Mayor Greg Nickels has refused a request by Rick's strip club attorney Gil Levy to rescind his allegations linking Rick's to organized crime or to examine the club's financial records for evidence of mob activity. (Nickels has provided no evidence for his claims.) Speaking on his Seattle Channel call-in show, Nickels said he believed Rick's, which was implicated in the "Strippergate" campaign-contribution scandal in 2003, was engaged in "an organized attempt to buy influence on the council." You might think a mayor who spent thousands of dollars in city money to promote his Alaskan Way tunnel would be sympathetic to a group that spent thousands of dollars lobbying the council; but Nickels said the lobbying push was how he "defines organized crime."
Three weeks ago, Levy struck back, urging Nickels in a July 24 letter to take back his statements linking Rick's to mob activity. "Given the scope of the [Strippergate] investigation, and given the diligence of the deputy prosecutors who conducted the investigation, one can reasonably assume that any and all criminal conduct in which my client and its principals might have been engaged would have been discovered and appropriate charges filed." The only charges in Strippergate involved campaign-finance violations, not criminal activity. On its face, Nickels's claim seems, at best, like a last-ditch effort to defeat the strip clubs' $500,000 campaign to repeal anti-strip-club legislation passed earlier this year.
Levy went on to offer Nickels "a complete and thorough inspection of my financial records by any independent auditing agency that you suggest, and [I] will pay for the cost of the audit." The mayor did not respond to the offer, which Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis calls "an offer we could refuse," within the 10-day deadline Levy set. Levy subsequently sent the same offer to several local papers, including The Stranger. 
