Crime

Robber steals $22,000 in $1 bills from Providence strip club

Cadillac Lounge strip club owner Dick Shappy said he's never experienced anything like this before.

The Cadillac Lounge on Charles Street in Providence in 2020. Barry Chin/Globe Staff

July 18, 2022

A Providence strip club was robbed of $22,000 in $1 bills 15 minutes before opening on Monday, The Boston Globe reported.

Cadillac Lounge owner Dick Shappy released this photograph from a surveillance camera Monday after an armed suspect robbed the Cadillac Lounge strip club on Charles Street in Providence. – Courtesy of Dick Shappy

Cadillac Lounge strip club owner Dick Shappy told the newspaper he was at home when his manager called to tell him he had been robbed at gunpoint.

Security video footage from the scene shows the suspect dressed in a jacket, hat, jeans, and sunglasses, the Globe reported.

He was seemingly familiar with the club, and forced the manager to open a safe he knew was filled with $1 bills at about 2:45 p.m., the newspaper reported.

The robber also took $3,500 that the manager was counting before running out the door and jumping over a fence onto nearby railroad tracks, the Globe reported.

Nobody was hurt, but the club opened late on Monday, the newspaper wrote.

Shappy told the Globe that the small bills are meant to be exchanged with the customers for larger bills so that the customers can tip. The club acquires the bills by buying them back from the dancers each week.

In decades of owning strip clubs, Shappy told the newspaper, he’s never experienced anything like this, even during years when clubs in the city were pressured to pay the mob to protect them.

“In fact, that might have been the reason why we didn’t,” Shappy told the Globe.