MONICA Alves just can't stay out of the headlines. In November 1995, the 29-year-old exotic dancer was arrested in the highly publicized raid of a Kauai lap-dancing enterprise, owned by Carl Richie. Carl and Monica:
two lives behind barsLap-dancing -- know what that is? It's when some horny guy sits in a chair and pays a scantily clad babe to gyrate within inches of his face. Sounds tribal but, hey, whatever turns a person on...
When Alves was in custody, she claimed to have been sexually fondled and photographed by four police officers and a sergeant. The headlines announced her accusations and she was hastily released. In an out-of-court settlement, she got 250,000 smackeroos from Kauai County.
Richie had a very different experience with Garden Island authorities. He was charged and convicted of prostitution and racketeering, and sentenced to 10 years in the slammer. Then he was furtively shipped off to the spacious jails in the great state of Texas.
End of story? Unfortunately not.
Earlier this month, more ink was devoted to Alves and her husband, Mitchell Peralto, when they were charged with the kidnapping and murder of Monica's cousin, Kimberly Washington Cohen.
According to witness accounts, the couple beat the 23-year-old woman for two hours on July 11, before throwing her into their car trunk and driving off. Her bruised and suffocated body was found in a shallow grave at Wailua Houselots.
Once again, a furor is whipped up around the activities of Alves. Yet Richie's existence is mostly forgotten.
Fait accompli? Fortunately not.
While his vocal advocates are few, they are determined to free Carl Richie. According to Faye Kennedy, spokeswoman for the newly assembled group of community leaders, while they do not endorse Richie's lifestyle or his choice of livelihood, they do protest his overly harsh punishment.
It does seem a stretch. If lap-dancing is prostitution, then the "pros" in Oahu strip clubs and hostess bars clearly outnumber those trolling Kalakaua and Kuhio.
But the group's concern doesn't end there. Its members are also hinting, in the most diplomatic way possible, that Richie's conviction by a Kauai jury and sentencing by Circuit Court Judge George Masuoka may have been racially motivated. That's because in Hawaii, made up of its rainbow of divergent cultures, Richie is a true minority: He is black.
That discrimination charge will be very difficult to prove. But it won't be hard to show that 10 years behind bars for employing lap-dancers is going way overboard.
Remember, this is the same penal system that dispensed a few months in the detention facility for a young man who pushed a cop to his death from a freeway overpass, and a year in jail and five years' probation for a former schoolteacher convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl.
WE haven't read the last newspaper account on Alves and her husband, as they now move through the same Kauai judiciary that hammered Richie.
As they do, though, remember that a community is what a community deems to be important. Does Hawaii think that a person who supplies adult entertainment to consenting grown-ups is one of the worst criminals to plague society?
It the answer is yes, be prepared for a tax hike. We are going to need a lot more prison space.