PROVIDENCE -- The inspector from the city Fire Department is already pacing the room when nightclub owner Alex Tomasso bounds through the door.
Tomasso rushes over to shake the inspector's hand, then trails him around the empty nightclub. Armed with a clipboard and a Life Safety Code book, Joseph Michalczyk scans the place like a detective searching for evidence. Sprinklers? Yes. Exit doors? Three. Emergency lights? No. Fire extinguishers? No.
On this muggy August afternoon, Michalczyk (pronounced Ma-how-zik) ticks off a list of code violations Tomasso must correct before the club is allowed to open.
Tomasso, who owns five other nightclubs, has already sunk about $50,000 into Jade, his newest club, for lighting, sound equipment, fixtures, liquor, and legal and accounting fees.
Tomasso repeats the list aloud. Emergency lights. Panic hardware. Fire extinguishers. Nothing major.
Last on the list is the occupancy limit.
That one could hurt.
Ever since 100 people were killed when a fire broke out during a packed rock concert at The Station nightclub in West Warwick on Feb. 20, the fire inspectors have gotten tough on occupancy limits.
No more standing-room-only clubs. No more hoping for a low number so you can fly under the code for sprinklers. No more packing them in.
If Jade's capacity is less than 200, Tomasso knows that it may not be worth opening.
"I want to get as many people in here as possible," says Tomasso, dressed in khaki shorts and a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, sweat beading on his sun-tanned forehead. "Every space counts."
"What are you shooting for?" says Michalczyk, scribbling notes on his clipboard.
"Two-fifty."
"Two-fifty is gonna be tight, especially with the history of 125," says Michalczyk. "I'm just gonna do the math."
THE NIGHTCLUB business has always been about pushing numbers. The reason is obvious: more customers mean more money.
Ed Meek, the Oxford, Miss., publisher of Nightclub and Bar Magazine, says nightclubs make their money on liquor sales. Fifty cents worth of liquor with a mixer, for example, can sell for $5.50.
"Volume is the name of the game," Meek says.
In Rhode Island, firefighters licensed by the state fire marshal's office must inspect nightclubs and all other places of public assembly to set a maximum occupancy. Nightclubs are supposed to keep crowd counts, and report the numbers to any public-safety official who asks.
But once a nightclub opens its doors, the question becomes: who is watching, and who is counting?
In the mournful days after The Station fire, Governor Carcieri ordered the inspection of every place of assembly in Rhode Island, including more than 1,000 bars, taverns, nightclubs and restaurants. Night after night, police and fire inspectors roamed Providence, checking for fire-code violations and occupancy limits.
What they found shocked even some of the licensing department's veterans. Fire alarms with dead batteries. Missing fire extinguishers. Sprinkler heads caked over with layers of paint. Doors that swung in when they should have swung out; doors exiting into blocked alleyways. And nightclubs packed way beyond their maximum capacity.
"Blatant violations," says Providence Police Sgt. Peter Costello, who heads the licensing division. "Things that hadn't been checked in 10 years. Most of them were at nightclubs."
Suddenly, owning a nightclub meant more than just fending off complaints about loud music or underage drinking or fights. Suddenly, owning a nightclub meant sprinklers and exit doors and occupancy limits and clubs getting shut down.
"THEY TOLD me I was crazy," says Tomasso one afternoon, seated behind the wheel of his powder-blue Mercedes model CL500. He is recalling his journey from lounge pianist to nightclub owner while on his way to pick up his personal trainer for their three-times-a-week workout at a gym.
The Mercedes, which he leases, doubles as his office. The cell phone tucked between the black leather seats rings constantly.
Tomasso is 44, with a boyish face and chestnut-brown hair combed over his forehead. His voice bears traces of his blue-collar roots, but not his clothes. After he lost 72 pounds, friends suggested that he auction off his oversized Versace and Hugo Boss suits.
On this afternoon, Tomasso has traded designer-label suits for gym shorts, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. Around his neck dangles a silver chain with a gold coin of Alexander the Great. Alex wears it for good luck.
The plumber's son grew up in the Fruit Hill section of North Providence, in a family where illness took an early toll. Tomasso's father died of a heart attack when Alex was 13; his mother developed multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair. The eldest of two sons, Alex had studied piano since he was a child, and by age 15 or 16 he began making money playing at parties and restaurants.
He dressed in long, fur coats like his musical idol, Elton John. He played five, six nights a week at Capricios, the 417 Club and Raphaels. He loved the crowds, but the pay was lousy. So at age 27, with money he had scraped together from family and friends, Tomasso rented space in a former country music lounge on Atwood Avenue in Cranston, and in 1986 opened his first nightclub.
Alexander's was in trouble almost from the start. The crowds came, but so did the cops. Neighbors complained about the noise and fights in the parking lot; the police accused Tomasso of allowing underage drinking and reneging on promises to beef up security. Sixteen months after it had opened, the city revoked the nightclub's liquor license, shutting Alexander's down.
In 1989, Tomasso filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection from creditors. According to court records, he was living in a $300-per-month rental apartment and making $17,000 a year playing the piano at Chalet Restaurant in North Providence.
Tomasso says his big mistake was location. The neighbors had not wanted his club and neither had Cranston's public officials.
In Providence, Tomasso found city officials willing to bankroll his nightclubs. Beginning in 1998, the Providence Economic Development Corporation granted Tomasso a series of low-interest loans to help defray the costs of transforming vacant warehouses and factories in poor neighborhoods into a new generation of stylish discos. The agency loaned Tomasso $30,330 to open Pulse, a gay nightclub in South Providence; $55,660 for Bar One; and $75,660 for his Olneyville nightclub, Sanctuary. (The agency also loaned Tomasso $90,660 to open Viola's restaurant, which he recently sold.)
He secured the city loans with his North Providence condo; he recently transferred the loans to his new $625,000 home in North Smithfield.
Tomasso spent the city money on the nightclub renovations, sound equipment and even liquor.
"It is no secret," former Providence Mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci wrote to Tomasso in 1998, "that businesses, such as yours, are the cornerstone of our neighborhoods and the basis of employment for the residents of the City of Providence."
Cianci's letter, included in the agency's loan files, congratulated Tomasso on the approval of his $30,330 loan to turn a vacant Crary Street yarn factory into the nightclub Pulse.
"Buddy was very supportive," Tomasso says, a smile creasing his face as he steers in stop-and-go traffic. "As is the current mayor," he adds. "David Cicilline is very supportive."
Tomasso is well known around City Hall. Clerks greet him with hugs. Mayor Cicilline stops to chat. At political fundraisers, Tomasso can often be found at the piano, tapping out Sinatra's "My Way."
Tomasso's cell phone rings. One of his club managers is on the line.
"We got a band at Sanctuary tonight? What's the name of the band?" Tomasso says.
Pause.
"Six bands? I hope we're busy. . . ."
SANCTUARY is Tomasso's biggest nightclub. Though he won't say how much money the club takes in, his application for a city loan estimated that revenues during Sanctuary's first year of operation would be $912,000, with more than half from liquor sales.
And that figure is based on crowds of just 200 to 350. Sanctuary's capacity is 540.
Yet, since its opening in September of 2001, the police say, the nightclub has been a magnet for trouble. Everything from parking lot fights to assaults and a stabbing.
More than 500 people packed into the Olneyville nightclub on the night of Sept. 12 to hear Puerto Rican rapper Tego Calderon. The performance ended, fights broke out and people fled to their cars. Traffic jammed. Somebody fired a shot into a car stuck in the parking lot, and a 23-year-old patron was killed.
The city's licensing board suspended Sanctuary's license for 60 days.
Sanctuary wasn't the first of Tomasso's clubs to be shut down.
During the post-Station inspection blitz, police officers with licensing-division patches stitched to their shirts spot-checked city nightclubs for overcrowding and other code violations. Among the more serious problems surfaced at Tomasso's Dike Street clubs.
Therapy, his after-hours club on the second floor of an art gallery, had no municipal fire alarm. And the doors did not pass code as exits. One opened onto a winding stairwell so narrow that two people using it could not pass each other; the other led downstairs to the first-floor ticket vestibule, says Michalczyk, who inspected the club. If there was a fire, people coming down those stairs would run smack into patrons in the ticket area.
The Providence fire inspector had set Therapy's maximum capacity at 216, well bellow the 300-threshold that required sprinklers.
But Therapy's capacity rating did not include Gallery Insane, on the first floor, which is also used as part of the nightclub. Gallery Insane had a capacity of 161.
Back before The Station fire, Therapy's low capacity rating seemed like a blessing in disguise, says Nancy Melucci, general manager of Tomasso's nightclubs. A lower capacity rating meant a club didn't have to pay for sprinklers or parking lot leases.
"To be perfectly honest with you," says Melucci, "it used to be the lower the number the better, because you were gonna run it over anyway."
On Feb. 20, 2003, The Station nightclub burned. Eighteen days later, the state fire marshal shut down Therapy. When the nightclub was allowed to reopen about a week later, with a promise to install sprinklers, its capacity had been cut 26 percent.
The city placed Therapy on official fire watch, posting a firefighter at the 2-to-7 a.m. club, at a cost to Tomasso of $194 per day.
The fire marshal also cut the capacity of two of Tomasso's other clubs.
Costello, the city's licensing division head, says nightclubs typically post somebody at the front door with a clicker to count patrons as they walk in. The cash register also records the number of tickets sold. And "most times," Costello says, the two counts "don't match."
Melucci, Tomasso's general manager, says there is not a nightclub around that wants to turn away business, especially during this slow economy when their numbers are already down.
"As a capitalist, who wants to deny entry? Who wants to deny a sale?" says Melucci. "It's not that we intentionally try to break the law; we intentionally try to make money."
NEXT DOOR to a cemetery on North Main Street, a sign outside a low brick building announces the opening of Jade in green neon.
The location seems a safe bet. A nightclub's best neighbors are ones whom no amount of noise can wake.
Tomasso got the lease after the last tenant, a jazz club, went belly-up and defaulted on the city's $196,735 economic-development loan. Tomasso agreed to take over the loan payments, interest-free, for the next 10 years, in return for the business.
He renovated the club: ruby-red walls; mirrors behind the bar; carpet runners around the dance floor. And he did what the inspector ordered: new exit signs, emergency lights and panic hardware. Push the lever, and the doors swing wide open.
The fire inspector gave Jade a passing grade. The red-letter certificate, propped against the wall behind the bar, reads: Capacity of this Establishment is Not to Exceed 204 Persons Per Order State Fire Marshal.
Not ideal, but a number Tomasso and Melucci say they can live with. To get to 204, the club limited seating to 33 people: five cocktail-sized tables with four chairs each; three bar stools at a counter along the front wall, and 10 more at the bar. Every space counts.
The way things are now, manager Melucci says, "you're scared to push capacity."
On opening night last month, five bouncers and two uniform cops whom Tomasso hired for $175 a piece, guard the entrance.
Inside, the club is practically empty. People stand around the dance floor, like teenagers at a high school prom.
Alex Tomasso is nowhere to be seen.
Eleven-thirty rolls around and the parking lot next door begins to fill up. Twenty-something women in skin-tight jeans and tube tops; men in baggy jeans and pressed T-Shirts. Frat boys with crew cuts wearing chinos and Polo shirts. Bouncers check IDs, pat down the men for weapons and search the women's pocketbooks. Trouble comes in all sizes. A lipstick case can hide a miniature knife.
A group of women and a man clear the door and zip past the cashier.
"Hey, wait," says the cashier. Too late. They disappear into the crowd.
The cashier says women get in free before midnight; everybody else pays $5. But the bouncers are telling patrons everyone gets in for free until midnight.
With so few paying the cover charge, a true crowd count based on the register rolls is impossible. Normally, one of the club employees carries a clicker to keep count. But on this night, nobody expects a capacity crowd and no clicker is in sight.
The club's general manager, Brian Guadagno, clean-cut and built like a jockey, folds his arms over his chest and observes the crowd.
How many people?
One bouncer guessed 80; a police officer outside the club estimated 150.
"If I had to guess," says Guadagno, "I'd say 125."
Not a capacity crowd. On that point all of them agree.
"If it were even close," says Guadagno, "I'd be counting."
By 1 a.m., DJ Big Stress from Hot 106 is spinning hip-hop and reggae and people dance shoulder-to-shoulder, holding drinks and cigarettes. Colored lights jump in dizzying spirals. The music is bone-rattling loud. At the bar, prices are communicated in hand signals. The two women bartenders serve Sex on the Beach, Absolute, Hennessey and Hpnotiq in plastic cups.
Three exit lights glow.
In the parking lot, a group of young men in do-rags and backwards baseball caps cuss at the police. The bouncers told them club rules say no head gear and turned them away, and now they're mad.
"They say I can't get in 'cause I'm dressed like a dog!" shouts one in the group.
One of the officers lifts his microphone off its shoulder strap and radios for backup.
DIGITAL EXTRA: Keep up with coverage of The Station fire and its aftermath, visit an online memorial to its victims, find related documents, graphics and more, at:
http://projo.com/extra/2003/stationfire/
