But can Lepolo go upscale and shake his old Madd Pac rep? So far, reviews are mixed.
"I think he can turn around, put on a suit, and do that because he's a sweetheart," entertainment commissioner Audrey Joseph says. "I love him! Love him! Love him!"
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Baki Lepolo does some final security checks before a sneak preview party at new SOMA club Mist.
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Vajra Granelli, who monitors club noise levels for the commission, isn't so charitable. "There was a while there that every time I turned around, there was some incident and, oh, the security guards were from EPIC," he says. "But recently they seem to have gotten their act together."
Paul Hemming, the owner of Temple, EPIC's largest account, says working with the company has been a "process of refinement," sending back about 15 to 20 guys who "were a little rough around the edges." Of those, he says, one made out with a patron on the job, one was getting high, another blurted out a homophobic statement, one let people in the back, and another pocketed money at the door. Windsor says 20 guys over more than a year isn't bad. "You try to teach 'em protocols and hope they follow them," Lepolo says. "It's hard when you teach over 200 people to be like you."
But Lepolo still has sway over his guys. A few months back, a young Samoan man rolled up to a reggae concert thrown by a Tongan promoter known as Ras Ghost at Pier 23, a lounge/bar on the waterfront where EPIC provides security. Though the differences between the two cultures might be indistinguishable to outsiders, they have been "enemies since 400 B.C.," Lepolo says. As Ras Ghost recounts it, as the Samoan stepped out of his Mercedes , a car of young Polynesians pulled up, stole his money and bling at gunpoint, and escaped. Ras Ghost asked Lepolo to come out to the next weekend's concert, since rumors were flying that the alleged armed robbers were Tongans; he wanted Lepolo there to handle the Samoans in case there was any more drama. Lepolo says he had to talk down his Samoan guard who witnessed the robbery. "I really had to tell them ... 'This is a business,' you know?" he says. "We're not gangsters. We're not thugs. But it's funny I say that, because some of us came from that lifestyle."
Lepolo doesn't forget where he came from. Almost every Friday and Saturday, he returns to City Nights, where he worked his first shift as a bouncer 22 years ago when he was still too young to get in himself. "This is where it all started ... and it's still almost the same," he says on a recent Saturday night at the club. "Just imagine: This is my third generation being here."
Lepolo is thoroughly in his element at his old haunt, waving to former City College football players driving by, fishing tickets out of his pocket for two more who walk up, and directing a gaggle of girls to a nearby corner to catch a cab. He cross-examines a white kid in a black T-shirt — seven on a punk scale of 10 — to see whether he's drunk, and then lets him through. The 18-year-old who comes up next for an appraisal isn't so lucky: "You reek of alcohol," he says. He recognizes a baby-faced young man clad in a lavender sweater vest and matching loafers as one of the "'hood kids" he counseled on the playground back at AP Giannini Middle School while working as a community outreach worker. The "kid" is now 22. "Man, am I getting old," Lepolo says.
Lepolo leans on the fence to take weight off his feet. While he used to get a rush out of working security at high-pressure clubs, now he's thinking he'd just like to get out of it altogether. The parade of young women in miniskirts doesn't rouse his interest now that he's a married family man; it usually just reminds him how lucky he is to have survived all those years of chasing women passing through the clubs without catching an STD. ("I'm hecka blunt," he explains.)
"When you go from your friends comin' to the club to your friends' nephews comin' to the club," says a bouncer named Murphy, another original Madd Pac, "to your friends' kids comin' to the club ..."
"When my kids start coming here, it's gonna be weird," Lepolo says. "I don't want to be here till I'm 60."
Mostly, Lepolo just wants to provide for his family. "If you see the people who got money, it's because a foundation was already set for them," he says. "I want [my son] to enjoy what his family's provided." To that end, after 2 a.m., when the nightclubbers and drunkards file out and are herded away, Baki will drive the hour back to Brentwood, where he moved eight years ago to give his kids a chance to grow up away from the temptations the 'hood dangles in front of young Samoans, to give them the opportunities he never had. "That's why I like the American way," he says.
Lepolo wants his sons to wear braces to close the gap in their front teeth — a family trait — and hopes they never work a day of security in their lives.
