The Knox News Sentinel had two huge pictures of golden boy Scott West in their Sunday edition. West was paid a visit by the FBI for drugs and money laundering, but the article focuses predominantly on West the businessman.
From the article:

What it appears to be, in federal court filings, is a long-running marijuana ring involving West, his brother, a Colorado artist and an Arizona businessman. It is, if you believe federal authorities, a drug-peddling operation that used artsy ventures like Mike West’s Sensua Gallery in Atlanta or Scott West’s businesses on the Square to help clean their dirty cash.

The article mentions Bill Haslam’s Policy Director, Bill Lyons and contains a few quotes from him, like this one about downtown redevelopment:

“He’s a pioneer,” Lyons said. “He was seen as the idea person. That was his role.”

But the article fails to mention that Mr. West was appointed by Bill Haslam to serve on a small, select group of individuals known as Mayor Haslam’s Dowtown Advisory Committee.

According to the pressers, The Downtown Advisory Committee aids the Mayor in creating strategies for continuous improvements to the heart of the city.

Don Bosch, another of Mayor Haslam’s appointments to the Downtown Advisory Committee, is serving as legal counsel for Steve West and his defense.

Another of Haslam’s buddy appointments is Leigh Burch. Whirlwind author Sandra Lea wrote about Mr. Burch last year and I contacted her for a copy. I am posting her copyrighted work here, with her permission.

While the Sentinel does a fine job of laying out just how great West is, if we see a conviction, then Haslam and friends have some explaining to do. I’ll provide more information on West later, and will lay out just how much favor the golden boy has purchased with the city’s gold.

Butcher Crime Time

Pornography and Prostitution
Knoxville and East Tennessee Businessmen
Expose`

Tell me whom you are with,
And I will tell you what you are.
-Old Spanish proverb

Sandra Lea

On my last “Tennessee Confidential” program, in August, we discussed the adult pornographic bookstores that are proliferating in this area, even invading upper scale residential neighborhoods. My guests on that program, the ladies from one of these Farragut neighborhoods, started an organization called “Stop the Store.” They were successful in getting the city of Knoxville to pass a 20-page ordinance setting requirements for the licensing, hours of operation, location, and practices of adult entertainment businesses, including oddities such as “adult motels where rooms are rented by the hour”, and “sexual encounter centers.”

On the Monday following our last program, the adult/pornographic businesses joined forces and filed a federal lawsuit against the city, claiming the city’s ordinance violates their respective rights to free speech, free expression, due process, and equal protection.

Prostitution, drugs, and pornographic adult bookstores are all part of one business, the business of sex.

After learning of C.H. Butcher’s involvement in a chain of escort services, I started investigating this business. I learned, and reported, that Knoxville was second only to Miami in the numbers of escort services, which is the present day mode of operation for prostitution. At the time of my first public announcement in May, 2004, Miami, with a population of 4 million, had 121 escort services; Knoxville, with a population of 500,000, had 116 escort services. Knoxville has now surpassed Miami and takes first place with 179 versus Miami’s 142 escort services. As an example of prostitution’s growth in other cities, New Orleans, known for its decadence, has five escort services; and on the west coast, known for its liberal sexual morals, Salem, the capital of Oregon, has only one.

Something is wrong here in East Tennessee; something stinks in Knoxville, and it reeks of heroin, cocaine, crack; syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, hepatitis A, AIDs and a whole host of killer drugs and diseases that have grown to epidemic proportions. A diabolical malignancy has invaded our community that now threatens the very foundation of our society, our families, as well as our future generations by polluting the minds of our children.

In my investigation, my focus has centered on the businessmen and women who profit from this dark business that is spreading through our community like a fast growing cancer. The quickest and easiest way to begin to identify the porno profiteers is through the ownership of the property housing these pornographic bookstores.

One of the largest and nastiest pornographic bookstores in this area, Inserection Adult Fantasy Store, is located in downtown Knoxville, at 501 North Broadway. This pornographic store is located near the heart of the area now being raided by Knoxville PD on a regular basis the past couple of months. The residents and businesses in this area of Knoxville have found this activity intolerable and have insisted that the city shut it down, and to his credit, Chief of Police Sterling Owen, IV, is attempting to do just that, with over 100 arrests to date at substantial costs to taxpayers.

The Knox County tax records show that a local businessman, Leigh A. Burch, III, as the responsible party for 501 North Broadway. Before our last program, I contacted Burch’s office at Terminus Real Estate and requested his input on our show on adult bookstores. When he didn’t return my phone call, I followed up with an email dated August 23, 2005, in which I said, “It would appear from the Knox County property records that you are the owner of this building housing the Inserection Adult Fantasy Store which deals exclusively in pornography, and that you are profiting from the proceeds of this business through rent/lease monies and/or other means. In order to give a well balanced viewpoint of this subject, we would like for you to be a guest on this Saturday’s “Tennessee Confidential” to discuss, as a local businessman, your view point of pornography as a business.”

Burch’s email response on that same date was not what one would normally expect from a supposedly respectable businessman, and was in my opinion, hostile and quite ill mannered. He wrote, “Before you start slandering people, you should check the deed not the tax records. I conveyed this property in September of last year. Please stop harassing me and my staff. Leigh Burch.”

I took Burch’s advice and checked the deed for 501 North Broadway and discovered that he had indeed conveyed this property in September of 2004 – to his then Vice President of Construction for Terminus Real Estate, Simon Cote, who holds the property in his name as Trustee for an unnamed beneficiary.

Leigh A. Burch III

Leigh Burch is a native of Knoxville, and was educated at the University of Tennessee, receiving a B.S. as well as his Master’s degree in finance and economics. For the past twenty years, the 48-year-old man has worked in the Atlanta area amassing an impressive portfolio of successful achievements in real estate development, leasing, sales, and property management, including the Brady Avenue office lofts in Atlanta and the Sterchi
Lofts in Knoxville. Most recently he was in the news after offering $100 for the old South High School property in south Knoxville, his offer being rejected by the Knoxville City Council. Burch was so sure of the acceptance of his hundred dollar offer for this piece of publicly owned property, he listed it as a future project on his website. This month, September, 2005, Burch’s company, Terminus Real Estate, paid $1,000.00 for an Urban Redevelopment project, the 13-story Highland building in Pittsburgh, where he expects to develop the building’s 100,000 square feet of space into 84 condo units. Immediately after the Urban Redevelopment Authority approved Terminus’s purchase of the property, Terminus asked the Urban Redevelopment Authority for a $60,000 street-façade loan as well as $1 Million loan from the Pittsburgh Development Fund. The Urban Redevelopment Authority agreed to seek Pennsylvania state loans to assist the project in site and infrastructure improvements.

By the spring of 2001, Leigh A. Burch, III had moved his wife, Jennifer, and his three children back to Knoxville from Atlanta. Burch immediately opened an office for his real estate company, Terminus, at 706 Walnut Street in downtown Knoxville. Mayor Bill Haslam appointed him to the Downtown Advisory Committee: a committee formed to “aid the Mayor in creating strategies for continuous improvements to the heart of the city.” However, his wife, two sons, and daughter, were not the only things Burch moved to Knoxville from Atlanta. He also moved Atlanta’s notorious porn king, Michael S. Morrison, along with Morrison’s Inserection Adult Fantasy Store.

Michael S. Morrison

Thirty-six year old Michael S. Morrison is one of the largest international porn producers and distributors in the Southeast. He distributes his smut through Morrison Distributors, LTD. His main operational entity is Focus Entertainment International, Inc. He operates over twenty locations in the Southeast U.S., including the Inserection, Heaven, New York Video, and Experience adult bookstores. Twelve of his locations are in Atlanta, including Jazzy T’s, a predominately black strip club. He also has locations in Florida and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Knoxville is his first venture into Tennessee, where he hopes to establish a lucrative foothold.

Focus Entertainment International, Inc., was formed February 19, 1991, with six officers and directors. By 2002, Morrison had condensed to two officers, himself as president and director, and 32 year-old Erik Clabaugh as secretary of the company. Clabaugh shares his Georgia address at 707 Bayliss Drive, Marietta, with Kristy Green, a former Playboy centerfold model and porn star.

Morrison incorporated 501 North Broadway, LLC, in Georgia, March 18, 2004. Attorney Alan I. Begner was the registered agent. 501 North Broadway, LLC, was incorporated in Tennessee on March 30, 2004, with Erik Clabaugh listed as the registered agent showing the principal office address as Morrison’s corporate headquarters at 1739 Cheshire Bridge Road in Atlanta, and the registered agent, Erik Clabaugh’s address, as 706 Walnut Street, Suite 102, Knoxville – the same address as Leigh Burch’s Terminus Real Estate.

Morrison’s Inserection Adult Fantasy Store opened in Knoxville in June 2004, three months before Burch flipped the property at 501 North Broadway to his then Vice President of Construction, Simon Cote.

The infamous Atlanta porn attorney, Alan I. Begner, represents all of Morrison’s approximately 50 known entities. Michael S. Morrison appears to be Begner’s largest client among a clientele that includes other infamous porn profiteers. Begner was also the attorney for Steven E. Kaplan, owner of Atlanta’s Gold Club.

The Gold Club

During the 1990s, Atlanta’s Gold Club, located at 2416 Piedmont Road, N.E., was one of the most successful and well-known strip clubs on the East Coast. Michael Morrison had opened one of his Inserection Adult Fantasy Stores near by at 2628 Piedmont Road, N.E.

The FBI became suspicious that owner Steven Kaplan’s friendship with members of the Gambino crime family might be leading to part of the club’s $20 Million income being funneled back to organized crime. Kaplan’s connections to the mob were detailed in FBI surveillance tapes of him and John Gotti, Jr., as well as Kaplan’s presence at a New York nightclub in 1988 when a Gambino member was shot and killed.

By 1999, owner Steve Kaplan’s Gold Club “nude dancing” business had been indicted on 54 federal racketeering charges that included prostitution, obstruction of a criminal investigation, intimidation or force against witnesses, narcotic manufacturing, extension of credit by financial extortion, interference with interstate commerce by threat or violence, concealing a person from arrest, credit card fraud, money laundering, police corruption, and ties to the Gambino organized crime family. This led to a major trial in the summer of 2001.

According to the Associated Press, in 2001, Steven Kaplan was “accused of building a $50 Million fortune in part by providing prostitutes for celebrities. Atlanta’s Gold Club is one of the most profitable nude clubs in the country, popular among convention-goers and visiting celebrities. Federal investigators say it is also a high-priced brothel that pumps cash into the Gambino crime family.”

The Federal indictment against Kaplan says Kaplan ordered more than 20 beatings of people who did not repay loans at high rates of interest. When testimony about sexual favors for celebrity athletes appeared, suddenly the trial became one of the biggest sex scandals in professional sports history. Witnesses described a high-flying world of $50,000 tabs, private rooms, and regular appearances by celebrities, politicians, and athletes. A number of athletes subsequently appeared on the stand, including Andruw Jones of the Atlanta Braves and New York Knick Patrick Ewing. Both testified to receiving “special treatment” from strippers at the Gold Club or nearby hotels.

Fourteen weeks into the trial, Kaplan agreed to a plea deal, a $5 Million fine and a prison sentence of three-to-five years. He received a lenient sentence of only 16 months to be served at the Federal Correctional facility in Otisville, New York; $100 special assessment; three years supervised release and 400 hours of community service, as well as $300,000 restitution to victims of his crimes.

Kaplan’s lawyer since 1982, Alan I. Begner, has carved a lucrative niche as a lawyer of adult entertainment establishments, representing about half of the 45 in the metropolitan Atlanta area. “I knock out laws,” Begner told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Another of Alan Begner’s clients is none other than Leigh A. Burch III. Begner is listed as the registered agent for Burch’s 997 Brady Avenue, LLC, formed February 2, 1999. The principal address for this entity is that of Burch’s Terminus Real Estate, 706 Walnut Street, Suite 102, Knoxville.

The porn kings’ attorney, Alan Begner, “knocks out laws” for pornographic businesses by arguing three prominent themes: (1) freedom of speech/ First Amendment Rights; (2) “these people have to work too,” meaning the employees of porn establishments; and (3) the most vocal, “We pay taxes.” These arguments are precisely the same as those being offered in the Federal lawsuit against the city of Knoxville filed by the pornographic bookstores here three weeks ago, as if Alan I. Begner is lurking in the background, advising and consulting with the local smut peddlers and their attorneys.

The same month Michael S. Morrison opened Inserection Adult Fantasy at 501 North Broadway in downtown Knoxville, he was indicted for tax fraud and lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to evidence presented during his sentencing hearing, in March of 2002, Morrison submitted to the IRS a Corporate Income Tax Return of his company, Focus Entertainment International, Inc, for the tax year ending June 30, 2001, which was false and fraudulent. Morrison reported to the IRS that the company’s total income was $6,115,985. At sentencing the government’s evidence showed that over a 3-year period Morrison under-reported income by approximately $2.3 Million which resulted in a tax loss of $1.4 Million to the United States.

The evidence also showed that in April of 2002, Morrison submitted a fraudulent Individual Income Tax Return for the 2001 tax year, which was verified by a written declaration by Morrison under penalty of perjury. This tax return showed that Morrison’s “Other Income” for the year 2001 was $4,134, when in fact it was approximately $1.4 Million.

Morrison’s businesses include cash-operated “booths” where customers view motion pictures and videos. Subsequently, Morrison reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that “Booth Revenue” was $1,637,342 and $701,376 for 2000 and 2001 respectively, and stated that the decline in such revenue was attributed to competition from discount stores that had opened within the past two years within close proximity to the company’s locations. An investigation by the FBI and IRS showed that the reported booth revenue was well below the actual revenue collected because the defendant was “skimming” money and not reporting a substantial part of such revenue. According to the evidence, the “skimming” amounted to over $2.3 Million.

So much for paying taxes, Mr. Morrison!

This past June, one year after opening Inserection Adult Fantasy in downtown Knoxville, Michael S. Morrison reported to the Federal Correctional Facility in Miami, Florida, to begin serving a three-year prison sentence.

And speaking of taxes, just this past August 2005, porn attorney Alan I. Begner and his law partner and wife, Cory, were ruled against by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, affirming a United States District Court ruling that Mr. and Mrs. Begner owed three types of back taxes: (1) employment taxes from 1984-1990, (2) unemployment taxes from 1983-1991, and (3) income taxes from 1984-1987.

So much for paying your taxes, Mr. Begner!

Meanwhile, over on Broadway in downtown Knoxville, the merchants and residents continue to protest the decline of their neighborhood and the increase in crime, while Police Chief Sterling Owen IV continues to order the arrest of more prostitutes near an East Knoxville school in the vicinity of the Inserection Adult Fantasy Store, where a big billboard sign advertises a “10% discount” for students.

Something stinks in Knoxville. It reeks……..

Copyright 2005
Whirlwind Encore