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The People vs. Erotic City

Behind the glory holes, orgy rooms and sex booths is a board of directors that includes a felon, a preteen and others who think things aren't that bad.

By Justin Kendall 

Truman Road curves past a desolate corridor of gas stations, liquor stores and adult bookstores on the way east to Independence. The stretch is called Blue Summit, an unincorporated part of Jackson County known mostly for Erotic City, the adult-entertainment complex that includes a novelty shop, video booths and a strip club.

In the early evening hours of January 17, a 16-year-old boy walked the stretch of wasteland. It's not clear whether he was hitchhiking or walking the strip for another reason. But he found a way out of the 18-degree night when a man in a silver Mercedes offered him a ride. The boy climbed in. The ride was short.

The driver was a 6-foot-3, 180-pound African-American in his mid-30s who wore blue jeans, a red shirt over a thermal undershirt and a black jacket. He drove to Erotic City.

From the outside, Erotic City looks like an old, kinky general store. Opaque windows give off a reflection but not a peek inside. A sign on top of the building declares: "The in place for consenting adults." A picket fence shields a massive concrete parking lot that's big enough for several semis. Near the entrance, an outline of the state of Missouri marks "Erotic City USA" with a red star.

A naked, life-sized love doll is spread-eagle inside the doorway. "Her" blond hair puffs like a 1980s porn star. A sign on her see-through box says she "never says no." Sex toys, whips, platform shoes, dildos, vibrators and blow-up dolls clutter the walls.

A hallway leads to a bank of 26 video booths with solid doors and locks for privacy. Outside the booths, a "buddy button" illuminates when someone is looking to hook up. Inside, mirrored walls and vinyl-padded seats wrap around a video player. Some booths are big enough for at least 15 people.

The 16-year-old shouldn't have been allowed inside Erotic City; Jackson County requires sex -shop customers to be at least 18 to enter. The boy also shouldn't have been allowed inside a video booth, where men frequently meet for anonymous sex. But between 8:45 and 9 p.m., the man took him into one.

The teen later accused the man of sodomizing him. He escaped and called the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, which is still investigating the complaint.

Erotic City's owners deny that the teen was sodomized on their property. When told that the sheriff said the assault happened inside the sex club, Ron Boone, one of Erotic City's seven owners, tells The Pitch: "That is so not true.

"I don't know nothing about what happened, but I know it didn't happen on our property," Boone says. "We would know. The sheriff would have come in, and there would have been a crime scene and all that stuff. And it did not happen on our property."

The timing of the alleged assault was astonishingly coincidental. Three days before, Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders introduced an ordinance to crack down on sex in Erotic City's video booths. Sanders and county legislators were reacting to the November 5 guilty plea of Jesse Franklin Herd III, who had admitted to prostituting his 14-year-old stepdaughter in the club's "orgy room" to as many as 20 men starting in 2005. (Pick up next week's issue of The Pitch for more on Herd.)

At the January 14 meeting, Sanders compared Erotic City to the Wild West. "We have an industry that has virtually no regulation," he said. "Virtually anything goes."

Jackson County legislators met again on January 22 — five days after the alleged assault. Photographs shown at the meeting revealed that glory holes had been drilled into the walls of Erotic City's video booths. Legislators unanimously passed the ordinance outlawing locks and doors on video booths, sex acts in the booths and prostitution in the store.

The county also now limits the booths to one person at a time, and a manager must be able to see inside. The new law requires owners, board members, shareholders and employees of adult-entertainment complexes to pass criminal background checks. It also bans felons from owning an adult bookstore — and that could pose a problem for Erotic City.

Until last month, a seven-member board of directors controlled the complex. The board included a convicted felon, a 12-year-old boy and an aspiring Hollywood actress. It was created after the death of Erotic City's owner, Elvin Lester Boone, in 1997. Video booths were the backbone of the sex empire that the scrap-metal dealer built on the outskirts of Kansas City. The glory holes, skin flicks and dildos made Boone millions and, after his death, would pay his eight children annual six-figure dividends.

Eleven years after his death, though, Elvin Boone's porn empire is crumbling under his children's control.

Erotic City would never have opened if Elvin Boone hadn't been busted for hiding money.

Sometime in the early '70s, he flew to Switzerland to open a bank account. Boone's oldest daughter, Debrah Lackey, recalls that her father took his then-girlfriend, Mary Lou Jacoby, to Switzerland with him. But when Boone dumped Jacoby for another woman, Jacoby turned him in to the Internal Revenue Service for keeping the secret account. (Jacoby could not be reached for this story.) Boone was sentenced on April 28, 1983.

That same year, behind the walls of Leavenworth's minimum-security farm, Boone met Theodore "Sugar Bear" Irving II. Together they dreamed up Erotic City.

Irving was serving a nearly two-year sentence for tax fraud. He had run massage parlors in the 1970s and early '80s, and still owned the VIP Health Studio and Massage Parlor, a trailer at 8603 Truman Road. Irving lived wild and dangerously. He wore canary-yellow leisure suits, drove a matching Cadillac and exchanged gunfire with a wannabe thief during a car chase, according to a 1998 story in The Kansas City Star.

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