More Trouble for Nightclub Mogul Catroppa

We’ve kept you up to date on Fayetteville nightclub mogul Tony Catroppa putting his assortment of strip clubs, bars and restaurants up for sale.

Maybe Catroppa is retiring, maybe he’s just tired of keeping up with all those pesky regulations of the Arkansas Alcohol Beverage Control board. We don’t really know because when we call he hangs up.

On July 10, ABC director Michael Langley told us that Catroppa has been “consistently fined over the last year” for violations at his various clubs and that another fine was being prepared as we spoke for violations at his Electric Cowgirl club in west Fayetteville.

The club was fined $1,000, had its liquor license suspended for a week and was put on probation for a year in February for a June 2007 brawl involving flying pool balls and swinging billiard cues.

Tony C, as Catroppa is better known, has run afoul of the law repeatedly. Rogers residents may remember the Coyote Club being fined $1,500 and losing its liquor license for a month in 2004 after being found guilty of running an illegal adult cabaret.

His taxi service also ripped of the University of Arkansas to the tune of thousands of dollars operating the “Safe Ride” program. The UA eventually discovered drivers were falsifying reports on the number of rides given and were taking students from bar to bar or dropping them off at their cars instead of taking them home.