Twelve Questions: Brian Le Gros

Brian Le Gros, shown with Benji, grew up poor in Murupara and got into the sex industry after a girlfriend's stepfather offered him a job. Picture / Chris Gorman

Brian Le Gros owns the White House strip club and brothel in Queen St, and another in Noumea. He sends his children to a private school and keeps the ashes of his parents at work.

1. What are you frightened of?
Spiders, yes. Give me a gang member no problem at all but spiders and sharks scare me. As a kid I used to watch a show called Panic with my mum. I was about 13, I suppose, and it was all sharks and spiders. Can't bear them now. I grew up in Murupara with all the wetas and that and would catch them in my hand. But watching that programme put me off for life.

2. What was life in Murupara like?
There were very, very few people there. My father was a logging foreman, there were four of us kids. I was a mummy's boy really. I would always look after my mum. The fathers would be out at the pub all the time, making a meal of 6 o'clock closing. My mum was a beautiful lady. The pinnacle of the family. She and dad are here (at the White House) - that's their ashes over there. It's a mini-mausoleum I suppose, or a moveable grave. I brought them here when I sold the house I'd bought for them in Cambridge, about a month ago.

3. Was there a lot of money?
Oh no. We were very poor, as a lot of families were in those days. My childhood was not being able to afford shoes and off to school, not quite in snow but you know what I mean. My mum was the sort of woman who put up with so much. Everything was about the family. Dad was okay but a hard man. Drank a fair bit. Hard on me, yep, and that was a good thing, I think. Taught me not to be a wimp. I don't know what's going to happen to these kids these days. You can't hit them or tell them off. Can't drag them away from their computers. They don't even know how to dig a hole.

4. What was school like?
Mum and dad split for a bit and we moved to Porirua. That was terrible. I was one of the few Pakeha. No, I wasn't a good fighter. I was an awfully good talker. A good ducker. Living in Porirua I learned how to duck. What did I want to be when I left school? A gynaecologist. Ha. That's a joke. I did a building apprenticeship with my dad. I still build a lot of my places today. I design them all, then bring the architect in to do the drawings. The White House I basically did myself with a few helpers. I love old colonial buildings - the ornateness of them.

5. Where did you learn about business?
From the school of hard knocks. I left school at 15 but when I was 19 I was going with a girl whose stepdad was the Mr Big of Wellington. He was building massage parlours - the very first ones - and I helped him build them. He asked me to take over the Hole in the Wall club which wasn't doing very well. I hadn't even been in a strip club really - massage parlours, yes, but this was different. I thought I would clean it up, make it more profitable. I always put my main effort into the toilets because that's where people decide if it's tacky or not.

6. Are the men's toilets always the worst?
No, it's definitely the women's. I closed New Zealand's first male strip bar because of the way the women behaved. I had embroidered hand towels and beautiful toilets in that club. I won't tell you what they did with the towels, what they did with the walls, what they threw down the toilets.

7. What did your parents think of you getting into clubs?
They thought I was absolutely stupid. I had to tell them - you can't keep that a lifelong secret can you. Dad ended up making a lot of the props for (the White House) and I looked after them very well with the money I made. In the early days, the 70s, there were a lot of drugs - heroin, pinkies, tuis. But P is the worst drug I have ever, ever seen. It takes your soul. Makes you kill your best friend and rip off your mother.

8. Have you ever had trouble with booze or drugs?
I have never been into alcohol or drugs. I tried marijuana when I was 18 but when I got to about 27 I became very serious about business and life. Learned a lot about friends. I follow all these old sayings like 'shit follows shit', 'no friends in business', 'what goes up must come down'. It's what I teach my kids too. I've got three at home - 16, 15 and 14. I wanted to show I could do that [three in three years]. They have four rules to live by - no alcohol, no drugs, no lying, no stealing. My son Ryan was away with his friends for the weekend and he came home early because the other boys had drugs and whisky. I was so proud of him for that.

9. Do your children's friends' parents know what you do?
Most do. They go to Kristin School which is good. Education is important but I don't mind what they do when they leave. There's no pressure on them. Their teachers tell me they're well behaved. I make sure they don't get too spoiled. You want to give them what you didn't have but I worry about [so much] money. It's hard being a dad in some respects - their mum and I split up eight years ago but my partner Fay is great with the kids. She's a good lady. Malaysian Chinese. Very hard working and hyperactive. Money orientated. Nothing gets past her around here - I call her the Chinese Detective.

10. Was your divorce hard?
It nearly ruined me. The money was all gone and I was left with the land and buildings. I've spent the last eight years digging my way out to where I'm okay again. It hasn't put me off marriage - I met Fay a month after we split - but I think it can ruin relationships. I didn't go to pieces after the split - I'm not a piner - like a lot of men I just involved myself in work and tried to carry on. I'm not really a socialising-type person. I've got nothing to say to people unless I talk about the business. If someone wants to talk about a lap dancer or something to do with the club, then I'm your man.

11. Have you had tough times in business?
I've always done very well because I've always run it like a business and cared about it. You have your lean times. All business does. None of the clubs are doing flash at the moment. It's not like it was. The changing of the alcohol laws has been hard - shutting at 4am - we used to do our best business from 4am-6am. One of the worst things about the sex industry is they legalised the prostitutes wrongly. They should have legalised the massage parlours and made any prostitution at all on the street or in houses illegal. Now they are among families and in apartment buildings and hotel rooms. Twelve-year-olds hooking on the street. And where does the tax money go? Not into New Zealand, I can tell you.

12. Aren't you just grumpy because the women don't have you clipping their ticket any more?
We pay our taxes and our council levies and everything else businesses pay. They don't. It's driven prices down. It's not as safe for the girls or the customers. It was like the deregulation of the taxis. Now you can't get anyone who speaks English. It was good to legalise it but it was the way it was done. I'm looking at it purely from a business point of view and the tax dollars are the most important thing. Honestly.