For 14 years, the Gold Club has been the destination of choice for a restless segment of the city's huge convention business, clusters of boisterous men eager to spend precious evenings away from home in the company of nude dancers and expensive cigars.
Shuttle buses to the club leave regularly from the city's best hotels.
Starting this week, the city's more adventurous tourists may just as well ask their concierge to direct them to the federal courthouse downtown, where arguments in the Gold Club racketeering trial will begin after 18 months of legal preparation. For pure salaciousness and dark intrigue, the trial is likely to rival anything that goes on in the private back rooms of the club itself, even at the notorious party in Charleston thrown by the owners. Over most of the summer, federal prosecutors will try to prove that the club was a cash conduit to the Gambino organized-crime family of New York, which they say provided protection in exchange. And most provocatively, the government charged that the club's dancers were ordered by their employers to provide sexual services to a long list of professional athletes and other celebrities whose presence at the club helped raise its profile. The team is not named, but it is widely acknowledged that the reference is to the New York Knicks, who were at the College of Charleston at that time in training for the playoffs.