![]() He buys customers shots, smokes cigars on the patio and hangs out with Minnesota Wild hockey players who frequent his bar. "Peter is like a celebrity," said former bartender Jason Breezee. Peter Hafiz usually arrives at the club after 10 p.m. Four years after opening, it attracts long lines of patrons outside on weekends. With a two-level sports bar by day that morphs into an over-the-top party bar at night, Sneaky Pete's is among the busiest and most lucrative nightspots in the Twin Cities. Jason Mohney asked to see a list of questions he did not reply to them.īut property records, court filings and interviews with those who know Hafiz offer a glimpse of his world. Also declining to comment were his younger brother, Stewart, 46, who runs Sneaky Pete's, and Hafiz's sister, Leslie, 48, who works at Déjà Vu. Neither family will discuss it, and Hafiz ignored multiple interview requests for this article. In more recent years, business ties between Hafiz and Mohney have continued. An $11 million settlement in the dancers' favor awaits a Michigan judge's final approval (and an inevitable appeal). Hafiz's two Minneapolis clubs are part of the suit. The plaintiffs allege that they were cheated out of pay. ![]() Parts of Mohney's operations were revealed in a recent class-action lawsuit brought against the Déjà Vu chain on behalf of more than 25,000 female dancers. Prosecutors describe him as a sophisticated operator who keeps his name off documents and stays behind the scenes. He was sent to prison for tax evasion in the 1990s. The Mohney enterprise's maze-like corporate structure has bedeviled lawyers battling him in court. With his son, Jason, and porn publisher Larry Flynt, he recently opened a 70,000-square-foot Hustler strip club in Vegas. Mohney even has his own museum of erotica in Las Vegas. Mohney, whose operations then were estimated to be worth $100 million, is the central figure in the Déjà Vu chain, with more than 50 lap-dancing clubs that stretch from California to Paris, as well as other sex-oriented businesses. "I've had nothing but positive experiences with him," said Minneapolis City Council Member Lisa Goodman, whose 7th Ward covers most of downtown.īut helping to finance many Hafiz enterprises is a partner who has run afoul of the law before.įor more than three decades, the Hafiz family in the Twin Cities has worked with Harry Mohney, a businessman operating out of Michigan and Nevada who was considered by prosecutors in the late 1980s to be one of the nation's largest X-rated entrepreneurs. His clubs seldom generate the kinds of controversies that pressured the family business out of St. Last year's opening of Target Field cast a brighter light on Hafiz's portfolio of property, much of it within a few blocks of the ballpark.īy most accounts, he runs a clean operation and hits his marks with city regulators. Fashionable restaurants and bars spill out into sidewalk cafes. The nearby North Loop has filled in with lofts, condos and apartments. Much has changed in the neighborhood since then. Paul in 1989, the Hafiz family moved across the river to a down-on-its-heels Minneapolis Warehouse District zoned to group adult businesses together. When his family's adults-only Faust Theater was bought out by the City of St. Since it opened in downtown Minneapolis two decades ago, the all-nude nightspot has shown remarkable staying power.Īt 51, he is the homegrown king of clubs in downtown Minneapolis, with an empire of strip joints (Déjà Vu and Dream Girls), gay bars (the Gay 90's and Brass Rail) and one of the busiest party spots in the metro area: Sneaky Pete's. Like any good boast, this one contains a grain of truth. Peter Hafiz claims that every man in the Twin Cities over the age of 18 has been inside his Déjà Vu strip club.
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