Party Pooper

The split had not been amicable. "During our marriage Jeff repeatedly declared that when I reached age 40 he was going to trade me in for two 20s," his wife, Janet Love, wrote in court documents. Love alleged that her husband had had at least three affairs while they were married. Over the course of several years, he'd spent more than $86,000 on one of his dental-office employees, a woman in her early 20s, paying for rent, trips and a boob job, he later told Sedalia police. Love also claimed that Holloway had left firearms and ammunition in an unlocked closet within reach of their daughter, and in court documents she accused him of refusing to adhere to the limitations of his dental license, treating his kids for medical illnesses related to "dermatology, gynecology or stomach pain."

For his part, Holloway reported to police that his wife was threatening to kill herself, resulting in her involuntary trip to a mental-health center for evaluation. He filed a restraining order against her in January 2001, calling her verbally abusive and griping that she hadn't taken her medication.

It was shortly after his divorce was finalized, in April 2003, that Holloway paid $400,000 to buy Salomon's 49 percent ownership of HMKG&C, the corporation in charge of Club XO. (Salomon describes HMKG&C as a handful of local businessmen who viewed the bar solely as a good investment; at one point in the early '90s, the club was reportedly grossing more than $139,000 a month.) Holloway would later buy the entire operation; at one time, the deal involved Holloway's solicitation of extra funding from his twin brother, Jon, who ran a large hog-farming operation in Sedalia.

For the Holloway brothers, the club wasn't just a way to make money. After initially agreeing to speak to the Pitch, Jeff Holloway failed to return phone calls. His brother, however, suggests that they thought of the club as a vacation spot with dividends.

"My closest neighbor is two miles away, so you can imagine just how fun life is here down on the farm," Jon Holloway tells the Pitch. "The corn blocks the view of the timber and the 1,200-head hog farm, [but] you can still smell it. There's really not a whole lot going on here, so for us to go to the city and to have a good time — it was just a good time is all it was. We like to see people have a good time, and that's what the whole purpose of the club was for."

Jeff Holloway claimed to have tipped drinks in exclusive circles in Puerto Vallarta and Las Vegas, former employees say.

They weren't impressed. They were professionals, most having worked in the nightlife industry for decades, and the club had been lucrative. But during club hours, former employees say, Holloway seemed more interested in meeting women than in running his business.

After Salomon sold out to Holloway, general manager Sleiman Abdullah stayed behind to ease the transition. Abdullah had started at the club as a doorman back in 1993 and had managed it since 1999.

But things got off to a rough start. That April, the club lost a major source of cash when cigarette maker RJ Reynolds stopped pouring more than $130,000 annually into clubs across the metro in exchange for stocking Camel supplies and giving away cigarettes. The money had saved XO $10,000 a year in bar supplies such as ashtrays and napkins, Abdullah told the Pitch in 2003.

Then, in October, Holloway single-handedly sabotaged the club's efforts to fight Jim Grow's much-publicized lawsuit when he showed up to Jackson County Circuit Court without a lawyer. At the hearing, Judge O'Malley told Holloway that because XO was technically owned by a corporation, he needed legal representation to speak on its behalf — and then ruled in favor of the Westport neighbors, granting their entire list of demands, resulting in the $360,000 worth of damages and the 1:30 a.m. shut-down order.

But XO continued to stay open until 3 a.m., in violation of O'Malley's ruling. Abdullah tells the Pitch that the club was spending only enough to keep running — and it showed. On April Fool's Day the club lost electricity, forcing a show by 'tween rocker Katy Rose across the street to the Hurricane. That spring, receipts plummeted by more than $14,000. The club began cutting its monthly liquor order in half, Barnes says.

"When I first got there, things were already going downhill," says a former bouncer who had worked doors at other metro clubs before joining XO just after Holloway bought the place.

"The ice machine broke, and he'd send employees to QuikTrip to buy bags, then the cooler broke," says Gabe Meyer, who worked his way from valet to barback by the time the club closed. "We never had anything fixed at the same time. We'd run out of cups, out of napkins. We were always running out of something."