KC sex club has closed, maybe for good. Why was it allowed to stay open for so long?
Every Saturday night, several hundred partiers flooded into an obscure industrial patch of the metro called Blue Summit, bound for a square metal building with a big blue rooster statue on top.
They’d line up and pay a cover at the door: $20 for single women, $40 for couples, $50 for single men.
Women were encouraged to dress seductively, according to the evening’s theme: “Bikers and Babes,” “Naughty School Girl Night,” “Dress Shirt and Heels Night.” Pornography played on the televisions. Stripper poles rose from the dance floor. The pool out back beckoned naked night-swimmers. Some guests gravitated toward “private rooms” stocked with ceiling mirrors, leather couches, and sanitary wipes. The more exhibitionist types simply had sex right out in the open, a free show under the club’s purple neon lights.
The Spott — it is an acronym for “Sexy People On The Town” — has never tried to hide its swingers-club status. It has partnered with local hotels and taxi companies. It has advertised on adult websites. It has its own website, where it describes itself as a “safe and fun environment for alternative lifestyles who would like to meet each other in an upscale, private night club setting.”
But in recent years, The Spott seems to have flown too close to the sun.
Last February, a Missouri Highway Patrol investigation of The Spott culminated with a raid on the business. Meth, ecstasy, marijuana, $47,000 in cash and several firearms were seized from the business and its owner, Jeffrey Allen Cline.
The club has officially been closed since, and Cline was charged with several counts of failing to pay state taxes and tax evasion. He was charged again last week with two counts of drug possession and one count of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.
Cline, who declined to speak to The Star, has claimed in The Spott’s email newsletter that he intends to reopen this year.
“To all of those that have written with kind words letting us know you’re still pulling for us, we appreciate you more than you know,” Cline, 57, wrote subscribers in September. “To those who have written that you are new to the lifestyle or just now hearing about The SPOTT, we look forward to meeting you in 2023! And to the haters, and to those of you who had a hand in helping us to be where we are right now … well, we’ll see you in 2023 too.”
But some things about The Spott have never made sense. Why, for example, was this 8,000-square-foot den of bacchanalia allowed to stay open until 5 a.m. — several hours later than every other club or entertainment establishment in the Kansas City metro area? Why didn’t it have a liquor license? The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office has been called to The Spott more than 100 times since 2016 for noise complaints, shootings, health code violations, theft, and rape — why did it take so long to initiate legal or governmental action against it?
Part of the answer lies in its location. Blue Summit, known to many as Dogpatch, is an unincorporated section of Jackson County served by a patchwork of civic entities. In many ways, it governs itself. Some have also suggested that The Spott was protected by Jackson County officials.
“Honestly, I don’t understand how a nightclub like this would be allowed to operate anywhere,” said Jackson County Legislator Jalen Anderson, who since 2018 has represented the 1st District at-large, where The Spott is located. “My feeling is … a place like this couldn’t have existed without the approval of powerful people in the county.”
Down and out in Dogpatch
What is today Blue Summit was once part of a larger constellation of communities called Inter City, an area that lay in a kind of nether zone between northeast Kansas City and Independence.
Over time, three other communities in Inter City — Leeds, Manchester and Centropolis — were annexed by Kansas City, while another, Sugar Creek, incorporated as its own city.
That left only Blue Summit, a hilly plot of ground roughly bordered today by Interstate 435 to the west and Blue Ridge Boulevard to the east, 23rd Street to the south and Truman Road to the north.
Nobody wanted it then, and nobody has claimed it to this day. Still unincorporated, Blue Summit remains a backwoods kind of place filled with mostly low-income residents who prefer to be left alone — a “rural slum,” as a former Jackson County official once called it. Somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people live there, many of them in trailer courts and dilapidated houses hooked up to substandard infrastructure. Their neighbors are industrial businesses: a truck equipment company, a steel fabricator, an HVAC contractor.
There is no local police force, and Kansas City and Independence police don’t patrol the area; it is serviced solely by the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office. Blue Summit does have its own fire department, the Inter City Fire Protection District, though lately it has been fighting a losing battle. Nearly 30 fires were set in Blue Summit in just one month last fall.
Historically, Blue Summit has been a dumping ground for things that were unwelcome elsewhere in the metro. Its nickname “Dogpatch” was derived, or so the story goes, from the fact that people would drive to the area to drop off dogs they didn’t want. Decomposing human bodies also have a way of turning up in Blue Summit.
“We probably get one or two body dumps a year,” said Pastor Charles Beeghley, who leads Summit Point Church in Blue Summit. “We’re sandwiched between the homicide capital and the meth capital, and we don’t have any police here watching anything. People get away with all kinds of stuff here.”
In the 1990s, when Kansas City was struggling with where to allow certain X-rated businesses like strip clubs and pornographic bookstores, then-Kansas City Mayor Emanuel Cleaver floated Blue Summit as a possible location for an “adult entertainment zone.”
That plan never materialized, but Cleaver’s proposal had a certain amount of logic to it, given that the most notorious sex shop in the metro, Erotic City, was — still is — located in Blue Summit.
In 2008, Erotic City made headlines when a man was charged with prostituting a 14-year-old girl in its “Orgy Room” video booth. The Jackson County Legislature subsequently placed new restrictions on adult entertainment businesses in unincorporated Jackson County. As The Star reported at the time, the 2008 ordinance “banned locked doors on video booths, sex or sex solicitation in the booths, and physical contact between dancers and customers. It also required employees to be licensed and to undergo criminal background checks.”
Those rules do not seem to have applied to The Spott, which Cline registered as a Missouri business that same year.
Cline initially leased the building, located at 2111 Television Place, from Samuel L. Levota, Jackson County property records show.
Levota, who died in 2014, owned a real estate appraisal business and served as both an Independence city councilman and a Jackson County Democratic Committeeman. His son Phil Levota served as an assistant prosecuting attorney under several Jackson County prosecutors, including Claire McCaskill, and is now an attorney in private practice. He told The Star that prior to selling the building to Cline, his father rented it out for private events — mostly weddings.
“I do recall hearing that he (Cline) rented it one night and threw a swingers party and the sheriff’s office got called, and it was a big mess,” Phil Levota said. “I think later on he wanted to buy it from my dad and wanted him to carry the note on it, but I’m not sure how that all went.” (Property records show that Cline eventually purchased the building from Levota in 2012.)
The Spott drew big crowds from the jump. Independence police eventually stopped responding to calls for service there, but among the few incident reports it has on file related to The Spott’s address is one for a “rave party” attended by “300-400 people” as early as 2008.
Cline also separated from his wife, Julie, in 2008, divorce records show. In 2010, Julie and their two children, Nicole and Jonathan, filed orders of protection against Cline, which were granted, court records show. The Star’s attempts to reach Cline’s family were unsuccessful.
Passing the buck
Most sex parties and swingers clubs prefer to remain something of a secret, spread through word of mouth and private message boards
The Spott was always a bit louder. It advertised on adult websites like Club Foreplay (“an online community for swingers”) and on the back page of alternative publications like The Pitch. You could — still can — learn all about The Spott on its website, which once had a dedicated tab for “Shoe and Foot Pictures.”
“There are couples here looking for singles and other couples just like you,” the site reads. “Our guests come here for the privacy and the opportunity to party like no other lifestyles club in the Midwest. Most of our single ladies and wives can (and DO) dress very seductively.”
Though Cline rented the facility out for private parties on other nights, Saturdays were for The Spott — “the ONLY late night, after hours party spot,” the site boasts. In its early days, The Spott stayed open until 3 a.m. Then, around 2017, it began extending its hours until 5 a.m., which invited a different clientele: Those seeking to keep the party going after all the other bars in town closed.
The only club in the state of Missouri that is allowed by law to serve drinks past 3 a.m. is the Mutual Musicians Foundation, the jazz club in Kansas City’s 18th and Vine District. The club enjoys that privilege because, after local authorities threatened to close down its legendary late-night jam sessions in 2006, the Missouri legislature inserted a carve-out into a bill that allowed “certain tax-exempt entities in the Kansas City area located in a building designated as a National Historic Landmark” to remain open until 6 a.m.
The Spott, a swingers club in Dogpatch, would not seem to clear that bar.
Licenses for bars, adult entertainment businesses and other entertainment venues in Kansas City and Independence are maintained and enforced by a division called Regulated Industries. Bars and clubs in unincorporated Jackson County require a permit from the Missouri Division of Alcohol and Tobacco Control.
Christin Templeton, the chief of enforcement for that state agency, told The Star that her office has “no liquor license or any other kind of license on file for The Spott or its address.”
Although an investigation by the state highway patrol eventually found that The Spott was illegally serving alcohol, it advertised for years as a “BYOB” establishment.
Templeton said that doesn’t matter.
“Even if it was BYOB, a business entertaining hundreds of people and charging at the door would still need a license with the state,” Templeton said.
Marshanna Smith, a public information officer for Jackson County, offered a different interpretation.
“While the sale of alcohol requires a permit, a private club may allow their members and/or guests to bring and consume their own alcohol, without obtaining a permit,” Smith told The Star. “The Spott is zoned for General-Business Planned and its operator held itself out as a private club, which is a permitted use under county code.”
What about staying open until 5 a.m.?
“There is no requirement in the county code that prevents this private club from operating throughout the night,” Smith said.
The jurisdictional confusion has not been confined to liquor licensing. On a Saturday night in August 2021, a Jackson County sheriff’s deputy who had answered an unrelated call for service noticed a sewer pipe connected to The Spott leaking a “steady, strong, constant flow” of water, feces, toilet paper and tampons. The sewer discharge was draining into a ditch near the Fisca Oil gas station, several hundred feet down the hill.
Concerned about the health hazard, the deputy took some pictures, filed a report and passed it along to the Jackson County Health Department.
The report seems to have gone nowhere.
Smith told The Star, “It’s my understanding that Kansas City handles the sanitary sewers for Blue Summit.” She suggested reaching out to KC Water to see what had been done about the sewer leak. She said that Jackson County Health Department had no paperwork documenting that the information was passed along to Kansas City because it likely would have taken place through a phone call.
Heather Frierson, media relations coordinator for KC Water, said KC Water maintains the sewer mains for the Blue Summit area, but water distribution is from Independence utilities.
Frierson told The Star that KC Water had no records on file related to the incident, and Independence did not respond to a request for information about what actions, if any, were taken related to the incident.
Crime surges
The Spott’s longer operating hours led to larger crowds, which inevitably led to a surge in crime and service calls in the area, sheriff’s office reports show. Some of those calls involved Cline, who lives in an apartment above the club.
In 2016: An otherwise redacted incident report notes that a woman at The Spott called the police after Cline allegedly “assaulted her by pushing her down the stairs.” Cline was not charged.
In 2017: Sheriff’s deputies and EMS responded to The Spott at 4 in the morning on a call about a woman who had been shot in the arm outside one of the club’s private rooms. The pop of the gunshot sent patrons scrambling from the building. According to the incident report, the person who reported the shooting told dispatch that Cline had shot her. Deputies initially took Cline and another patron into custody. But surveillance footage from inside the club eventually cleared Cline as a suspect. The woman, who sustained non-life-threatening injuries, did not see who shot her, and several guests deputies spoke to on the scene were “very intoxicated.” The case went inactive after a few weeks of investigation.
In 2018: the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office executed a search warrant at The Spott as part of an investigation into a reported rape there. They found a gun in Cline’s upstairs bedroom. The gun had scratch marks near the serial number, as though someone had attempted to prevent its tracing. The gun was later confirmed to have been stolen from the Kansas City Police Department.
In a “hidden room,” deputies then found a Harley Davidson backpack that contained 19 grams of methamphetamine and $17,800 in cash. Cline was arrested and charged with Class D felony possession of a controlled substance, but subsequently pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor possession. He denied at the time that he sold drugs, claiming that the 19 grams were his “personal amount, because buying a larger amount was cheaper.”
But The Spott continued to be a nuisance. Jackson County deputies dealt every weekend with cars illegally parked up and down Television Place and in the lots of neighboring businesses. Several times, Cline claimed to deputies that he had permission from his neighbors for Spott patrons to use those lots. But when the deputies talked to those businesses, they were informed that wasn’t true.
“Cline was informed that if he was providing false information as he had in the past, he would be cited,” according to an incident report. But he never was.
In September 2019, a 4 a.m. shootout outside The Spott sent five victims to Truman Medical Center. (More than 45 shots were fired, but everyone survived.) When police arrived, Cline remained upstairs in his apartment and refused to exit the secured door, according to an incident report. A security employee interviewed by deputies that night said there had been more than 1,000 people in the club along with approximately 15 security employees, most of whom were armed and wore bulletproof vests. The investigation into the shootout hit a dead end when the victims refused to cooperate.
Guardian angels?
Not everybody considers The Spott a bad actor.
Inter City Fire Protection District Chief Jeff Jewell — the closest thing Blue Summit has to a mayor — told The Star that Cline “was totally compliant as far as inspections” and said that the reports of the September 2019 shootout were overblown.
“Gunshots go off here every night,” Jewell said. “We’ve only been called down there a couple of times since he’s been open, and I’ve never seen anything crazy there.”
Jewell’s fire station is funded through a half-cent sales tax on businesses in the Blue Summit area.
“And when people go to The Spott, they buy a lot of stuff from the gas station at the bottom of the hill, which generates a lot of tax money that we need here,” Jewell said. “So from a taxpayer point of view, losing The Spott hurts the district.”
Joe Pace, a Dogpatch resident since 1975, said he worked for a few years as a security guard at The Spott.
“It was run like a business and Jeff treated me good,” Pace said. “I never saw sex. They had rooms for that stuff, but you just don’t go in when the doors are shut. It’s a shame they want to give him trouble when you have these other hot spots in the city where there are constant shootings and killings.”
He echoed Jewell’s point about the tax base. “The Spott is good for the neighborhood. We need all the tax dollars we can get around here.”
According to the Missouri Department of Revenue, though, Cline has never applied for a Missouri sales tax license for The Spott. The business owes the state of Missouri $62,000 in taxes, and Cline himself owes $64,000, according to the department.
Though its industrial neighbors, absent after dark, were mostly unbothered by the noise and gunfire emanating from The Spott, the club did draw the ire of some residents in the Blue Ridge Mobile Home Community, the trailer park that abuts The Spott’s backyard.
Larry Fyfe was one of them. A retired truck driver, Fyfe frequently called in noise complaints regarding The Spott starting around 2016.
“The deputies would come, but they’d try to talk me out of filing a complaint,” said Fyfe, who relocated to southwest Missouri three years ago. “The music was so loud it shook the ground, there were gunshots every other weekend, and there were people inside having sex all over the place. How do you let that go on? I called the deputies, I called the legislature. Nobody wanted to do nothing about it.
“The story I heard was that he (Cline) had somebody high up backing him — some kind of connection at the county where they just looked the other way on the whole deal,” Fyfe added.
Cline does have some connections to the Jackson County power structure.
Dennis Waits, an attorney who also served as a legislator in Jackson County’s 3rd District (which includes Blue Summit) for 32 years until stepping down in 2018, represented Cline on a previous criminal charge and initially represented Cline on his more recent tax evasion case.
“He (Cline) was a client on two cases, and other than that I’ve had no involvement with him or his dealings,” Waits said.
Cline also had ties to federal law enforcement, according to a 2015 federal lawsuit.
The lawsuit itself concerns gender discrimination and retaliation at the Kansas City division of the FBI. Cline is cited as the boyfriend of Julie Bulman, one of the agents involved. Another agent, Sean Edwards — who had previously been in a three-way relationship with his wife and Bulman — reported to higher-ups that “Bulman was engaged in unauthorized outside work at an adult club called The Spott, and moreover that illegal drug activity occurred there.” Bulman admitted dating Cline and “frequenting” The Spott but denied seeing evidence of drugs.
The issue of drug activity, according to the lawsuit, was referred to “local law enforcement authorities.” The FBI took no disciplinary action against Bulman.
Busted
Jackson County Sheriff Mike Sharp, who had held that position since 2008, resigned in 2018 after it was revealed he had a sexual relationship with a female employee of the sheriff’s office while she had a pending lawsuit against Jackson County for harassment. In a deposition from the case, Sharp acknowledged that he, the employee and his now-ex-wife had sex together. He did not respond to a request for comment about his office’s enforcement efforts at The Spott during his time as sheriff.
Sharp was replaced by former Kansas City Police Chief Darryl Forte. A year later, Forte initiated a crime reduction initiative targeting the area in and around The Spott. “The club has been a serious issue for several years,” Forte said in November 2019, adding that the goal was to “reestablish order for those who ultimately reside in the general area of Blue Summit.”
In August 2021, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office requested a Missouri State Highway Patrol investigation of Cline and The Spott. Over the next six months, undercover troopers witnessed weekly parties fit for Caligula. Their reports detail “open sexual activity including sodomy, full nudity and the exposure of genitalia.” Those acts took place in “numerous rooms designated for various sexual activities … and a room designated for observing others engaged in sexual activities.”
The troopers purchased cocaine and ecstasy, and were offered Percocet, Oxycodone and fentanyl. They also reported a litany of violations of Missouri law, including televisions playing pornography in a public setting and health code offenses “related to the service of food, drinks and a pool.”
A search warrant was served on The Spott on Sunday, Feb. 13, in the early morning hours of the “Lady in Red Valentine’s Day Party.”
Authorities seized $47,638 in cash, 5 grams of methamphetamine, 5 grams of ecstasy, drug paraphernalia, 4 grams of marijuana, digital scales, a Springfield handgun, an Anderson AM-15 pistol, a Mossberg shotgun, a Phoenix Arms handgun, a bolt action rifle and a Smith & Wesson revolver.
They also seized an Apple iPad showing that The Spott had completed more than $20,000 in transactions at that evening’s party alone.
A grand jury subsequently charged Cline with four counts of failure to file/pay Missouri taxes and one count of attempting to evade or defeat income tax. All are felonies and were allegedly committed during the years 2018 and 2019. That case is set for trial in May.
Cline was also charged with 24 misdemeanor counts of “Fail to Collect Sales Tax, File Return and Pay Taxes; Misrepresent Assumption of Taxes.” Those are misdemeanors allegedly committed in 2019 and 2020.
The Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office filed a petition seeking forfeiture of the drugs, guns and money seized during the February raid. Before his new attorney, Nicole Forsythe, entered an appearance for him on the forfeiture case, Cline filed his own answer to the court attempting to explain himself.
All the cash that was seized? He was saving up to pay the income taxes he owed.
The ecstasy? There were 500 people at the party and it was found in a publicly accessible area of the club — how could he be expected to monitor every single person for drugs?
The digital scale? It was to weigh gun powder.
The meth? Planted there by his cleaning lady, who did it in exchange for a reduced sentence on a recent DUI charge: “I believe she planted this so that when the law enforcement executed the search warrant, they would find what they needed to ensure the property could be confiscated,” Cline writes.
Forsythe has since filed a far less colorful amended answer in the case. She declined to comment to The Star about Cline’s cases.
On Jan. 5, the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office brought new charges against Cline in connection to the drugs seized in the February 2022 raid. He faces one felony count of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, one felony count for possession of cocaine and one felony count for possession of methamphetamine. On Monday, Cline was arrested and released on a $50,000 bond.
In the meantime, The Spott, like Cline, lies in limbo, a flaccid sex palace hidden behind tall gates, black tarp and razor wire. If it is permanently closed, there remains cause for hope among the city’s swingers: There don’t seem to be any laws stopping someone else from opening another BYOB sex club that stays open all night.
At least not in Dogpatch.
This story was originally published January 11, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
