The music inside Paul’s Casablanca lounge was thumping on a recent night as sweaty dancers maneuvered under a disco ball. Outside, a line of would-be revelers looked longingly at the entrance. A green velvet rope was nearly all that was separating them from the good times being had inside.
That rope and Fabrizio Brienza.
As the “door” of the lounge, in SoHo, Mr. Brienza is in charge of plucking patrons from the line to enter. Only a choice few get in.
“I curate the vibe of the place,” said Mr. Brienza, who has worked at Paul’s for five years and estimates that on busy weekends he turns away hundreds of people who don’t fit that vibe. Which is defined solely by him.
Mr. Brienza is on the front lines of gate-keeping in a city that thrives on exclusivity, giving rise to power brokers around every corner.
In New York, co-op boards decide who gets to buy apartments, and restaurant hosts control who gets the best tables — or any table — at the city’s hottest spots. Admissions officers choose which parents can send their children to the fanciest preschools. Even fishmongers have their own seat of power, selecting which high-end chefs get the prime catch.
Mr. Brienza is among a handful of so-called doors who decide which revelers get to come inside various nightclubs and lounges for drinking and dancing.
At 55, he is one of the city’s most experienced gatekeepers, having opened the rope for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, the supermodel Paulina Porizkova and even Anna Wintour. A few weeks ago, he turned away football players from the New York Giants.
He is also a dinosaur of sorts. In an increasingly economically stratified city, the nightlife scene is shifting from scores of sprawling night clubs to a proliferation of members-only social clubs with four- or five-figured entry fees.
Getting into Paul’s can be pricey too. There is no cover charge, but it costs $1,000 for two people for “bottle service” — V.I.P. treatment that guarantees a table, includes a bottle of alcohol and offers a waiter to serve it. Mr. Brienza rounds up some of those clients himself. Those who don’t want to pay line up outside and take their chances.
His method of choosing patrons is as difficult for him to define as it is for outsiders to discern. “If you have a good vibe and are a fun person, I’m going to take care of you,” he said.
On a recent night he looked almost hulking in a custom-made white fur coat draped over his 6-foot-4 frame, hovering over the line that had formed.
His face remained expressionless. He turned his back to the small crowd, looked at his reflection in a window and spun back again. He shuffled from foot to foot, tapping his python-skin boots on the sidewalk. He licked his lips. Suddenly, he locked eyes with a woman toward the back of the line. He nodded. A security guard pulled back the green rope and she slipped inside.
Prince, Madonna, ‘Miami Vice’ types
Mr. Brienza grew up in Campobasso in southern Italy and was fond of night life from an early age.
“Everyone looks better at night,” he said.
He found work as a model across Italy until he scored a two-week job in Miami for Versace. He decided to stay, eventually gaining U.S. citizenship.
It was the 1990s and Miami was peaking, Mr. Brienza said, “the best place in the world.”
“Retirees, models, “Miami Vice’ types, drug dealers, girls, old Cuban guys,” he said. “Prince owned a night club, Madonna was there, Sylvester Stallone was there, Sean Penn had a bar.”
One night, he did a favor for a friend who asked him to stand outside the door at a party, making sure the guests who tried to enter belonged there. Someone tied to a new nightclub was at the party, watching him work, and offered him a job to become the “door.”
He went to work at Club Liquid owned by Chris Paciello, a wealthy Miami nightclub impresario who at the time ran some of South Beach’s most popular establishments.
Mr. Brienza was not a bouncer who manages unruly patrons and deals with other security issues; the club already had several of those. He was simply the door.
The job was overwhelming at first. Mr. Paciello stepped in and offered advice: Think of the club as your house, Mr. Brienza recalled him saying as they surveyed the eager crowd one night. Ask yourself: Who would you let into your house?
“Everything got clear in my head — then I understood the assignment,” Mr. Brienza said. “And that’s how you create the vibe.”
Mr. Brienza stayed mostly in Miami until the early 2000s. After a brief stint in Los Angeles, he moved to New York in 2004 to tap into the city’s newly energized nightclub scene.
He worked at all the hot spots: Pink Elephant, Home, Guest House and various night clubs at the Plaza Hotel, Maritime Hotel and SoHo Grand Hotel. He was part owner of Happy Valley in Flatiron with its Cheetah-print banquettes and a neon-lit staircase. All of them have closed down.
He became a fixture of New York City nightlife. The Village Voice called him a “door God,” and “a hunk of Italian bread who wears rosary beads under his Dolce suit.” For a Miami publication he summed up his methods as, “Scumbags out; cool people in.” He played himself in a mockumentary, “The Doorman.”
He’s still at it, armed with war stories from all the nights spent with alcohol-fueled crowds.
There was the time an intoxicated woman injured a security guard’s eye with her fake fingernail. And the time a man picked up the heavy pole attached to a velvet rope and threatened to beat someone with it. Mr. Brienza developed a knack for spotting troublemakers.
“I see a person, and I can tell their background in three seconds,” he said. “If a guy is cool or not cool, it’s in the way they move.”
He added: “Almost never I am wrong.”
He occasionally made people sob by refusing them entry.
“It’s not that difficult to make a girl cry. They love the drama, the crocodile tears,” he said, his Italian accent adding an extra syllable to “crocodile.” “If inside is incredible and everybody looks spectacular and the people who are, let’s say, average or below average show up, I shut them down.”
‘The daughter of somebody big’
Outside Paul’s, small groups spilled out of three limousines and got in the line on a chilly night in March.
Mr. Brienza’s phone buzzed constantly.
“I have a big hot group of girls coming out to celebrate,” read one text message. “I would love to bring them to your spot to dance and have a fabulous time. Let me know what you can do.”
The vibe varies from night to night, Mr. Brienza said. The crowd generally is a collection “of gays, straights, a lot of finance bros, a lot of skaters, the billionaire, the tech bro, the hot girl, the not-so-hot girl but she’s the daughter of somebody big,” he said.
“I like to keep it mixed and eclectic,” he said. “But I have to play with what I’ve got.”
On this night, the line included a manager at Instagram, two guys who had been barhopping, a man who worked in software development, two women in cropped fluffy fur coats, six women in cocktail dresses and a man in a leather trench coat.
There was also a 20-something guy in earth tones — khaki pants and a roll-neck sweater — standing with a friend.
“Finance bros,” Mr. Brienza summed them up by looking at them. “We like the finance bros because they keep the nightlife alive. They are the ones with the money. But the look — the Patagonia vest and the backpack and the khaki pants — they are very square, nice people.”
The two men, indeed, said they worked in finance. The wait was worth it, they said.
“This is as close to New York nostalgia as you can get,” said one of them, Morgan Shepherd.
After an hour they decided their chances of entry would be better if they had women with them. The tactic worked: As soon as their female friends arrived, Mr. Brienza let the group in.
On occasion Mr. Brienza will shoo patrons away.
“I tell them don’t waste their time. It’s not going to happen tonight,” he said. “Bada boom.”
But he doesn’t often outright say no to anyone. Instead, he refuses entry by ignoring people. Eventually, they take the hint and leave.
Among those who wandered off were three large men who had arrived in a dark S.U.V. They exchanged quiet words with Mr. Brienza, then spun on their heels and walked away. They were members of the New York Giants, Mr. Brienza said, but didn’t want to pay the steep fee for bottle service and didn’t want to wait in line either.
“A big football player from the New York Giants — they make $20 million a year,” he scoffed in exaggeration. “Cheapest people in the world.”
Mr. Brienza likes to reminisce about the heyday of night clubs in New York, the era of supermodels and celebrity encounters. Back then the owner of one club even tried to impose a height rule: Only tall people could enter. It was a way to ensure the club filled with models.
“Then all of the sudden one year, no more celebrities — just influencers,” he said. “I can’t stand influencers. It makes my skin crawl when I hear influencers.”
Still, he knows that nightclubs in New York have begun to fade in popularity. The supermodels have been replaced by TikTok stars. Mr. Brienza is trying to focus more on acting and already has racked up roles in various films and shows. He knows New Yorkers don’t go out as much as they used to and don’t stay out as late when they do. Young people are even drinking less alcohol than they used to.
In the early hours of the morning, the line in front of Paul’s started to shrink, whittled down to a handful of people, including one man who had arrived alone.
He stared at his Converse hightop sneakers, glancing up only occasionally at Mr. Brienza who was letting in people both in front of and behind him. Finally, not long after 2 a.m., Mr. Brienza opened the rope for the man.
“He was there for two hours,” Mr. Brienza said and shrugged.
