dov
September 9th, 2005, 10:44 AM
The M Generation
By Alon Hadar
The night is coming to an end, but the datebook is still empty. Shlomi Gavrieli and a friend climb the stairs to the second floor of the Lemon Club in South Tel Aviv and take seats at the bar. A barwoman he knows sits down and gets an update on the Viscaya, a new club Gavrieli will be opening in the area in another two months, close to Haooman 17. The barwoman shows an interest and calls over two of her girlfriends.
A quick glance at his Bulgari watch tells Gavrieli that it is 4:30 A.M. For lunch later in the day he is invited to have hamin with dad - Reuven Gavrieli, the casino and cruise ships tycoon - and with mom, Miriam, at the family estate in affluent Herzliya Pituah. "So, where's the party?" the barwoman asks. "Friends are coming to my place, you're invited," Gavrieli says.
He ushers the three girls into his Mercedes CLK coupe and they head for his apartment in New Ramat Aviv. They sit on the white leather sofa. Gavrieli goes to the glass bar, fashioned out of two huge elephant tusks, and pulls out a bottle of vodka. "I'm addicted to the gym," he says and flexes his muscles. "Hey, do you have muscles on your legs, too?" one of the girls asks, and takes a close look. "We don't have muscles like that,
yo
Advertisement
you know feel this," she says and lifts her blouse. Gavrieli runs his hand over the girl's stomach. The blouse is thrown to the marble floor.
Gavrieli's friend, who is sitting at the other end of the sofa, fallsinto line. The odd girl out makes a face and in return gets a kick from one of the other girls. Now there is a green light from all three of the girls; the guys strip last and don't forget to grease the fifth wheel, too. The partying ends at 11:30 A.M. No one bothers to leave phonenumbers. Gavrieli heads for his parents' place.
"There is no weekend that doesn't end with a situation out of a Tarantinomovie," he says. "In the last year and a half, since I came back to Israel in order to set up the club, it's as though Tarantino has been directing my life. What happened at the weekend is not an exceptional or terrible situation. There were things that were a lot worse."
Such as?
"When we are with escort service girls there are no limits at all. The only limit is money. There is no scene of teasing, courting and foreplay. It's the difference between slow cooking and fast food. You eat, you fuck, you go home. You can demand anything. The whole purpose is just to pleasure you, not the girl. I don't know anyone from my close circle who hasn't been with escorts."
With all due respect to Tarantino, don't you think you are contributing to the white-slavery industry, which usually involves exploitation and humiliation?
"The girls who are really good work alone and not with pimps. A girl who knows that all the money will go to her will do it a lot better. A whole lot of Israeli girls have chosen this as a profession. You won't be with a girl who has been kidnapped and smuggled from Eastern Europe to Egypt. You won't enjoy yourself with her. It's like a sack of meat on the bed."
Whether it's "Pulp Fiction" or "Sin City," it's just another scene from the life of Shlomi Gavrieli, 27, who is about to consummate a dream with the help of daddy's big money. But Gavrieli junior, his style notwithstanding, is not the only leading man in the movie. Gavrieli is the archetype of a group of hundreds of young people his age,
most of them the second generation of the nouveau riche, whose pampered adolescence prepared them to become heavy swingers who work out in the gym every day with a personal trainer, drive luxury cars, are familiar with every dish in the poshest restaurants of Tel Aviv and neighboring Herzliya Pituah, and spend their nights in the glittering bars
of the Yad Harutzim section of Tel Aviv, which in the past year has become a nouveau-riche preserve with new rules of going out.
They are the product of quick-money education. As children, they saw classical Europe on their parents' gambling junkets. Mom and Dad didn't deny their children anything, thus producing a spoiled, alienated, designer-label generation that doesn't understand why people have to live in half a tin shack. With their Hugo Boss trousers and Dolce & Gabbana shirts, they carry the metrosexual label, spending endless hours and money to match in the search for designer clothes and adopting the latest trends as they work on creating celebrity-reinforced social circles with soccer players, night-life types and models. Some of them have found places in their dads' developing businesses.
New Ramat Aviv, Saturday afternoon
In the New Ramat Aviv neighborhood in upscale North Tel Aviv, high-rises are adorned with tropical flora, hiding the separation wall between them and the northbound highway. Gavrieli, a new kid on the block, is renting a sixth-floor apartment. He has furnished it himself: meter-high "Greek" sculptures, a living room table fashioned from a sculpture of a naked girl in pseudo-antique finish, a dining table and aristocratic
chairs with gold ornamentation and a large plasma screen on the wall. An entire room has been converted into a clothes closet in which four hanging devices hold hundreds of shirts.
"D-G is my favorite company, I buy at the Versace stores in Kikar Hamedina [a super-pricey shopping and residential area in Tel Aviv] and in Ramat Aviv Mall. Dump me in the desert and I will find a Dolce store. In Israel all we have is Castro. I did the pose thing and didn't buy Israeli products, but I did get a good recommendation about their sweat suits. Then I got to the store and found out that they have nice shirts." A huge clothes closet in the bedroom contains dozens of pairs of jeans, shelves for the workout clothes and a closetful of suits and sports jackets. In another corner lie stacks of folded towels. There are so many clothes that there is no room for books. "I am obsessed with shopping. I inherited it from my mother," he admits.
How much do you spend a month, on average?
"Forget the numbers, they'll just make people's eyes pop."
It is important for Gavrieli to underscore the fact that he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but even his faint smile and soft delivery send a million-dollar message. "Until I was 16 we lived in Holon," he relates. "Only then we moved to Herzliya Pituah. During school breaks I worked in a restaurant in the Ayalon Mall where my father
was a partner and I helped on the fish farm in the south. My father taught me the value of money. I am the last-born and most pampered - I have two older sisters."
Gavrieli attended Mishlav, an external high school in Kikar Hamedina. His boyhood idols were Madonna, Sharon Stone and Bruce Willis. Later he came under the spell of Reuven Lublin, owner of Haooman 17, and of Benjamin Netanyahu ("The way he speaks on television - a superb media person").
These days he has new heroes: "My father, who was an ironmonger and built himself from nothing; Rani Rahav [a public relations man]. I mean, forget it, he's a genius. He knows everything. Just to see his attitude toward people." And, of course, his cousin, MK Inbal Gavrieli (Likud): "Despite all the ambushes, she proved that she is the best. A first-rate MK. Just this week she was here for dinner at my place with Orly Weinerman."
What do you think is most Israeli?
"The desire to be America."
Who is most representative of Israel?
"Once it was [the actor] Ze'ev Revach, today it's [Likud political activist] Uzi Cohen."
Shlomi skipped military service because of "high blood pressure" and immediately became involved with his father's cruise ship, Magic 1. Later he started an independent company for marketing vacation rooms and a line of cruises for clubbers that included appearances by well-known European deejays.
In recent years the Gavrieli family has been in the headlines. His father, according to media reports, owned casinos in Turkey, Bulgaria and Azerbaijan. Papa Gavrieli was also frequently invited to police interrogations, though these were not converted into indictments. Two years ago, he was questioned by customs and VAT authorities on suspicion of tax infractions totaling about NIS 3 million. A year ago he was arrested on suspicion of running a gambling establishment, when a building he owns was used for illegal bingo games under the management of Aharon Abu Hamra, whom the police describe as the "right-hand man" of alleged underworld figure Zeev Rosenstein (now in prison, fighting an extradition request by the United States).
According to a recent report that cited a police intelligence document, Gavrieli and a partner were planning a $100 million sting operation against the Bank of America in Manhattan. (Gavrieli, by the way, was not questioned in this case, and his lawyer says the whole thing is nonsense.) Where the elder Gavrieli did get a favorable press was in
the sports pages, after he became one of the sponsors of the Betar Jerusalem soccer club during its heady championship years in the 1990s.
Since the last Likud primaries, when Inbal Gavrieli, who was then 27, surprised everyone by getting on the party's Knesset list, the family has become the subject of investigative reports in the press. There have been articles about uncles Aryeh and Haim, who served time for drug dealing, extortion and threats; about the political meetings that Uncle Shuni, Inbal's father, held to promote "the girl" in the family banquet hall, Ariana, (now Hatzrot Yafo), with the participation of the family favorite, Danny Naveh, (now health minister), along with MK Uzi Landau (leader of the anti-Sharon "rebels"), Tzachi Hanegbi (former public security minister) and Reuven Rivlin (speaker of the Knesset). There, legend has it, between the appetizers and the fish, the great political deal of the Likud primaries was hatched, known as the "Gavrieli-Mussa Alperon-David Appel-Eitan Sulami axis."
Shlomi, what's it like living with the dubious image of the Gavrieli family?
"At first we got upset. Today we don't have casinos anymore. Everything we had was legal. In London, running a casino is one of the most respectable businesses there is. People watch a TV series like 'Las Vegas' and think that's how it really is. Anyone who doesn't actually live it, doesn't understand the essence. In the big world, a casino is legal and legitimate even more than other businesses, because of the close supervision. My father is the honorary consul of [the republic of] Georgia. To be that, you need a walking certificate of good character. That says it all. It's hard for people to swallow his success. Inbal's entry got us into [the public] consciousness."
Velvet on Sunday
The favorite hangouts of Gavrieli and his friends are to be found in the
commercial area of Yad Harutzim in Tel Aviv, site of the country's most glittering mega-bars. Every day the kids of the M Generation from Herzliya Pituah and the new prestige neighborhoods of North Tel Aviv flock to one of the 20 bars in the area, reinforced by youngsters of both sexes from the periphery Bat Yam, Holon, Rishon Letzion - who dream one day of being on a par with the kids who were born to the right parents. Parked on the sidewalk are Jeeps, Mercedes and BMWs.
The names of the 20 bars also flirt with the million-dollar image: Escobar, Ingrid, Anna, Donna Martin, Denzel, XO, Lamina, Lincoln, Velvet. Local Israeli names are unheard of. Everything here is the product of fast-culture import. Hallmarks are the inflated chest from hours of working out, cropped hair or a bald look, the scents of Issey Miyake
mixed with sweat.
How many people would you say live like you?
"There is a core of 600-700. You won't see them together, other than at events like birthdays or in new bars, which for us become places for business meetings, a substitute for the cafes of the 1950s. A few days ago, for example, I met Uri Stark at Escobar, and we talked about how he could help me with the club so that it will be a success. It wasn't a planned meeting. But the designer bars of Yad Harutzim are the natural stomping ground for our group."
At the entrance to Velvet, Gavrieli explains why he prefers this area to the port or Lilienblum Street: "Look at all the girls here," he says. "Look how much work they have done on themselves. A girl who hasn't invested in herself doesn't do it for me. Look how elegant they are. Think how many hours they worked on themselves before they dared to take their body out of the house. The girls who sit in the pick-ups of Lilienblum will come in sweat suits and clogs. What is that? A bar isn't a grocery store. I don't feel comfortable there."
It's midnight, and outside the bar a few dozen young swingers are begging the female bouncers at the entrance to let them in. On Sunday, Velvet has the most highly regarded line in the bar compound: rhythmic Hebrew music. On other nights the other bars take the lead - Escobar on Tuesdays, Donna Martin on Thursdays, for example. "The female bouncers
are there not for their beauty but to prevent fights. No one will attack a girl," Gavrieli explains. Inside it's business as usual: What's doing, man? What's doing, man? A double handshake. "People who have a certain status in night life and barely said hello to me, now come and embrace me."
Doesn't that disgust you?
"It is 100 percent hypocrisy. But that's life. Of course it cuts both ways, because I also need them for business."
It's not only the night people who seek Gavrieli out. The M Generation know how to choose their chicks with a gilded pincer. One by one the girls go over to him, plant a fleeting kiss on his cheek and get the latest news about the club launching.
Does power with women come only from money?
"Money is a type of power, but what will make a greater impression on her is your status. Getting her for free into places where people wait in line for hours. An entry like that promises you half a fuck. There are a lot of girls without confidence who attach themselves to people with strength and draw power from them. The girl of a club owner is treated differently from just any broad. Look, I know I look very good and intelligent, but those are not the reasons that will generate immediate attraction. The attraction will be achieved with the help of the power. And, of course, the question: 'What can I get from him? I will be a model because his buddy has an agency; he will get me a job as a barwoman; I will have money and live well.'"
You are giving me the profile of a meathead, not of a girl you will take to mother's for dinner.
"The longest serious relationship I have had lasted three months. I do not think I am ripe for a serious relationship. I really want it, but it's impossible. It's hard to create a relationship in the nightlife of Tel Aviv. I have always had options for sex, because I was the son of so-and-so, I had this really nice car. But now it's really rising, because since they heard about the club, all the girls want to be in your zone."
One of the PR people informs Gavrieli that the British singer Craig David has popped into Velvet for a visit. On the way, Gavrieli meets the son of the owner of a well-known steak house. They head for the bar, where a few men in their fifties are ensconced. One of Gavrieli's female friends explains what they are really looking for there. "They are known as sponsors. Some are divorced and some are married. They come to meet girls who want someone to pamper them with money. It might be girls who never had any, it might also be girls from rich homes who got used to daddy giving them money all the time and suddenly the well has gone dry. Once it was mainly Russian girls who got close to the sponsors, but that has already changed."
And girls who are not looking for patronage, what are they doing here?
"Yad Harutzim is a meat market. They are all whores. A girl who comes here knows what she wants. Look at the way the girls here are dressed. For whom do they dress like that? It's not for their mommas."
Adi, a young woman from Herzliya (as distinct from Herzliya Pituah), hair pulled back, emphasizing long eyelashes and gigantic almond eyes, does not pretend to modesty: "Graduates of Ramle prison come to Yad Harutzim. I have no problem with that. Those are the men I am looking for. Arsim, as you call them" - referring to a particular class of hyper-groomed males. "For me they are real men."
2 A.M. at Donna Martin
The clock strikes two; this is the time to head for Donna Martin, adjacent to Escobar, the mega-bar that heralded and labeled the compound. A few seconds next to the female bouncer and almost instantly, the owner is updated about the snazzy guest. We enter a dark, eclectic space, rife with prisms of glaring metal. In the middle is a huge, square bar, at which are seated a few dozen young men in black T-shirts and brondes(blondes who were formerly brunettes) in white tank tops.
Yeki Kabir, a co-owner of the bar (the other is Haim Luzon), offers Gavrieli a drink and provides a local profile: "The first bar that opened in this compound was Escobar, a year and two months ago. We opened 10 months ago. Our crowd is a label crowd, nouveau riche. Sons of businessmen, daughters of so-and-so. A crowd that respects itself and
leaves a lot of money behind. A lot of hotshot CEOs come here with their mistresses."
Kabir tries to explain the distinctiveness of Yad Harutzim as opposed to the leading night spots in the city, the port and Lilienblum. "The compound is the new competitor of the port, only without the sea. The Lilienblum crowd knows how much money it has for the evening and will not go beyond that. The Yad Harutzim crowd has no limits. People come
here in Mercedes and BMWs; they come to Lilienblum on bicycles. Hats and clogs don't get in here. People will come here specially. It's the subconscious of a periphery crowd that wants to show off, to drive back and forth next to the entrance in a Mercedes or a Land Rover. He wants a girl to notice him outside, with the car. That's called foreplay."
Have the rules changed?
"Once there were 'northies' and 'southies.' Today there is integration. When we were at 85 Allenby we looked for a quarter color, a quarter celebrity, a quarter money and a quarter all the rest of the stuff. Today, either there is money or there is no money. You can get a person to drop NIS 800 in an evening and turn him into the CEO of Donna Martin.
Tuesday, Viskaya, Abarbanel Street
At 9 A.M. the architect Michael Azoulay - he has done TLV, Haooman 17, Orka - arrives at the site of the planned club. The concept that has been chosen is of a middle-sized club to which a huge bar will be appended. The bar will be called "Rocco." (Gavrieli: "We saw an exhibition of the designer Rocco Lucco - and the idea came up.") The complexes will be separated by a wooden divider that will be opened for
special events. The planned cost is about $1 million, to be divided among three partners, all around 30 years old. Gavrieli owns 40 percent. "The 300-meter bar will have an eclectic but also classy style," Azoulay explains. "A red divider, artistic pictures, a gold frame. Materials that will broadcast warmth. Both the bar and the club will have VIP rooms."
The idea for the club was hatched during Gavrieli's voluntary exile in the United States. "After completing my first degree in business administration at the Israeli branch of Chamberlain University, I flew to America to start life there," he relates. "I worked for a shipping company in Orlando and it was terrible. I was completely alone. I was on
the mobile phone all day talking to people from Israel. At the opening of the 'Ehrlich' and the 'Lansky' I didn't stop talking - the main thing was to feel that I was there. After a year I had had it. I landed back here a year and a half ago and held a birthday party in the Wax Club for 2,000 people. After that it was clear to me that I had to open my own nightclub. Since then my whole life has revolved around it."
One of the pre-launch events was a party on Independence Day 2005, held at his parents' place. "I hired a PR firm and they invited celebs: Zvika Pik and his girlfriend, Avi Nimni, Yossi Aboukasis, Moran Eisenstein, Rotem Abouhav. Half the city didn't talk to me after the party. People I hadn't heard from since first grade called and begged to enter. The club was the only reason I agreed to let a crew from Rino Tzror's program [a
documentary series on Channel 10] come into the house and film the event. The main thing was for people to remember the name of my club. You have no idea how happy the drinks company that sponsored the event was when they saw the T-shirts with their logo on TV."
I guess the exposure in the report was also part of the deal.
"Obviously. What am I, a celebrity who needs media coverage? Let me spell the club's name for you."
Gavrieli has a clear marketing strategy for the club to succeed. "The circle of swingers in town revolves around 200-300 people who are the hard core. They go out every day and they set public opinion. Around them are another 700 people who are considered a good, consistent crowd. In the wider circle there are another 2,500 swingers. I will try to
get to the 700 and live from the 2,500 for as long as possible, until I shut down the place."
Wednesday, evening, Great Shape gym
The new religion of metrosexuals of the Gavrieli type is body culture. The gym is the temple, the weights room is the holy of holies and the trainer is the high priest. Gavrieli works out six times a week in Great Shape (its name in "Hebrew"), located next to the Brasserie on Ibn Gvirol Street. Three times a week he works out with his personal coach, Roi.
Gavrieli enters the gym, sits at the bar and orders a cappuccino. Sitting next to him is Avi Fuchs, a former Mr. Israel, who is twice as old as Gavrieli. Above them are dozens of television screens, tuned to different channels. A deejay sweetens the atmosphere for the calorie burners with the sounds of club trance. A group of young people are practicing kickboxing in the next room, and in the corner is the spinning
room.
Gavrieli forgoes aerobic fitness like running on the treadmill and gets down to the real thing: weightlifting. He does a few sets with Fuchs, while Roi watches from above and corrects the angle of lifting. Their groans are heard all over the gym. From the weights, the three move to a few more instruments of torture and finish the set at the
bar. They order a protein-rich drink. Gavrieli explains how the gym became a central part of his life:
"I don't miss a single session. I make sure that my whole way of life will change because of this. I stopped eating junk food, I eat almost only proteins. Tuna, fish, fowl. There is no cheese above 1.5 percent fat in my refrigerator. I will make sure to drink protein shakes. There is also a dress culture special clothes and shoes - you accessorize yourself before going out. It used to be that you got fucks in the gym, too, there were terrific cunts, today there are a lot of gays here. Gyms are opening in Tel Aviv at the rate of cafes. This month alone, four opened. Some of them are small neighborhood places, like Great Shape, others are huge, like the one in Dizengoff Center."
Gavrieli finishes his drink and bids his pals farewell. "I'm going to a tanning bed in the gym to get some color before the shoot," he says as though we are in Copenhagen in mid-February.
Wednesday, night, Massa Restaurant
Yaron, a good friend of Gavrieli's, is celebrating his thirtieth birthday. The chosen location is the VIP room of the Massa Restaurant on Ha'arba'ah Street.The food may not be great, but the setting creates the experience. Huge bell lamps descend from the ceiling and cast a clean light over the space, which resembles a Hellenistic temple in a postmodern computer game. A vast marble table, cold curtains and a plasma
screen showing scenes from live performances of Depeche Mode and U2.
Before the high-tech bubble burst, it was the young whiz kids who nourished the luxury restaurants. Now these temples of food are the dining rooms of the M Generation kids, who come here with their parents or with their latest doll.
After dinner, the waitress serves up a check of NIS 3,500, and the group heads for Yad Harutzim. On the way to Escobar, where a birthday party is being held for the owners, Gavrieli explains his plans for the future: "In another three years I will sell the club, in another five years I will fall in love, and in 25 years I will be a successful businessman, and not in the night business."
What thoughts go through your head before you fall asleep?
"The club, only the club. What I did right and what not. With me everything is subjective. In certain things I lack confidence and in other things I feel 10 miles high, so I will emphasize them. These days I live 24 hours around the club. If it succeeds, I am Shlomi Gavrieli the success; if it fails, my self-confidence will crash."
By Alon Hadar
The night is coming to an end, but the datebook is still empty. Shlomi Gavrieli and a friend climb the stairs to the second floor of the Lemon Club in South Tel Aviv and take seats at the bar. A barwoman he knows sits down and gets an update on the Viscaya, a new club Gavrieli will be opening in the area in another two months, close to Haooman 17. The barwoman shows an interest and calls over two of her girlfriends.
A quick glance at his Bulgari watch tells Gavrieli that it is 4:30 A.M. For lunch later in the day he is invited to have hamin with dad - Reuven Gavrieli, the casino and cruise ships tycoon - and with mom, Miriam, at the family estate in affluent Herzliya Pituah. "So, where's the party?" the barwoman asks. "Friends are coming to my place, you're invited," Gavrieli says.
He ushers the three girls into his Mercedes CLK coupe and they head for his apartment in New Ramat Aviv. They sit on the white leather sofa. Gavrieli goes to the glass bar, fashioned out of two huge elephant tusks, and pulls out a bottle of vodka. "I'm addicted to the gym," he says and flexes his muscles. "Hey, do you have muscles on your legs, too?" one of the girls asks, and takes a close look. "We don't have muscles like that,
yo
Advertisement
you know feel this," she says and lifts her blouse. Gavrieli runs his hand over the girl's stomach. The blouse is thrown to the marble floor.
Gavrieli's friend, who is sitting at the other end of the sofa, fallsinto line. The odd girl out makes a face and in return gets a kick from one of the other girls. Now there is a green light from all three of the girls; the guys strip last and don't forget to grease the fifth wheel, too. The partying ends at 11:30 A.M. No one bothers to leave phonenumbers. Gavrieli heads for his parents' place.
"There is no weekend that doesn't end with a situation out of a Tarantinomovie," he says. "In the last year and a half, since I came back to Israel in order to set up the club, it's as though Tarantino has been directing my life. What happened at the weekend is not an exceptional or terrible situation. There were things that were a lot worse."
Such as?
"When we are with escort service girls there are no limits at all. The only limit is money. There is no scene of teasing, courting and foreplay. It's the difference between slow cooking and fast food. You eat, you fuck, you go home. You can demand anything. The whole purpose is just to pleasure you, not the girl. I don't know anyone from my close circle who hasn't been with escorts."
With all due respect to Tarantino, don't you think you are contributing to the white-slavery industry, which usually involves exploitation and humiliation?
"The girls who are really good work alone and not with pimps. A girl who knows that all the money will go to her will do it a lot better. A whole lot of Israeli girls have chosen this as a profession. You won't be with a girl who has been kidnapped and smuggled from Eastern Europe to Egypt. You won't enjoy yourself with her. It's like a sack of meat on the bed."
Whether it's "Pulp Fiction" or "Sin City," it's just another scene from the life of Shlomi Gavrieli, 27, who is about to consummate a dream with the help of daddy's big money. But Gavrieli junior, his style notwithstanding, is not the only leading man in the movie. Gavrieli is the archetype of a group of hundreds of young people his age,
most of them the second generation of the nouveau riche, whose pampered adolescence prepared them to become heavy swingers who work out in the gym every day with a personal trainer, drive luxury cars, are familiar with every dish in the poshest restaurants of Tel Aviv and neighboring Herzliya Pituah, and spend their nights in the glittering bars
of the Yad Harutzim section of Tel Aviv, which in the past year has become a nouveau-riche preserve with new rules of going out.
They are the product of quick-money education. As children, they saw classical Europe on their parents' gambling junkets. Mom and Dad didn't deny their children anything, thus producing a spoiled, alienated, designer-label generation that doesn't understand why people have to live in half a tin shack. With their Hugo Boss trousers and Dolce & Gabbana shirts, they carry the metrosexual label, spending endless hours and money to match in the search for designer clothes and adopting the latest trends as they work on creating celebrity-reinforced social circles with soccer players, night-life types and models. Some of them have found places in their dads' developing businesses.
New Ramat Aviv, Saturday afternoon
In the New Ramat Aviv neighborhood in upscale North Tel Aviv, high-rises are adorned with tropical flora, hiding the separation wall between them and the northbound highway. Gavrieli, a new kid on the block, is renting a sixth-floor apartment. He has furnished it himself: meter-high "Greek" sculptures, a living room table fashioned from a sculpture of a naked girl in pseudo-antique finish, a dining table and aristocratic
chairs with gold ornamentation and a large plasma screen on the wall. An entire room has been converted into a clothes closet in which four hanging devices hold hundreds of shirts.
"D-G is my favorite company, I buy at the Versace stores in Kikar Hamedina [a super-pricey shopping and residential area in Tel Aviv] and in Ramat Aviv Mall. Dump me in the desert and I will find a Dolce store. In Israel all we have is Castro. I did the pose thing and didn't buy Israeli products, but I did get a good recommendation about their sweat suits. Then I got to the store and found out that they have nice shirts." A huge clothes closet in the bedroom contains dozens of pairs of jeans, shelves for the workout clothes and a closetful of suits and sports jackets. In another corner lie stacks of folded towels. There are so many clothes that there is no room for books. "I am obsessed with shopping. I inherited it from my mother," he admits.
How much do you spend a month, on average?
"Forget the numbers, they'll just make people's eyes pop."
It is important for Gavrieli to underscore the fact that he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but even his faint smile and soft delivery send a million-dollar message. "Until I was 16 we lived in Holon," he relates. "Only then we moved to Herzliya Pituah. During school breaks I worked in a restaurant in the Ayalon Mall where my father
was a partner and I helped on the fish farm in the south. My father taught me the value of money. I am the last-born and most pampered - I have two older sisters."
Gavrieli attended Mishlav, an external high school in Kikar Hamedina. His boyhood idols were Madonna, Sharon Stone and Bruce Willis. Later he came under the spell of Reuven Lublin, owner of Haooman 17, and of Benjamin Netanyahu ("The way he speaks on television - a superb media person").
These days he has new heroes: "My father, who was an ironmonger and built himself from nothing; Rani Rahav [a public relations man]. I mean, forget it, he's a genius. He knows everything. Just to see his attitude toward people." And, of course, his cousin, MK Inbal Gavrieli (Likud): "Despite all the ambushes, she proved that she is the best. A first-rate MK. Just this week she was here for dinner at my place with Orly Weinerman."
What do you think is most Israeli?
"The desire to be America."
Who is most representative of Israel?
"Once it was [the actor] Ze'ev Revach, today it's [Likud political activist] Uzi Cohen."
Shlomi skipped military service because of "high blood pressure" and immediately became involved with his father's cruise ship, Magic 1. Later he started an independent company for marketing vacation rooms and a line of cruises for clubbers that included appearances by well-known European deejays.
In recent years the Gavrieli family has been in the headlines. His father, according to media reports, owned casinos in Turkey, Bulgaria and Azerbaijan. Papa Gavrieli was also frequently invited to police interrogations, though these were not converted into indictments. Two years ago, he was questioned by customs and VAT authorities on suspicion of tax infractions totaling about NIS 3 million. A year ago he was arrested on suspicion of running a gambling establishment, when a building he owns was used for illegal bingo games under the management of Aharon Abu Hamra, whom the police describe as the "right-hand man" of alleged underworld figure Zeev Rosenstein (now in prison, fighting an extradition request by the United States).
According to a recent report that cited a police intelligence document, Gavrieli and a partner were planning a $100 million sting operation against the Bank of America in Manhattan. (Gavrieli, by the way, was not questioned in this case, and his lawyer says the whole thing is nonsense.) Where the elder Gavrieli did get a favorable press was in
the sports pages, after he became one of the sponsors of the Betar Jerusalem soccer club during its heady championship years in the 1990s.
Since the last Likud primaries, when Inbal Gavrieli, who was then 27, surprised everyone by getting on the party's Knesset list, the family has become the subject of investigative reports in the press. There have been articles about uncles Aryeh and Haim, who served time for drug dealing, extortion and threats; about the political meetings that Uncle Shuni, Inbal's father, held to promote "the girl" in the family banquet hall, Ariana, (now Hatzrot Yafo), with the participation of the family favorite, Danny Naveh, (now health minister), along with MK Uzi Landau (leader of the anti-Sharon "rebels"), Tzachi Hanegbi (former public security minister) and Reuven Rivlin (speaker of the Knesset). There, legend has it, between the appetizers and the fish, the great political deal of the Likud primaries was hatched, known as the "Gavrieli-Mussa Alperon-David Appel-Eitan Sulami axis."
Shlomi, what's it like living with the dubious image of the Gavrieli family?
"At first we got upset. Today we don't have casinos anymore. Everything we had was legal. In London, running a casino is one of the most respectable businesses there is. People watch a TV series like 'Las Vegas' and think that's how it really is. Anyone who doesn't actually live it, doesn't understand the essence. In the big world, a casino is legal and legitimate even more than other businesses, because of the close supervision. My father is the honorary consul of [the republic of] Georgia. To be that, you need a walking certificate of good character. That says it all. It's hard for people to swallow his success. Inbal's entry got us into [the public] consciousness."
Velvet on Sunday
The favorite hangouts of Gavrieli and his friends are to be found in the
commercial area of Yad Harutzim in Tel Aviv, site of the country's most glittering mega-bars. Every day the kids of the M Generation from Herzliya Pituah and the new prestige neighborhoods of North Tel Aviv flock to one of the 20 bars in the area, reinforced by youngsters of both sexes from the periphery Bat Yam, Holon, Rishon Letzion - who dream one day of being on a par with the kids who were born to the right parents. Parked on the sidewalk are Jeeps, Mercedes and BMWs.
The names of the 20 bars also flirt with the million-dollar image: Escobar, Ingrid, Anna, Donna Martin, Denzel, XO, Lamina, Lincoln, Velvet. Local Israeli names are unheard of. Everything here is the product of fast-culture import. Hallmarks are the inflated chest from hours of working out, cropped hair or a bald look, the scents of Issey Miyake
mixed with sweat.
How many people would you say live like you?
"There is a core of 600-700. You won't see them together, other than at events like birthdays or in new bars, which for us become places for business meetings, a substitute for the cafes of the 1950s. A few days ago, for example, I met Uri Stark at Escobar, and we talked about how he could help me with the club so that it will be a success. It wasn't a planned meeting. But the designer bars of Yad Harutzim are the natural stomping ground for our group."
At the entrance to Velvet, Gavrieli explains why he prefers this area to the port or Lilienblum Street: "Look at all the girls here," he says. "Look how much work they have done on themselves. A girl who hasn't invested in herself doesn't do it for me. Look how elegant they are. Think how many hours they worked on themselves before they dared to take their body out of the house. The girls who sit in the pick-ups of Lilienblum will come in sweat suits and clogs. What is that? A bar isn't a grocery store. I don't feel comfortable there."
It's midnight, and outside the bar a few dozen young swingers are begging the female bouncers at the entrance to let them in. On Sunday, Velvet has the most highly regarded line in the bar compound: rhythmic Hebrew music. On other nights the other bars take the lead - Escobar on Tuesdays, Donna Martin on Thursdays, for example. "The female bouncers
are there not for their beauty but to prevent fights. No one will attack a girl," Gavrieli explains. Inside it's business as usual: What's doing, man? What's doing, man? A double handshake. "People who have a certain status in night life and barely said hello to me, now come and embrace me."
Doesn't that disgust you?
"It is 100 percent hypocrisy. But that's life. Of course it cuts both ways, because I also need them for business."
It's not only the night people who seek Gavrieli out. The M Generation know how to choose their chicks with a gilded pincer. One by one the girls go over to him, plant a fleeting kiss on his cheek and get the latest news about the club launching.
Does power with women come only from money?
"Money is a type of power, but what will make a greater impression on her is your status. Getting her for free into places where people wait in line for hours. An entry like that promises you half a fuck. There are a lot of girls without confidence who attach themselves to people with strength and draw power from them. The girl of a club owner is treated differently from just any broad. Look, I know I look very good and intelligent, but those are not the reasons that will generate immediate attraction. The attraction will be achieved with the help of the power. And, of course, the question: 'What can I get from him? I will be a model because his buddy has an agency; he will get me a job as a barwoman; I will have money and live well.'"
You are giving me the profile of a meathead, not of a girl you will take to mother's for dinner.
"The longest serious relationship I have had lasted three months. I do not think I am ripe for a serious relationship. I really want it, but it's impossible. It's hard to create a relationship in the nightlife of Tel Aviv. I have always had options for sex, because I was the son of so-and-so, I had this really nice car. But now it's really rising, because since they heard about the club, all the girls want to be in your zone."
One of the PR people informs Gavrieli that the British singer Craig David has popped into Velvet for a visit. On the way, Gavrieli meets the son of the owner of a well-known steak house. They head for the bar, where a few men in their fifties are ensconced. One of Gavrieli's female friends explains what they are really looking for there. "They are known as sponsors. Some are divorced and some are married. They come to meet girls who want someone to pamper them with money. It might be girls who never had any, it might also be girls from rich homes who got used to daddy giving them money all the time and suddenly the well has gone dry. Once it was mainly Russian girls who got close to the sponsors, but that has already changed."
And girls who are not looking for patronage, what are they doing here?
"Yad Harutzim is a meat market. They are all whores. A girl who comes here knows what she wants. Look at the way the girls here are dressed. For whom do they dress like that? It's not for their mommas."
Adi, a young woman from Herzliya (as distinct from Herzliya Pituah), hair pulled back, emphasizing long eyelashes and gigantic almond eyes, does not pretend to modesty: "Graduates of Ramle prison come to Yad Harutzim. I have no problem with that. Those are the men I am looking for. Arsim, as you call them" - referring to a particular class of hyper-groomed males. "For me they are real men."
2 A.M. at Donna Martin
The clock strikes two; this is the time to head for Donna Martin, adjacent to Escobar, the mega-bar that heralded and labeled the compound. A few seconds next to the female bouncer and almost instantly, the owner is updated about the snazzy guest. We enter a dark, eclectic space, rife with prisms of glaring metal. In the middle is a huge, square bar, at which are seated a few dozen young men in black T-shirts and brondes(blondes who were formerly brunettes) in white tank tops.
Yeki Kabir, a co-owner of the bar (the other is Haim Luzon), offers Gavrieli a drink and provides a local profile: "The first bar that opened in this compound was Escobar, a year and two months ago. We opened 10 months ago. Our crowd is a label crowd, nouveau riche. Sons of businessmen, daughters of so-and-so. A crowd that respects itself and
leaves a lot of money behind. A lot of hotshot CEOs come here with their mistresses."
Kabir tries to explain the distinctiveness of Yad Harutzim as opposed to the leading night spots in the city, the port and Lilienblum. "The compound is the new competitor of the port, only without the sea. The Lilienblum crowd knows how much money it has for the evening and will not go beyond that. The Yad Harutzim crowd has no limits. People come
here in Mercedes and BMWs; they come to Lilienblum on bicycles. Hats and clogs don't get in here. People will come here specially. It's the subconscious of a periphery crowd that wants to show off, to drive back and forth next to the entrance in a Mercedes or a Land Rover. He wants a girl to notice him outside, with the car. That's called foreplay."
Have the rules changed?
"Once there were 'northies' and 'southies.' Today there is integration. When we were at 85 Allenby we looked for a quarter color, a quarter celebrity, a quarter money and a quarter all the rest of the stuff. Today, either there is money or there is no money. You can get a person to drop NIS 800 in an evening and turn him into the CEO of Donna Martin.
Tuesday, Viskaya, Abarbanel Street
At 9 A.M. the architect Michael Azoulay - he has done TLV, Haooman 17, Orka - arrives at the site of the planned club. The concept that has been chosen is of a middle-sized club to which a huge bar will be appended. The bar will be called "Rocco." (Gavrieli: "We saw an exhibition of the designer Rocco Lucco - and the idea came up.") The complexes will be separated by a wooden divider that will be opened for
special events. The planned cost is about $1 million, to be divided among three partners, all around 30 years old. Gavrieli owns 40 percent. "The 300-meter bar will have an eclectic but also classy style," Azoulay explains. "A red divider, artistic pictures, a gold frame. Materials that will broadcast warmth. Both the bar and the club will have VIP rooms."
The idea for the club was hatched during Gavrieli's voluntary exile in the United States. "After completing my first degree in business administration at the Israeli branch of Chamberlain University, I flew to America to start life there," he relates. "I worked for a shipping company in Orlando and it was terrible. I was completely alone. I was on
the mobile phone all day talking to people from Israel. At the opening of the 'Ehrlich' and the 'Lansky' I didn't stop talking - the main thing was to feel that I was there. After a year I had had it. I landed back here a year and a half ago and held a birthday party in the Wax Club for 2,000 people. After that it was clear to me that I had to open my own nightclub. Since then my whole life has revolved around it."
One of the pre-launch events was a party on Independence Day 2005, held at his parents' place. "I hired a PR firm and they invited celebs: Zvika Pik and his girlfriend, Avi Nimni, Yossi Aboukasis, Moran Eisenstein, Rotem Abouhav. Half the city didn't talk to me after the party. People I hadn't heard from since first grade called and begged to enter. The club was the only reason I agreed to let a crew from Rino Tzror's program [a
documentary series on Channel 10] come into the house and film the event. The main thing was for people to remember the name of my club. You have no idea how happy the drinks company that sponsored the event was when they saw the T-shirts with their logo on TV."
I guess the exposure in the report was also part of the deal.
"Obviously. What am I, a celebrity who needs media coverage? Let me spell the club's name for you."
Gavrieli has a clear marketing strategy for the club to succeed. "The circle of swingers in town revolves around 200-300 people who are the hard core. They go out every day and they set public opinion. Around them are another 700 people who are considered a good, consistent crowd. In the wider circle there are another 2,500 swingers. I will try to
get to the 700 and live from the 2,500 for as long as possible, until I shut down the place."
Wednesday, evening, Great Shape gym
The new religion of metrosexuals of the Gavrieli type is body culture. The gym is the temple, the weights room is the holy of holies and the trainer is the high priest. Gavrieli works out six times a week in Great Shape (its name in "Hebrew"), located next to the Brasserie on Ibn Gvirol Street. Three times a week he works out with his personal coach, Roi.
Gavrieli enters the gym, sits at the bar and orders a cappuccino. Sitting next to him is Avi Fuchs, a former Mr. Israel, who is twice as old as Gavrieli. Above them are dozens of television screens, tuned to different channels. A deejay sweetens the atmosphere for the calorie burners with the sounds of club trance. A group of young people are practicing kickboxing in the next room, and in the corner is the spinning
room.
Gavrieli forgoes aerobic fitness like running on the treadmill and gets down to the real thing: weightlifting. He does a few sets with Fuchs, while Roi watches from above and corrects the angle of lifting. Their groans are heard all over the gym. From the weights, the three move to a few more instruments of torture and finish the set at the
bar. They order a protein-rich drink. Gavrieli explains how the gym became a central part of his life:
"I don't miss a single session. I make sure that my whole way of life will change because of this. I stopped eating junk food, I eat almost only proteins. Tuna, fish, fowl. There is no cheese above 1.5 percent fat in my refrigerator. I will make sure to drink protein shakes. There is also a dress culture special clothes and shoes - you accessorize yourself before going out. It used to be that you got fucks in the gym, too, there were terrific cunts, today there are a lot of gays here. Gyms are opening in Tel Aviv at the rate of cafes. This month alone, four opened. Some of them are small neighborhood places, like Great Shape, others are huge, like the one in Dizengoff Center."
Gavrieli finishes his drink and bids his pals farewell. "I'm going to a tanning bed in the gym to get some color before the shoot," he says as though we are in Copenhagen in mid-February.
Wednesday, night, Massa Restaurant
Yaron, a good friend of Gavrieli's, is celebrating his thirtieth birthday. The chosen location is the VIP room of the Massa Restaurant on Ha'arba'ah Street.The food may not be great, but the setting creates the experience. Huge bell lamps descend from the ceiling and cast a clean light over the space, which resembles a Hellenistic temple in a postmodern computer game. A vast marble table, cold curtains and a plasma
screen showing scenes from live performances of Depeche Mode and U2.
Before the high-tech bubble burst, it was the young whiz kids who nourished the luxury restaurants. Now these temples of food are the dining rooms of the M Generation kids, who come here with their parents or with their latest doll.
After dinner, the waitress serves up a check of NIS 3,500, and the group heads for Yad Harutzim. On the way to Escobar, where a birthday party is being held for the owners, Gavrieli explains his plans for the future: "In another three years I will sell the club, in another five years I will fall in love, and in 25 years I will be a successful businessman, and not in the night business."
What thoughts go through your head before you fall asleep?
"The club, only the club. What I did right and what not. With me everything is subjective. In certain things I lack confidence and in other things I feel 10 miles high, so I will emphasize them. These days I live 24 hours around the club. If it succeeds, I am Shlomi Gavrieli the success; if it fails, my self-confidence will crash."