- It was the most famous
exotic male review of all
exotic male review of all time.
- Chippendales was fueled on total, wild, open sex.
- It was woman power.
They could go there and be themselves.
- Shows were sold out around the world.
The merchandise flew off the shelves.
- Chippendales was a multi-million dollar
international brand.
- Everybody's fantasy.
- The Chippendales saga features
a cast of characters straight out of Hollywood,
including a Playboy Playmate...
- Dorothy was a liaison with Mr. Hefner.
- ...an award-winning TV producer...
- De Noia was seeing all this cash.
And he kept hammering,
"I want more. I want more."
- ...and at the center of the drama,
a man who lived the American dream
but who became consumed with protecting his empire.
- Steve Banerjee was insanely jealous.
- Steve Banerjee's insatiable
need for power turned deadly.
- Somewhere along the line, he snapped.
- He wants these people killed.
- I'm Soledad O'Brien. This is
"Mysteries and Scandals" --
The Chippendales Murder.
The music blares, and muscular men take off their clothes
while women scream.
From "Magic Mike" to the Thunder Down Under,
male strippers are the poster boys of pop culture.
But at the dawn of the 1980s,
when Reaganomics and big hair dominated the landscape,
a male strip show was new and daring,
the special attraction of a club called Chippendales.
The club became world famous, and Chippendales' owner,
Steve Banerjee, made millions.
Did Banerjee's desire for wealth, fame,
and power lead to murder?
The year was 1987.
In New York, Los Angeles, and cities around the world,
music throbbed as muscular dancers strutted and stripped,
the rooms packed with screaming women.
- It was the 80s. The 80s were insane,
and Chippendales was just a big part of that insanity.
- Chippendales tapped into the excess of the decade,
where anything was possible
and nothing seemed too extreme.
Women were demanding equal rights
when it came to sex and entertainment.
- The '80s was the best time for Chippendales
because of the women's movement.
There was this second wave of feminism just getting started.
- Chippendales was fueled on total, wild, open sex.
That's why girls went down there.
- Buddy, you're not wearing any underwear!
Don't encourage him. He'll do it.
- The time was right. It was girl power, woman power,
and this was a sanctuary for women.
They could go there and be themselves.
- Women could put money in the jockstraps
and get kisses and all that.
- They could scream and yell,
and we could never do that before Chippendales.
- It was set up to feed in to everybody's fantasy.
- Welcome to your fantasy at Chippendales.
- But on the night of April 7, 1987,
there was a bloody reality behind the fantasy.
Just a few hours earlier, Nick De Noia,
the producer and choreographer
who created the Chippendales dances,
the man behind the dreams of so many women,
was dead, gunned down in his New York City office
by an unknown assassin.
Police were on the scene within minutes.
They saw the aftermath of an execution,
but at first there seemed to be no leads at all.
- Here was a murder that occurred
in a busy office building,
and nobody remembered anything.
There was nothing that stood out.
There was no elevator cameras.
There was none of that.
It was like we just couldn't get a break.
The person came in, did what he had to do,
and he left,
just faded into a crowd.
- We thought maybe it was some vendetta, personal,
you know, love triangle, involving De Noia.
And they pulled all those possibilities out.
- There was some business partners that we looked at,
but we didn't find anything that linked any of them
whatsoever to the death of Mr. De Noia.
- The case began to go cold.
In Los Angeles, Chippendales attorney,
Bruce Nahin, raised money
for a reward to help catch the killer.
- We were getting money from all sorts of people.
Barry Manilow donated money
because he was one of Nick's friends.
And tons of other people donated money.
- Contributions poured in from celebrities to stagehands,
but the man who owned Chippendales,
Steve Banerjee, refused.
- I asked for a donation, and he said, "F--- you,
he got what he deserved."
- At the time, the refusal stunned Nahin.
- I don't know why Steve Banerjee
acted the way he did on so many things.
You'd have to ask Sigmund Freud.
- What Nahin didn't know was
that Steve Banerjee held the key
to the mystery of Nick De Noia's murder.
The events that led up to the brutal slaying began
in Los Angeles in the early 1970s.
- Steve came from Bombay, which now is Mumbai,
and his family, I think, two, three,
four generations back, were printers.
He came like everyone comes to America, with a dream.
- Banerjee explained his dream of success in a rarely seen
promotional interview from 1986.
- Banerjee launched his rise to power in 1973.
He bought a bankrupt Los Angeles nightclub,
The Round Robin,
and renamed it "Destiny II."
- It was a backgammon club.
Backgammon at the time was huge.
It was like playing video games today.
- After a few years, Banerjee decided the club
required a more elegant name.
Steve's attorney and business partner, Bruce Nahin,
was inspired by the tables and chairs
that came with the property.
- We were throwing ideas out. I said,
"Well, the furniture's Chippendale style,
so let's call it that."
- Now, the renamed club needed a special attraction
to bring in the really big crowds.
- We tried things like magic shows and dinner theater,
anything to fill the time.
- In 1978, Banerjee got some advice
from a Canadian entrepreneur
who often hung out at Chippendales.
- The myth was that Paul Snider came there a lot.
So he's kind of a lowlife, talker wannabe.
Wanted to be part of the whole nightclub scene.
- Snider came up with a way to attract an untapped market.
- Paul came to the club one day
and pitched the idea of the male stripper.
We tried it for a day, and we tried it for two,
and it started to grow.
- They were trying to feel it out.
They were trying to figure out, you know, if it was gonna work
'cause no one had ever done it before.
- We started off in the beginning very raw.
We had jockstraps with Velcro,
so the girls could pull them off,
violating probably every law
in the Alcohol Beverage Commission.
- Banerjee wanted to give the strip show elegance and class.
Part of the solution came from Paul Snider's wife.
- Paul was married to a gorgeous lady, Dorothy Stratten.
- Dorothy Stratten was an actress
and Playboy centerfold
who worked briefly at one of Hugh Hefner's Playboy clubs.
Stratten was inspired by the bunny costume
she wore with its collars and cuffs
and suggested a similar look for the Chippendales men.
- That was Dorothy's contribution, 100%.
- With collars and cuffs, I still have them.
- Dorothy was a liaison with Mr. Hefner for a while.
Mr. Hefner gave us the right to utilize the costume
much like the bunny costume.
So the dancers and ushers would walk around
with cuffs and collars and bare chests,
fulfilling the ladies' dreams being waited on.
- Playboy was huge back then, and Steve Banerjee idolized
Hugh Hefner so much
and wanted to become the Hugh Hefner for women.
- By 1980, Banerjee's new more elegant strip show
attracted hoards of eager women.
- You've got to credit Banerjee for this.
He made the show feel sexy,
safe, very clean,
and guys were supposed to look at each woman
like that's their girlfriend for the night.
And these women went for that kind of magic.
- As Chippendales gained traction in Los Angeles,
it seemed that Steve Banerjee's dream
was coming true.
But that dream was marred by a real life nightmare.
Dorothy Stratten fell in love with film director
Peter Bogdanovich
and left her husband, Paul Snider.
- Snider was obsessive. He was kind of a nutjob,
and probably cocaine had a lot to do with it.
- On August 14, 1980, Snider murder Dorothy Stratten
with a 12-guage shotgun,
then killed himself.
- Her murder is sad, sick.
- In what may have been an eerie
foreshadowing of things to come,
two people who helped create
the Chippendales image were dead.
News about the bloody murder-suicide
could have destroyed another club's reputation,
but it was ignored by the throngs of women
who kept lining up for a fun night out.
- When Paul Snider killed Dorothy Stratten,
everybody was shocked, but it wasn't a scandal for us at all.
It didn't affect us.
- Chippendales survived, but for Steve Banerjee,
merely surviving wasn't enough.
- Banerjee always had this bigger dream
of what he wanted to do with it.
I heard him talk about Playboy,
but he always talked about Walt Disney.
He always talked about growing Chippendales
into this Disneyland attraction.
I don't even know how he thought.
You know, it's not a family show, but he wanted to expand.
He had his dreams.
- And Steve Banerjee would go to any extreme
to make those dreams a reality.
It was the era when excess was celebrated,
and the strip club for women
was about to become an iconic symbol of the '80s.
But would Chippendales' success
lead to a deadly backstage rivalry?
- Nick became the one who got all the publicity,
and Banerjee was being slighted,
and it just fueled his hatred toward Nick.
- In early 1981, the Chippendales Club in Los Angeles
was becoming one of the city's hotspots,
thanks to the male strippers who performed
for crowds of delighted women.
Owner Steve Banerjee thought his strippers
could bring him fame and fortune
if he could turn a popular show into a must-see experience.
So Banerjee made a creative decision
that would lead to murder.
By mid 1981, a stranger
started showing up at the club,
some times in his own Chippendales costume.
- I used to see him at the club. He'd come in
and stand in the corner, and wearing the spandex pants,
cuffs, and collar and stand and watch the show.
He was this 40-something-year old gray haired guy,
gray chest hair, at the Chippendales show,
and we're like, "Who is this guy?"
- Nick De Noia was a Emmy award-winning producer.
He was married for a while to Jennifer O'Neill,
a very famous actress at the time.
He liked to hang out at the Chippendales club.
Went to Banerjee, "This is a great idea,
"but you know, I could put some music in there.
"You know, you could make this fun, you know?
Make it into a show."
He was that kind of impulsive driven-by-fire New Yorker.
If he said it, the next second it was done.
- Steve was the mastermind when it came to the business
of operating Chippendales,
but he needed Nick De Noia's creativity
to take the club to a higher level,
so Banerjee put De Noia in charge of the show.
- Cut!
You know, for about two weeks now I've been telling you,
"Damn it, Bob, this is slow."
Ladies, watch this.
- Nick came in with background dancers.
The music was choreographed to the act itself,
and he made sure everybody hit a certain spot.
- Get your leg up! It's hot.
- It became a Broadway production caliber.
This was largely, of course, attributable
to bringing Nick De Noia in.
- By 1983, the new and improved Chippendales
was the place to go
for birthdays, bachelorette parties,
or just a wild night out with girlfriends.
- The boyfriends and their dad and their brother
wasn't there saying, "Hey, hey, hey. Calm down."
- This was the hottest thing in all of Los Angeles.
- Take it off.
- The word was out.
- One of the things that the strippers would do is find
a woman--They'd pick one they liked.
Usually the giggly, kind of animated, type.
She's drunk, and she's laughing.
She's having a good time. She got her legs
wrapped around him, and the guy's dancing with her,
and she pees herself.
I saw this puddle on the floor.
A guy came up with his mop and mopped it up and left,
and the show just went on like it never happened.
It happened more times than I can count on my fingers.
- One woman came down every night with a stack,
like $1,000 worth, of singles,
and loaded those guys' g-strings up with them
just so she could imagine having sex with them.
- For some women, the Chippendales dream came true.
- I went back to the men's room,
opened the door, and low and behold,
there's a woman spread-eagle in the door frame
while the guy was having sex with her.
She looked really happy. I have to say that.
- Nights at Chippendales could also get physical
in a different way.
- At the club, there was no food,
so the women would drink for three
or four hours on empty stomachs.
- Repeat after me. "Look, but don't touch."
- It was what you would think would happen.
The women would fight each other over a guy
that didn't even know they were there.
There were fistfights. Hair pulling was a weekly event.
- I had to fix the problems in the morning that happened
at night--damages, people falling off of tables
'cause they were drunk,
police complaints, fire department raids.
- He wanted to make Chippendales
into a Broadway show.
He wanted to make it in to a TV show.
He wanted to make it in to a Vegas nightclub.
- Here are the Chippendales!
- Put the Chippendales dancers on a lot of shows at the time.
His goal was to get as much publicity as possible.
- But when Chippendales was featured on news
and talk programs,
it was producer and choreographer Nick De Noia
who was hailed as the creative force behind the strip club.
- Women have never had this before.
We men never permitted them to have it before,
and damn it, what I've created is going to be
the most important entertainment
in the world for women.
- Tension began to build between De Noia and Banerjee.
- Nick wanted the fame.
Banerjee, I think, wanted the tap on the back.
- So publicity-wise, Steve never considered that he,
Steve, should be the one on camera.
It was always to be Nick,
but Nick then became the one who got all the publicity.
Banerjee felt he was being slighted
and was insanely jealous
that Nick became the face of Chippendales.
- The friction led to fights that Banerjee always lost.
- Banerjee, when he'd try to get a word out,
De Noia would have, like, 20 words out, and Banerjee,
all he could say is like, "You--You--You--You--You--"
De Noia would finish his lancing and storm out of the office,
and Banerjee would just sit there and go "Motherf---er."
- He would leave every time utterly frustrated,
and it just fueled his hatred toward Nick.
- For a while, Banerjee soothed his wounded ego
by counting the money Chippendales made,
not only from the clubs, but from an expanding
catalogue of merchandise.
- He did playing cards. He did calendars, coffee mugs.
He did, you know, g-strings. Everything sold.
- Banerjee got married in 1984.
He could provide his wife, Irene,
with whatever she wanted.
- He was just this kind of odd little guy
that lucked into this thing
that became a world-wide phenomenon,
which, I think, shocked him as much as it shocked anybody else.
His wife said that holding on to that,
that was the most important thing in his life.
She told me once,
"The show was probably more important to him than I am."
- But shortly after the honeymoon, Nick De Noia
came to Banerjee with a new demand.
- So De Noia was seeing all this cash
that Banerjee was pulling in,
and De Noia kept hammering at him,
"You know, look, I want more. I want more."
- We went out. It was the three of us,
and Nick was talking about
"I can bring Chippendales on the road,"
and he said, "This is what I want."
He wrote it down on the napkin, showed it to Steve.
Steve signed it, and that was it.
They just signed it on a napkin. I was just there eating.
- The napkin deal was Nick would get half of our share
in New York and of all the money from the tours.
- As Nick told me about the napkin deal,
there were only clubs.
There was no tour, so when Steve gave Nick touring rights,
Steve was giving Nick nothing.
- By 1984, that wasn't the case.
De Noia was producing tours
that brought Chippendales dancers
to cities across the country.
For Banerjee and De Noia, the tours changed everything.
- The tours became the biggest source of money more so
than our fixed clubs.
Fixed clubs are expensive, but the tours,
we'd go into somebody else's property, mount the show,
and walk out with a lot of money.
- At the height of Chippendales, it was freaky.
Just the sound tapes of the show in London,
it's three hours of screaming.
It's like the Beatles.
You can't hear any music. You just hear screaming.
- Banerjee began to suspect that De Noia
was betraying the napkin deal
and holding back tour money.
- Oh, that's 100%.
It's because Nick was-- in Steve's mind--stealing.
- Nick had me keeping receipts religiously.
Nick never cheated Steve out of one penny.
- Nick De Noia helped Steve Banerjee
build his empire of sexual fantasy.
Along the way, did De Noia
become too rich and famous for his own good?
Banerjee now saw De Noia as a rival.
What was the catalyst that would turn him into an enemy?
- Banerjee started to become very dark.
He just thought everyone was out to get him.
- For years, Steve Banerjee made a fortune
from his male strip show, Chippendales.
But Banerjee believed wrongly that his partner,
Nick De Noia, was stealing from him, and at the same time,
Chippendales faced its first financial crisis,
all because of an error
that fell at the feet of Steve Banerjee.
- Chippendales was a multi-million
dollar international brand.
- The prize piece of Chippendales merchandise
was the annual calendar which usually sold a million copies.
In 1986, Banerjee helped oversee the new edition.
- Banerjee thought he knew graphic production
and print making 'cause his father
was the kingpin of print making in Bombay.
He just said, "Yeah, color looks good to me,"
and signed off on it.
- The calendars were printed and shipped.
They looked great, except that all 12 months
had 31 days.
Banerjee refused to pay the printer,
who sued for more than a million dollars.
- He went bankrupt just because he didn't want to pay it
because he thought it wasn't his fault.
It wasn't because he didn't have the money to pay.
- He actually had to hire some really sharp bankruptcy people
to pull himself out of it.
- Banerjee cleared up his bankruptcy and legal problems,
but some associates thought the strain affected his mind.
It was the beginning of a dark and dangerous shift
with far-reaching consequences.
- Banerjee started to become totally friggin' paranoid,
and he just thought everyone was out to get him.
- Banerjee had other worries.
Chippendales was spawning imitators,
and some club dancers jumped ship.
- We had a company called "Skin Deep."
We ended up getting ex-Chippendale guys,
and we did several shows. We were sued because they said
we used Chippendales name to promote the show,
and we ended up winning the suit.
Three days later we were shot at.
- The shooting occurred in 1986
along a secluded stretch of California beach.
Dan Peterson and two other men
were taking pictures for a Skin Deep calendar.
- We were shooting a model, and all of a sudden
we hear--
It just went by you.
Almost sounded like a huge bumblebee
that was just there and gone.
15 seconds later, about 20 feet away, the sand
popped up in front of us.
Both of us and the model looked at each other
and jumped behind the trash can.
And then the next shot hit the lifeguard tower about 20 feet
to the right of us.
And we saw a car pull away.
It was so far away.
- Peterson never saw the shooter,
but he suspected the gunman worked for Banerjee.
- This was, again, three days after we had just won this case,
so we did the assumption that's who it was--Steve.
- Still, Peterson never called the police,
and there was never any proof
that Banerjee hired the gunman.
A few months later, Banerjee learned
he was about to face new competition.
His partner, producer Nick De Noia,
was launching his own exotic male review.
- Nick was tired of splitting everything with Steve,
and Nick also felt that he, Nick, was responsible
for all the success of Chippendales.
And so the group that we were starting
was called "U.S. Male," M-A-L-E.
It had a postal theme. "We deliver."
So we had this celebration dinner.
Nick left for New York to sign contracts.
- Steve was pissed at Nick, and some thing turned.
It's hard to tell what snaps in someone's head,
but somewhere along the line he snapped.
- Steve Banerjee's anger at Nick De Noia
would have lethal repercussions.
In February 1987,
Banerjee turned to an old friend,
a man named Ray Colon.
Colon was a lounge singer, apartment building manager,
and a part-time police officer.
Sometimes he taught traffic school.
- Ray Colon was my traffic school instructor
in Santa Monica.
I remember walking in to Banerjee's office.
Steve said, "Eric, this is Ray," and I look at him,
and I said, "I know you. You're my traffic school instructor."
- Ray Colon met Banerjee
in the early days of Chippendales.
According to the FBI,
Banerjee loaned Colon money over the years
and got some special and illegal favors in return.
- In the late '70s, early '80s,
he had Colon attempt to burn down several clubs.
Banerjee felt that those businesses were hurting his.
They were unsuccessful arson attempts, fortunately.
- Whenever Mr. Banerjee needed any, like, dirty work done,
he would go to Ray Colon.
And Ray Colon would do the dirty work for him.
- Only this time the dirty work involved murder.
As the FBI later discovered, Banerjee offered Colon $25,000
to arrange a hit on Nick De Noia.
Colon ended up hiring a gunman,
Gilbert Rivera Lopez, AKA Louie Lopez, a heroin addict
who participated in the failed arson attempts.
- So Ray asked if he's willing to do this,
you know, the ultimate,
and what winds up happening is Colon and Louie
took a red-eye flight from Los Angeles into New York.
They rented a vehicle. They drove around the building.
Colon, he had two weapons with him at that time,
handed Lopez one of the weapons.
- Lopez took the elevator to the 15th floor.
- And then he went down the hall,
and he walked in to the inner office
which was De Noia's.
De Noia stood up, and Louie shot him.
Louie ran down the stairs,
and Colon was waiting for him downstairs.
They hopped in the car
and heard the ambulances and sirens arrive.
- The news of De Noia's murder
spread throughout the Chippendales empire.
- I was on tour with the group, and we were in Indiana.
I got a phone call telling me
that Nick had been shot and killed.
My universe collapsed, and the show went on, as it should.
There's a moment in the show
that's louder than any other.
The roof comes off the place,
and that night
I let out a primal scream.
All my agony and all of my anguish came out.
Nobody heard me at all.
- De Noia's friends and family
were sure they knew who was behind the crime.
- The brother of the deceased, Mr. Val De Noia,
was taken to the precinct.
Within not even a minute of talking to him, he said to me,
"That Steve Banerjee is responsible."
- But police found no evidence against Banerjee.
Steve was in Los Angeles when
De Noia was murdered in New York.
The NYPD couldn't find the gunman
and didn't know about Ray Colon.
- You know what? Every door I knocked
and every street I walked down, there was nothing.
- The investigation hit a brick wall.
- If you don't solve a homicide case
in the first few days or weeks, they tend to go cold.
New cases pile up on you, and you know,
that's just the nature of the business unfortunately.
- There was never a moment
that I wasn't absolutely certain
that Steve Banerjee was behind the murder of Nick De Noia.
I haven't ever told anybody these things.
On the first anniversary of Nick's murder,
I took out an ad in Variety,
and it simply said, "Steve, I know it was you. Nick."
- Once again Steve Banerjee was the undisputed master
of his empire.
But as the 1990s began, Chippendales
faced new competitors.
Would Steve Banerjee see them as rivals who had to be destroyed?
He seemed to have gotten away with one murder.
Would he risk everything to kill again?
- He was going to wait and claw hammer him in the head
and then inject him with cyanide.
- More than three years after the murder of
Chippendales producer Nick De Noia,
it seemed the mystery would never be solved.
Many Chippendales employees who suspected their boss,
Steve Banerjee, was responsible, began to think he was innocent.
- After no arrest for a couple number of years, my wife Debora
and I started socializing again with Steve and Irene.
We even took care of their dog, and I figured I was wrong.
- In a shrewd deal, Banerjee bought the touring rights
to Chippendales from Nick De Noia's family.
- So Steve now had the entire package.
- But Banerjee didn't feel secure
in his strip show kingdom
because competitors were trying to steal his crown.
In 1990, a choreographer, two emcees,
and a backup dancer left Chippendales
for more money with a new strip show called "Adonis."
Banerjee didn't hide his fury.
- He took it really, really personally.
I heard him talk about it a few times.
"I was so good to you guys. These are my boys."
He took these boys off the beach and made them rich and famous.
It's kind of hard to even imagine
that they were like movie stars.
For him, it was like your children betraying you in a way.
- In 1991, Banerjee tried a legal maneuver
to stop an Adonis tour in England,
but the effort failed.
- Banerjee didn't take too kindly to that,
so what does he do?
He picks up the phone.
- According to the FBI, Banerjee
once again contacted Ray Colon,
the man who arranged the killing of Nick De Noia,
which remained unsolved.
- He wants--he wants these people killed.
- Ray was hired by Mr. Banerjee
once again, to go and eliminate the competition.
- There was one small change to the deadly plan.
- One of the dancers had AIDS
and was very, very, very sick.
- Banerjee must've had a change of heart
or a rare moment of sympathy
and decided to cancel the hit on him.
- Brilliant young dancer, and was, you know, really dead
within months after that.
- The other three, it was a go as far as he was concerned.
- Nick De Noia's killer, Louie Lopez,
wasn't available for the job.
- Louis was locked up in a state prison
for some narcotics transactions,
so he was on ice for a little bit.
- Instead, according to the FBI, Colon approached a man
he knew from the apartment complex he managed.
- This individual named Earl Lynn Bressler--
nicknamed "Strawberry" for the color of his hair.
- Bressler agreed to go to England
where the Adonis show was touring,
but there was a problem.
- They didn't want to take a chance and try
and get caught with a weapon
either on the airplane or in the U.K.
So it was Colon's idea to use the cyanide.
- According to the FBI, Colon took Bressler to his garage
where he filled an eye dropper with potassium cyanide.
- Colon claimed it was for gophers' eradication and rats
and rodents, things of that like.
- And they were gonna give cyanide to the dance group,
the owners, the managers in the U.K.
- He was going to wait for
this dancer and his choreographer
and this emcee to go to the men's room,
and this friend of Colon's was gonna claw hammer him
and then inject him with cyanide.
- In early July 1991, Bressler flew to England
with the eye dropper of cyanide and a syringe.
But according to the FBI, after landing in London,
Bressler poured the cyanide down his hotel sink
and made a transatlantic call
to an old contact in law enforcement.
- Bressler was a DA informant.
Colon didn't know Bressler was an informant
and was gonna turn on him.
- The DEA put their informant in touch with the FBI.
The Bureau flew Bressler back to the States.
- An agent convinces Bressler
to make recorded phone calls to Colon
and to pretend that he's in England
and that he had done the deed.
He had killed the people that Colon wanted him to kill.
The point of it was to get Colon
to admit his knowledge of the acts.
- Neither Colon nor Bressler mentioned the name of the man
paying for the murder plot,
but when the three intended victims were contacted
by British authorities,
they all said the same thing.
- These men of Adonis immediately knew
that there was only one person
that would plot something so nefarious,
and they're the ones that said it was Steve Banerjee.
- Accusations weren't evidence.
If Banerjee was behind the plot,
the FBI needed to build an air-tight case against him.
First, agents raided Colon's house in Los Angeles
and found his stash of cyanide.
That, along with the tapes of his calls with Bressler,
was enough for the FBI to arrest Ray.
- Colon winds up getting charged with interstate murder for hire.
- Facing decades in prison, Ray was ready to talk.
- He did exhibited some sense of remorse, but you know,
I think he was eventually trying to save his own skin
to get the sweetest deal possible.
- In a surprising development, Ray spilled the beans
not only about the murder plot in England,
but about everything he'd done for Steve Banerjee.
- The big reveal at that meeting was that he was responsible
for a murder in 1987
of one of Banerjee's business partners...
Nick De Noia.
- It seemed the tide was about to turn against Steve Banerjee,
but he was a wealthy and successful businessman
who knew how to cover his tracks.
What forces would take Banerjee down?
- We'd try and have conversations between
Colon and Banerjee,
get them on tape, but Banerjee was crafty.
- In 1991, the FBI was closing in on Steve Banerjee,
the owner of Chippendales, for attempted murder
and for conspiring to kill his former partner,
producer Nick De Noia.
Banerjee's accomplice, Ray Colon,
told agents he helped plan
and carry out these crimes.
With that confession, the chase was on.
- We worked on gathering evidence,
and the evidence we can gather has to be--Still
we have to do it surreptitiously.
We were listening to find out conversations
between Colon and Banerjee,
get them on tape to corroborate them, but Banerjee was crafty.
- Banerjee was suspicious everybody was ratting on him.
I know he was worried about Ray ratting on him.
In one of the meetings in a hotel lobby,
Banerjee took out a pad of sticky notes
and started writing notes to him,
and he made Colon respond back to him by writing.
When the meeting was over, Banerjee took the notes,
went into the men's room, flushed them down the toilet,
handed Colon a package of money and said,
"This should last you for a while."
It was all hush money from day one.
It was to keep him quiet.
- Well, Steve was-- he was paranoid.
I mean, you're paranoid when you do something wrong
and you don't want to be caught,
so he wouldn't talk to anybody about anything to do
with Nick after Nick was killed.
- The FBI still had no
physical evidence tying Banerjee
to any crimes.
Agents needed Banerjee to talk freely
in what he thought was a safe environment.
So the Bureau set up an elaborate
international sting operation
almost 6,000 miles away.
- Banerjee was gonna be in Zurich, Switzerland
with the Chippendales group.
We also had great cooperation with the Zurich police.
- Colon was also in Zurich pretending to be hiding out
from American authorities.
He asked Banerjee for more hush money.
On February 10, 1993, they met in a hotel room.
FBI agents were listening in the adjoining suite.
- And in the hotel room, Mr. Banerjee was very nervous
because he never trusted anybody,
but after being with Ray Colon for x amount of time,
he started to trust him.
- He said, "If you want, you can go to India.
I know a plastic surgeon.
He'll fix you up, change your appearance."
- Ray said "no."
They talked for hours about the chances
of getting caught for their crimes.
- Banerjee was anxious to know what the law enforcement
knew about him.
He kept on asking Colon if the FBI knew about the deed.
He referred to the De Noia murder as "the deed."
Colon told him, "No, they know nothing about it.
"They don't know you're involved.
"They don't know that you gave me money.
They don't know you gave me the guns."
They talked about the plot to
kill the dancers over in London.
They even discussed some of the arsons
that Colon had attempted to do for Banerjee.
- And they got the recording.
Once you hear that, I mean, it's high-five time.
The FBI did a great job.
- And then at the end of the meeting,
Colon walked Banerjee down to the car,
and Banerjee gave him another package of money.
- The FBI waited until Banerjee
was back in the States.
Then agents made their move.
- So in 1993, my partner and I
are sitting in a surveillance van
outside of Chippendales' office, and Banerjee drives up,
and him and I take him into custody
This was not a difficult arrest
by any stretch of the imagination.
Basically we're taking a businessman into custody.
He was pretty cocky that we didn't have anything on him.
You know, he was gonna beat it.
He had nothing to do with anything,
That was the initial reaction.
- Six years after Nick De Noia was gunned down,
Steve Banerjee was finally behind bars
charged with ordering De Noia's murder
along with multiple counts of attempted murder.
The case made headlines from Los Angeles to London.
- It was on the news that Steve had been arrested,
and I said something along the lines of "Holy sh--."
Even during the time that
Steve had major anger with Nick,
I never realized that he'd kill a friend for money.
That was the rude awakening when it actually happened.
- Next, law enforcement needed a confession from Louie Lopez,
the triggerman in the De Noia murder.
Detective Mike Geddes had retired from the NYPD,
but he insisted on going to the Texas prison
where Lopez was held.
- I said, "I'm gonna get you the confession.
Don't worry about it."
I went out there with a detective Richie--Ricky--
and we sat down with Mr. Lopez,
and I said, "Imagine you drove into New York.
You rented a car. You went to 8th Avenue.
You went up in an elevator, and somebody got shot."
I knew exactly what he was gonna be thinking.
"They know everything. Somebody gave me up."
He said, "Look, I want tell the whole story."
He admitted to everything.
- Lopez ended up with a sentence of 25 years to life
for killing Nick De Noia.
In exchange for cooperating with the FBI,
Ray Colon received a reduced sentence,
30 months in federal prison.
- Ray Colon is very upset
that he got pulled in with Banerjee.
He's the guy who wanted to be this lounge singer.
I think the most he ever got to entertainment
was being that traffic school instructor in Santa Monica.
- What about Steve Banerjee?
The man who made his dreams a reality now
faced a nightmare,
life behind bars.
Was there any way out?
- We had the goods on him.
- Despite his success,
Steve Banerjee almost never made headlines
as the owner of Chippendales
until he was arrested on multiple counts of murder
and attempted murder.
In the summer of 1994,
Banerjee sat in a Los Angeles jail, awaiting trial.
Was there any way for him to somehow save his reputation
and his entertainment empire?
- We had the goods on him.
He hired some high-priced defense attorneys.
Once discovery started,
they realized what we had in corroboration,
and they negotiated.
- Banerjee's legal team worked out a deal, plead guilty
in exchange for 26 years in prison
instead of a potential life sentence.
- The guilt entitled us to seize the business
and forfeit the business to the government.
- The government was gonna take over Chippendales?
as crazy as that is that the government
would own a beefcake-- male beefcake company?
- Banerjee plead guilty and agreed
to give up Chippendales.
The deal would become official at his sentencing.
- On the morning of the sentencing, I went down
to the federal courthouse.
I wanted to see Steve Banerjee brought in in shackles,
and I wanted Steve Banerjee to see me.
When we got to the federal courthouse,
we were told there would be no sentencing and no hearing.
- It turned out he had hung himself with a bed sheet
on the morning he was gonna be sentenced.
- The De Noia family had two reactions to it.
One, they were happy that he was dead,
but the other reaction is they wanted to see him suffer,
and that would've gave them a lot more joy.
- I think part of him taking his own life
was that you're not truly convicted
until you're sentenced.
By him not being sentenced,
we weren't able to complete the asset forfeiture,
and all his money went to his estate.
All his property, all his rights, went to the family.
- So in the end, Steve Banerjee died as he lived,
as a man who owned Chippendales,
a prized possession that led to his downfall.
- Banerjee had everything. What makes you snap
to do some thing so stupid and idiotic
and take someone's life and change everything--
their life, your life, everything?
So I would love to know,
but I think it's just greed and power.
- He was a man of tremendous insecurities and never enjoyed
all the great things that he could've enjoyed.
The acclaim and the money, he never enjoyed any of it.
- Steve Banerjee's wife, Irene, sold Chippendales
shortly before her death.
For the Chippendales brand, the show goes on,
but its founder never became the next Hugh Hefner or Walt Disney.
Instead, Steve Banerjee became infamous as a man
who thought murder was just part of doing business.
For more on "Mysteries and Scandals,"
go to Oxygen.com.