Jonathan Shecter - Page 3

Even with poker-tournament winnings that total over $200,000, Shecter’s primary gig is Hip-Hop Honeys, a DVD series that since 2001 has sold over 400,000 discs of multicultural girls posing naked (or close to it). Not long after leaving The Source, he tried to start a “sexy, Playboy-type magazine for the hip-hop generation.” British-style “laddie” magazines like Maxim and Stuff had yet to crop up on American soil, though, and publishing houses were hesitant. Out of frustration, Shecter used photos from his prospective publication as titillating cover art for a series of vinyl singles on Game Recordings, an indie label he began with DJ Stretch Armstrong. Their most notable release—which introduced Eminem and Royce Da 5’9” as the tag-team Bad Meets Evil—depicted a pair of beauties in black leather lingerie and high heels. The “Game Girls” became his version of the Playboy Bunnies, and Shecter became Shecky Green, hip-hop’s Hugh Hefner.

After five years of constant shuttling between Nevada and New York, Shecter moved to Las Vegas permanently in 2002. It’s here, in a city of unabashed tackiness, wild-eyed hedonism, and buildings rising from the squandered retirement savings of countless Americans, that he found nirvana. An ideal location for his twin pursuits of hardcore gaming and softcore porn, it was also fertile soil for reinvention. “After years of writing about other people, there was a desire in my mind to be the one written about,” says Shecky.

“Here I can be who I want to be,” he continues. “It’s not embarrassing that I put out Hip-Hop Honeys. In New York, I might walk into a room and some Time magazine guy might be like, ‘Ooh, you do what?’ But here, it’s all good.” Partly because he is a true believer in the possibilities of this neon-bathed oasis—and partly because he has sutured his new identity to it—Shecky is both an ambassador and defender of the city to visiting East Coast cognoscenti from his former life. “Everyone finds their own Vegas,” he likes to say.

Still, the question never fully vanishes: Can poker, champagne, and a parade of party girls be enough for an Ivy League grad who founded The Source in hopes of joining Rolling Stone and The Village Voice as a cultural institution? “As a person with a good education and an intellectual background,” he admits, “there was a side of me that felt guilty about my newfound love affair with Las Vegas. [But] I’ve learned so much more about business and the entertainment industry, about the economy of the planet earth—not everyone here is a brainless partyer.”

Cue the strip club. Crazy Horse Too Gentlemen’s Club (which was raided by the feds in 2003, reportedly as part of an investigation of the club’s alleged organized-crime ties) is an unlikely locale for high-minded pursuits. But while you can take the boy out of Harvard, you can’t take the Harvard out of the strip-club patron. Shecky claims to have developed a technique for “penetrating” the stripper/customer relationship; in a startling twist, it involves spending money.

Leaning against the bar, and bookended by a pair of Asian exotic dancers, Shecky does what he’s always done: turn a good idea into a better life. “I’m going to spend some time with this one,” he whispers after a time, signaling the shorter and more silicone-stuffed of the two. And he and his companion depart for the grander dreams of the champagne room.