This is incredible. Last week I visited several tattoo parlors, all across town, attempting to catch the drift of the word on the street as to what had happened at the Black Pearl Tattoo Parlor on Flamingo and Fort Apache Roads, the studio that went up in flames on the same tumultuous morning—May 7—that an explosive device went off in the parking garage of the Luxor Hotel and Casino. Because thus far nobody—not the owners of the Black Pearl, nor its neighbors, nor even the local and federal agencies investigating the incident—seems to know much.
Only that, as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms states, an improvised explosive device was thrust into the Black Pearl on that early Monday morning—right around 2 a.m., according to the two media outlets who covered the blast—and that, according to witness statements, the insides of the parlor were charred, disintegrated and, in the end, disemboweled.
That’s all. It was the second time in less than a year that the Black Pearl was sabotaged; the second time it went up in flames. Neither Metro nor anyone else has identified a suspect for either incandescent attack.
I did not go to all 52 tattoo parlors in town. Only enough, starting at the Black Pearl and moving in concentric circles, to sample the industry, which everyone knows is longstanding, impenetrable and even a bit ominous. I went to places on the west side, near the Black Pearl, such as the Bad Apple Tattoo Parlor on Charleston Boulevard and Torrey Pines Drive. Sitting behind the front counter were two men, as thick as they were wide as they were tall, playing dominoes. I introduced myself as a reporter. One didn’t look up from the game; the other, bald and with one eye bloodshot, stared at me without blinking, cold and stolid. I said: “You fellas heard anything about the Black Pearl Tattoo Parlor, the place that got blown up over there on Fort Apache?” The one continued to avoid looking up, instead staring at his hand, not timid but indignant, for sure. And the other continued to stare, unblinking, cold and stolid, straight at me. “Anything,” I said. “At all?” Their silence drowned out the buzzing of the restless needles, and as I walked out of the parlor I could feel the other’s bloodshot stare pursuing me.
I went to parlors on the east side, a little farther away from the Black Pearl, such as Sin City, a venerated studio. The girl at the counter was pretty and amiable, and without revealing my reason for being there I asked if she’d heard anything about Black Pearl. She said: “I ha—” but was cut off by a young man with a reptilian face, piercings in the most inconceivable of places and tattoos sheathing his arms:
“We haven’t heard nothin’,” he said, not looking at me but staring at the girl. He repeated, one letter at a time: “Nothin’.”
I returned my attention to the girl, gave her my business card and said: “Well, if you do happen to hear anything, you’ll call me, won’t ya?”
To which the young man with the reptilian face, shaking his head, said: “We won’t know nothin’.”
The Black Pearl’s owners, who wish to remain anonymous, due to the fear factor, refuse to believe the tattoo industry could be so nefarious as to blow up their business twice. Moreover, they, a lawyer and an associate of the Clark County School District, have no real history with the city’s subculture.
But their tattoo artists did, says a source close to the owners. And, according to Nick, an artist I spoke with from Pricz Tattoo studio on Rainbow Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, it’s the artists who thread the community together, weaving between shops and oftentimes cutting ties with one to intertwine with another. “It’s a competitive business,” says Nick, his studio busy like any other in this town. “But it’s not like you see shops getting blown up every day.”
Nor do you see the same shop getting blown up twice, within a span of a little more than six months.
On October 30—just 10 days after the Black Pearl opened—someone drilled a hole in the back wall and poured flammable liquid into the parlor, which was closed and vacated for the night. The place was ignited, torched, investigated by the Clark County Fire Department to no success in determining a culprit and then rebuilt by its owners, who, unvanquished, opened up the shop again in January of this year with a new, sophisticated security system. Which seemed to work well during the next four months, as business did well, the Black Pearl’s neighbors say.
Up until, that is, the early morning of Monday, May 7, when an improvised explosive device, laced in accelerant, was thrust through the front of the parlor, causing a blast whose force ripped a hole through the ceiling, projected the front window frame more than 50 feet out into the parking lot and shook the foundation of the strip mall in which the Black Pearl was located with such violence that the parlor’s next door neighbor is now also in need of renovations. Flames gushed through the open window and crept up the Black Pearl’s edifice, lighting up the 2 a.m. sky, say clerks at the nearby Longs drugstore, and soon cops, firefighters and agents from the ATF were swarming the suburban shopping center.
Two hours later, a far less potent device exploded in the parking garage of the Luxor Hotel and Casino. It killed one man and injured another, and beckoned so much attention to the south end of the Strip that the blast two hours earlier on West Flamingo and Fort Apache got lost in its smoke.
Yet Metro says it hasn’t lost sight of the Black Pearl. A spokesperson from the department says investigations are ongoing, and that they are optimistic they will identify a suspect responsible for what happened at the Black Pearl Tattoo Parlor.