Club Owners Revenge

[slacker]

Irregular News for 04.03.07

 

Bock, MN -- Elders in Bock thought the supper club's new owner had little change in mind when he reopened the establishment in the four-block-long town just before Christmas 2002.

 

But Richard J. Jacobson was planning an exotic holiday surprise.

 

"I ran it four days and then remodeled over Christmas and put in a stage [for nude dancers]. It was a late Christmas present," said Jacobson, smiling in his Bock club, a few miles east of Milaca and well-travelled Hwy. 169. "When I reopened, the place was packed. I didn't even do any advertising."

 

Jacobson, 36, is a gadfly to officials in Bock and in Coates, the Dakota County city that forced him to close Jake's Gentlemen's Club in 2002. He was acquitted last month on charges of trying to pack the Coates City Council to get his club reopened.

 

Jacobson said he has rejected a $1 million offer for the Coates bar, which he painted bright pink before leaving town.

 

"I can be feisty when I have to be," he said.

 

Jacobson was ordered to pay more than $6,000 in attorney's fees to Coates during their 10-year court battle. He dumped 600,000 pennies, weighing about 3,700 pounds, on and around a sagging table at a City Council meeting in 2002.

 

Nor has Jacobson forgotten his Coates nemesis, Mayor Jack Gores. His Bock club's name? Fat Jack's Cabaret.

 

Gores declined to comment on the name.

 

Jacobson grew up south of Coates in Cannon Falls. He wrestled and pitched in high school, worked at his father's mobile home dealership and later cooked at his dad's bar. After high school, he worked at a now-defunct strip club in Cannon Falls. His parents separated about the time he graduated in 1988.

 

He left town three days later to study finance at Arizona State University. He transferred to Augsburg College in Minneapolis before the nude dancing business lured him back in 1992. He was hired to open and manage the Coates club and bought it about two years later.

 

'Some very irate people'

 

In 2002, when Jake's closed, he opened Fat Jack's in Bock.

 

"There were some very irate people," said Clerk-Treasurer Lynda Sjoberg. "The council felt he had pulled a fast one." It suspended his liquor license, and some residents picketed the club. But Fat Jack's kept pouring and the ladies kept stripping.

 

And Sjoberg, who once counted herself among Jacobson's strongest opponents, now lives with Jacobson and manages Fat Jack's. They have been a couple for about two years.

 

The city called the Mille Lacs County sheriff, whose deputies ensured that Jacobson stopped serving liquor, said Undersheriff Alan Marxhausen. So Jacobson sold soft drinks and stayed open till 4 a.m., no longer bound by the 1 a.m. law on serving alcohol, Marxhausen said.

 

After assessing legal options for more than a year, the council in March 2004 granted Jacobson a liquor license, Sjoberg said. She said two council members resigned in protest, as did the new clerk. Sjoberg, who had resigned as clerk months before to care for an ailing son, was rehired and still fills the post.

 

Dennis Girard, who became mayor in January, said Fat Jack's has brought a lot of business to Bock's two gas stations and two other bar-restaurants. Girard said he and his wife have eaten at Fat Jack's, where the X-shaped dance stage is in a separate room from the bar. There's also a shop that sells sex toys and videos.

 

"I've seen the dancers perform at a bachelor's party or two," Girard, 38, said. "It is very tastefully done for the type of place that it is ... They have signs up saying 'Gentlemen - No Touching the Ladies.' "

 

He noted that Fat Jack's gives locals a $2 break on bottled beer.

 

"I am glad they're here," said Girard, sipping a beer at the bar. "We cannot deny it is financially beneficial to the town."

 

The mayor conceded that some in the town of 106, with many retired folks, "have a problem morally with the club."

 

'He runs a pretty good show'

 

"A lot of people in the city of Bock don't want it there," said Chad Wedell, council president of Emanuel Lutheran Church, Bock's only house of worship.

 

source

[Drowning_in_the_Sea_of_Red]

I see no problem

[tattooedhusker]

neither do i...neither do i

 

*if the wife reads this: honey i love you...when do you want to plan that trip to Minnesota?

[BIGREDFAN_in_OMAHA]

The map on Yahoo says its 69 miles north of Minneapolis.

[rawhide]

There used to be a chi chi bar on the N side of Lincoln just outside the City Limits can't remember the name but it was out by the old City Landfill. BJ's ??????

[Touchdown Tommie]

I remember the bright pink building....it's f-ing hilarious. I just might have to make a little road trip up there. I fish at Mille Lacs a couple of times a year.....new pitstop!!!!