Kings Of The Night

- Bobby Palmer

It’s 11pm on a Saturday night, and 100 beautiful women are lined up in front of me. There are girls in barely there cropped tops and leather trousers so tight they look painful. Others are swaddled in enormous fur coats, but wearing skirts so short they are all but invisible. I’m standing on the cobbles outside Cirque Le Soir, perhaps the most exclusive nightclub in London, and every single one of these women wants to get in.

Among them, there is a lone guy, wearing a Gucci hoodie, a Rolex watch and a winning smile. His name is Mickey Arora, and he’s got the power to make this club tens of thousands of pounds every night. And, this evening, he’s my boss.

Let’s pedal back five days. I’m talking to a man called Franky Brillante, and he’s telling me he has the numbers of 12,000 women in his phone. “I am probably known as one of the biggest people-movers in London,” he says, without irony. “I move four-to-five hundred girls every week. Nobody in London does that.”

Franky is London-promoter royalty, with a jaw carved from marble and a name like something out of The Godfather. But instead of the Mafia, Franky is a made man of the “Mayfair Triangle” – everyone I’ve spoken to knows his name. He operates in a world of clubs like Libertine, Cirque, Tape and The Box, where wealthy customers can spend around £5,000 on a table and £20,000 on a single bottle of champagne. In his own words, “This isn’t Tiger Tiger.”

Men like Franky work on a “who you know” basis. They’re out every night, meeting attractive women and affluent men in the most expensive bars in the city. Then, with a bit of charm, and a smooth flick of the iPhone that’s permanently fused to their right hand,

they convert these interactions into “premium” female customers and high-spending male clients.