Party Pooper

Holloway reopened the club in September, this time calling it Evolution.

Still, the six-digit, court-imposed tab was due, and Holloway's new direction for the club was seemingly conceived to make fast cash. But before he got that plan rolling, he wanted to get an ATV back from an ex-girlfriend. Holloway's new bachelorhood had a messy complication, one that would grow into a series of accusations that threatened to shut down his dental practice and poop on the Kansas City party. Again.

On July 20, 2004, Holloway's 23-year-old former girlfriend accused him of sexually assaulting her. She said she'd come to his dental office after-hours for free veneers. (She told police that Holloway had bought her an ATV but now wanted it back; she said she'd agreed to trade the off-roader for some under-the-table dental work.) She claimed that while she was in his chair, he'd injected her with three times the normal dosage of Demerol and that when she awoke hours later, her shirt and bra had been pulled up over her breasts, her belt cut and her jeans pulled down. She had a hickey on the right side of her neck.

No formal sexual assault charges were filed. But the woman's statements to police also contained claims that Holloway had been her prescription-drug dealer. She told police that Holloway had used phony names to issue her numerous prescriptions for painkillers and had allowed her to write and fill her own.

Soon, Holloway's dental practice was crawling with Sedalia police officers as well as investigators from the Missouri State Dental Board and the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services' Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Things got worse for Holloway on September 13, when he tested positive for cocaine after agreeing to the dental board's demand for a urinalysis. Court records show that Holloway tried to explain that "someone must have slipped the cocaine into a drink."

Jon Holloway uses what might be called the "redneck defense" to dispute the claim that his brother used cocaine. "I know my brother. I know my brother real well. And I know, as redneck as he is and as redneck as I am, that we are totally against that," he tells the Pitch.

Cocaine or no, Jeff Holloway's behavior was disturbing. At noon on September 27, dental board inspector Mark Dudenhoeffer later reported, Holloway was standing despondently in front of his office building with his dental mask untied. He had cuts on his right arm and leg that he'd sutured himself, according to Dudenhoeffer's sworn affidavit. "The defendant was not alert, was unclear in answering questions, and behaved in a manner that was disoriented and unfocused," Dudenhoeffer testified. He added that Holloway said he "did not know how he became injured but that he may have fallen" and "did not remember coming to work ... or how he got to work." But he had seen patients that morning, Holloway told Dudenhoeffer.

That day, Holloway voluntarily surrendered his license. The next day, the Missouri Dental Board, arguing that Holloway presented "a substantial probability of serious danger to the health, safety and/or welfare of clients and patients," won a restraining order barring him from practicing.

Board investigators alleged that since May 2002, Holloway had issued at least 89 undocumented prescriptions, and they accused him of "incompetence, misconduct, gross negligence, fraud, misrepresentation or dishonesty."

To regain his license, Holloway agreed to complete a treatment program. In summarizing the results of a court-ordered psychological evaluation, Judge Donald Barnes noted that Holloway had an "inability to control impulses including gambling and compulsive behaviors with people" and that he "appeared to brag about such relationships and conduct, which by any reasonable standard is outside the norms expected."

By last fall, Holloway was heavily leveraged. He faced fines against XO, was fronting cash for the club's remodeling and was fighting to keep his decaying dental business solvent. Everybody seemed to have a hand in his wallet: He'd paid a $65,000 settlement to his wife in early 2002 and owed $4,000 a month in alimony. He owed more than $19,000 to Jackson County for 2003 and 2004 real estate taxes on the property at 3954 Central. The bank had foreclosed on his home. The two checks he had written for his court-ordered mental evaluation had bounced. Jackson County court records show that he owed more than $9,000 to American Ingredients for back rent on the club's parking lot and was about to be hit with a $50,000 judgment for another personal-injury lawsuit over a bar fight in the fall of 2001. He had been sued for another $2,000 in small-claims court by a man who'd paid in advance for dentures but claimed never to have received them.

But things could have been worse.

Lacking DNA evidence, the Pettis County Prosecutor's Office never filed charges on the sexual-assault complaint. In February of this year, the Missouri State Dental Board allowed Holloway to return to practice under supervision while he awaited a trial to determine professional sanctions, including the revocation of his license. (The hearing is scheduled for September 15.) For writing undocumented prescriptions, Holloway pleaded guilty in March to a misdemeanor charge for failing to keep records of controlled substances, earning two years of probation and community service. He also was able to keep control of his nightclub; under Kansas City ordinances, a bar owner must be convicted of a felony to be ineligible for a liquor license.