Never stepped into a strip bar?

Ignoring the massage parlor down the street?

Doesn’t matter. You, too, may be profiting from Florida’s $1.5 billion adult entertainment industry.

Like any major business, the 2,000-business, 25,000-employee sex industry has spawned an extensive support network.

It includes doctors who profit by making exotic dancers more exotic; newspapers and magazines that sell advertising that helps men find the best call girls $200 can buy; lawyers who make a living protecting sex entrepreneurs from government regulation; and corporations and shop owners who thrive by distributing sex entertainment.

Take Dr. Patrick Graham, for example. Twenty-five percent of the Delray Beach plastic surgeon’s practice is dedicated to enhancing the natural assets of exotic dancers.

It’s lucrative.

Dancers come to him for fuller lips: $2,500.

A few want liposuction: $1,000 per site.

Most want bigger breasts: $4,500 to $7,000, depending on size.

Breast implants are one of his specialties. On average, he says, six of the 15 breast enhancement surgeries he performs each month are for strippers. His ads, which run in local adult magazines, target exotic dancers. “Dr. Graham knows breasts,” they boast.

“These women feel that a large bust will help them make more money,” the prim Dr. Graham said. “And, after an operation, their income significantly increases. A lot of them have B-size cups naturally and they want a full-C or a small D. For these women, it’s strictly a business decision.”

If they want the big money, most dancers end up in the operating room of a plastic surgeon. The more glamorous the strip bar, the more perfect the body must be.

The payoff can be sizable: hundreds of dollars in tips per night.

Graham makes it an affordable investment, too. When a dancer doesn’t have the cash, his staff helps her find financing through the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. It’s a two-year loan with interest rates of 14 to 24 percent.

And then there are always some benevolent gentlemen.

“A lot of them come in here with sugar daddies,” said the doctor, father of three boys. “They manage to find some guy somewhere who’ll pay for the surgery.”

Newspaper ads

They may never step into a strip bar, but 1,500 reporters, editors, press operators and advertising representatives at the Sun-Sentinel _ and twice as many collectively at The Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post _ reap the benefits of a thriving sex industry.

Last year, Tribune Co.-owned Sun-Sentinel made more than $750,000 in revenue from selling advertising space to topless bars, escort services and massage parlors.

The ads have long been a source of controversy for the newspapers. Local police officials and community activists often request that they voluntarily stop running them, especially those for escort services.

“The Sun-Sentinel and the others are aiding and abetting prostitution, and supporting a criminal organization,” said Detective Vincent Rizzitello of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s Organized Crime Division. “I’ve never seen an escort service that doesn’t provide prostitution, and the paper knows it. Newspapers are the biggest pimps in the county.”

Rizzitello said his squad used the Sun-Sentinel sports pages _ where most of the ads run _ on Sept. 25 to call four escort services from a hotel room. There, posing as customers, officers arrested eight women and charged them with prostitution.

Sun-Sentinel spokesman Richard Pollack said the paper is just accepting ads from businesses that are licensed by government agencies. Counties usually license escort services as “adult entertainment.”

“Government holds the primary responsibility for ensuring that illegal businesses do not operate in our community,” Pollack said. “If government officials determine that a business is not legally operated by denying it a license . . . we’ll re-evaluate its viability as an advertiser.”

Adult entertainment ads in the Sun-Sentinel must follow certain guidelines: They are not published on Sundays, run only in certain parts of the newspaper and must be in good taste _ without vulgar language, nudity or lewd photographs. And they are relegated to the back sports pages, which are well read by men but regarded by mainstream advertisers as the least desirable newspaper space.

The newspaper charges more for adult entertainment ads, too. Rates for adult entertainment display ads are $155 to $175 per column-inch per day, or about 50 percent more than for non-adult businesses.

“As with any advertisement rates, these rates reflect what people are willing to pay and how much value they feel they get,” Pollack said.

In the classified pages, or “want ads,” rates are $200 for a three-line escort service ad for one week _ about $30 more than the highest rate for other businesses.

In August 1995, the Broward alternative weekly XS, now called City Link, decided to do away with the tabloid’s most risque ads. The paper is owned by Gold Coast Publications, a subsidiary of the Sun-Sentinel Co.

Former City Link Publisher Stephen Wissink pulled personal ads for threesomes and wife-swapping along with dozens of large display ads for sex phone lines, strip clubs and escort services _ complete with provocative pictures.

“We lost $500,000,” Wissink said. “But we made it up in credibility and mainstream, national ads. We’ve seen a sharp increase in circulation over the past two years, and it’s partly due to our decision to stop running them.

“We were seen as a sleaze publication. Women readers were alienated. . . . My decision was strictly a business decision.”

Magazines out of mainstream

South Florida is also home to a half-dozen flourishing local sex-related magazines, mostly vehicles for advertisements that no mainstream publication will accept.

Scoop Magazine, After Dark and Hot Spots, among others, feature personal ads for sex partners and strip clubs, escort services, massage parlors and dominatrixes.

In May, a new magazine, Florida Play Time, appeared on the newsstands and in adult establishments. This freebie, the brainchild of 20-year Fort Lauderdale resident Trisha Caruso, 49, primarily features ads for strip bars and escort services and a few photo essays, all with naked women.

Caruso, a grandmother, said she decided to start the magazine because she saw how much money could be made.

She invested slightly less than $15,000 and hired three full-time employees. By year’s end, she figures, she’ll be generating sales of at least $40,000 a month.

“I mainly owned clothing stores in my life,” Caruso said. “If I had known the volume of adult entertainment was this phenomenal, I would have started sooner.”

Caruso’s mag competes with the granddaddy of the local sex-related magazines, Xcitement, considered a must-read for anyone interested in South Florida adult entertainment.

Four years ago, Xcitement was a gritty, badly printed tabloid in which full-page ads sold for $200. Now it is a slick, full-color 130-page monthly with a circulation of 35,000 in the tri-county area. A full-page ad sells for up to $1,500.

The magazine’s parent company, the locally owned Media International Inc., recently made two private offerings of stock, at $5 a share. The stock offering was expected to raise $3.1 million. The company has 30 investors nationally.

Few read Xcitement for the stories. They’re few and far between: Obscenity-laden opinion columns; legal advice for industry insiders; gossip and reviews of pornographic literature and videos. There are also short stories, cartoons and maps directing readers to local adult entertainment businesses.

Xcitement’s main purpose is its ads, which take up three-quarters of its space. Naked, provocatively posed women hawk massage parlors, strip bars, S&M; studios and escort services.

A yearly subscription for the magazine costs $69.95, although it can be found free of charge in most businesses that advertise in it. New issues usually vanish from the racks as soon as they appear.

“We usually get batches of 1,000 Xcitement at a time and they go like crazy,” said Mordecai Benowitz, owner of Adult Video Warehouse near Pompano Beach.

With the magazine’s success, parent company Enternet is diversifying. In the spring, it started a more outrageous, cheaper-looking offshoot called Xtra Hot. The company’s offices, just north of Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport on Powerline Road, recently were outfitted with an on-premises studio for taping soft-core movies.

Xcitement publisher Bob Newman declined to be interviewed for this story.

In defense of sex

Because of the controversy spawned by anything that has to do with sex, adult entertainment feeds a battery of lawyers.

They are First Amendment lawyers, authorities in the legal nuances of the constitutional amendment that guarantees freedom of expression. Courts have ruled that the Constitution also protects nude dancing, pornography and pretty much anything that courts don’t deem “obscene.”

Former University of Florida roommates James Benjamin and Daniel Aaronson practice law from an office perched high in downtown Fort Lauderdale’s tallest building. With its leather sofas, breathtaking view and extensive collection of law books, the place whispers “money.”

With clients that include street hookers, fancy madams and sex-bookstore owners, Benjamin and Aaronson, both 42 and fathers of two children each, defend commercial sex.

“We’re not pimps,” Benjamin said. “We just believe that government should not tell people what they should see or read. If people want to read or see most despicable things, they should be able to.”

Someone wants to open a new massage parlor? If he’s willing to dish out $50,000, Benjamin and Aaronson will guide the owner through the licensing process.

A prostitute offered undercover cops a sex act for money? They’ll defend her in court for up to $2,500.

A strip bar threatened by a strict new ordinance? Call Benjamin and Aaronson, and expect to pay at least $50,000 in legal fees.

How efficient are they? If nothing else, they say, they’ll stall pending ordinances for years.

They were instrumental in preventing the enforcement of a tough Broward County ordinance regulating the adult entertainment industry in unincorporated areas _ although it was approved by the County Commission in 1993.

That ordinance is supposed to prohibit lap and friction dances, separate patrons from dancers with a partition, and force the owners of adult businesses to undergo background checks. It could run several adult establishments out of business, Benjamin said.

The lawyers sued on behalf of several businesses to block its enforcement.

In September, four years after the law was approved, the Florida Supreme Court finally refused to hear the industry’s argument on why it should not be enforced. Several weeks later, sheriff’s deputies raided four strip clubs in unincorporated areas, arresting 81 people _ including patrons, strippers and club managers.

The lawyers have now taken their case to federal court.

“Eventually, we’ll have this one declared unconstitutional, too,” said Benjamin, who as a former assistant state attorney prosecuted prostitution and obscenity cases. “Dancing is protected by the Constitution.”

“If you’re going to regulate adult entertainment out of business, you might as well run Calvin Klein out of business,” said Aaronson, a former Dade County public defender. “A lot of businesses use sex.”

Being on the side of the sex industry hasn’t made them popular.

“People have called us ‘devils.’ We’ve been asked, ‘How can you guys live with yourselves?’ ” Benjamin said. “But we have the same values as everyone else. We just want to live in a country where adult entertainment is permitted.”

Cash for corporations

Even if corporate America gets queasy at the word “sex,” it has cashed in on adult entertainment as well.

Americans spent about $350 million on “900” phone sex lines last year. About $80 million went to AT&T; and $30 million to MCI, said New York telecommunication consultant Mark Plakias.

For 68 cents to $3.99 per minute, callers who access the services can listen to “actresses” simulate sex acts.

The phone companies have no choice but to provide the service.

“We are mandated by law to provide phone service to anyone who’ll pay, even if the content is sexual in nature,” said Janet Wyles, an AT&T; spokeswoman.

Hotels, too, get into the act.

Soft-core porn pay-per-view movies are offered at a majority of hotels _ large chains such as Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton, Holiday Inn, or at small family-owned motels.

The hotel’s take is usually $1 per order. In some rooms, there may be as many as 10 sex movies. Industry insiders say porn movies are ordered by 33,000 hotel guests each year in South Florida.

“It does generate a little income,” said Gordon Lambourne, a spokesman for Marriott Lodging. “We offer it because there’s a demand for it, and because our competition offers it, too.”

Those who provide home entertainment via cable TV or satellite dish make a little money, too.

Tom Chiappetta, director of marketing for the pay-per-view company Request, said that each time his company presents a show with strong sexual content, it is purchased by almost 9,000 homes in the tri-county area. The profits are split equally between the local cable company and Denver-based Request. Each showing represents an income of about $30,000.

Some neighborhood stores and local businesses owe their existence to adult entertainment.

For small, family-owned video stores in the area, renting out X-rated tapes can make the difference between bankruptcy and financial stability. Large chains such as Blockbuster Video have eroded the revenues of smaller neighborhood stores, and they survive because they offer something Blockbuster doesn’t: X-rated stuff.

In these mom-and-pop shops, porno videos are often kept in back rooms, with access restricted to those who can prove they’re 21 or older.

“X-rated is the only thing that keeps places like ours . . . in business,” said Peter Polazzotto, who owns three Michele’s Video stores in Broward. “It represents 20 percent of our revenues.”

As if Blockbuster weren’t competition enough, mom-and-pop video shops like Polazzotto’s have more trouble coming.

It’s called Adult Video Warehouse, a corporate chain that has opened two stores in South Florida and has another in the works.

Its owner says he’s in the business for a simple reason: There’s lots of money to be made.