Last dance: Ga. town closes its only strip club

This summer, a mob led by the mayor tore down gaudy billboards advertising topless dancers, put plywood over glass doors bearing a nude silhouette and purged the awnings proclaiming the incendiary name of the club--Cafe Risque--in a diesel-fueled bonfire.

Now Mayor Ralph Owens stands at the place where XXX once marked the spot, his grin widening as he takes out a set of jingling keys from his blue jeans.

"You want to take some pictures inside?" he says with a smirk, walking toward the metal building. "We own it."

Seven years after Lavonia was duped into allowing the strip club to open, it got even by secretly buying the club in a backhanded property swap. It cost the town $1 million, or roughly a third of Lavonia's annual budget. The deal could have come cheaper if Lavonia hadn't gone through a middleman.

But Owens says it was worth it, and Lavonia residents still stinging from the deception are eager to back him up.

"We're in the Bible Belt," says Ron Walters, the owner of a downtown flower shop. "You just don't do things like that here."

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Interstate 85 brushes by Lavonia on its way out of northeast Georgia and has fueled some growth there. But the 10 churches within a shout of downtown--that's nearly a church for every 200 people--still have only a handful of shops and a few sit-down restaurants for neighbors.

That's why the Florida businessman who came to town in 2001 seemed so promising. Jerry Sullivan vowed to build a mom-and-pop restaurant geared toward families, and drummed up support for the idea by presenting the plan to locals.