Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ART & ARTISTS (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (90%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (90%); PAINTING (89%); SCULPTURE (79%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (79%); RETAILERS (72%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (70%); PUBLISHING (55%); CITIES (50%); CITY LIFE (50%); ACTORS & ACTRESSES (65%)
COMPANY: LVMH MOET HENNESSY LOUIS VUITTON SA (68%)
TICKER: MC (PAR) (68%); LVM (LSE) (68%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS316992 WOMEN'S HANDBAG & PURSE MANUFACTURING (68%); NAICS312140 DISTILLERIES (68%); NAICS312130 WINERIES (68%); SIC3171 WOMEN'S HANDBAGS & PURSES (68%); SIC2085 DISTILLED & BLENDED LIQUORS (68%); SIC2084 WINES, BRANDY, & BRANDY SPIRITS (68%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (91%) NEW YORK, USA (91%) JAPAN (92%); UNITED STATES (91%); GUATEMALA (77%); GERMANY (50%)
LOAD-DATE: April 11, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Schedule
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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The New York Times
April 10, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Dancers for Hire at Queens Club Claim Wage Violations
BYLINE: By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 1299 words
Every evening into the wee hours, lonely men slip into the dance clubs scattered under the el along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. Inside, these men, most of them Hispanic immigrants, pay $2 for a dance in clubs with alluring names like Casanova and La Romantica.

The busiest is the Flamingo Night Club, where, past the hulking bouncer, 50 for-hire dancers gyrate and two-step until 4 each morning, donning different outfits for Miniskirt Night, Pajama Night and Schoolgirl Night. On Bikini Night every Wednesday, the dance floor is jammed, the men pulling the dancers close, the lights dim, the reggaeton music blasting.

For the men -- construction workers, janitors, supermarket stockers -- the Flamingo may be an antidote to loneliness, an opportunity to press against soft skin, but for many of the dancers, the club is an out-of-kilter world with bizarre rules. Several former Flamingo dancers plan to file a federal lawsuit against the club on Thursday, asserting that it repeatedly violated federal and state wage laws and cheated its dancers of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In interviews in Spanish, several former dancers said the owners often made them pay a $60 or $70 fine when they missed a day of work. Several complained of having to pay an $11 fee each day just to enter the club and an additional $10 if they arrived a half-hour late.

They said that sometimes, after dancing from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., they had to attend meetings that lasted until 6 a.m. in which the owners held forth, calling some dancers ''puta'' (whore) as well as ugly and fat. The dancers' most serious complaint was that the club never paid them a cent for their 45-hour workweeks.

''I never received anything in wages,'' said Patricia Gonzalez, a long-haired, leggy immigrant from the Dominican Republic who quit dancing at the Flamingo last June. ''In my three years there I must have paid thousands of dollars in fines. And I paid the daily fee of $11 to enter. What kind of job do you have to pay just to go to work?''

The lawsuit raises an intriguing question of law: whether the for-hire dancers were employees, who should have been paid wages for every hour they worked, or independent contractors who, as the Flamingo's owners assert, were merely renting space on the dance floor.

The owners say they had no obligation to pay wages, asserting that the dancers were entrepreneurs who made a living by keeping the $2 they earned for each dance.

''They're paying to rent the space so they can make a living,'' said Peter Rubin, a lawyer for the club. ''They can keep all the money they make dancing. They don't have to split anything with the house.'' The club makes its money by charging the men $5 to enter and $7 a drink.

Mr. Rubin said the club's owners, Edith D'Angelo and Luis Alberto Ruiz, who declined to be interviewed, denied fining dancers for missing days or arriving late. Mr. Rubin suggested that the former dancers, seeing a potential payday in court, had concocted and coordinated their stories with the help of an immigrants' advocacy group, Make the Road New York, that has embraced their cause.

''The girls have the right to come and go as they please,'' Mr. Rubin said. ''They don't have to rent a space at the club.''

If the dancers win their lawsuit, it could have ripple effects at the city's many for-hire dance clubs, latter-day versions of Depression-era joints where men paid 10 cents for a dance. Many of today's dancers, like their customers, are illegal immigrants who earn their money off the books. Amy Carroll, a lawyer for Make the Road, said it was ridiculous for the Flamingo to suggest that the dancers were independent contractors.

''It seems that Flamingo is doing the worst of both worlds,'' she said. ''They're not paying the workers anything, and they're controlling every aspect of the dancers' work life. They tell them what days to work, what time to show up, what outfits to wear, what makeup to use. They even make the dancers sign in and out to go to the restroom. That level of control makes them employees, not independent contractors.''

The lawyers for the dancers -- from the Urban Justice Center and the Milbank Tweed law firm as well as Make the Road -- argue that the $2 dance fees are tips, rather than wages.

''We are alleging that the dancers were never paid minimum wage, never paid overtime, and there were illegal deductions and kickbacks in the form of entry fees, late fees and sick fees,'' said Elizabeth Wagoner, another lawyer for Make the Road.

The lawsuit is alleging wage violations on behalf of more than 2,000 dancers, waiters and bartenders who the lawyers say worked at Flamingo over the past three years.

The plaintiffs also accuse Mr. Ruiz, the co-owner, of battery, specifically of shoving some dancers toward men so they would dance with them, and occasionally pouring drinks on the dancers.

''Imagine having to dance until 4 a.m. after someone poured tequila down your clothes,'' said Floricelda Alonzo, a tall, dark-haired dancer from the Dominican Republic.

Mr. Rubin denied that Mr. Ruiz had hit anyone or thrown liquor on any dancers. He said it made sense to require the dancers to sign in and out when they went to the bathroom and to time them there so they would not use the bathrooms for illicit sex with customers.

Diana Trejos, an intense, talkative dancer from Colombia, said she in no way felt like an independent contractor in her several years at the club. Among other complaints, she said the women were prohibited from sitting between dances unless customers bought them a drink. On many nights the management announced ''women's liberation time,'' requiring the women to do their next four dances free as a way to liven things up, she said.

''Wherever I've worked, I see bosses want to take advantage,'' Ms. Trejos said. ''But there they took it to a whole other level.''

She said she dreaded when the owners ordered the exhausted dancers to attend meetings that began at 4 a.m. ''They'd say we were lower-class, that we're idiots, that we came to this country with mops and now we think we're queens,'' she said.

Several dancers complained that they, not the club, had to pay for their nurse, schoolgirl and cowgirl outfits.

''If you said anything to complain, you were fired,'' said Berky Lopez, a former dancer who said she quit because of kidney problems.

Ms. Trejos said the job was not all bad. She loves to dance and liked chatting with -- and being admired by -- the customers, at least those who did not try to grope her. But she said the managers made the job miserable.

She said she hated that the dancers were timed when they were in the dressing room and bathroom. In the evening the dancers were generally prohibited from stepping outside to buy their meals; they were instead relegated to buying food from a vendor who set up shop, selling sandwiches and other items, in the women's bathroom.

Ms. Trejos she said she put up with the job for several years because the money was good, notwithstanding the fines. She often earned $150 to $200 a night, but sometimes as little as $50 or as much as $300. (She said she was fired in February when the management accused her of overcharging a customer, which she denied.)

''I have a mother and two daughters that I support back in Colombia,'' she said. ''My goal was to earn whatever I could earn to support my family.''

Mr. Rubin, the club's lawyer, said many dancers quit other clubs and took jobs at the Flamingo because the money was better and because the club, unlike some others, was firm about keeping out prostitution and drugs.

''If they're complaining about rules, the only rules are ones that protect the integrity of the organization and protect the girls as well,'' he said.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: WAGE VIOLATIONS (90%); HISPANIC AMERICANS (89%); WAGES & SALARIES (89%); WAGE & HOUR LAWS (78%); WORK WEEK (78%); RECRUITMENT & HIRING (76%); SELF EMPLOYMENT (74%); LABOR & EMPLOYMENT LAW (72%); LAWYERS (69%); FINES & PENALTIES (68%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (68%); INTERVIEWS (66%); FREELANCE EMPLOYMENT (71%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (50%)
GEOGRAPHIC: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (76%)
LOAD-DATE: April 10, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: From left, Floricelda Alonzo, Patricia Gonzalez and Diana Trejos, former dancers at the Flamingo in Jackson Heights, Queens. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ULI SEIT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

878 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 10, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Love Your Idea (Don't Want to Finance It)
BYLINE: By BRENT BOWERS
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; IN THE HUNT; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 1151 words
AT age 62, Patrick Brooks believes he has identified the biggest winner yet of his entrepreneurial career: licensing rights to a Savile Row trademark, ''Henry Milbourne & Son -- established 1769.''

The magic of that brand name, he says, should give a major boost to his fledgling effort to sell luxury men's apparel, made in Britain, over the Internet.

But while potential investors had only good things to say about his planned venture, few are willing to invest in it.

''Henry Milbourne has a great plan to combine the old-school industry of custom-tailored shirts with the modern Internet model,'' said Michael Hammond, founder and chief executive of Copana Partners, a New York investment firm.

''Keep working this strategy; it has great potential,'' said Marvin Wilcher, acquisition strategies consultant for Solar Capital in Benicia, Calif.

Still, neither Mr. Hammond nor Mr. Wilcher planned to provide money for Mr. Brooks's venture, Henry Milbourne & Son Ltd. of Arcadia, Calif. (The Web site, http://henrymilbourne.com, is still in the works.)

Mr. Brooks said he had contacted about 500 angel investors and angel-investor groups and 40 venture capital firms and boutique investment bankers over the last year to raise the $2.5 million he thinks he needs. But only nine have put up any money, including his former wife. The total he has raised so far is $475,000.

To some extent, Mr. Brooks is snared in the Catch-22 paradox that bedevils many entrepreneurs who have come up with a promising product and marketing plan: investors are reluctant to open their wallets until they see a functioning business. But it is difficult to create a functioning business until the investors open their wallets.

In addition, he may be looking in the wrong places. Some of the investors he has contacted get involved only in deals worth at least $5 million.

''We have everything in place,'' Mr. Brooks said. ''We have the premises rented; the Web site under construction; the logo done; the marketing plan set up.'' Even the boxes for the $365 custom shirts, $235 ready-to-wear shirts and $108 hand-made silk neckties, all British-made, have been designed, he said. (He plans to branch out from those core products to silk underwear, cashmere hosiery, toiletries, cufflinks and leather goods, and to fragrances made by the supplier to Truefitt & Hill, barbers to the British royal family.)

Moreover, he has invested $600,000 of his own money, including $300,000 for the Henry Milbourne & Son trademark rights, and has spent two years trying to put the company together, paying himself no salary.

Mr. Brooks, a native of St. Vincent in the West Indies, said his African heritage might also be an impediment. The issue is not racism, he said, but the fact that he does not have a network of well-heeled friends and acquaintances that he can tap.

Luke Visconti, co-founder of DiversityInc magazine, which covers diversity in the workplace, said aspiring black entrepreneurs are at a clear disadvantage. ''There are almost no black-run venture firms and very few black angel investors,'' Mr. Visconti said. ''Successful black entrepreneurs are scarce, and they are getting hit on every day.''

As for family and friends, a traditional first stop for start-ups, Mr. Visconti said the average wealth of black households in the United States is one-tenth that of white households.

''The circle of wealth that black people can tap into is minuscule compared with what is available to well-connected white people,'' he said.

Mr. Visconti added that the slowing economy might also be cutting into the funds available for a start-up.

Mr. Brooks conceded that investors were more cautious than they were a year ago, but he said he believed that there were still plenty of deep pockets in search of opportunities.

The real problem, potential investors he has contacted say, is that he needs to narrow his hunt for money.

Mr. Hammond of Copana Partners, for example, said the deal was too small for his firm. ''Unfortunately, start-ups like Henry Milbourne often find themselves in no man's land when looking for capital between $1 million and $5 million,'' he said. ''The capital requested is too small to attract big institutional investors.'' On the other hand, it can be difficult to raise even $1 million from acquaintances or angel investors, he said.

Paul Azous, managing member of the A.Z.O. Group, a consulting firm in Seattle, said, ''That much money for a start-up without a track record -- I've never seen it happen.''

These investors did have some words of advice. Mr. Hammond urged Mr. Brooks to ''better the odds by creating a proof of concept,'' notably by developing a ''full-blown professional-looking home page to communicate to investors his exact brand image, layout, style and Web site.'' He also suggested that Mr. Brooks take a quick test of his products' appeal by standing outside an office building and handing out fliers, then going inside and making pitches door to door. ''Prove to investors that demand exists,'' he said.

Mr. Azous encouraged Mr. Brooks to open a store, seek investors who specialize in retailing and, above all, be persistent. ''It's a marathon, not a sprint,'' he said.

Mr. Brooks accepted some of the advice, like aiming at investors more carefully. But he rejected other parts, like going after tiny investments or peddling high-end apparel on the street.

He remains confident that he can meet his goal of raising $2.5 million by summer. Realizing he needs to jump-start the process, he has hired several professionals over the last month, including lawyers with connections to high-wealth individuals, to scout around for him. ''Three or four good investors would take care of it,'' he said.

In his favor, he has the entrepreneurial gene. As a child growing up in St. Vincent, he made money photographing villagers with his Kodak Brownie 127. In 1989, he started Bio-Dental Technologies with $16,000 in savings and built it into a $33 million distributor of dental products before selling it to Zila for $35 million in 1994, making a seven-figure profit for himself.

His other big money-making adventure was engineering reverse mergers, in which he created public companies, combined them with privately held firms that wanted to go public without dealing with a lot of regulatory problems, and cashed out. He completed eight such transactions, he said, grossing about $2 million.

He said he continued to make progress in his latest venture. Late last week, he said, two investors who previously were not interested in his company took a new look at it, and one wrote a check for $75,000, while the other seems close to making a commitment. He renewed talks with a third investor this week.

''We hope to be operational in about three months,'' Mr. Brooks said. ''This is a company whose time has come.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); VENTURE CAPITAL (90%); MARKETING PLAN (89%); TRADEMARK LAW (89%); LICENSING AGREEMENTS (78%); COSMETICS & TOILETRIES (77%); INTERNET & WWW (76%); FASHION & APPAREL (76%); INVESTMENT BANKING (71%); MEN'S CLOTHING (71%); WEB SITES (67%); READY TO WEAR (77%)
GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED KINGDOM (72%); CARIBBEAN ISLANDS (50%)
LOAD-DATE: April 10, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Patrick Brooks plans to sell luxury men's apparel under the Henry Milbourne brand. So far, investors are hard to come by.

A mock-up of a Henry Milbourne & Son box. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANN JOHANSSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

879 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 10, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

JetBlue's Chairman Will Be Stepping Down
BYLINE: By REUTERS
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 127 words
JetBlue Airways said Wednesday that its founder and chairman, David G. Neeleman, would not stand for re-election at its annual meeting next month.

Mr. Neeleman, who founded JetBlue in 1998, recently announced plans to start a new airline based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and said he would devote his full attention to that venture.

He stepped down as JetBlue's chief executive and took on the role of nonexecutive chairman last May, a few months after the airline miscalculated the effect of an ice storm in New York and had to cancel almost 1,200 flights, stranding thousands of passengers.

Mr. Neeleman, who regards himself more as an entrepreneur than an airline manager, shook up the industry with JetBlue, a low-fare carrier with perks like live television.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: AIRLINES (90%); AIR FARES (88%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (88%)
COMPANY: JETBLUE AIRWAYS CORP (98%)
TICKER: JBLU (NASDAQ) (98%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (91%)
GEOGRAPHIC: SAO PAULO, BRAZIL (71%) NEW YORK, USA (79%) BRAZIL (92%); UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: April 10, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

880 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 9, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

Changes, and a Constant, For New York Jazz Festival
BYLINE: By BEN RATLIFF
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 856 words
Last year when George Wein sold Festival Productions Inc., jazz fans worried about what might happen to the programming of his JVC Jazz Festival New York, the city's biggest and longest-running such event.

But this year's edition, which takes place from June 15 to 28 and whose details were announced Tuesday, turns out to be undiminished and newly energized by welcome changes of locations and some imaginative bookings.

Mr. Wein has been running a jazz festival in New York since 1972, and before that, in 1954, he started the Newport Jazz Festival. His New York festival has rarely been vanguardist. It has often relied on formula or genre crossovers that have diluted its aesthetic integrity. Yet now it appears to be edging closer to a truer reflection of serious jazz, with one of the more promising lineups in recent years.

Mr. Wein's sale of Festival Productions was more like a merger. He and most of his employees went to the new company, the Festival Network LLC.

JVC-New York and about 15 other music festivals around the world are now under the aegis of the new company, and Mr. Wein is no longer the chief executive. (His new title is chairman of the company's Live Events Division.) At the time of the sale he said he intended to keep acting in a managerial role, but there was a natural assumption that Mr. Wein, now 82, might step back from the day-to-day business. Instead, starting last fall, he got more involved, especially once his main festival booker, Danny Melnick, left to start his own company, Absolutely Live Entertainment.

''I just jumped in and did it,'' Mr. Wein said. ''In the past I always made the final decisions, but this was as I hadn't done it in 25 years or more.'' Together with Jason Olaine, a 40-year-old producer hired in November by Festival Network, he booked this year's event.

Mr. Olaine -- whose resume includes six years of booking Yoshi's, the Bay Area jazz club, and working as a record producer at the jazz label Verve -- explained that he was given a mandate by the company, for this festival and others, to find combinations of A-list artists that fit well together for exclusive festival events. ''It isn't really about making the concerts skew younger,'' he said. ''It's just an attempt to reach new audiences.''

Mr. Olaine added that it was initially daunting to work with Mr. Wein. ''He's very direct, and he has so much knowledge of tickets and audiences and scaling,'' he said. ''He'd say that clubs are different from festivals, that the West Coast is different from the East Coast. But then he said, 'O.K., kid, whaddya got?' ''

Mr. Wein said simply, ''We speak the same language.''

As in the past the JVC festival will use Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium for a string of larger shows. They include the bossa nova pioneer Joao Gilberto on June 22, Herbie Hancock's new band on June 23, the pop-jazz trumpeter Chris Botti on June 24, Al Green and Dianne Reeves on June 27 and the Mos Def Big Band with Gil Scott-Heron on June 28. Four concerts will be held in Carnegie's Zankel Hall: the pianists Brad Mehldau (June 22) and Dick Hyman (June 23), the singer Tierney Sutton (June 24) and the French accordion virtuoso Richard Galliano, with his Tangaria Quartet (June 28).

But another set of concerts has been scheduled at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, whose auditorium has never been used by the festival. On June 17 it will be the site of a tribute to Alice Coltrane, including her son Ravi Coltrane, Geri Allen, Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette. Two pianists of radically different stripes play solo performances in a June 20 double-bill: George Cables and Cecil Taylor. On June 24 the Bad Plus, a trio, will for one night add the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel as a fourth member. Another double-bill, on June 25, presents two new young bandleaders, Anat Cohen and Esperanza Spalding, and Charles Lloyd's new quartet, with the pianist Jason Moran, plays on June 28.

And finally, instead of hanging the festival's banner in different self-programmed jazz clubs through the city, Mr. Wein and Mr. Olaine have fully programmed the music in one club, Le Poisson Rouge, a new space occupying the site of the old Village Gate, which closed in 1993. (The club, which holds 200 seated and 750 standing, will start its own regular programming in the fall, Mr. Olaine said.) The shows include Charlie Haden's Quartet West on June 18, Bill Frisell's trio on June 19, the Swedish group E.S.T. with the New York band Aetherial Bace on June 21 and the jazz-funk band Soulive collaborating with the saxophonist Joshua Redman on June 26 and 27. In recognition of the old club's groundbreaking Monday night Salsa Meets Jazz series, the Latin-jazz conguero and the bandleader Poncho Sanchez will perform there on Monday, June 23.

Other concerts will be held at the Rubin Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Prospect Park Bandshell. Tickets go on sale Wednesday at 10 a.m. through the concerts' respective box offices or the festival's Web site, festivalnetwork.com.