The first time Peter Gerace Jr. met the then-22-year-old dancer at his strip club, he sent her to an Allentown address to buy a packet of cocaine, she said.
Complete coverage: The case of ex-DEA agent Joseph Bongiovanni
She went alone, and after returning to Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club in Cheektowaga, she used the cocaine that night with Gerace, she said.
At the time, she was three or four months into her job as a Pharaoh’s dancer and using drugs regularly, she testified Tuesday at ex-DEA agent Joseph Bongiovanni’s corruption trial.
“I would have to use to dance and work my whole shift,” said the woman.
The Buffalo News is not identifying women whom prosecutors say were exploited through their drug addictions and coerced into engaging in commercial sex acts or other crimes.
She started using drugs at an after-work party after her first shift as a dancer in 2007, she said, but before long she was using a gram of cocaine a day, smoking marijuana twice a day and drinking “a lot.”
The testimony from Pharaoh’s dancers is expected to be a key part of the government’s case against Gerace, whose trial will begin only after Bongiovanni’s trial ends. Federal prosecutors also found her accounts of the strip club and Gerace useful in their case against Bongiovanni, as the now-38-year-old former dancer linked the former federal agent to Gerace and the Cheektowaga strip club.
Among his other federal charges, Bongiovanni is on trial for allegedly taking bribes from two sources: the Ron Serio drug-trafficking organization and Gerace.
The dancer’s testimony focused on Gerace.
Gerace introduced Bongiovanni to the dancer at the club, she told jurors.
She said she spotted Bongiovanni sometimes drinking at the bar, and she knew him to be a friend of Gerace’s.
She knew Bongiovanni worked as a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration because Gerace gave her Bongiovanni’s DEA business card to keep.
“If I ever got in trouble, he could help you get out of trouble,” she said Gerace told her as he handed her Bongiovanni’s business card.
She said she kept Bongiovanni’s business card “for a long time.”
Bongiovanni’s defense team has acknowledged his relationship with Gerace.
“We’re not going to deny they grew up together, and over the years had contact,” defense attorney Parker MacKay said in his opening statement. “They had a relationship going back years – the kind of contact that amounts to text message conversations over the years, back and forth, maybe a drink while out and about, even a dinner together on even fewer occasions.”
MacKay described it as the kind of contact one has with an old neighborhood friend who has gone his own way but still has a past in common, “someone you can’t quite shake despite your best intentions to put some distance between you and him.”
MacKay also said Gerace has been described as “something of a cop groupie.”
“He often bragged about his affinity for law enforcement,” MacKay said. “He was close with law enforcement of all types.”
But MacKay denied Bongiovanni took bribes.
“Make no mistake, Joe Bongiovanni took no bribes here,” MacKay told jurors last week during his opening statement. “We’re not letting go of that point.”
Prosecutors have described “a bad situation” at Pharaoh’s, where cocaine and other drugs were being distributed and dancers were overdosing on heroin.
“Some of the women are being essentially pawned off to Peter Gerace’s powerful friends, brought upstairs to his private area where he would give cocaine to important people, and set them up with women to have sex with,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tripi said in his opening statement last week. “Categories of people included a judge, lawyers, important people in the community. So Gerace was highly motivated to protect that.
“Meanwhile, Pharaoh’s was continuing on as a rampantly drug-involved premises with drugs flowing through there,” Tripi said.
The former dancer told jurors there were “girls using ... customers using, employees using.”
She said she never saw anyone use heroin at the club, but suspected some did so based on what she heard from others and “you could see the track marks on girls.”
She testified she had never been to a strip club before walking into Pharaoh’s, but she heard a friend was “making a ton of money” dancing. So she went to Pharaoh’s with a friend. Tentative at first, she sat and watched the dancers. She eventually went on stage herself and danced the rest of the night, she said.
She said she started dating Gerace soon after she first met him, and the two dated steadily for four or five months and then on and off for six years.
She tended bar and waited on tables during the time she was dating Gerace exclusively, she said.
“He didn’t want me dancing,” she said.
She was later fired by a Pharaoh’s manager during a period when Gerace was barred from the premises because of his legal troubles. The manager found her drugs in the dressing room and fired her.
When Gerace returned to the club, she was hired back, she said.
She testified about buying cocaine inside the strip club so she could sell it to other dancers and her better customers to cover the costs of her own habit.
The former dancer has met with law enforcement agents in recent years to cooperate in their investigation.
Her Pharaoh’s days of drug abuse ended over 12 years ago, she told jurors.
“I’ve changed my life completely,” she said, noting she has full custody of her child. “I’m trying to be a good mom.”
