Dozens of complaints have been made against Club Cinema in Pompano Beach regarding scantily clad teenagers engaging in drug use and underage drinking. Now Pompano Mayor Lamar Fisher wants to shut the club down, according to an article in the Sun-Sentinel today .
That's just a little ironic, because it was another mayor who helped make the nightclub possible.
Recommended Videos
Former Deerfield Beach Mayor Al Capellini, who now faces corruption charges, was hired to do the renovation for the club beginning in 2001 (that's his mugshot here). The man secretly behind the club was Sam Frontera, a pal of Capellini's -- and a convicted cocaine dealer out of Chicago known for robbing other drug dealers. Here's a passage from a story (part of a series that sparked the investigation that led to Capellini's arrest) I wrote for New Times in 2006: ----------------------------------------------------------
Until 1991, Frontera was a leader of a vast cocaine cartel that, according to federal agents, brought at least 40 tons of cocaine into the country worth about $500 million. He pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in 1992 for his role in the operation and could have been sent to prison for life. After snitching on many of his cohorts, he wound up serving only about four years.
Today, the 50-year-old Frontera is out of prison and running another enterprise: Club Cinema, one of the biggest new rock clubs in South Florida. He spent six years building his new operation in Pompano Beach. And serving as Frontera's general contractor for the club's multimillion-dollar renovations: Al Capellini and his private engineering firm.
Because Florida law forbids Frontera from holding a liquor license, the club's true backers are obscured by shell companies and straw owners, including the ex-con's 79-year-old mother, who lives in Michigan. The real money behind the club appears to be coming from a company linked to Frontera's old partner in Chicago, notorious slumlord, twice-convicted felon, and multimillionaire Louis Wolf.
In Chicago, Wolf owned the buildings holding Frontera's nightclubs through which millions of dollars in cocaine money was laundered, according to law enforcement sources.
The renovation work that Capellini's company, Atlantis Environmental Engineering, oversaw at the club was fraught with code violations and unlicensed workers. But the mayor managed to navigate the club's permits through the Pompano Beach Building Department, where he is a personal friend of the building chief.
And Capellini isn't the only South Florida heavyweight in Frontera's corner. Well-known Fort Lauderdale attorney and developer Ron Mastriana handled the dubious liquor licensing process for Frontera.
Mastriana readily admits his friendship with Frontera and says he knew of his pal's crime-filled past. Capellini, however, says he had no idea that his business associate had a background steeped in boatloads of cocaine and tens of millions of dollars in illicit drug money.
"If I had knowledge of that, I wouldn't have been involved," the mayor says. "In my business, we don't ask those questions." ------------------------------------------------------
So I guess the problems happening there now shouldn't be too surprising. What is it they say? What's past is prologue.