Columnist Jeff German: Eliades brings fight to cabbies

Friday, April 12, 2002 | 4:31 a.m.

LAS VEGAS cabbies should have learned by now not to underestimate Pete Eliades.

The outspoken Olympic Garden owner is holding back no punches in his high-stakes battle with drivers unlawfully diverting passengers away from his popular topless nightclub.

Eliades raised the stakes last week, when he filed a racketeering lawsuit, alleging cabbies were conspiring with managers of the rival Palomino Club to steal thousands of dollars in business from him each night.

"I filed the lawsuit to stop the bleeding," Eliades says. "I'm not going to quit fighting until the cabbies stop cheating the public. I want to eliminate the crooks."

Eliades alleges that drivers have been paid $15 to $20 a head to disparage the Olympic Garden and divert passengers to the all-nude Palomino Club several miles down the street.

Palomino Club operators deny any wrongdoing.

But by week's end they entered into discussions with Eliades to settle the suit. They agreed to immediately stop giving drivers cash as a sign of good faith.

The quick move underscored the seriousness of the civil racketeering allegations leveled in the suit, put together by attorney Dominic Gentile, who once chaired the American Bar Association Racketeering Cases Committee. The charges are modeled after the criminal laws Congress passed more than 30 years ago to fight the nation's organized crime families.

Palomino Club managers, according to Eliades, have engaged in a pattern of unlawful activity for months to hurt the Olympic Garden's business and obtain money under false pretenses from the public. Passengers taken to the Palomino Club, he says, have not been told that all or part of their $20 admission fees are being returned to the cabbies.

What Eliades has done by filing this complaint is demonstrate that he's not going to roll over and play dead for the cabbies, who also have tried to put a dent in his business by staging a mean-spirited boycott of the Olympic Garden.

Nearly 300 unidentified cabbies and supervisors from 13 local companies have been dragged into the conspiracy as defendants in the suit. Eliades and Gentile plan to identify those defendants in the coming weeks and proceed with the case against them, even if a deal is reached with the Palomino managers.

The suit already has stirred up chat lines on VegasCabbie.com, a website for local drivers. Much of the talk, not surprisingly, has been critical of Eliades.

"I'm a patient, logical individual who believes in the rule of common sense," writes cabbie John Shannon, who runs the website. "This new action defies both logic and common sense."

Another driver, Raymond R. Stults, adds: "No one can justify this type of action or attack on the hard working, low-paid ambassadors of this city."

We can expect the anger level to remain high as the suit proceeds against the cabbies reported to be diverting passengers away from the Olympic Garden.

Life could get uncomfortable for those drivers, especially if John Plunkett, the administrator of the state Taxicab Authority, takes an interest in the racketeering case.

Even bigger shockwaves could rumble through the taxicab industry if Eliades can prove that cab company supervisors allowed the conspiracy against him to thrive without taking action against their own drivers. That could jeopardize the operating certificates of the companies, even those owned by Yellow Checker Star Transportation, where Eliades has a financial interest.

Eliades, it would seem, is someone you don't want to underestimate.