No more fight club: NV forced to shut down for 45 days

Gary Majors, the manager of the city’s division of Regulated Industries, says that he just signed an agreement with the owner of NV, 220 Admiral Blvd., that will suspend the downtown dance club’s operations for 60 days. They’ll be closed for the first 45 days, then allowed to operate on a probational basis for the next 15, which means no violations of any kind before they’re off the hook again. The suspension starts Tuesday, May 26. 

NV was the target of a Kansas City Police Department stakeout for some

time in response to multiple complaints of violence, says Majors, who

watched hours of the surveillance tapes. “The police had been called so

many times about fights, and they (the police) didn’t feel that they

had the cooperation of the security staff,” Majors says. On Friday and

Saturday nights, they’d observe fights in which security was involved,

but when asked about the incidents later, the same bouncers would deny

that the altercations ever happened.

The administrative smackdown comes after a shooting on May 3 that proved the club to be completely out of hand. That shooting still wasn’t enough to chill the place out, Majors says: On a later night, a female bartender got in an argument with a female patron, stepped out from around the bar and bashed the woman over the head with a bottle of Grey Goose, resulting in 10 stitches, according to the police report Majors says he read.

“We’d been in conversation with the owner about administrative actions directed at the club prior to the shooting,” Majors says. “We were saying, amongst ourselves, that we couldn’t believe that no one else had been shot, up to that point.”

According to the business directory at the Missouri Secretary of State’s Web site, the registered agent of NV is Del Hedgepath. Hedgepath, interestingly enough, is one of the self-made businessmen featured in a shmaltzy-sounding book called Rags To Riches: Motivating Stories Of How Ordinary People Achieved Extraordinary Wealth. It was published in 2003 — the same year he opened NV. Hedgepath’s story takes up Chapter 1.

Any more shootings at Hedgepath’s club and the authors might want to amend that chapter in their next edition.