effort to build a criminal case, and it helps to have someone on the inside or at least near. So there has to be a motive, a customer on whose behalf a legal problem is created, with an emotional need to see it happen. If you don’t make enemies, if you don’t scam the locals, and you don’t steal anyone’s girlfriend or make anyone jealous, you are less likely become a priority or an opportunity for the law. Nobody in a position to make trouble has the impulse to hurt you. That was not James Mulrenin. He had sex with everyone’s girlfriend. He created conflict everywhere he went. Some of the girls at Stars were so offended by how he approached them for money at the end of the shift, and fired them, they sued Stars in Orange County Circuit Court for minimum wage. It had to be Mulrenin! Rather than being a gifted manager, he was socially stunted. I believe his deep psychological need to control the girls and have sex with them was driven by this low self esteem from being socially stunted. His whole life he felt like he was missing out, compared to guys with more charm. He probably got accused of two rapes, for every one he was actually guilty of. He felt a need to be involved in the lives of the girls he managed, and have sex with them, to make up for it. And BFF Barbara Mellinger boosted this childish creep's self esteem with some weird enabling symbiotic thing. Mulrenin was a control freak. He took the girls' car keys away, and gave them back at the end of the night. I never heard of that at any other strip club, or any other business of any kind outside Saudi Arabia. And because he had the desolate need for everything the girls did to run through him, when they got in trouble he got in trouble. And he made enemies. Especially the girls, who wanted him off their backs. So he didn't keep a low profile and just settle for three or four girls a year. He wanted money and sex from every girl that was doing anything. He involved himself and made himself a target for legal problems. That’s my theory, anyway. I wasn’t at Rachel's in 2001. Mulrenin first appears at the fanciest strip club in Orlando and Palm Beach, Rachel's. He gets arrested, prostitution, racketeering, probation, the club gets sold. Next thing he is involved in a little more modest endeavor, the Plaid Rabbit, some kind of shithole bar in Michigan. He fucks a female employee like every bar owner in the world, and somehow gets run out of the state for rape. His own childhood friend and partner throws him out, buys him out. Next he ends up at Rachel's North, probably why he got his apartment in Altamonte Springs. He does okay. So after they buy Cabaret Internationale they need someone with legal experience to go down there and make sure the hookers don't give the new owners legal problems. They give Mulrenin a chance. But there weren’t even any real hookers at Cabaret Internationale and he blows it. He just runs off all the free-spirit girls who won’t have sex with him, and their regulars with them. He runs Cabaret Internationale into the ground. So they send Mulrenin across the street to Dollhouse, after they gave up trying to use Dollhouse to compete with the better strip club across the street and just bought it. So after 20 years of stumbling downhill, Mulrenin f1nally finds his level at Dollhouse. The middle-class black decor at his supposedly upscale apartment, that was new for him. It's an egg carton strangely situated in the middle of a heroin-county strip-mall, which only real estate agents would think to call "The Lofts at Uptown." But if all you have to compare to is the roach ranches in the area, who would know better. The sofa he was shot on, that came to Rooms To Go from China on a 2014 import license, that was new. The aspirational Detroit car the Chrysler 300, all that was new for him. Mulrenin started getting girls more naturally, he relaxed a little, he wasn’t quite as creepy. The girls coming through the door at Dollhouse trend a little shorter, darker, and sleazier than the other places he worked. He's a little more attractive to them, it’s a little bit easier picking for a tall white guy. The short guys he hired looked up to him. But as usual, he was overdue to fuck it all up, snorting coke with the town space cadet and falling off a balcony, still over twice the alcohol limit for driving three days later. Even Scott Love was doing better than Mulrenin. Before Mandi start hanging out with Mulrenin, Scott had a job. Even after she started hanging out with Mulrenin, Scott was not doing coke. And after Mulrenin no doubt escalated the conflict he found himself in, Mulrenin is dead and Scott Love is alive and may walk out of prison someday. Do any coke addicts who work at strip clubs ever have happy endings? Kids, this is why cocaine is illegal. It is an off- ramp fiom whatever life you may build for yourself. II-30