For almost a decade, when a certain breed of expat or impoverished American college student felt a thirst for cheap beer and late-night adventure — and didn't mind too much if the setting was sleazy — there was one bar in Prague that answered the call. Now such drinkers are on their own.

The era of the Marquis de Sade pub in Old Town has ended with the bar's closure following a squabble between the owner and the tenant over rent, complicated by allegations of a bomb threat and claims that the building has fallen into a dangerous state of rat-infested dilapidation.

Exuding a rough and ready appeal that was partly cultivated, partly caused by neglect, with a whiff of decadence that harkened back to its pre-World War II origins as a brothel, the Marquis drew both jaded Prague old hands and curious newcomers in search of pleasures not permitted or not affordable back home. Often the attraction was absinthe, the wormwood extract long favored by artists but now banned in many parts of the world for its reputed psychoactive side effects.

"There were a lot of good times here in the Marquis," says John-Bruce Shoemaker, the American entrepreneur who operated the pub, located on Templová street, for nine and a half years. "I just wish it hadn't ended up so ugly."

Some of Shoemaker's friends say the closure is hardly a surprise, considering the pub's problems, Shoemaker's talent for upsetting people, and a wider trend in Prague toward bars that are sleek but soulless.

The Marquis de Sade was named after the infamous writer and French aristocrat (1740–1814) whose erotic tales gave rise to the term sadism and who was particularly fascinated by rape and violent perversions — practices he claimed provided a way of surpassing the bounds of convention and morality.

The original Marquis de Sade "would have liked Prague and vice versa," says Shoemaker, known to most simply as J.B., a bug-eyed 37-year-old ex-journalist for The National Inquirer.

Shoemaker, who's also a collector of antiques and scientific curiosities, has operated a string of bars in Prague since he arrived here in 1991, looking for adventure.

Shoemaker's friend and former business partner, Glen Emery, 40, says the Marquis, located in a cavernous room with high, ornate ceilings and tattered velvet sofas, was a beautiful space ... but a "manky and skanky and nasty" pub.

"Whenever I'd go in there and it was really packed, I would just turn around and walk out because I had been in the basement in that place," Emery adds.

"Support columns had been ripped out. The Marquis de Sade was just hanging over a pit. If you got a bunch of stag party guys in there jumping up and down it could have collapsed. It would have been a fitting end to John-Bruce, having him collapse into a pit full of rats."

Emery, from Vancouver, Canada, describes Shoemaker, with some affection, as "criminally insane ... he's bonkers." Emery quickly adds, though, that his erstwhile business partner is a great drinking companion. "There's never a boring moment. He's a very clever guy and funny as hell."

Emery and Shoemaker teamed up in 1993 and took over a large section of the Municipal House, a building that these days is one of the city's finest showcases of turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau architecture.

At the time, it was in sorry shape, having been badly neglected under the pre-'89 regime, but the duo installed a bar, cafe and nightclub called Repre, a venture that employed 150 people.

But Emery and Shoemaker fell out over an unpaid bill of tens of thousands of crowns to a large brewery that resulted in Interpol knocking on the door of Emery's relatives in Canada.

The pair later made up. "Life's too short," says Emery.

Nevertheless, such beefs with Shoemaker are not unusual, he says. Emery illustrates the point in a short story he has written, part of an as-yet-unpublished collection titled Prague Unplugged: The Left Skank of the 90s.

The story, set in a dingy pub in Žižkov, recounts Emery meeting an American from New Orleans, who is complaining he has been ripped off and asking how much it would cost to have the perpetrator assassinated. The man the stranger wants dead turns out to be none other than Shoemaker.

Emery jokes that his friend is still alive, basically, "because he's as slippery as a bar of soap."

If Shoemaker remains in good health, many seasoned expats lament that establishments like the Marquis are rapidly disappearing from Prague's landscape, replaced by more-profitable but less-colorful cocktail bars.

"The people investing in bars these days are less adventurous and less hip, but they're more businessmen," says Emery, himself a veteran owner of several Prague pubs over the years. "Some of us who came here right after the revolution, we didn't come here to necessarily make money — we came here to have fun and to do something interesting." Now, Emery adds, it's mostly business people who want a return for their investment.

For all his faults, Shoemaker could never be accused of that; he says his troubles at the Marquis started 18 months ago after a new owner bought the building and raised the monthly rent from 85,000 Kč ($3,630) to 208,000 Kč.

Shoemaker balked, arguing that the price was far too much for a building he says is rat-infested with a kitchen that floods when it rains and toilets that mostly don't work. He admits that he stopped paying rent over six weeks ago but insists that he was willing to make a deal and pay off his debts.

In the meantime tensions escalated, culminating, Shoemaker says, in a rocket-propelled grenade being left outside the door of his office at the end of August. The grenade turned out to be a dummy used for training purposes. Police say they are investigating the incident.

Shoemaker, unshaken, is already planning his next venture. He wants to write a book, "a true story of people I know [that] involves the Olympics, multinational corporations, drugs, murder, rap stars, steroids and beautiful dead women."

He also wants to open a city-center pub specializing in beer produced by independent breweries using age-old techniques — beer that's usually sold only locally in small towns, meaning that most Czechs and tourists don't get to taste it. Shoemaker wants to export the idea to six cities abroad, such as Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw.

Whatever becomes of that idea, those who know the Marquis, as many simply called it, say it was surely a last remnant of the heady post-'89 days.

One bartender who worked for Shoemaker until the two parted acrimoniously contends that bars like the Marquis, where "you never knew what was going to happen from night to night," are rare indeed these days in the city.