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-We actually came specifically from Ohio for spring break.
MATT: When you come from Tennessee, Georgia, South
Carolina, any Southern state, Daytona Beach might as well be
the south of France for these people.
SEAN BISHOP: The way I've always described Daytona Beach
to people is it reminds me of somebody who fell in love with
a hooker and is trying to turn her into a lady.
She's always going to be a whore.
On a good spring break night, we'll have well over 100 girls
dancing here.
NADIA: By the time midnight hits, this place is crazy.
SEAN BISHOP: At first, when we started letting the spring
breakers in, the girls looked at them like they were a bunch
of young kids without any money until they find out they
were spending money.
And now they embrace it.
And the unique thing about it is if you look at the age
group, our average dancer is a girl in her
young 20s, late teens.
NADIA: I've had girls say they've walked out of here
with $2,000.
I mean, crazy, off-the-hook amounts.
What happens in Daytona stays in Daytona.
DAVE: Daytona is just the Vegas of Florida, because it's
so trashy as it is that people come down here for spring
break, leave all their morals at home.
SEAN BISHOP: You go to bed one night, and you wake up and
there's an extra 200,000 people in town.
So the place just explodes.
MATT: It's just a bunch of people who came to one place
with good weather to just get hammered and have sex.
RANDY PHILLIPS: Dirtona Beach, man.
That's the name that sticks.
That is Dirtona.
MATT: If you spend five minutes in a hotel room during
spring break, you have to wonder all the atrocities that
are going on.
All the hotel room doors are open.
There's a beer bong in every room, people having sex as
loudly as possible, belongings everywhere.
Like people just left their shit, and
they're down on the beach.
There could be a whale that just washed up on the beach
and is decaying and smells like shit.
If there's people around it, they'll flock to it and
they'll get hammered by it.
RANDY PHILLIPS: These two girls were totally going at it
right on one of my mop sinks.
And I literally walked in.
I was like, are you women serious?
Do you realize what I put in that sink?
And they're totally going to town on each other.
MATT: The sweetest girls back home are the
craziest girls down here.
You could definitely have at least two girls every night.
SEAN BISHOP: The whole "Girls Gone Wild" thing started here
in Daytona Beach, Florida.
I mean, if you look at it, it is the perfect environment.
MATT: These girls don't care what's going on.
You can pass them to your buddies even though they know
what has happened.
DAVE: It's a really great town to be a drug dealer, because
everyone's on drugs.
Everyone's a customer.
As a spring breaker in Daytona Beach, you're looking to get
those things that you don't think you can get at home.
Recently, it has been more meth, ecstasy, coke.
Pills are really big now.
And the pills are cheap down here, so they know
they can get them.
Mostly you can sell them whatever you want.
Ripping them off is real easy.
Quality doesn't have to be there.
Sometimes you can just take the money and run.
Sometimes you can give them a bad bag, a lot of cut, bad
weed, tell them it's good weed.
Hook them real easy, because they don't have a lot of
options when they're on vacation.
SCOTT EDWARDS: Fifteen or 20 years ago, spring break would
bring about $100 million into this economy.
We have MTV.
We had the Miss Hawaiian Tropic International pageant.
STEVE PENDLEND: We had 250,000 to 300,000 kids for an
eight-week period of time.
-We would do, I would say, on an average, anywhere from 30
to 45 tattoos a day.
It was really good for everything, all the way down
to gas stations and restaurants.
I don't see where all the problem--
what they tried to say was such a big problem.
-So everybody thinks, oh, it's spring break, it's party time.
In reality, there's another element that
comes into this city.
They're out there selling drugs.
They're looking to do rapes.
They're looking to do burglaries.
They're looking to hurt somebody.
DAVE: There's nothing really to do but do drugs, so it's
right up someone's alley if they want to get
fucked up all the time.
MATT: If this was mid-October, the owners would
just kill us all.
But it's during spring break, so they just let the
ridiculousness happen.
SCOTT EDWARDS: We are marketing to America's best
and brightest young people.
I don't see what the problem is.
RANDY PHILLIPS: They want to make it this pristine, clean,
clear, no vacationers, no whatever, family town.
STEVE PENDLEND: They didn't replace it with any business.
SCOTT EDWARDS: The newspaper did an expose about two months
ago in talking about all the closed businesses on A1A.
And I think they counted up 205.
RANDY PHILLIPS: I hate to use the word blight, but it has
become a blight.
Look at the cityscape around you.
It literally looks like a bomb went off.
This town could be something again.
I want it to change for the better.
I want to go back, not necessarily to what it was,
but I definitely want it to aspire to be something better.
But Daytona's got that unique quality about it.
SCOTT EDWARDS: The college students really took a bad rap
in a lot of ways.
We are still a spring break destination.
DAVE: More spring breakers are starting to come back.
Every year there's more and more.
SEAN BISHOP: Embrace the kids.
Come down.
Let them have fun.
I mean, that's what this town's known for.
MATT: If spring break was to ever class it up, I think it
would lose the element of freedom.
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