Former exotic dancers testifying about his drug use at Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club. Ex-girlfriends recounting who he socialized with. The FBI analysis of his call records.
It’s almost like strip club owner Peter Gerace Jr. has been the one on trial the past three weeks in U.S. District Court in Buffalo.
Gerace Jr.
Retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent Joseph Bongiovanni now sits at the defense table as the lone defendant, thanks to a federal judge in January ordering separate trials for Gerace and the 59-year-old former federal agent accused of protecting drug dealers he thought had ties to the local mob.
But jurors at Bongiovanni’s trial have heard a lot about Gerace over the first 12 days of testimony. Among the four dozen government witnesses who have testified, six are former exotic dancers or bartenders who said they used cocaine with Gerace, the 56-year-old owner of Pharaoh’s in Cheektowaga. Several became intimately involved with him.
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They described pervasive cocaine use at the strip club, with several giving personal accounts on how Gerace introduced them to drug use.
“I never used cocaine or Lortabs before meeting Peter,†said one former dancer, 38, who first danced at Pharaoh’s as a 19-year-old. “It became a daily thing. I would get sick if I didn’t have it.â€
“The first time I had sex with him I was 18,†another former dancer testified.
At the time, Gerace was in his early 40s.
Testimony about the Pharaoh’s owner was inevitable because eight of the 15 bribery, obstruction of justice, false statement and other charges Bongiovanni faces involve Gerace in some way.
“Anytime they’re not talking about our guy, that’s a wonderful defense,†said attorney Robert Singer, who, with Parker MacKay, represents Bongiovanni.
Singer points out that witnesses so far have seen Bongiovanni at Pharaoh’s only a few times, if at all.
“I don’t think we disagree that Mr. Bongiovanni’s absence from the club is something that’s striking,†Singer said.
But the attention on Gerace is also fraught with risk for the former federal agent. Bongiovanni’s past and current lawyers worried he would not get a fair trial if he had to stand trial together with the strip club owner facing a sex-trafficking count among his other charges. As far back as 2021, Bongiovanni’s previous lawyer sought to sever Gerace’s sex-trafficking count from Bongiovanni’s case, worried about “the likelihood of severe spillover prejudice to Mr. Bongiovanni from conduct which a jury may find abhorrent.â€
Bongiovanni does not face a sex-trafficking charge. His lawyers last week aggressively and successfully prevented any testimony from any ex-addict saying she was compelled to engage in commercial sex acts at Pharaoh’s in order to get cocaine to feed her addiction.
Bongiovanni faces a charge that he defrauded the United States by obstructing the legitimate government functions of the DEA. The indictment against Bongiovanni says he protected Gerace and Pharaoh’s from federal narcotics investigations while Gerace maintained the strip club to facilitate prostitution from 2009 to 2019.
A couple of ex-dancers have each mentioned only one incident in which they remembered hundreds of dollars being paid to Gerace to arrange a hookup between a dancer and man, and in only one case did the ex-dancer specifically call it an act of prostitution.
“There’s a distinction between drugs for sex, which is like quid pro quo prostitution,†Singer said. “There’s not any element of nonconsensual sexual activity. On the other side of it, Gerace is charged with sex trafficking, and one of the ways you can do that is by destroying consent by getting someone addicted and then dangling drugs in front of their face and saying, ‘Oh, you want the drugs? Well, guess what, you have (to have sex) with me first if you want them.’ That’s nonconsensual, because at that point the person does not have capacity to consent. That’s why it’s sex trafficking. Bongiovanni is not charged with sex trafficking. And so the distinction we wanted to make at trial here is we don’t want to have witnesses coming in saying I was forced to do all this sex stuff.â€
As for Gerace, the testimony about him in the Bongiovanni trial remains unchallenged, said attorney Mark Foti, who represents the strip club owner.
“One of the reasons we asked to be included in this trial was so that we would have the opportunity to confront witnesses that are primarily testifying about allegations against Peter Gerace,†Foti said.
The testimony about Gerace in Bongiovanni’s trial matters, Foti said, even though the current jurors have no role in what happens at Gerace’s eventual trial, which has not been scheduled yet.
“It is true that Peter Gerace is entitled to his own jury, but selecting a jury that hasn’t been exposed to the allegations becomes significantly more challenging when that testimony has already been presented in a public forum,†Foti said.
For prosecutors, Gerace remains key to convicting Bongiovanni on many of the charges.
“Joe Bongiovanni was looking out for him,†Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tripi told jurors earlier in the trial. “He had his back. Out of loyalty, out of friendship, out of affinity for Gerace’s family reputation, and eventually for cash bribes, envelopes of cash, because as you’ll hear about, there were several occasions where Bongiovanni came through for Gerace. He shut down an FBI investigation ... by misleading and misrepresenting a member of the FBI. He earned his worth, and he was paid for it.â€
Upstairs invite at Pharaoh’s
The testimony from Pharaoh’s dancers is a precursor to what Gerace can expect of the government’s case against him after Bongiovanni’s trial ends. In Bongiovanni’s trial, federal prosecutors have sought to use the ex-dancers’ accounts of the strip club to bolster their description of Pharaoh’s as “a bastion of alcohol, women and drug use†Bongiovanni frequented.
Among his federal charges, Bongiovanni is on trial for allegedly taking bribes from two sources: Gerace and the Ron Serio drug-trafficking organization.
The ex-dancers’ testimony focused on Gerace.
Most of them are now in their mid- to late 30s and years removed from Pharaoh’s or using cocaine.
Several said they used cocaine for the first time to overcome their anxiety as they began new jobs dancing in front of customers at the strip club.
One dancer recounted how Gerace introduced himself when she arrived for an audition.
Nineteen years old at the time, she was nervous about taking her clothes off for the audition, so Gerace had a female employee take her into the bathroom and offer her cocaine.
“She put it up to my nose and I breathed it in,†the ex-dancer said.
The Buffalo News is not identifying women whom prosecutors say were exploited through their drug use and coerced into engaging in commercial sex acts or other crimes.
A couple of the ex-dancers said they would become bartenders and no longer dance on stage or for customers in the VIP room once they became romantically involved with Gerace, because he did not want them dancing for others.
Regulars at Pharaoh’s knew which dancer or drug dealer to approach at the club if they needed to get cocaine, they testified.
“I knew who to go to,†testified Jeffrey Anzalone of Lockport, who estimated he patronized Pharaoh’s “over a hundred times†after his marriage fell apart.
He said he could acquire cocaine from dancers, cooks and even a security guard.
The ex-dancers said Gerace would invite them to his private upstairs quarters at the strip club – off-limits to customers – to use drugs with him and his friends.
Normally Gerace invited his friends, but regular customers occasionally were also invited, including Anzalone.
You never went upstairs without Gerace, Anzalone testified.
“We went upstairs to do cocaine,†he recalled, adding that he used cocaine with Gerace a half dozen times or so.
There was no other reason to go upstairs, said Anzalone, who is scheduled to be sentenced in May for possession with intent to distribute cocaine.
The dancer who used cocaine right before her audition became addicted to cocaine, but last used it in 2018.
Gerace provided her cocaine “every day,†she said.
What would happen if she didn’t use it?
“I wouldn’t even want to move,†she said.
She said there were plenty of spots inside Pharaoh’s to use cocaine: bathrooms, smoking areas, a dressing room and the upstairs quarters.
She recalled doing cocaine with Gerace in a hotel room when she had a seizure. A few others were in the hotel room.
When Gerace saw what was happening, he told a woman he was with “to get her stuff and he ran out of the hotel,†the ex-dancer said.
Another dancer in the room, who was studying to become a nurse, drove her to where her brother was for help, she testified.
The ex-dancers had far less to say about Bongiovanni, if anything at all, beyond saying they knew him to be a friend of Gerace’s.
One ex-dancer testified that she knew Bongiovanni worked as a special agent for the DEA because Gerace gave her Bongiovanni’s DEA business card to keep, saying “he could help you get out of trouble.â€
Kissing up to cops
A bartender testified she did cocaine with Gerace “during a dark time in my life†and lived with him. She testified about a trip to Las Vegas she took with Gerace and Bongiovanni and several others. Gerace and Bongiovanni “were good friends who knew each other for a long time,†she said.
She saw no drug use during that trip, she said.
Gerace was friendly with Buffalo and Amherst police officers, she said.
“He would kiss up to them,†she told jurors. “I feel like he always wanted to have police officers as friends.â€
One person who did not want to be Gerace’s friend was Melissa Uslabar. She met Bongiovanni in 2004 when she was 27 years old and he was a 39-year-old DEA agent. The two became a couple, and even got engaged, although the relationship ended after several years.
She was a student while the two were a couple, and she eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 2009.
Uslabar, now an intensive care unit nurse in California, did not use cocaine and did not tolerate anyone using drugs around her.
She said she never saw Bongiovanni use drugs.
She remembers going to bars and restaurants with Gerace and his girlfriend, a stripper at the time, and was uncomfortable around them when she learned how they made their money.
“I did not want to hang out with those people,†she testified.
She said she would ask Bongiovanni at the time why he hung around with Gerace.
His response was that Gerace was his friend, she said. He grew up with him.
Uslabar said Bongiovanni “felt torn†by friendships with some people he has known since childhood, because “now he had this job and his lifestyle was different than theirs.â€
Patrick Lakamp can be reached at plakamp@buffnews.com
