SEXIS WRONG

to be the first one to go public with swinging. Swinging shot
through the roof. Now I’m riding the crest. I’m a fat, middleaged
guy. These chicks only want me ‘cause I’m the owner
of Plato’s. Ya think I don’t know that?”
But while Levenson screwed around, his relationship with
Mary suffered. With so much sex at his disposal, he all but
ignored her as a sexual partner. Eventually, Mary fell for Levenson’s
married chauffeur. One night Levenson became chagrinned
when he saw them holding hands at the club. “You
want to fuck him, that’s all right,” Levenson told Mary at the
time. “But you can’t show people that my woman is walking
around holding hands with another guy. Doesn’t look good.
That’s all I’m concerned about.” Levenson laid down the law
to the chauffeur: No-strings-attached sex was the rule at
Plato’s, nothing more. But the chauffeur couldn’t accept it,
claiming he was in love. Levenson promptly fired him. One
morning, just as Levenson was exiting the club, the chauffeur
and two accomplices jumped him and beat the crap out him,
breaking his arms and legs. They dumped him on a deserted
street near JFK Airport and ordered him to leave town.
Levenson survived. Ultimately, his relationship with Mary did
not. Not long after, she disappeared from the Plato’s scene.
But something much more serious was transpiring. Something
was killing gay men. In 1981, a New York Times headline
stated: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” Back at
Plato’s, the party raged on, oblivious to the mysterious disease.
Or perhaps they were just having too much fun to stop.
“It was just something people didn’t even want to discuss,”
recalls Candy.
However, Upper West Side community members were very
ready to discuss their displeasure with the brigades of single
men who loitered outside Plato’s soliciting for “dates.” Finally,
Ansonia’s owner, who wanted to transform the building
into a condominium complex, paid Plato’s owners a million
dollars, much in deferred payments, to move downtown to
a larger space on 34th Street, which would feature a Japanese
tea room, a jungle habitat, and a “tent fit for an Arabian
sheik.”
The new home garnered mixed reviews. “It didn’t work
downtown at all,” remembers Henry, who paid just one visit
to the new locale. “The times had changed. It didn’t have the
same kind of friendliness. It was big and very empty. It was
very creepy. I remember Jerzy Kosinski skulking out of a back
room, wearing only a towel.”
Others found fault with Levenson’s bloated ego and aloof attitude.
“He thought he was God’s gift to the sexual revolution.
He really felt he was important,” recalls Goldstein. “In the
end, he was in his private room doing coke. It was no democracy.
The King didn’t fuck with the rest of us.”
Levenson had other things to consider. While Internal Revenue
Service officers were probing his den of decadence,
Plato’s former manager, Anne Grippo, whom Levenson had
recently fired, handed over a second set of the club’s accounting
books. “This was a chronic case of a company that had
two sets of books,” explains then-organized-crime prosecutor
Peter Sudler, who also went after Studio 54’s Rubell and
Schrager. “One was phony.” Unfortunately for Levenson and
his partners, Grippo had handed over the true set of books.
On trial for skimming $2.3 million in receipts, Levenson was
the lone Plato’s owner to take the stand. The King should have
kept his mouth shut. In response to the question of whether
he had skimmed money, Levenson responded: “I never took
anything that didn’t belong to me, that wasn’t owed to me.”
Levenson also stated that he believed Plato’s was a tax-exempt,
not-for-profit organization. “The jury was laughing at
him. He was pathetic,” recalls Sudler. “He was like a kid with
his hand caught in a cookie jar.”
Goldstein was flabbergasted by Levenson’s lack of business
savvy. “He was a retard, a disgrace to Jews,” rails Goldstein.
“If you’re gonna do cash, you don’t do it in front of people
you’re gonna fire the following week.”
Sudler claims that there was no shortage of witnesses willing
to spill the beans on the Plato’s operation. “All the employees
hated these guys,” recalls Sudler. “They were having fistfights
to take the stand against them.”
In July 1981, Levenson and his partners got eight years in
Allenwood federal prison. Even locked up, Levenson ensured
that he was not forgotten. His son Michael, known to many
club members as the Prince, emceed at Plato’s on Saturday
nights, and Levenson tape-recorded announcements that
the Prince played over the loudspeakers. But it wasn’t the
same. “The club definitely suffered,” remembers Rick “The
Prick.” No doubt the club missed Levenson’s enthusiasm for
the lifestyle and his unique showmanship. With Goldstein as
his tag-team partner, Levenson had mud-wrestled women.
When the club closed for the evening, Levenson would transform
himself into a Semitic Elvis, lip-synching “The Wonder
of You.”
Most notably, Plato’s suffered regarding the admission of single
men and working girls. According to Plato’s former head
of security, single men, including a number of Hasidic Jews,
were allowed entry for a hefty payoff. In return for a house
fee, working girls were allowed to ply their trade.
Captain John, the Jersey stud, whom women once lined up
to be with, was staying clear of Plato’s. He had heard about
the mysterious virus referred to as acquired immune deficiency
disease in a May 1982 New York Times article. The paper
INSIDE THE CAVE 75