The Last Strip Club in Miami Beach

This photo story is taken from VICE magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—you’ll need to subscribe by Friday, August 29 to ensure the summer issue is the first one you’re sent.

I came back that night like I said I would. Joe, the manager, was at the front. We talked. I told him I wasn’t trying to make anyone look bad. I was just there to document something real.

He gave me a shot. And that’s how I fell into the world of The Madonna’s.

At first, I thought I’d just shoot a few portraits. One night, maybe two. But I kept coming back. Night after night. Losing hours under the lights. Watching girls work the pole while tourists blinked in slow motion, overwhelmed and underdressed.

I talked with the dancers in the back during smoke breaks. I explained my project. I was surprised but most of them were into it. Over time, I got to know a few of them. We’d hang out after work, drink together, do coke in the dressing room, trade stories about life and loneliness.

I was high more often than not. One night, I accidentally reloaded my camera with a roll of film I’d already shot. I thought I’d ruined everything. But when I developed it, I saw something kind of magical: double exposures of strippers’ faces layered with bright skies, waves, palm trees, old pastel buildings.

It looked like a dream, or a hallucination. Maybe both. What’s the difference?

“I accidentally reloaded my camera with a roll of film I’d already shot. When I developed it, I saw something kind of magical: double exposures of strippers’ faces layered with bright skies, waves, palm trees…”

THE METH DEALER

I landed in Miami in October 2018 with a vague idea and a half-dead phone. I’d made contact with a guy—I don’t even remember how—but he was a meth dealer. That was enough. I wanted to do a story about him. Follow his life, shadow his deals, soak up the strange rhythm of Ocean Drive from a different angle.

The beach was buzzing. Spring break energy: Heat pressing down like a sweaty palm, EDM and “Te Boté” pouring from open bars as sunburned tourists slowly liquified on the sidewalks.

When we met behind some cheap hotel he was shirtless, rocking gold-frame sunglasses, a battered pack of Coronas swinging from his shoulder. ‘Florida Man.’ We sat on the sand, drinking, facing the ocean. I started taking pictures.

One of his hands was bizarrely swollen, like a balloon. He told me he took a bullet trying to break up a fight a few months earlier. He said it so casually, like telling someone about a stubbed toe.

Then we were moving. He had regulars waiting. He was in good spirits, talking about how we were gonna party later. I told him I wasn’t into meth but I’d be down for a gram of coke to keep the energy up.

After a few handoffs, we sat on the strip of grass that separates Ocean Drive from the boardwalk. I had my little baggie by then, and we were chatting like kids who’d just scored candy. The night felt full of promise, and probably a little doom.

As we started doing keys, I noticed something buzzing overhead. I didn’t think much of it—until three police quads pulled up and boxed us in a minute later. Giant, hairless Miami cops.

First time getting busted by a drone. Welcome to the future.

I was sitting cross-legged, and managed to slide my bag into my sock and wedge it under my foot. Miracle reflex.

After a brief scuffle, they found about a dozen grams of crystal meth on my friend. He was already on probation and now he was toast. As for me, I played dumb. French dumb. “I not know these men,” I said. “I ask for cigarette. I just-ah arrive in Miami. They look nice, so we talk little bit.”

Broken English, wide eyes. Channeling my inner foreign exchange student. One of the cops waved me off. I walked away slowly, playing it cool, even though my heart was thundering. I hadn’t made it 50 feet before I heard the whistle.

Unbelievable. Snitched on by a dealer in Miami.

The cop gave me the classic ultimatum: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. If you tell me what you’ve got, it’s gonna be much easier than if I find it myself.” I kept the act going. “Please, I just land. I not know what they are doing.”

The cop lost patience, pulling off my shoes, sniffing around my waistband, digging his fingers into my socks. Miraculously, again, he somehow missed the bag.

I walked away faster this time. At the next street, I sprinted like hell.

I could’ve ended up in jail my first night in Miami. What a fucking nightmare.

“It became just a story I told to friends or strangers during late-night conversations, somewhere between the eighth drink and the ashtray.”

The next day, with no real plan, I wandered around Washington Avenue. The sun was out. I was fried and floating, unsure what to do, until I passed by this weird building that looked like a set left behind by the Scarface production crew.

Art deco bones. Faded pink trim. Posters of peroxide-blonde women in barely there bikinis lining the facade. The Madonna’s. Totally old school, frozen in time.

A guy was smoking a cigarette at the door. We hit it off surprisingly quick. I told him I’d love to shoot some photos for a magazine—maybe backstage stuff, portraits, whatever. He told me to come back later when it opened and talk to the manager. His name was Joe.

And that’s how I fell into the world of The Madonna’s.

A BIT OF HISTORY

Before I move forward, it’s worth rewinding. The Madonna’s isn’t just a strip club, it’s a relic. A last gasp of sleazy glamor in a city that got too expensive for its own sins. The place was created by Leroy Griffith, a legendary showbiz outlaw who’s been fighting censorship, lawsuits, and city regulations since the 1960s. Griffith carved out a name as both a provocateur and a savvy businessman. Picture Larry Flynt, if he owned a dozen neon-lit burlesque theaters and had a tan that never fades. Griffith’s empire once included peep shows, adult cinemas, and clubs across the Southeast. But The Madonna’s was his Miami masterpiece.

In the 90s, riding the wave of Madonna’s cultural dominance, Griffith opened this club as a tongue-in-cheek tribute slash cynical business move. The name stirred up legal drama with Madonna herself but the buzz only boosted the place. Pink lights, glam dancers, and an atmosphere like one of her music videos gone sideways.

Today, The Madonna’s isn’t flashy like it once was. But it’s the only strip club left in Miami Beach. That’s right. In a city known for wild nights and barely legal everything, this is the last adult club standing. It also holds the only liquor license of its kind in the area, which makes it even more of a unicorn.

Griffith may be more low-key now—he’s 93 years old, after all—but he still pops into the club almost every night with his wife to check out the scene, like a grandfather ghost of Miami vice.

Watching people fall into the world of The Madonna’s.

THE STRIP SCENE

The visit in 2018 was to be the first of many. I couldn’t stay away. I shot more. Met new dancers. New managers. The club was always shifting, always itself. Until, eventually, I did drift away. Back to my normal life in New York. The film negatives sat in my drawer for years, like little memories fading as the years passed. It became just a story I told to friends or strangers during late-night conversations, somewhere between the eighth drink and the ashtray.

What I kept from this whole ride: a couple hundred photos, a handful of half-written memories typed into my phone with one eye open, and a voice memo of the club’s longtime manager, Joe Corvesa, telling me the story behind the angels of Miami Beach’s last standing strip joint.

“Every year, there’s a new batch of 18-year-olds. The older girls try to fight it with surgeries, fake everything. But you can’t fake one thing: skin. A man with money wants to feel young skin. That’s it.”

THE INTERVIEW

“To understand strip clubs, you gotta understand what they really are: a fantasy people pay to live in. It’s a business of illusion, lust, and survival. And once you’re in, it’s almost impossible to get out,” explains Joe, who’s spent two decades watching the strip club business morph from old-school burlesque tease into something far more intense.

“Twenty years ago, you couldn’t even touch the girls,” Joe tells me. “Honestly, it wasn’t a bad gig for the dancers. But then came the Eastern Europeans—Hungarians, Czechs, Slovakians, Russians. Beautiful, and they didn’t care if you touched them. For the same price, they offered more. Suddenly, American girls had to compete. And to compete, they had to allow touching. That’s how friction dancing became the new normal.”

Joe managed clubs in Queens and Manhattan before moving to Miami. “When I arrived? Man, it was like another planet. Fully nude. Friction. Private rooms where… Well, things happened that weren’t supposed to. Miami’s not a city—it’s a playground with a resort mentality.”

He’s seen people get sucked in from every angle—dancers, bartenders, even himself. “The money’s too fast, too good. Dancers tell themselves they’ll save up, go to school. But you’re making in a few hours what people make in a week—cash. No taxes. No rules. How do you go back to a ‘normal’ job after that?”

Joe lights another cigarette. “No dancer uses her real name. Jennifer becomes ‘Karen.’ And the longer she stays, the more she becomes Karen. ‘Jennifer’ fades out. Disappears. Every night, these girls see married men—doctors, lawyers, cops; guys with wives, kids, good jobs—coming in and chasing 20-year-olds. You think that doesn’t mess with your head?

“The worst part,” Joe says, “is time. Every year, there’s a new batch of 18-year-olds. The girls in their thirties try to fight it with surgeries, fake everything. But you can’t fake one thing: skin. A man with money wants to feel young skin. That’s it.

“One night, back in New York, I was managing a club. Mixed neighborhood, a lot of Orthodox Jews. This old rabbi comes in. He asks how much for a private room. I’m already shocked. Then he picks a girl—very dark-skinned, not what I expected.

“Two minutes later, the girl comes out, eyes wide like she saw a ghost. ‘Joe, oh my God, what am I doing?’ So I go in. The rabbi’s completely naked. Except for the yarmulke.

“I said, ‘Rabbi, what are you doing?’ He looks at me dead serious and says, ‘I know, but I can’t let this Black girl sit on my clothes.’ The clothes were more sacred to him than the act itself.”

Joe shakes his head. He now sees the world in layers that can’t be unpeeled. “You see a guy with his wife and kids walking by in the daylight. You pretend not to know him. But you saw him last week, asking to get slapped, asking to be humiliated. What happens in the strip club stays in the strip club. But once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to forget.”

Before we wrap, I ask him: Does he regret getting into this line of work?

He pauses. Long drag. “The money’s good. But sometimes, I wonder. I see what women will do for money, what men will pay for. And I ask myself—how do you trust anyone after this?”

Maybe you can’t. Maybe the best thing to do is to give in, and fall into the world of The Madonna’s.