New charges against Club Shadows

December 23, 2006

By Matthew Lysiak
The Brooklyn Paper

The tally of charges is now up to four against Club Shadows, the embattled Third Avenue nightspot whose future increasingly appears in doubt, according to City Councilman Vince Gentile (D–Bay Ridge).

On Monday, Gentile told Community Board 10 that the state liquor authority was investigating whether shadowy Shadows manager Joseph Domovsky has any connection to the man who actually owns the site’s liquor license.

If not, “it’s illegal and could result in revocation of the license,” Gentile said.

He also claimed that Club Shadows had been representing itself to the SLA under the unregistered name “Club Crash,” and that the agency was investigating why the content of some liquor bottles did not match the bottles’ labels.

“This could mean that the liquor is being watered-down or that the labels are being switched,” Gentile said. “We just don’t know. It gets more mysterious by the minute.”

But not everything is as mysterious as Gentile claimed.

State Liquor Authority spokesman Bill Crowley confirmed that four charges have indeed been issued against the club, but at least one violation was due to a bureaucratic snafu.

“We screwed up; they never presented themselves as Club Crash,” Crowley said. “That was a typo on our part, but we are going ahead with the charge that ‘Club Shadows’ is an unregistered name.”

Crowley also clarified that the charge wasn’t for watered-down or mislabeled booze, as Gentile represented, but for vermin.

“We found five bottles with flies in them, and that was what that charge was for,” Crowley said.

Club Shadows got on community radar screens in November, when a sign appeared on the club, which is on Third Avenue between 90th and 91st streets. The sign — adorned with a silhouette of a curvy woman — promised “exotic dancers” at the Nov. 30 opening.

But the strippers never materialized, and Domovsky insisted it was only a misunderstanding. Nonetheless, a skeptical Gentile showed up at the opening with SLA officers, who issued the citation for flies in a liquor bottle.

Domovsky, who also manages “Shadow’s Lounge” in Sheapshead Bay, told The Brooklyn Papers that his only intention was to “bring a high-class, high-fashion environment to Bay Ridge.”

He was not available for comment on the latest round of charges.