"The beauty of a strip club is the girls have all the social skills that you need," Eric Langan, the CEO of Rick's Cabaret, once boasted, casting himself as the Wall Street-friendly king of neon nightlife. But those words might not have aged well. Today, the empire he built on champagne rooms and "dance dollars" is facing the kind of scrutiny not many would have imagined. Rick's Cabaret chain, the only publicly traded strip club in the world, is in serious trouble.

On September 17, New York Attorney General Letitia James unveiled a sweeping indictment against Langan, five of his lieutenants, and RCI Hospitality Holdings, the parent company of Rick’s Cabaret, according to a Reuters report.

Prosecutors say the only listed strip-club giant in the US spent 13 years bribing a state tax audito

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