A St. Louis Hills octogenarian who last year was charged with attempting to run over a parish maintenance worker as part of a long-running dispute over garbage was back in court this week.
Roland Clubb, 81, stands accused in a civil lawsuit of brandishing a gun at a man who rented an apartment from him. That incident was part of a broader campaign of harassment against the tenant in September 2023. That former tenant happens to be restaurateur Paul Beffa, owner of Beffa’s Bar & Restaurant in Downtown West.
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Beffa also accuses Clubb of building a wall down the middle of the property’s driveway that prevented Beffa from accessing his garage, removing a portion of his air conditioning unit amid 90-degree heat, and making it virtually impossible to continue living in his residence.
The dispute came to a head Tuesday during a bench trial in front of Judge Rochelle Woodiest in St. Louis City Circuit Court. Both Beffa and a neighbor, Carolyn Mueller, have accused Clubb of assault. Beffa also accuses him of wrongful eviction. Both Beffa and Mueller are seeking monetary damages from Clubb.
“His behavior towards Paul is emblematic of the problems that he’s been causing all over,” one of Beffa’s attorneys, Krystal Weigl, tells SLM.
Clubb’s attorney, Peter Bruntrager, sees things differently. “The bottom line is that the evidence against Roland Clubb was wildly exaggerated, blown way out of proportion.” He describes Beffa as a difficult tenant and Mueller as an “extremely difficult” neighbor. He says that Clubb, on the other hand, is a retiree trying to make some money off a few duplexes he owns, living in one of the units and renting out the others.
Clubb was in the news last year after prosecutors filed a felony assault charge against him in March for attempting to run over a maintenance worker for St. Raphael the Archangel Church. The incident took place in the church parking lot, which was filled with children at the time. The maintenance worker had previously told Clubb to refrain from dumping his personal trash in the church’s bins. The church accused Clubb, whose rental properties sit right across the otherwise quiet stretch of Jamieson from the church, of using the bins to dump whatever his tenants left behind after they moved out.
Clubb was sentenced in November for the incident in the parking lot. He jokingly told a Post-Dispatch reporter, “I’m going to the penitentiary for 25 years.” A judge gave him two years probation, even though he was facing another assault case, this one for allegedly swinging a piece of vinyl siding at a passerby in the same area of St. Louis Hills. That criminal case remains pending.
Clubb’s saga with Beffa pre-dates both those incidents. According to Beffa’s lawsuit, he began leasing a duplex off Jamieson from Clubb in June 2023. A few months later, Clubb got into a dispute with a neighbor of the rental property over a shared driveway, at which point Clubb began constructing a foot-tall wall of bricks down the center of it. That dispute was with Mueller, the other person suing Clubb, but the wall also inconvenienced Beffa, as it prevented him from accessing the duplex’s garage.
“That kind of led to the beginning of the hostility between them,” says Lucas Jackson, an attorney also representing Beffa. “Within a matter of days of that happening, according to both sides, things really deteriorated.”
In August 2023, Beffa confronted Clubb about the wall. Clubb told Beffa that if he didn’t like it, he could leave. That evening, Beffa found a “for lease” sign installed in front of his unit.
One night in early September, Clubb showed up at Beffa’s duplex at 10:30 p.m., demanding rent payment. Two days later, Clubb removed the unit’s external AC controller, rendering the air conditioner inoperable. A few days after that, Clubb came to Beffa’s restaurant and, according to the lawsuit, demanded in a threatening manner that Beffa pay him rent.
Beffa began the process of moving out that Labor Day weekend. On September 8, as Beffa removed his remaining belongings from the unit, Clubb began yelling and cursing at him, causing Beffa to return to his vehicle. From the driveway, Beffa turned around to see Clubb waving a gun at him. He snapped a photo of Clubb with his gun tucked into his pants, its handle showing. That photo was entered into court records and appears at the top of this post.
Jackson says it’s uncontested that Clubb showed up that day with a weapon. “His solution to this problem, whether or not he thinks it was an assault, was to approach our client with a gun in his hand,” says Jackson.
Bruntrager says that while Clubb did indeed have a gun, there’s no evidence to support him pointing it at anyone. He says the presence of the gun might be shocking to some people, but Clubb was an 81-year-old man walking into an empty apartment: “He didn’t know what he was going to find in there.”
Clubb took the stand on Tuesday as part of his defense. Says Weigl: “Testimony that was elicited demonstrated that he had behaved abusively, and it didn’t contradict the claims that were brought against him.”
The neighbor, Mueller, is also suing Clubb as part of the same civil lawsuit. In 2018, she moved into the property adjacent to Clubb’s duplex. The lawsuit describes her relationship with Clubb as “increasingly antagonistic” due to Clubb’s “repeated unwanted attempts to get closer” to her.
When Clubb purchased the duplex in May 2023, he allegedly told Mueller, “Bitch, you’re either going to die by stroke or heart attack” due to being his neighbor. The suit alleges that Clubb built the wall that cost Beffa access to his garage to further antagonize Mueller.
About two weeks after Beffa moved out, in September 2023, the lawsuit alleges that Mueller was attempting to cross Jamieson when Clubb came towards her in his vehicle, attempting to “intimidate, scare and even run Mueller over.” (Bruntrager says Mueller’s version of events is contradicted by video.)
After Tuesday’s bench trial, Judge Woodiest indicated she will rule on the matter at a later date.
Both Beffa and Mueller had originally been represented in the lawsuit by attorney William Wurm. Late last year, Wurm’s law license was suspended by the Missouri Supreme Court after he was accused of misappropriating tens of thousands of dollars of his clients’ funds. He allegedly spent $50,000 of his clients’ money on Nazi artifacts.
At the bench trial, Beffa was represented by Weigl and Jackson, Mueller by Clayton Varley. Varley didn’t respond to SLM’s message seeking comment.
