Dynasty

They hire only female bartenders and waitstaff. Maggie is warm and maternal to the workers in her favor but sizes up new applicants with narrowed eyes and an unimpressed smile.

Maggie claims that she used to be very, very mean.

"I'd burn down my house to get to yours," she often says of her younger days, giving particular weight to offenses against her family. "If somebody attacked one of us, we'd attack them."

Now, though, her fire has mellowed, and she maintains a spiritual vibe. The family is loosely Catholic, and she makes sure that a Santeria candle always burns behind the server station at Slow Ride, near the coffeepot and the emptied bottles of expensive Cazadores, Don Julio and Patron tequilas.

Maggie has a rapport with Slow Ride regulars, but Jesse Jr. is their favorite, with his Sturgis T-shirts and wide, easy smile. A few of his biker friends make racist jokes but don't seem to notice or care that Jesse Jr. is Mexican. Not so long ago, he was known to party with strippers and wake up on houseboats on Lake Perry. His shoulders are immense, and the most unlikely women — say, pretty, college-age waitresses — adore him, despite his large beer belly.

Besides his grown son, Angelo, Jesse Jr. has two small daughters by different mothers, both in their 20s. He gives much in the way of financial support — he recently bought a mobile home for daughter Eliana's mom. But when she calls, his cell phone blares the Guess Who: American woman! Stay away from me-hee. "Jesse is a pimp daddy," Maggie often jokes.

Jesse Jr. gutted and remodeled the Slow Ride building mostly by himself. He and Maggie maintain the place ferociously — rigorous morning cleanings, cameras behind the bar, strict enforcement of the city's smoking ban. Customers revere the place — a biker bar that's not a dive — and often serve as its unofficial bouncers.

The bar also earns good marks from the North Lawrence community for drawing patrons up U.S. Highway 24 and away from residential neighborhoods.

Disappointment was palpable, however, when Jesse Jr. abandoned his original plan for the building: to relocate his Club 508, an infamous bar nestled within a family neighborhood near La Tropicana.

Opening his father's Club 508 on a Thursday night, Angelo Del Campo is dressed in a tan South Pole shirt, baggy jeans and two gold Catholic medals. He wears spiked black hair and a gold bracelet with several diamonds that appear to be real. Angelo is all business tonight, so he's not wearing a gold grill in his mouth. Jesse Jr. calls his son "25 Cent" and trusts him at the helm of his original nightclub venture.

"It'd be fun to take it over, passing from family member to family member. I like the nightlife," Angelo says, leaning against 508's chipping formica bar, an obvious contrast to the glossy black granite at Slow Ride. "If I didn't do this, I'd still probably be working for one of the family businesses."

Like La Tropicana, Club 508 faces the railroad tracks. Its sign reads "Club 508, Premiere Dance Club," though all but the neon "8" are burned out.

Jesse Jr., now 46, started the place with his mother's help in 1982. He named it Los Amigos Saloon, after his old softball team. He says he quickly began catering to students at Haskell Indian Nations University. The bar so relies on Haskell students that it shuts down over the summer.

Angelo sees a smattering of white and black customers now.

"But my dad says that, back in the day, this was like the reservation. It was the only place they felt welcome," says Angelo, whose mother is half Haida, Indian from Alaska.

Harmonica player Brody Buster is performing at 508 tonight, and his band is setting up. Buster walks over and asks whether to expect a crowd.

"Thursdays, you never know," Angelo tells him. "But Haskell kids just got their Pell Grants. Last week, we opened up on Tuesday just because they got their Pell money. They drank that up real fast."

With American Indian clientele, Mexican-American owners and a mostly white neighborhood, 508 has been a racial lightning rod throughout its contentious relationship with the community.

In 1991, responding to theft, vandalism, beatings and stabbings in and around Los Amigos, Lawrence officials asked the Alcoholic Beverage Control director not to renew the bar's liquor license. North Lawrence Neighborhood Improvement Association President Ted Boyle recalls the situation as dire.

"Nearby schoolkids were picking up pop cans with needles in them," he says.

The ABC renewed the bar's license anyway, agreeing with Jesse Jr.'s argument that he could not be held responsible for crimes in the vicinity of his business. Over the next decade, violence near 508 continued: three men wounded by bullets, one Haskell student disappearance and a drive-by shooting.

The neighborhood association continued to lobby the city commission to crack down on the bar, whose commercial zoning within a residential area is protected by a grandfather clause. In the late '90s, the city passed an ordinance singling out Los Amigos for an earlier closing time and stricter regulations on lights, parking and security. But neighborhood relations remained strained.