Photographs by Scott Rovak
One night at Shady Jack’s, a couple of Hell’s Angels who’d lived close to the flames started talking to one of the bar’s regulars—unbeknownst to them, a city judge. Ten seconds later, on one of his regular hawk-eyed sweeps of the crowd, Jack Larrison noticed and headed over to their table, an easy smile on his face. He told a few jokes, talked a little politics, then said lightly to the bikers, “Now, you gentlemen aren’t saying anything that would incriminate yourselves, are you?” The conversation continued smoothly, but he could tell by one of the bikers’ quick blinks that his point had registered.
When he walked away, it was as though a magnet pulled their attention with him. Conversation stalled as people watched Larrison move through the crowd, his long white beard glowing in the dim light, a beaded braid running down its center, a two-foot queue down his back. They knew him as a wickedly funny storyteller with the charm of a true host, and he fascinated them.
But they’d never heard his whole story.
When Larrison opened Shady Jack’s Saloon two years ago, he turned a condemned electrical warehouse at North Broadway and Cass into a biker bar as surreal as the Star Wars cantina, where aliens from different planets mingle.
He never meant to.
The first Shady Jack’s, a bikers’ campground and RV park with a swimming pool and indoor and outdoor bars in Villa Ridge, Mo., had just been shut down by the feds. “They raided me with 30 federal agents,” he says. “I lost the campground, house and two bars because they said I was a bad character and called my loan. I’d just made a $7,000 payment. That’s the real world that people who go to bed after the10 o’clock news don’t see.”
Fact is, having a biker bar nearby made the neighbors nervous. And the customers, sometimes fresh out of prison, made law enforcement suspicious. And all that made the bankers worry.
“When you’re running with outlaws, you’re gonna get heat,” Larrison says with a shrug. “But the rumors that surround my world are overkill.”
Broke again—he’s made and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years—he slept in his truck while he rehabbed the new Shady Jack’s and thought about what went wrong. “I have a girlfriend; I could’ve slept there, but I take my punishment,” he says. “I can’t figure something out being a fat cat on the sofa.”
First he was bitter. Then he decided he’d made his own fate and hatched a new plan: He’d open a hardcore biker bar, score a quick profit and retire in Mexico. A skilled plasterer and general contractor, he vowed that, this time, he’d leave the floors and ceilings rough, the walls smoke-damaged and dusty.
Then the bikers started calling.
“What do you need, man?” they’d say. “I’ve got some ’crete for you.” “Got some bricks I can give you cheap.” One morning his phone rang at 5 o’clock: “Go to this site.” He got there, and the guard made him turn around. “Yep, got that long pigtail, go on in.” He drove through, and the next thing he knew he heard the sound of a crane and steel dropping into his truck, then the rustle of guys tying it down.
By fall 2005, Shady Jack’s had taken rough shape. Outside, high on the brick, a mural designed by a friend shows Jack on his “suicide bike,” which dares a hand shift and foot clutch and which he paints flat black with a spray can from the hardware store. “Nothin’ cute about my bike,” he mutters.
You enter Shady Jack’s through a burned-out area that Larrison turned into an interior courtyard. You pass a carved wooden statue of a white-bearded wizard that a customer gave him because its resemblance to Larrison is uncanny.
The menu’s bordered with quotes—like “Bureaucrats welcomed occasionally.” Two former mayors, Freeman Bosley Jr. and Vince Schoemehl, have taken Larrison at his word. Brokers from Stifel Nicolaus eat lunch there; Circuit Judge Mark Neill comes after events at the Missouri Athletic Club and gets ribbed (but not for long, once people catch Larrison’s eye) for wearing a suit.
The menu used to boast, “We have no fried foods!” but Larrison—who doesn’t smoke and swears he’s never taken so much as an aspirin—caved to popular demand: “When people drink late at night, they want the fried stuff.” He did keep the tilapia and the tuna melt.
Shady Jack’s mixes tough-guy bravado with a sweet camaraderie, softens pinup girl sexism with old-world chivalry. To Larrison, these are not contradictions. The men’s room sign reads “Dogs,” an overlap of biker and prison slang that the RUBs (rich urban bikers who’ve barely ever broken the speed limit) don’t even notice. He insists on seeing every female guest to her car.
“I’ve got people like Bam Bam’s mom, she’s from Chesterfield, she hangs here,” Larrison says. Flash (a.k.a. Bob Pierce, a city employee by day) hears him and nods. “There’s been the most foo-foo people here, and they loved it,” he chortles. “Once people came from the suburbs on a bus, all wearing the same color T-shirts ...”
Larrison smiles. “They stood there like a little covey of quail, staring at what we call our poli-o-kee pole [he substituted pole dancing for the clichéd karaoke]. Finally they realized they could take their top off if they wanted and nobody here would give a shit. Nobody’s gonna bother them.”
Flash laughs even harder, and light dances all over the table from the gadget he’s peddling—multicolored LEDs wrapped around his fingers with Velcro. “By the end of the night they were all around that pole.”
Upstairs at Shady Jack’s, there’s a leather workshop, a room-sized humidor for cigars, a T-shirt shop (Larrison silk-screens his own, and they’re collector’s items), and what he fondly calls a head shop, selling biker accessories. “This is gonna be a tattoo parlor, that’s our next adventure”—he gestures to a cavernous space—“and I’m looking for a masseuse and a jewelry shop.”
The third floor’s devoted to ultimate combat fighting.
Yet Larrison’s the ultimate peacekeeper.
Eight different motorcycle clubs come here—“outlaw clubs, been riding for years and they don’t conform to anything,” Larrison explains. “They have their own agenda, and they have their own area they like to protect.” They also have their own colors—and most bars don’t allow colors, because when two clubs pick the same night and place to get lit, blood spills fast.
Not here, though.
“They give the place respect,” he says.
Neill, the circuit judge, remembers being impressed on hearing that when a problem broke out between two motorcycle clubs, the word went out: “Call Larrison. He can put anybody to the table, and they’ll behave.”
Anne Alonzo’s been friends with Larrison for 15 years, and she’s watched him in the bar. “I used to be a pretty crazy gal who caused a lot of drama, so I have a keen awareness of what could cause trouble,” she says. “He stays very calm. He’s not afraid, and he’s not going to step down. And people just mellow and leave.”
One of Larrison’s younger sisters, Charlotte Wiedman, remembers a night last summer, around midnight, full moon, when 50 bicycle riders rolled up. “Jack’s got this puzzled look: These aren’t bikers. They’re young, and they say, ‘We looked you guys up on the Internet.’ So Jack says, ‘Hey, a bike is a bike, come on in.’
“They had a fantastic time—he’s a great host—and they said it was the most fun they’d had anywhere. But toward the end of the evening, the bartender gives him the high sign—they have this language between them—and he springs up. Apparently one of the kids was trying to pass a bad check or debit card or something. The kid’s saying, ‘Just take this, man, this is good.’
“‘This is not real, dude,’ Jack says. ‘It’s not real.’ And then all of a sudden he reaches over the bar, grabs this kid by the collar and says, ‘OK, we can do this two ways. Pay your tab or pay it in a different way outside. And sir? It doesn’t matter which way to me.’ He was very calm, very quiet. One of the other guys comes running over, pays and apologizes. He says, ‘I hope you will let us come back,’ and Jack says, ‘Hey, ain’t no thing. Happens. You come back anytime—you are always welcome here.’”
They left, and his sister stared at him incredulously. “Oh my God, this is how you handle things?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Real world, there’s consequences.”
“I’ve owned 12 or so joints over the years,” Larrison says, not mentioning that he bought and sold big chunks of midtown and the Central West End and was, in developer Pete Rothschild’s opinion, the pioneer of what’s now the Grove neighborhood.
“I’ve known Jack for about 20 years, and he’s more fun and more intelligent than anybody you’ll meet,” Rothschild says. “I’ve hired him as a general contractor, gotten drunk in several of his bars and well fed in others, and I’ve bought at least four bar operations from him. He gives you an honest picture, which is not always the case in the world I walk in.”
The fourth of seven kids, Larrison grew up in what he calls “the ghetto”—Park and Compton—and got kicked out of Garfield Elementary for pulling the fire alarm, Shenandoah Elementary for fighting. At his third elementary school, the principal had a different approach: “He told my mother, ‘Everything is going to be fine,’ shut the door and knocked me across the room. I saw him years later and thanked him.
“My mom made me go to church day and night,” Larrison says a minute later. “My dad was a railroad man for 45 years. He got my brother a job, but not me; he said I was too mischievous.”
The best advice his father ever gave him: “Son, you know when things get down and out and life’s hard on you?” Larrison nodded, waiting eagerly. His father leaned forward. “It’s going to get worse.” It seemed like forever passed before his father added the punch line: “So don’t ever give up.”
During high school, Larrison got a job as a towel boy at the M.A.C., cheerfully sopping up the sweat of crotchety repositories of power. He decided he wanted to be a lawyer, but he didn’t take to college. He married his high school sweetheart, and soon she was pregnant. He became a cop instead.
He doesn’t talk about those days much at Shady Jack’s.
“When I met him, around 1966, he was an east-of-Grand hoosier, totally naïve,” says Bob Gates, a retired police officer. “He joined the department, cut his hair and had whitewalls over his ears. I have a photo of the two of us giving a talk at the police academy: the three-piece suits, the hair, the ties ... We were partners for a while in the dress-up detectives bureau—burglaries, robberies, that kind of stuff. And Jack’s still fastidious. He doesn’t always look it, but if you notice his jeans, they are starched and laundered, with a crease. He’s always liked to dress up.”
Gates’ advice about his old partner: “Expect the unexpected.” Once they stopped at the scene of an accident: “These guys were drunk as hoot owls, and one got hit so hard, his eyeball was out of the socket. His friend saw it and started screaming, so Jack knocked him cold and calmly told the first guy, ‘You’ll be fine.’”
Larrison loved, then hated, the intensity of police work, from autopsies and shootouts to undercover intelligence, vice and riot control. “It makes you high-strung, keeps you attuned. One slight body movement across the room, if you are not vigilant and yet casual, can be a bad situation.” He lived fast and ate stress, and eight years later, he quit. “I had five kids by then,” he says, “and I was thinking, ‘Man, this is nuts.’”
So from his current vantage point, how much difference is there between cops and outlaws?
“Not a lot,” he says, “and both sides know it.”
It was Wiedman who gave her brother the name that stuck: She told him he should call his campground Shady Jack’s, “because it has all these trees, and because you are very shady!”
His whole life’s been a bit of a mystery, she explains. “When he was a cop undercover, we could never really know what he was involved in. One time we were watching TV, and I heard my mom say, ‘Oh my God!’ Jack was on the news being indicted. He had five warehouses in the city, and they were running a gambling operation out of them. My mom was hysterical. And then it all went away. They arrested a lot of people, but not Jack. I asked him about it, and he said, ‘Oh, you know ...’
“He’s a badass and a good guy, and that’s the mystique,” she says later, “because how can you be both?”
Larrison’s response? “You can’t cower.” He pauses, then says, “People hear pieces of rumors and think I’m mysterious, maybe because I don’t confide in anybody. Keeping a secret does not bother me. Nobody can ‘pick’ me, the way they teach you in undercover school, engage me in a conversation and do all the listening.”
He crosses back and forth above what, for the rest of us, is a chasm between worlds. “He’s Karl Wallenda, walking the tightrope,” Gates says. “When we were policemen, we were locking these guys up, and they’re his friends now.”
Larrison shrugs. “I know it’s strange, but these are righteous guys, a lot of ’em. You gotta know who’s who. The system—” he breaks off. “I shoulda been a lawyer.”
Would he ever inform on someone? “No, not even a murderer,” he says so fast you know he’s thought about it. “It’s not in my vocabulary. I don’t have room for that in my life.”
Two men walk in and head for the courtyard. “See, these guys just got out of prison,” Larrison says in a low voice. “You can tell by the way they walk. East-side lean, that convict stride. Stature, hair, clothes, language, the way they shake hands with their fists ...
“My word is my bond,” he resumes. “People tell me incredible things because they know it’ll never be shared with anybody ever. I want to forget half the stuff I know.”
He falls silent as one of his regulars passes the table. “Hey, bro,” Larrison says, and waits until the man passes.
“My world is very fragile,” he says, “because I don’t belong on the judicial side and I don’t belong on the outlaw side. I get respect in both worlds—but it’s kind of a lonely life, too, because I don’t belong anywhere.” He looks into the distance. “I really didn’t mean to be where I’m at. I really didn’t mean to be Shady Jack.”
Not only does Larrison avoid talking about his police days, he also doesn’t mention how he feeds customers without families and street folk without homes a turkey dinner every Thanksgiving and Christmas at his bar, helps people from halfway houses get jobs, sends money to people in prison.
“One day he was writing all these checks, and I said, ‘Jack, what are you doing?’” Wiedman recalls. “He said, ‘Well, they don’t have anybody, and I know ’em, so ...’”
He doesn’t go to church night and day the way their mother did, but he thinks about big questions. “I believe we make our own fate,” he says. “I believe in ghosts if ghosts come to me, but they don’t. I believe in the dark; I’m just as comfortable in the dark as the dark is.”
And that sunny retirement in Mexico?
“The older I get, the stupider I become,” he says with a sigh. “You know what happened? The damned place took off.”
He could lose it all tomorrow and not care, though; he’s a survivor. “You can take my clothes off me, put me on a plane, fly me to another city, and in one mile I’ll have some clothes on and be smoking a cigar,” he says, timing his delivery like a stand-up comic. “That’s the street ability. I’m a good confidence man; I could start a cult. But I would never do that.”
Maybe he already has.
