Metro

Shaking that moneymaker for 10 grand a night

WORKIN’ IT: “Avalon,” a 32-year-old beauty who’s been stripping for three years, says her technique is faking intimacy. She says her regulars “come in to talk about their days at work.”

WORKIN’ IT: “Avalon,” a 32-year-old beauty who’s been stripping for three years, says her technique is faking intimacy. She says her regulars “come in to talk about their days at work.” (Angel Chevrestt)

YOU THE MAN: Rick’s Cabaret boss Eric Langan says his foxy ladies are “very, very good at what they do.”

YOU THE MAN: Rick’s Cabaret boss Eric Langan says his foxy ladies are “very, very good at what they do.” (WireImage)

The best night Tali ever had working the night shift at Rick’s Cabaret in Midtown, one of the most profitable strip clubs in the nation, she took home $10,000 — and never even took off her clothes.

Her sugar daddy that night was an older man dressed in jeans and a clean-pressed button-down shirt, recalls the 30-year-old dancer, who grew up in Colombia and moved to New York 13 years ago in pursuit of “the American dream.”

“I watched as all the girls approached him in an aggressive way and he told them all to go away,” she said on a recent Wednesday night in between lap dances.

“I decided to go up to him, but I was going to do it different.”

Tali, a buxom brunette dressed in a custom-made “gown” she takes off and puts back on countless times each night, approached the man and introduced herself, as if they were meeting at a regular bar where the women aren’t payed to strip.

“He said, ‘You’re the first person who actually told me her name,’ ” she said. “As soon as I sat down, he gave me $1,000. I said, ‘Does this mean you want me to stay?’ Sometimes people give you money to leave. He told me to stay because he didn’t want all the girls approaching him. We just talked and he ordered a bottle of champagne. Every hour, he gave me another $1,000.”

The entertainment executive opened up to Tali about problems with his marriage. “He wanted to know what I thought from a woman’s point of view,” she recalled.

After spending the night propped on the bar stool chatting over flutes of champagne, he left her with a big tip and never saw her again.

“None of the other girls connected with him the way I did,” said the stripper. “It was the best night.”

From its nondescript awning on 33rd Street near Penn Station, you wouldn’t think Rick’s Cabaret houses some of the highest earners in the city. But some of the dancers here bank more than a half-million dollars a year — as good as most hedge-fund traders on Wall Street.

Rick’s, frequented by high-rolling athletes and celebrities, as well as commuters looking for a drink and a quick lap dance on their way home from work, is a well-oiled machine where the house pulls down $300,000 in a good week.

The 1,200 dancers that work in Manhattan sign on as independent contractors and pay about $200 a night for the right to strip at the club.

The best hustlers bring home between $600,000 and $800,000 a year — and that’s just the dollars the club tracks through credit-card purchases, and doesn’t factor in cash tips, which could push their annual take to seven figures in a good year.

“We have ladies who work six days a week and who are very, very good at what they do,” said Eric Langan, president of Rick’s Cabaret Inc., a publicly held company with 22 clubs scattered around the country.

Rick’s in New York was a huge gamble for the fledgling company six years ago; the company had a market capitalization of just $7 million when it borrowed $2.9 million from a Houston bank to take over the 10,000-square-foot Midtown space.

Today Rick’s is worth $70 million, and its most recent sales were up 13 percent over the previous year.

Langan had his eye on the 33rd Street location since 2001, when he tried to persuade the owner to sell.

With just 137,000 square feet of adult-entertainment space throughout the city, according to Langan, the cleaning of Times Square had created an opportunity.

The cavernous space on 33rd Street seemed almost too good to be true. The foot traffic near Penn Station was in the hundreds of thousands, and a strip club there could draw locals as well as commuters and out-of-town businessmen. “How could you not make it with that kind of traffic to draw on?” he said.

The club itself had to fit specific regulations — the owners had to wall off the floor plan by 11 square feet because of strict local regulations.

New adult-entertainment establishments cannot be larger than 10,000 square feet of floor area and cellar space, according to the Department of Buildings. (Establishments that opened before 1995 can be larger.)

Rick’s set up shop with all the essentials of any profitable club — exclusive VIP rooms upstairs, a back entrance for discreet customers, women who work until 4 a.m. for a crowd that includes wealthy Wall Streeters, traveling businessmen and even Hasidic Jews.

Rick’s poured about $1 million of its own cash into improvements, including adding a steakhouse to attract the right clientele.

The clubs are basically high-end bars: Rick’s makes most of its money on liquor and takes a small cut from the dancers.

Most clubs have a system of tips that start from dances: The clubs can take a slice of profit off credit-card-processed dances or sell cards to members that are redeemed for dances.

Managers also get a piece of the action. The typical strip-club floor manager is a young man who finds himself managing many women who want the most lucrative night shifts.

“We run through managers like crazy — these guys just can’t handle all the attention they get from the girls,” said one DJ who has worked the business for decades. “Not a lot of these guys have had jobs where people who report to them also want to sleep with them.”

The advantages for women are flexible hours and the ability to work at any club that will let them audition and approve them to dance. The trouble for them is there’s simply no telling how much they’ll make in a night.

“The best night I had, I made $10,000,” said Cristina, 28, a blonde from Eastern Europe who said she’s stripping to pay for grad school in speech therapy. “There are guys that fall in love with a girl to the point that putting down money is nothing. But you can also go home negative, because you pay $200 a night to work here.”

There’s no typical profile of what makes a successful stripper. Young or old, curvaceous or thin, breast sizes of all types — all can do well in the business if they’re flirty and persuasive.

Most of the women interviewed by The Post said making big bucks isn’t about having the hottest body in the room.

It’s actually about having an appealing personality and spending your free time reading up on current events so you can engage men in conversation for hours while they fork over money because they feel a personal connection.

“The guys who spend hours, the guys who spend the most money, they don’t look at the beauty. They look at how comfortable they are with the girl,” Cristina said.

Avalon, 32, has been stripping part-time for three years and said it’s the regulars who pay her bills.

“They come in to talk about their days at work,” she said. “They want to get to know someone, have a drink, relax. I used to think there was a type of body that was popular, but it’s not. If you make it easy for them to relax, you can make the most money in the world no matter what your body is like.”

Her trick is to fake intimacy: “Just think of someone you really like and are passionate about. Then you get into it and it gets easier.”

The most successful dancers get patrons to “buy them off” the main dance platform and make bigger money — often upstairs in more private booths that go for $600 per hour. The club sells bottles of liquor to facilitate these sessions at healthy mark-ups. Private booths are where police say the rules for adult entertainment are broken; enforcement can be uneven and some dancers said prostitution is an unspoken part of the business. DJs said girls prefer to keep things strictly professional, in part to keep the allure — and the tab — running.

“They want to keep getting that dumb money from rich guys who think they’re in love — they don’t give anything away,” one Dallas-area strip-club DJ said.

Tali was most honest about what stripping does to her relationships outside the club.

“It’s not easy money,” she said. “There’s nothing easy to it. It’s tough for me to go on a date. When guys approach me, I have a wall up. It makes me think of work. And when you’re having problems in your life and putting up a smile, hearing other people’s problems, and knowing that you have your own, it’s hard. But I’m grateful.”

Tali’s ex dumped her when he learned she was dancing. “He couldn’t handle it, and I understand.” But she sticks with it because she has no college education and can’t give up the big paycheck.

As for the New York adult-club landscape, a 2010 court ruling against 60/40 clubs — establishments that declare 60 percent of their space is used for clothed activities like a comedy club, so they are exempt from regulations — could give clubs such as Rick’s a bigger slice of the market. The judge’s decision could close 20 clubs in the city, leaving Rick’s with a bigger share of the topless pie.

“If those clubs are gone, then you’re talking less than 70,000 square feet in play,” Langan said. “If I can’t make it work with that many people walking by our place, I thought to myself I probably couldn’t make it anywhere.”