks”) hangs in his office.

He came to Atlanta in the late ’80s on other business. Checking out local bars, he walked into The Cheetah Lounge, a Midtown strip club, and thought, ” ‘Oh, my God. I need to get in on this action.’ There were beautiful girls everywhere. All blondes.”

He opened the after-hours Club Anytime in Midtown and the original Pink Pony in DeKalb County. But the 1993 opening of the Crazy Horse Saloon sparked such outrage in Forest Park that the mayor and city council were booted from office. Other clubs followed, and this month’s Forest Park council approval of Pink Pony South passed without a peep.

Galardi Nation has taken hits. The most public came in 2003, when Galardi’s estranged stepson Michael, a club partner, pleaded guilty to bribing officials in Las Vegas and San Diego. He’s serving a 30-month sentence in federal prison. Original asking price for his Las Vegas mansion: $20 million.

“Mike wouldn’t listen to me,” says Galardi, never charged in the two-year FBI investigation.

“Jack knew how to play the game. Michael didn’t,” says columnist Smith. “There are ways to juice the system that’s accepted. Jack’s no choirboy, but that doesn’t make him the big corrupter of political virgins.”

Outside Galardi’s office window, a pearl Cadillac Escalade is parked in a space “Reserved for Mr. G.” Earlier, Galardi had called himself “a car freak,” yet wasn’t sure how many he owned. When his secretary recently had him sign a stack of insurance papers, she asked Galardi to guess the number. He said maybe 20. She laughed: It was twice that.

“Mike was flamboyant. He threw his money around,” Galardi continues of his stepson. “How he got that way, I don’t know.”

few hours later, Galardi sits with three women —two blondes — at an upstairs table inside Pink Pony South. Dressed in a multi-colored leather jacket, he soon moves to a center booth downstairs. His eyes are wide and darting. It’s the club’s “soft opening” — it wasn’t advertised — yet customers stream in.

Galardi often stops at his original Pink Pony, in DeKalb County. He has coffee or bottled water (he quit drinking after the cancer surgery), then heads to his intown house to “open a can and have some soup. It’s me, the newspaper and the dog.”

A Galardi operations manager, Mike Kap, sees another side. Some nights Galardi hits “every one of his clubs until three in the morning. That’s how involved he still is.”

His “haven” is his Flovilla ranch. Beyond the stone wall and iron gate that announce the “Circle G,” a long driveway winds past a garden that blooms with wildlife statuary: a horse, an eagle, an elephant, a bear. A big American flag flaps in front of the long, low-slung main house.

Most locals only know Galardi for his annual July Fourth party, a kid-friendly affair that lures as many as 1,800 invitation-only guests to middle-of-nowhere Butts County.

Area fire departments work the event because of the giant fireworks display. Galardi is a big donor to the Flovilla department’s fund-raising drive for a new training vehicle.

Firefighter Shaun Lamb jokes they might christen it the “Pink Pony.”

But Galardi says he can take only so much peace and quiet. He has no plans to retire.

“My hobby’s building clubs,” he says. Next project is in Romania.

“When I open a new club, and I walk in and the lights are on and the dance floor is flickering — the hair on my arm raises up.

“It gives me a thrill watching that club come alive and saying, ‘You did it.’ ”

Still, Galardi always covers his bets. Peeking from his shirt pocket: a lottery ticket.