LAVONIA, GA. - The windowless building that once housed the city's only strip club sits empty in the middle of a sprawling gravel parking lot, made all the uglier by the scars from its final party.

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.

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

"You want to take some pictures inside?" he said 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 city $1 million, or roughly a third of Lavonia's annual budget.

The deal could have come more cheaply if Lavonia hadn't gone through a middleman. But Owens said it was worth it, and Lavonia residents still stinging from the deception are eager to back him up.

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

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 the city in 2001 seemed so promising. Jerry Sullivan vowed to build a mom-and-pop restaurant geared toward families.

Linda LeCroy, who works at a downtown jewelry store, remembers the name he pitched: "Skeeter's Big Biscuits."

"I was excited," she said, shaking her head. "We all were."

Inspectors who took a final look at the building found a typical restaurant: a few tables, a stocked kitchen, a small counter area.

By the next morning, the place had transformed. A makeshift stage hugged its walls. The lunch counter was replaced by a bar. Neon signs graced the walls, and four stalls in the back served as changing rooms.

Sullivan died in his sleep in 2006, but his attorney, Gary Edinger, said that this sort of trickery is the norm for the industry.

"He duped them. Very intentionally," said Edinger, a Florida lawyer who has represented strip clubs for 17 years. "When you go in and say you want to open a strip club, it never gets opened. But if you merely open, through subterfuge or whatever, there's not much that can be done."

In recent years, Lavonia's elders learned the club's owners wanted to sell but figured they wouldn't want to negotiate with the city.

Owens turned to a middleman, Stacey Britt, to buy the club himself and then turn it over to the city.

The city paid Britt through a bond for a water treatment upgrade, which could end up costing Lavonia $1.2 million in interest payments.

"We're in an economic turndown and here we decide to spend $1 million. Was that the best use of funds?" asked city manager Gary Fesperman. "It's an investment, and it's something we had to do."

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