In KC’s Westport, a landlord-tenant dispute has unraveled into a $70 million lawsuit
.JPG "Westport Ale House, 4128 Broadway, Thursday, Apr. 16, 2015.")
Hal Brody was not interested in leasing to another version of Westport Ale House.
He wanted a quieter tenant — a brunch joint, maybe, or a Mexican restaurant — at 4128 Broadway Blvd., the Westport building he’s owned for decades. Ale House had been a headache in its later years. Opened in 2014 as an upscale sports bar, it had gradually morphed into a late-night club with a reputation for trouble: fights, shootings, vandalism.
The bar closed in April 2024, and by October, Brody thought he might have found a suitable replacement in Chris Lee. The president of a local trucking company, Lee had flown to California, where Brody lives, and pitched him on a sports bar concept that emphasized food service and catered to an older crowd not interested in sticking around much past midnight. The business would draw inspiration from high-minded local establishments like The Monarch Bar and Ocean Prime. Lee would call it Euphoric Bar and Lounge.
The two men came to a tentative agreement. Lee returned to Kansas City and began making plans for 4128 Broadway. But soon, Brody said, he began to hear troubling reports from back in Westport.
Lee was marketing his bar as a kind of Westport Ale House comeback. He wasn’t operating under the name Euphoric Bar and Lounge; instead, Lee had registered an LLC and created an Instagram page and website under the name Ale House West. Lee had told Brody that they would be hiring a seasoned manager from Ocean Prime to operate the restaurant; now, Brody was hearing that a former fugitive known as “Fat Boy” would be running the place.
The parties involved hold differing accounts of what happened afterward. But the bar never materialized, and the disagreement over its direction set in motion a $70 million lawsuit, filed in January by Lee and others, accusing Brody and multiple Westport stakeholders of systematic racism.
“My clients are confident they will prevail in the litigation,” said Dave Rauzi, who declined to make Lee and other plaintiffs available for further comment.
The dispute has since expanded to include a counterclaim, a widely shared YouTube video that alleges Westport fosters a “Whites Only” mentality, and a defamation suit in response to that video.
“Unfortunately,” Brody said, “I think this could go on for a long time.”
From record store to nightclub
Brody’s building — 10,000 square feet, midcentury facade, corner of Broadway Boulevard and Archibald Avenue on the southeast edge of Westport — is rich with countercultural history.
It was formerly home to a location of Pennylane Records, a local chain of record shops Brody once owned. In 1980, an employee convinced Brody to start an arts publication to market their inventory. Working out of the basement, they put out an eight-page paper called Penny Pitch. It eventually grew into The Pitch, Kansas City’s long-running alternative publication.
Brody sold the paper in 1999. In 2007, he purchased another alternative weekly, the East Bay Express, and moved to the Bay Area. By then, Brody had sold his record stores, too. But he held onto his building in Westport, leasing it to Streetside Records until that shop closed in 2011.
Three years later, Zach Marten and Bret Springs — two up-and-coming restaurateurs fresh off the success of a Country Club Plaza pizza joint and wine bar called Coal Vines — moved in.
Their concept, Westport Ale House, was an upscale sports bar with a menu featuring Maryland crab tater tots, Hawaiian hot dogs, Tank 7 doughnuts and a wide variety of craft beers. They added a 3,000-square-foot rooftop deck later that year.
In a lawsuit filed in Jackson County last year, Brody claimed that Springs and Marten came to him in 2015 seeking to amend their lease, which required them to be majority owners of the business. Springs and Marten wanted to sell to a majority stake in Ale House to Scott Mars, president of an adoption agency called American Adoptions.
Brody denied the request. But according to his lawsuit, Springs and Marten sold a majority stake to Mars anyway. His suit accused Springs, Marten, Mars, and their LLCs of breaching the lease, fraud, civil conspiracy, and negligence. He sought substantial damages, including over $70,000 in unpaid base rent and fees, more than $226,000 in unreported percentage rent since 2016, and $95,445 related to unreported Restaurant Revitalization Fund grants received in 2021.
The parties reached a confidential settlement in October. Mars did not respond to a request for comment. Springs previously told The Star he and Marten exited Ale House in 2017.
As Westport Ale House evolved into a nightclub under Mars’ majority ownership, incidents of violence increased.
In the last two years it was open, records show that police received 50 disturbance calls to the address, five of which involved the firing of weapons. In 2022, a chaotic shootout outside Ale House left six injured and one dead.
When it closed in the spring of 2024, a social media post from the bar said it was due to inflation.
Video alleges racism
In January, a nine-minute YouTube video began to circulate on Facebook and Instagram, promoted in part by local nightlife accounts popular among young Black Kansas Citians.
The video is titled “$70 million lawsuit against Kansas City, MO’s Westport Plaza for Racial Discrimination.” It is posted at a website domain called euphorickc.com and on the page of a YouTube account run by Victor Vickers, a Kansas City rapper in prison for manslaughter stemming from a 2011 home invasion.
It splices together AI narration alongside a real-life interview with a man named Gary Mitchell who introduces himself as general manager of Ale House West. It tells a story of the bar’s management being denied access to 4128 Broadway despite having a “legally binding lease for the building.”
“After we did the planning to put together a hiring event, they literally left us standing outside on the corner because we couldn’t get the keys to get inside the building to host them properly,” Mitchell says.
The automated narrator goes on to explain that a “whites only” attitude among the members of the board of the Westport Community Improvement District was behind an effort to scuttle a deal for Ale House West to reopen in Brody’s building. The video features photos of members of the 12-member CID board alongside illustrations of 19th century slave auctions and black-and-white images from the 1960s civil rights movement.
“Most of the 12 members are extremely successful white business owners who have businesses on the Westport themselves,” the narrator says. “And the CID has been allowing white business owners like themselves to open hip-hop clubs and any other kind of business they want, while at the same time denying Black business owners from opening any businesses at all.”
“The ‘whites only’ signs are no longer on the doors, but the CID is quietly enforcing that same racist mindset,” the video concludes.
The video appeared on YouTube on Jan. 20, six days after Euphoric LLC and another LLC filed a civil complaint against the Westport CID and its members in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri.
Euphoric and UniKC LLC, owned by local promoter D’Mario Gray, present arguments in their lawsuit that largely mirror those made in the video.
UniKC claims it was the victim of racial discrimination in a different Westport building, at 4140 Pennsylvania Ave. Gray claims he had a lease to open a nightclub in the space, which is also home to Fat Sully’s Pizza and Denver Biscuit Company. But after neighboring businesses learned he was Black and complained to his landlord, he claims, he was locked out of the building.
The lawsuit states that the owners of the building, DB Icehouse LLC, later paid UniKC a $100,000 settlement in exchange for terminating the lease. But UniKC and Euphoric’s attorney Dave Rauzi said that “UniKC now believes that the Westport CID influenced the denial of access.” (DB Icehouse is not named as a defendant in Euphoric and UniKC’s lawsuit.)
The $70 million figure was calculated, the suit says, based on a projection of $7 million in annual revenue at the bar over the 10-year lease that was denied to them due to “blatant racial discrimination.”
“We strongly refute the allegations made by Euphoric and Unikc,” the Westport CID and its board members said in a statement provided to The Star. “While we cannot comment on the specifics of ongoing legal matters, we are confident that the facts will demonstrate the baselessness of these allegations against the CID and its Board members. We unequivocally affirm our dedication to fostering a diverse and inclusive community that welcomes and supports individuals and businesses from all backgrounds.”
The claim that Westport’s leaders hold racist views came as a surprise to Fernanda Reyes, a first-generation Mexican woman who owns Taco Naco at 4141 Pennsylvania Ave. in the district.
“I don’t know what that lawsuit is really about,” Reyes said, “but the inclusiveness and sense of community is part of the reason we chose Westport to open our second location.”
Defamation suit
Individual members of the Westport CID have responded with legal actions of their own.
Brett Allred, a Westport bar owner and CID member who is depicted throughout the YouTube video as racist for having once created a “no-play list” of hip-hop songs at his nightclubs, filed a defamation lawsuit in Jackson County last month against Lee, Gray, Mitchell, Vickers and others allegedly involved in the making and promotion of the video.
In it, Allred claims that Lee provided inaccurate facts to the makers of the video that portray him as “racist, corrupt, and immoral.” He says he sent a cease-and-desist letter requesting the video be taken down from Vickers’ channel and it was ignored. Allred’s suit seeks in excess of $250,000.
“As far as my clients know, (the YouTube video) was produced and posted by a third party that apparently heard of the situation, but is not connected to (Euphoric or UniKC),” Rauzi said.
Euphoric and UniKC’s lawsuit claims that Allred convinced Brody to deny Ale House West its lease after Allred saw social media posts promoting the bar’s hiring fair on popular Black accounts like Mark’s My Barber and Rio Entertainment (which is run by Gray). It claims a three-way phone call took place in mid-October between Lee, Brody and Allred in which Allred expressed security concerns about Lee’s concept and said that he and other Westport business owners didn’t want Euphoric’s “type of crowd.”
None of the three men dispute the phone call happened. But Brody and Allred recall it differently than Lee recounts in the lawsuit.
“During my conversation with Lee and Brody, Lee revealed for the first time his intentions and details about Ale House West mimicking the same problematic concept that plagued Westport for their last two years in operation,” Allred told The Star in a statement. “Lee also revealed he would be partnering with Rahmon Allen, the owner of Elevation Lounge, a nightclub in Jacksonville Florida which has had numerous shootings inside their establishment.”
Allen, who also goes by “Fat Boy,” was convicted in federal court in Kansas for possession of a firearm and silencer and sentenced in 2004 to 21 months in prison. In 2014, he was indicted on drug-trafficking charges linking him to a Kansas City-based drug ring with ties to multiple street gangs. He became a fugitive, evading authorities for four years until he was apprehended in Jacksonville in 2018. Allen was sent back to Missouri, where he was ultimately acquitted in the federal drug trafficking case in 2019.
Vickers, the imprisoned rapper whose YouTube page hosts the Euphoric video, was also charged in that case. A federal appeals court ruling notes that evidence from the trial showed that Vickers purchased “resale quantities” of drugs from Allen on “multiple occasions.”
In recent years, Allen has worked as a concert promoter at clubs in Kansas City and at Elevation Lounge in Jacksonville, where two people were shot in December. His Instagram profile shows him posing with hip-hop stars like Rick Ross, Kodak Black, Jeezy, Sexxy Red, Da Baby, and, in 2019, Diddy.
Along with Lee, Allen also flew to California in early October to meet with Brody to discuss what Brody at that point thought would be the upscale, food-centric Euphoric Bar and Lounge.
“He was a little bit of an intimidating character,” Brody said. “He showed up with a bodyguard in his car and starts telling me about how he’s a ‘sovereign’ — one of these guys who doesn’t pay taxes. He shows me pictures of a 12,000-square-foot house he’s supposedly building in Jacksonville. Overall, it was a nice chat, but I later told Chris (Lee) that I didn’t want Rahmon involved. I didn’t know about his criminal history at that point.”
The deal collapses
Lee assured Brody that Allen would not be involved in the management of the bar, Brody says in a counterclaim filed in February against Euphoric and UniKC. Brody’s counterclaim also says Lee told him the bar would distance itself from the Westport Ale House nightclub model, including its name; have no association with Allen’s Elevation Lounge; market itself as Euphoric Bar and Lounge; and “focus on food service not bottle service and would cater to an older demographic patron.”
Based on these representations, Brody said he signed and extended Lee a lease Oct. 21 that he said was contingent on Lee obtaining two personal guarantees (a personal guaranty requires individuals, not just LLCs, to assume responsibility for rent under a lease) for the lease and insurance for the business.
That lease and personal guarantee agreement were later introduced as an exhibit in Euphoric’s lawsuit and referenced in the YouTube video as evidence that Brody had locked the group out of the bar despite having signed a “legally binding agreement” to lease them the space.
“I don’t deny that I signed it, but it was predicated on two personal (lease) guarantees that we never got — and there’s no commencement date filled in,” Brody said. “It’s an incomplete lease I gave Chris when he was in California. We were going to finalize it when I came to Kansas City the next week.
“Then a few days later, somebody sends me a copy of their ‘Now Hiring’ sign that says Ale House West on it,” Brody continued. “Even in the lease they included in the lawsuit, it says they don’t have the right to use that name. So I called Chris to clarify. I was genuinely confident he could explain.”
That conversation — the one Allred would eventually be patched into as a three-way call — did not go well. Two days later, when Lee was supposed to receive keys to the building for the hiring event, Brody declined to make them available to him, saying he wanted Lee to produce a plan laying out the concept in writing. “He kept saying he’d do it, but he never did,” Brody said.
The Euphoric lawsuit alleges that Allred and Westport CID executive director Kim Kimbrough are the ones who refused to give Euphoric the keys, causing Lee and others public humiliation.
That’s not true, Brody and Allred say.
“At no point did I nor any member of the CID have keys or the ability to access the 4128 Broadway Blvd. property as Lee claims,” Allred said. “No one in the CID including myself had any involvement or authority over the ownership, operation, or leasing decisions concerning this property.”
But, Allred added: “I fully support (Brody’s) decision in this matter. For Westport to remain a thriving district, the safety and security of all residents and visitors must be a top priority. This includes leasing to responsible tenants who do not run high-risk, problematic establishments.”
Lee says in his lawsuit that he told Brody all along that his establishment would be modeled after Elevation Bar and Lounge in Jacksonville, but that it would also “pursue a diverse crowd of patrons, customers, and/or consumers” and have in place “security measures would have been sufficient to sustain a successful, peaceful, and profitable business.”
Lee also says he sent a demand letter in November informing Brody that he was in breach of their contract and demanding possession of the Ale House space, but Brody never responded.
4128 Broadway remains unoccupied, but Brody said in early April that he expects to soon sign a lease that would bring Holy Brunch to the space. That restaurant, which opened last year a few blocks away at 204 Westport Road, has already posted a “Now Hiring” message on its social media paired with a photo of Brody’s building.
“The irony in all this is, before Chris, I turned down a white guy who said he wanted to do a restaurant,” Brody said. “But then I looked him up and his other locations were nightclubs. And I’ve been through that once already.”
This story was originally published April 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: This story previously overstated the length of Rahmon Allen’s prison sentence. It has been updated.
