OP courtesy of randomtroper89

Legitimate Businessmens Social Club is supposed to be about poorly disguised criminal fronts, given that the name is a form of Suspiciously Specific Denial. Most of the time however, it is about criminal fronts in general, regardless of how well disguised the operation is.

The wick check has 60% of examples as criminal fronts in general, 22% as zero context, 16% as poorly disguised criminal fronts, and the last wick doesn't quite fit any of the categories above.

One option is that the description should be rewritten, unless the idea of a criminal front is considered chairsy. Another option is to remove the examples, except for the poorly veiled ones. With the latter option, a rename might be needed to make the idea more clear.

1. CardCarryingVillain.Film

• Parodied with Dr. Evil in Austin Powers, who went to evil medical school and is disappointed that his son wants to be a non-evil veterinarian... or perhaps work in a petting zoo. And when Scott does tries to think like a villain, he spouses thinking like a No-Nonsense Nemesis, which annoys the Doctor to no end.
  Dr. Evil: An evil petting zoo?
  Scott: You always do that! (Storms off)
  • Later in the movie:
  UN Representative: Mr. Evil–
  Dr. Evil: DOCTOR Evil! I didn't spend six years in evil medical school to be called "Mister", thank you very much.
  • The Running Gag between him and Number Two is that Number Two has turned Dr. Evil's front companies into incredibly profitable enterprises (at one point even at least bowing to the Doctor's ideals a bit and creating a Hollywood casting agency, which is vile and profitable), but the moment Dr. Evil arrives it's back to the schemes to Take Over the World and/or putting it under ransom with unprofitable prices (one million dollars in The '90s where that's only a tiny fraction of what they earn legitimately, then one hundred billion dollars in The '60s where "that amount of money doesn't even exist") – which will waste lots of money and lead to Powers destroying everything.

2-3. TheWire.Tropes E To L

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club:
  • Stringer has a copy shop where he parleys with McNulty. Subverted as Stringer wants it to be a serious business, not a mere front, and chides his lazy underlings —who don't understand a word of the business-studies jargon he starts throwing around—for their lack of professionalism.
  • The Barksdales' well known headquarters are initially located at Orlando's bar, and more concealedly inside a funeral house later.

4-5. The Sopranos S 4 E 5 Pie Oh My

• Bait-and-Switch: The opening scene has Adriana ask herself, "What the fuck?" as though trouble she didn't want was coming through the door. But then she warmly greets Tony and Silvio as they come in. Could also double as Rule of Symbolism, since her original curse ends up reflecting more and more how she's really going to feel about the mobsters using the Crazy Horse as a place to conduct their own business.
• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Tony and company gradually turn the Crazy Horse more and more into this, much to Adriana's chagrin and worry, since she originally understood that it would be her own thing. She becomes increasingly stressed over the heat that increased mobster presence will bring.

6. The Great Gatsby

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Gatsby's "pharmacies", which he purchased to sell illegal alcohol through.

7. Eiyuu Senki War Wonder

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: She runs the Marauders' operation under the guise of a sea merchant. It ties in well with her previous occupation and legitimately generates half of the pirate group's income, even if the other half is still earned through robbery and charging illegitimate tolls.

8. Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil

• In One Piece, a manga centered around pirates who make a living robbing and killing (although the protagonists never seem to get around to much of that), slavery is treated as an especially terrible crime, and rightfully so. Examples include:
  • The World Government has technically outlawed the slave trade, but they turn a blind eye to their own members and their allies who do it, usually to peoples whose governments they don't recognize. They and the Marines refer to the Human Auctioning House in the Sabaody Archipelago as the Public Employment Security Office.

9. Dope

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: The operation is disguised as a support group for at-risk youths. In reality... Not clear what the operation, but clearly disguised as something mundane

10. One Piece: Donquixote Pirates

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Almost every place with their mark on it just happens to be this. In some cases, the World Nobles, the ruling power in One Piece, actually buy from these places — one of which is a shop for slaves — which means that they have legal amnesty for anything they do so long as they cater to those nobles.

11. Boy of the Streets

• Legitimate Business Mens Social Club: Blackie tells Chuck they're a group of financiers.

12. Intelligence (2006)

• Legitimate Businessmen's Social Club: Jimmy has a strip club called the Chick-A-Dee, while the Disciples work out of a poolhall.

13. Discworld Others

Ankh-Morpork's most famous "Legitimate Businessman". Is mentioned several times but doesn't make a real appearance until Soul Music, and later on, Thud!. Known to take an interest in horse racing and has recently gotten out of the drug trade business.

14. The Serial Murders

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Discussed. The villain introduces Richard to a couple of really obvious Legitimate Businessmen, present to bid on using the villain's powers for assassination. Jeperson quips that the men must be "olive oil salesmen", referencing the legitimate business of the Corleones in The Godfather. They appreciate the joke, but the villain — who is neither as smart nor as cultured as he thinks he is — is lost.

15. Sniper Assassin

• Complete Monster: The heads of FFG Corporation are drug dealers who don't have any regard for their fellow criminals or civilians:

16. Persona 2

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Club Zodiac is either a front for the Taiwanese mob or the Masked Circle.

17. The Sopranos S 4 E 2 No Show

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: One of the ways that the mobs take advantage of the Esplanade project. Some of them get either no-work jobs where they have to show up but just get to sit around in lawn chairs pretending to be on call, or no-show jobs where you don't even have to show up on-site. It also has other benefits besides an extra cash stream from the government funds allocated for the construction itself. It allows them to file tax returns and legitimately accrue health benefits and the like, which also helps deflect concerns about Suspicious Spending. A form of money laundering in other words.

18. Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Ohnaka Transport Solutions is a cover for Hondo's smuggling operation that also delivers supplies to the Resistance, and Savi & Son Salvage secretly collects lightsaber components. On the Galactic Starcruiser, the First Order boards the ship because they suspect the Halcyon might be cover for a Resistance cell.

19. Shadowrun Returns

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: She operates out of the Swift Winds Mahjong Parlor, which also doubles as the Heoi Chamber of Commerce.

20. TheTwilightZone1985.Tropes I To P

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: In "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", the mob boss Nino Lancaster uses Nino's Toys & Imports at the docks as a cover for his smuggling operation.

21. Black Market

Sometimes you will encounter a literal Black Market, a covert shopping emporium complete with merchants hawking their dubious wares from established stalls. This latter type is often a subset of the Bazaar of the Bizarre, with everything for sale and the outright illegal stuff lurking around the edges. The black market goods may be offered in a private, invitation-only section of a innocuous-seeming front business, which looks normal except for the 6'4" Bouncer at the door. While a large bouncer is suspicious, if it where thinly veiled it would have more suspicious elements.

22. Trend Aesop

• Judge Dredd has inspired tons of these in its approximately 30 years of existence, as the comic takes place in a future dystopia where most humans are practically permanently unemployed and take up unusual hobbies, trends, and activities to pass the time. A lot of them end up being banned or heavily regulated by Justice Dept. after a problem arises because of it; notable examples include:
  • Blob was a fashion trend created by a Legitimate Businessmens Social Club as a way to make their activities easier. The idea was to create the perfect, unidentifiable criminal by erasing every physical feature from a person's face with the aid of face-changing machine, replacing his voice with an electronic scrambler, and dressing him in a single, identifiable outfit... then they present it as the next big thing so that large quantities of people in Mega-City One look like the same featureless blob that no one can tell apart from another, thus allowing their own criminals (also unrecognizable blobs) to commit crimes while not being able to be identified. Massive confusion ensues as no one is sure who people around them are, forcing the Judges step in and decide that anyone partaking in the blob fashion trend has to have an ID number printed on their foreheads so it's easy to tell who is who... and let Judges figure out which blobs are committing crimes.

23. Gang of Hats

• Count Sigi Reuven is the former Redanian Spymaster who used his massive network of contacts and informants to build a new life as a mob boss, he runs a bathhouse which caters to Novigrad's wealthy and doubles as a meeting place for the Big Four.

24-26. Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club:
  • In the time of The Adventures of Niké, Cafe Qunorts is in actuality a front for the Antique Hall, and Fran deliberately goes there to get caught by the gang. Twenty years after the Antique Hall's subjugation and a change in ownership, the cafe has become a legitimate establishment.
  • The spy organization where Yuuri works at in The Fictional Witch in Volume 4 fronts as a coffee shop; in the back of the house where the real business is conducted, the organization accepts commissions for assassinations and other unsavory deeds.
  • There are multiple of these in the Merchant City Triones in Volume 8, which prompts the United Magic Association to send in witches like Saya and to recruit more traveling mages like Avelia to deal with the problem.

27. MagnificentBastard.Video Games A To L

• Vice City: Tommy Vercetti, aka the Harwood Butcher, is a member of the Forelli crime family who, shortly after his release from prison, is sent to Vice City to expand the family's influence in the drug trade. After a drug deal goes wrong due to an ambush, he begins investigating who was responsible so he can recover the stolen money and product and take revenge. Upon discovering that his new employer, drug baron Ricardo Diaz was behind the incident, he kills him and takes over his operation. Tommy decides to branch out into legitimate business, using some of the properties he acquires as '''fronts for criminal activity. Double-crossing his nominal boss Sonny Forelli to become independent and successfully straddling both sides of the law, Tommy makes himself the most powerful crime lord in Vice City.

28. The Syndicate

• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has the Camonna Tong, the native Dunmer Mafia. They're involved with nearly every seedy operation going on in Vvardenfell, particularly smuggling and drugs. They invert the Ruthless Foreign Gangsters trope, as they are much more ruthless than their Imperial import counterpart, the Thieves' Guild, who avoids murder and generally practices Honor Among Thieves. The way they operate is very Mafia-esque, with Orvas Dren as the kingpin of the operation while they conduct business out of legitimate bars and taverns. More recently, they've even gotten involved with the Sixth House cult, whose promises of driving the Empire out of Morrowind meshes well with the Tong's utter hatred of outlanders. The Tong has two members of the House Hlaalu council in their pocket, and also have control over the Fighters Guild due to controlling the faction leader's gambling debts. As if that weren't all bad enough, they also take it upon themselves to enforce Morrowind's pro-slavery laws, which includes hiring bounty hunters to ruthlessly hunt down escaped slaves while they themselves are known to use slaves as drug mules. Finally, their leader, Orvas Dren, is planning to have his brother, Duke of Vvardenfell Vedam Dren, assassinated.

29. Freshy Kanal

• The Penguin’s second verse ramps up the aggression.
  The Penguin: Silence, those lines are enough! Did you read those lines off a bus?
  If you'd like another business meeting my Iceberg Lounge satisfies any crook.
  Squeal to the feds, then I'll break your damn wrists
  You're closer to pigs than David Cameron is!
  Spent four bars insulting my likeness
  That's twice now you've been hung up on a line, huh?

1.Bookends.Web Animation

• Lackadaisy features multiple sets:
  • Barring The Stingers, the story opens and closes on Lackadaisy Speakeasy's doors and stage, preceding and following characters' glamourous Fantasy Sequences. It begins on Lackadaisy's doors opening to reveal its empty stage, with the curtain rising on violinist Rocky performing a glittery, golden, lavishly staged Disney Acid Sequence, eventually revealed as his Daydream Surprise while neglecting lookout duties on a bridge. It ends with the band beginning to play as Lackadaisy's owner Mitzi shuts her eyes, envisions her husband's hand on her shoulder, then opens them to reveal they've filled with stars. A wash of glitter reveals her gold-hued fantasy of the stage and speakeasy filled with people, and the camera pulls out until the speakeasy doors shut.

2. 2D Visuals, 3D Effects

• in Lackadaisy, the Lackadaisy Speakeasy's doors in the Bookends, its stage in the opening, and the cars and guns used by the Lackadaisy and Marigold gang members are CGI features in an otherwise consciously Retraux hand-drawn universe.

3. Constructive Body Disposal

• Shows up as a background gag in The Simpsons Hit & Run: One interactive joke has Bart or Apu turning on a cement mixer. Fully-formed cement will fall out...in the shape of a human body...which breaks in two. Definitely the work of the Legitimate Businessmens Social Club.

4. Dead to Rights

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: The Den of Iniquity from the first game.

5. OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes S 2 E 8 The So-Bad-ical

• Paper-Thin Disguise: A literal example as Box-More (with that formatting) applies post-it notes to the front covers of all of their textbooks covering over the "x-" in favor of "oks", forming the front brand Booksmore.

6. Criminal Punishment

• Portfolio: Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!, Legitimate Businessmens Social Club, Genial Gangsters, Very Fond of His Mother, Brooklyn Rage, Phony Veteran, Hates Being Called Italian Or Scarface, Had A Brother On The Force Against Him, Wouldn't Hurt a Child, Justice by Other Legal Means, Losing His Mind In Prison, Started As a Street Punk, Gangsterland, Mob War

7. Grand Theft Auto 2

The Yakuza represent Greed with spades of Pride. They are thieves that accumulate wealth and hardware through their maritime industry and smuggling operations. They also love to show off the hardware that they have stolen so they can show everyone else that they have the latest and greatest weapons, cars, and clothes.

8. Lackadaisy

• Bookcase Passage: Speakeasy Proprietrix Mitzi May is shown pushing a tall, bookshelf-sized glassware cabinet inward like a door to exit the Little Daisy Cafe and enter a small underground foyer where a doorman guards the entrance to the Lackadaisy Speakeasy.

9. The Man in the High Castle Series - Japanese Empire

• Sharp-Dressed Man: Regardless of whether he's in his office on the docks, in a dark alley, or at his Legitimate Businessmens Social Club, he's always wearing a fancy suit.

10. The Sky Tides

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: There was one, early in the game, though it's mostly faded from sight.

11. Offworld Trading Company

• Penal Colony: Reclamation Inc, the Scavenger corporation, are a corporation that take in employees with debts or questionable pasts and send them to Mars on a five-year indenture, after which their slate is wiped clean. Definitely a case of the inmates running the asylum; they have a loose view of regulations and building codes, and quite a few connections with independent contractors.

12. Green Room

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: The venue is a front for Darcy and company's heroin dealing.

13. Sing – Calatonia

Financial and "Independent" Associations

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Discussed in The Boondock Saints 2 episode, when they mock the fan hysteria and love that the Saints get for murdering mobsters. In the real world, they point out, most people are relatively unconcerned and unaffected by mobster-on-mobster crime and violence, and the only time most civilians will encounter the mob (assuming they have no involvement in criminal activity) will be if they happen to wander into a coffee shop operated by unwelcoming Italian men that never seems to have any coffee in it.

2. Particle Fiction

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Mulligan runs a nightclub on Mars in Issue #8 that is well known for being his headquarters, not that he needs to hide it.

3. The Elder Scrolls: Factions

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: For obvious reasons, the Thieves Guild doesn't have open guild halls like the Fighters or Mages guilds. Instead, they tend to operate out of various taverns and clubs in major cities. These are something of an Open Secret to create plausible deniability, since their guild halls actually being secrets would be bad for business.

4. Pregnant Badass

• The Sims:
  • In The Sims 3, a heavily pregnant super-spy can raid the "secret" criminal base.

5. Star Citizen

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: Drake Interplanetary presents itself as a legitimate ship manufacturer yet it's an "open secret" that they manufacture cheap and heavily armed spacecraft specifically catered to pirates. Several of their flagship products in fact have pirate-themed names: "Cutlass", "Buccaneer", etc.

6. Rifftrax Feature Films Video On Demand

• Later, Joe hits on Fujiyama's girlfriend Jennifer, who turns out to own the restaurant. (Sort of.)
  Joe: It's a very nice restaurant.
  Mike: Shame the grenade damage cost you a Michelin star.
  (Jennifer ducks Joe's suggestion of a date)
  Jennifer: Not today—my bookkeeper's coming by later.
  Kevin: Turns out there's all this paperwork when a quintuple murder happens on your property.

7. Final Fantasy Tactics A2

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: For a supposed "agricultural collective," they sure do love to cause trouble.

Old World Blues

• Legitimate Businessmens Social Club: While the Salvatores are genuine in trying to go legitimate, they still remain fond of using their establishments to conduct backroom and underhanded deals if it means getting the upper hand over both the First Families of Missoula and hardline Chicago Enclave loyalists.