At the time of his passing, Somen Banerjee, the late creator of Chippendales, had a total net worth of $3 million. His controversial dance troupe was the source of his financial success.
For those of you who are unaware, Somen is the man who established the Chippendales, which is today one of the most famous touring dance troupes. The upcoming miniseries on Hulu will tell the narrative of Somen’s life and career in the entertainment industry.
Robert Siegel is the mind behind the upcoming, highly anticipated television series that will air on Hulu and was inspired to develop it by the book Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders written by K. Scot Macdonald and Patrick MontesDeOca.
On Hulu, the upcoming television miniseries Welcomed To Chippendales is scheduled to make its debut on Tuesday, November 22, 2022. So. Make a note on your calendar to remind you to mark the date.
Somen Banerjee is an Indian business tycoon and the founder of Chippendales
Somen Banerjee Net Worth As The Founder Of Chippendales
Somen Banarjee, the man who founded Chippendales, passed away with a significant net worth of approximately $3 million at the time of his passing.
Banarjee, much like many others, began his career at the bottom and worked his way up. The route that the Bengali businessman took to amass a fortune and improve the quality of his life was fraught with numerous challenges and setbacks along the way.
According to the reports, Banarjee travelled all the way from India to the United States with the hopes of amassing a significant fortune. Soon after the novel concept for a business was presented, people began to recognise him as a prominent figure.
At that time, he was at the top of his profession and had a successful brand that was worth multiple millions of dollars. A Bengali business entrepreneur brought the innovative idea of Chippendales to the world’s attention, which led to his rise to stardom.
Banerjee’s determination to keep moving forward and his desire to try something new were the driving forces for the formation of the Chippendales, which he founded.
The 1980s were considered the most successful decade for the corporation, with reports indicating that it made millions of dollars from worldwide tours and merchandise sales. They were able to create enormous sums of money that ranged anywhere from $5 million to $8 million because to the enormous profit they made.
Banarjee amassed a tremendous fortune through his ownership of the Chippendales dancing group and its subsequent business ventures. The dancing ensemble gained a lot of notoriety for putting on male striptease performances aimed specifically towards female audiences.
The inclusion of male stripper dancers, which was the first of its sort to be performed in the United States, was the primary factor that contributed to the popularity of the dancing company. Within a short period of time, the company became quite effective at targeting female audiences.
Before he came up with the idea for Chippendales, Steven worked in a variety of fields simultaneously in various employment. When all of Bannerjee’s sources of revenue are taken into account, it is safe to claim that he amassed an enormous personal wealth.
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4 Ways Somen Banerjee Made His Money
Somen Banerjee, a successful businessman in India, amassed a vast fortune through the acquisition of wealth from a variety of different sources.
1. Dancing Troupe “Chippendales”
The innovative idea of an Indian entrepreneur to form a dancing troupe known as the Chippendales led to the accumulation of a significant chunk of the billionaire’s total wealth.
The ambitious Bengali business tycoon left Bombay, which is located in India, and moved to the United States in the hopes of making a fortune there. Nobody ever dreamed that Banerjee’s business idea would bring in such a substantial amount of money for him.
After a string of failures in the business world, he transformed a Los Angeles club known as Destiny II into a nightclub complete with events like Female Exotic Dancing Night and many others. After some time had passed, Banerjee conceived of the novel concept of including a male stripper dancing company.
The enterprising owner transformed the nightclub in Los Angeles into a haven for male strippers in a very short amount of time. During that time period, it was the first firm to target female audiences specifically. Banerjee drove the company to its highest level of success.
2. Jobs Including Executive Producer And Director
Somen, sometimes known as Steve Banerjee, was employed in the film industry as an executive producer and director before he came up with the revolutionary idea of Chippendales.
In 1987, he was involved in the production of Tall, Dark, and Handsome both as an executive producer and as a director. In a similar fashion, Banerjee served in the capacity of executive producer for both Ladies Night (1983) and Chippendales (2001).
3. Backgammon Club And Mobil Gas Station
A Mobil petrol station and a backgammon club were both owned and run by the late Bengali businessman Banerjee. However, he was disappointed to find that the business at the backgammon club did not live up to his expectations.
Although he did pick up some valuable life experiences from his past jobs, he wasn’t able to grow his net worth because to the company’s lack of assistance in that regard.
4. Connections And Networking
Somen Banerjee was able to improve his financial condition thanks in large part to the intangible assets of networking and connections he had developed.
Chippendales’ trailblazing female audience was the primary goal of the company’s business model, and his strong ties with well-known names contributed to the expansion of his net worth.
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Welcome to Chippendales review: Kumail Nanjiani outshines Hulu’s so-so striptease saga
Hulu’s ‘Welcome to Chippendales’ Is Inspired by True, Terrifying Events
Somen “Steve” Banerjee, according to Hulu, was “an immigrant from India who became the unexpected founder of the world’s greatest male-stripping enterprise — and let nothing stand in his way in the process.” However, if you’ve seen the Welcome to Chippendales trailer for Hulu’s upcoming true crime series, you know that Banerjee’s story is more like a murderous nightmare than the American dream.
Kumail Nanjiani portrays the controversial creator of the Chippendale dancing group in the eight-episode series, which premieres on November 22.
According to a 1994 Los Angeles Times article, Banerjee, an Indian native of Mumbai, purchased a struggling bar in the Westside section of Los Angeles, changed its name from Destiny II to Chippendales, and started a ladies-only “male exotic dance night.”
According to The Daily Beast, Paul Snider, a promoter who Banerjee’s previous attorney described as “sleazy and slick,” had the idea for a concert featuring scantily dressed studs. Snider’s tale also ended violently: in a 1980 murder-suicide, he killed Dorothy Stratten, the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year and his girlfriend at the time.
As ABC News reported last year, Banerjee hired Emmy-winning television producer and choreographer Nick DeNoia in the early 1980s to help the Chippendales revue grow and improve after it became an instant hit in 1979.
DeNoia put the Chippendales on the road in exchange for a 50% share of the tour’s earnings, but Banerjee and DeNoia’s working relationship soon fell apart and the two men took on various aspects of the business. According to FBI special agent Scott Garriola, Banerjee eventually became suspicious that DeNoia wasn’t being truthful about the amount of money the tour was bringing in, and as a result, he hired Ray Colon to attack the choreographer. Colon proceeded to New York with an associate named Gilberto Rivera Lopez, and on April 7, 1987, Rivera Lopez shot and killed DeNoia in his Chippendales office.
DeNoia’s murder remained unsolved for many years. However, Banerjee went after the rivals after purchasing the Chippendales’ touring rights from the DeNoia family.
Read When Scot, a former Chippendales dancer, was emceeing the Adonis male exotic dance troupe’s performances in Blackpool, England, in 1991, FBI agents approached him. The agents informed him that a hit had been made on his life as well as the lives of the other two Adonis performers. Someone wanted to inject them with cyanide to murder them.
Somen Banerjee
Somen Banerjee Bio
Somen “Steve” Banerjee was an Indian entrepreneur who was the inventor of Chippendales. He was born on October 8, 1946 and passed away on October 23, 1994.
On October 8, 1946, Somen Banerjee was born in Bombay, which is now known as Mumbai, in the country of India. After running a Mobil gas station and a backgammon club that was unsuccessful, Banerjee purchased a club in Los Angeles called “Destiny II” that was also unsuccessful and transformed it into a nightclub that included female mud wrestling and a “Female Exotic Dancing Night.” It wasn’t until 1979 that the United States saw its first performance of its kind, which consisted of a male stripper dancing ensemble aimed specifically at female audiences. Banerjee initially formed a partnership with Paul Snider, who would later be responsible for the death of Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten. However, not long after that, Banerjee began developing a more theatrical presentation in collaboration with Emmy Award–winning producer Nick De Noia.
Banerjee was accused of soliciting the assistance of Ray Colon, a former Palm Springs police officer and lounge room entertainer, in order to carry out the murder of show producer De Noia in 1987. Additionally, Banerjee was accused of hatching a plot in 1990 and 1991 to kill Michael Fullington, a former Chippendales dancer and choreographer, along with two other former Chippendales dancers, who Banerjee viewed as competition for the Chippendales franchise. In the end, he entered a guilty plea to charges including attempted murder for hire, racketeering, and arson. He agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence that would have sent him to prison for 26 years and caused him to lose his stake of Chippendales.
Banerjee was found to have hanged himself in his cell early on the morning of October 23, 1994, only hours before he was scheduled to be sentenced. His body was discovered there. Although there were reports that Banerjee was depressed, it was not believed that he would end his own life by taking his own life.
Somen Banerjee At the time of his passing
Details of events leading to Steve Banerjee’s death
Steve Banerjee, who was born in Mumbai, India, moved to Los Angeles and opened a nightclub called Chippendales. In 1979, he put on his first show with male strippers. The idea and show were a hit right away, and soon there were lines of women outside his club every night.
In the 1980s, Banerjee wanted to grow, so he hired Nick DeNoia, a TV producer and choreographer who had won an Emmy Award, to help him improve the performance. In the end, they opened a new Chippendales show at a club in New York City.
Soon, the two men’s relationship started to go bad, and the tension between them reached its peak when DeNoia kept Chippendales’ touring rights and started a competing male striptease club with a few former dancers. This was called Adonis.
FBI Special Agent Scott Garriola says that Steve Banerjee hired a man named Ray Colon to help him attack his former business partner DeNoia because he was angry that DeNoia was doing well. Colon found a partner named Gilberto Rivera Lopez, who shot DeNoia in his office and ran away before the police could get there.
Garriola says that as more male strip clubs and shows, like Adonis, popped up to compete with Chippendales, Banerjee wanted the people to be killed. In 1991, an FBI agent in Las Vegas got a call from a person who went by the name Strawberry and said that Colon had tried to talk to him about killing some of Adonis’ employees.
During a raid on Colon’s house, the FBI says they found 46 grammes of cyanide, which is enough to kill over 200 people. Colon was taken into custody and charged with plotting and hiring someone to kill.
Colon finally agreed to help the FBI and told them that Steve Banerjee was the one who killed DeNoia and was planning to kill the Adonis dancers. The FBI’s first plan to get Banerjee to admit to his crimes in a conversation with Colon failed. The plan was to secretly record the conversation and play it back. He knew that Colon had been arrested, so his sudden release made him suspicious.
Garriola told what his new plan was. Colon said he was a wanted man on the run in Europe and asked Banerjee to meet him there. The duo met in Zurich, Switzerland. Banerjee was there for business, but Colon was just a pawn that was used to catch Banerjee. Their conversation was secretly recorded by the FBI, which gave them enough proof to arrest Banerjee.
Steve Banerjee admitted to getting money by force and killing someone for money in September 1993. But he killed himself the day before he was to be sentenced in 1994. Colon got a shorter sentence because he helped the FBI bring down Banerjee. He was let out of prison in 1996.
The host of the Welcome to Your Fantasy podcast, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, talked about how important it is to tell the Chippendales story.
The first episode of Secrets of the Chippendales Murders will air on A&E on Monday, March 14, 2022, at 10 p.m. ET.
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