On the route that I drive to visit a friend’s house, in a little strip mall, there’s a “spa”, with a neon sign in the window indicating “Open 24 Hours!” Because I’m certain there’s a big market for pedicures at 3 a.m. OTOH, there may be a market for facials, after a fashion… 
Exactly what I was going to ask.
Knowing that you’re African-American, as soon as you mentioned Koreans and Los Angeles I thought some kind of bad blood in the community must be at work, when they asked you to leave. But I’ve never been there & my impressions are likely 20 years out of date.
Your post reminded me of a store around town. It’s completely legit (so far as I know) but your post reminded me of it. For years there was a store called Bucky’s Super Video. Just a regular video rental place. Then one day it changed to Bucky’s Super Video…and Tanning. I always wondered who thought it was a good idea to add a tanning salon to a video rental place.
It happened about a year before they went out of business so I’m guessing the owner was grabbing at straws at that point just trying to find some way to bring in some more money, but that seems so disconnected. The only way it makes sense is to let the kids go pick out a movie while mom hits the tanning bed for ten minutes, or hope people will get in a routing where they’ll pick up a movie and and return a movie and get a tan each time, as long as they’re there.
I’m guessing at this point the owner is wishing he had closed up a year earlier instead of shelling out, what I would guess must have been 20 or 30 thousand dollars to set up the tanning salon.
“You don’t know what evil lurks in the heart of the heatin-n-coolin man.”
About 10 years ago, there opened near my place a little eatery. Became very popular with the College and teenage crowd. A year or so later, the coppers shut it down. Turned out it was a front for drugs. When I became a lawyer, I traced the Court file out of curiosity. The Police Officer’s report stated in the dry, understated tones that only Police reports have, that the eatery made more money in a week then the illegal operation did in its entire existence and despite that it never occurred to our “legitimate businessmen” to go clean or even offer drugs to the College crowd.:rolleyes:
I just remembered another one. When the real Donnie Brasco trials started, it turned out that the mob had set up a string of pizza places along the eastern seaboard to launder money and give men fake jobs when they weren’t needed. One of these places was in my Virginian podunk suburb.
Ray never lost money on anything. Those machines were also the front for Ray’s protection racket. Businesses would “rent” them from Ray, at what I am sure was a very reasonable monthly rate. It was also a way for Ray to sell cigarettes and under report the taxes by a heroic amount.
Funny, this subject just came up between me and my daughter yesterday. We were in the drive through at DQ, waiting for our order to come in the window, and I looked across at the strip mall to our right. Among other “businesses” listed on the marquee in the parking lot was one for “Pizza Man (he delivers).”
I told her “That’s GOT to be a front for a drug ring. Have you or ANYONE YOU KNOW ever ordered a pizza from there? They don’t even have a phone number on the sign!”
All tongue in cheek, of course. They probably don’t expect people to call while they’re driving home from work.
There used to be a little Italian restaurant called Michaelangelo’s not too far from my workplace in Norfolk that turned out to be a money-laundering operation for organized crime. I too wondered how they managed to stay open with such little business … the food and service were actually pretty good.
And then one day we went over there for lunch to find the doors padlocked shut and a notice from the FBI posted in the window. It’s a colorful story.
The best pizza I ever tasted in my life came from a little plaza storefront shop below my apartment when I was 13. It closed shortly after I moved away, apparently it was a drug front. Damn good pizza - even gave me a free slice the day I moved!
I don’t know if it’s still there or not but someone once showed me an “Ice Cream Shop” in an industrial area that apparently stayed open all winter and always had big black Lincolns parked out front.
There is a very out of place strip joint in a town near me that is commonly believed to be mob money and probably a laundry joint even though it does pretty good business. I have an acquaintance who worked in its predecessor a few dozen years ago and was part of the staff when it was bought by some very scary people.
How do the financials of a crime front work? If Soprano’s Pizza says it takes in $100,000 in cash sales per month, wouldn’t they also need to have the appropriate amount of invoices for flour, cheese, toppings, payroll, etc. It’s easy enough to say it’s all cash because they don’t take credit cards, but how can they fake out all the invoice costs?
Any time you have a business that involves a lot of service and internal processing, you can pad out the receipts considerably without anyone noticing, even in a more-than-casual inspection of the books. Sometimes there are secondary laundry levels - Soprano’s Pizza pays a lot to Bompensiero’s Foods for nonexistent pizza supplies, etc.
The only thing anyone cares about is whether all the apparent revenue is declared and taxed. The IRS doesn’t much care that a ratty, always-empty pizza place does $20M a year in business, as long as they pay taxes on the net.
There was a car lot here that in 9 years never sold a single car. Yeah, it was a front for a coke ring.
There was another car lot here that had a lot with maybe 20 cars. As I drove past year after year it was apparent that the place was out of business. The cars and trucks became covered in grime, the tires were going flat but they just sat and sat and sat. One truck had the side window broken out and it sat exposed to the weather for a long, long time. Then one day they were all gone. Always seemed weird.
I’ve got two:
When I was growing up (in a quite suburban neighborhood), there was a little hole-in-the-wall drugstore nearby that rarely had any customers. It was in a strip mall which is apparently not in a good location or something, because businesses have come & go there for as long as I can remember. But this little shithole drugstore with a couple racks of dusty old candy bars and chips has been there for at least 25 or 30 years now. (It was still there, last time I checked.) They have got to be selling drugs on the black market or something; there’s simply no other explanation for how they’ve survived.
The other is an African-themed clothing store near the University of Detroit’s main campus. It was pretty big, but in 4 years of driving past this place at various times of the day (due to changing class schedules), I saw exactly 1 person enter the store. It was in a rather sketchy neighborhood, so the rent was probably pretty cheap, but I always wondered if it was a front for drug selling or something.
Massage parlours being a front for brothels is old news, but I was genuinely surprised when, at the hairdresser/nail boutique/massage parlour very near my house, where I’d had several haircuts, they responded to my request for an Indian head massage by ordering me to strip - for a full-body massage at the same price as an Indian head massage, and the owner is very forceful.
It all sort of made sense at the time, with the mad owner and me being a regular hairdressing customer.
I lay face down and the masseuse massaged me, then climbed on me and I felt her labia on my back. :eek:
I’m female and actually really wanted a massage, and thought that they would at least offer some real ones to sustain a veneer of credibility. There’s no massage place that seems to actually offer massages within a twenty-minute walk of my place, and I thought I’d found one. 
The cafe next door is a smoke-easy; people smoke in there in violation of the smoking ban, in a separate room. It does sell quite nice sandwiches but the two times I’ve been there they were very surprised at being asked for food and had to get it from out back, while shutting the door to the ridiculously-obvious smoking room. I guess that means it might well be a front for other stuff too, since they’re already risking large fines.
Barber shops were well known for making book. It was kind of understould that barbers were needed in the community and could not make it cutting hair alone so nobody ever bothered them.
I know of quite a few shops that started of legit and couldn’t make it so reverted back to selling drugs or other illegal activities. Pet shop, pizza shop, bars, any small business.
I’m a pharmacist. This drugstore may get their income from home health care or nursing home contracts, or doing compounding, which is custom-made dosage forms, often for veterinary use. My parents had to go to a place like this (although they said it was clean) for their cat, and there’s a similar operation in the city where I live. They kept a few commonly stocked drugs on the shelf for foot traffic.
One of my classmates had a business that did nothing but compounding for some years, and hers was “closed door”, meaning it was not open to the public. Most of her business was for veterinarians or dermatologists, although she sometimes mixed up things like ibuprofen suppositories for someone in hospice. The compounding pharmacy in my town specializes in smoking cessation products.
ETA: I just remembered an article I saw in a trade journal about a place like this that opened in a city that had a large number of AIDS patients, and they specialized in its treatment. Lots of people went there because they wanted to preserve their privacy.
As a kid I used to get my haircuts at an Italian barber shop on Sand Lane in South Beach, Staten Island. After being curtly reminded once, I knew not to read a certain magazine placed on the side table - the one that had the ‘policy slips’ in it waiting for pickup. There were also guys that would come in to mention that “some merchandise had just fallen off a truck” and “did anyone’s wife need a new washing machine?”. Once it was fur coats. “Vito, ya wife would look good in one a dem - we just got a shipment”. Good times…and the haircuts were reasonable price.