Honky-tonk from Hell

When Stelck stepped in to purchase the bar, Lancaster schools and city government, as well as Dallas County, were able to collect a total of $212,000 in back taxes owed by the Douglas interests. "I've tried to do this proper," Stelck says over the sounds of clicking pool balls and the rumble of the bar crowd.

"They cleaned it up a lot," says Shawn Shepard, a 27-year-old who--curiously--has been going to the bar for eight years. "This place used to be pretty easy about I.D.," she says.

A visit to the club one recent Thursday night made it clear that the Chandelier can move the booze. Throughout the smoky room, guys in hats or checker-board shirts huddled around tables covered with eight-ounce plastic cups of 25-cent beer. They mowed them down as Angel Fire, the bar band, covered songs like "Beaches of Cheyenne" or "Welcome to My Crazy Life."

For a two-song break that included a very noncountry Coolio number, longnecks dropped to $1 and the number of people in lines around the beer tub stretched to a dozen or more.

(Stelck said later, "I prefer not to give anything away that cheap, but you have to compete." On Fridays, the specials run all night: 25-cent draft beer, $1 well drinks, and $1.50 longnecks.)

A leggy woman browsed the club as sort of a walking tequila dispenser, shot glasses strapped across her chest in a brown leather sash, $2.50-a-snort Cuervo Gold holstered on her leg.

Eventually, several people in the crowd of about 700 staggered to the exit, although all were stopped by security people in black T-shirts and portable headsets, apparently to make sure they weren't driving.

Stelck, who says that like the Douglas clan he has no liquor liability insurance at the bar, says his only assets are "two thousand dollars in the bank."

"This club is no million-dollar honey, I guarantee," he says.
The Chandelier building and just about everything in it, including furniture, are leased, Stelck says. And while records from one of the Douglas company bankruptcies show that Stelck made clear he was purchasing the property, courthouse documents list Lester Stelck, Larry's father, and another investor as owners of record. That arrangement would isolate those assets from dram shop claims, lawyers say.

In other words, on the outside chance Wingo might win his lawsuit, he has little hope of seeing money.

"They're barking up the wrong tree," Stelck says in less legalistic terms. "They ain't gonna get jack shit.