The nonprofit set to benefit from a tournament at President Donald Trump’s Florida golf course this weekend is bailing on the event, claiming it didn’t know the tournament organizer is a local strip club.
“Forget about it. We’re not going to participate,” the director of the charity told TPM that he wrote to the event’s organizer early Wednesday morning, after the Washington Post first reported on the strip club golf tournament.
“I didn’t know there was a strip tease club involved in this,” Carlos Alamilla, director of the non-profit group Miami All Stars said over the phone Wednesday. He said he first learned the details after reporters from the Post called him for their story on it, which was published Tuesday night.
“You can’t mix kids with sex,” Alamilla told TPM. “It just doesn’t jibe.”
Alamilla told TPM that he was told that a group called “Shadow All Stars” was hosting the event, which he assumed was a regular club, rather than the strip club Shadow Cabaret. He recalled speaking with Emanuele Mancuso, the event’s organizer and director of marketing for the strip club, in multiple phone calls and one in-person meeting at Kao Sushi & Grill in Coral Gables.
“He said, ‘It’s going to be a very high-profile event,'” Alamilla recalled.
After the Washington Post published its report Tuesday night, Alamilla said he stayed up until three in the morning reading thousands of comments from readers.
“I read them all,” he recalled, adding: “I thought that maybe this would benefit us, it’s really taken the other extreme.”
In a subsequent phone call with TPM Wednesday, Alamilla said Mancuso agreed to remove his group from the event.
“He said ‘fine,'” Alamilla said of Mancuso.
Shadow Cabaret didn’t return multiple requests for comment.
The non-profit director admitted to TPM he hadn’t done his “due diligence.”
“We have golf tournaments in Miami all the time,” he said. “I thought it was another golf tournament.”
He said what little planning for the event he was involved with was not documented, aside from some handwritten notes.
“We never mentioned amounts, as far as the amount of money, any of that,” he said. “We didn’t sign any agreement. There was no documentation involved.”
Mancuso, he recalled, told him, “Look, once we finish everything we’re going to give you a donation.”
