CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Owners' efforts to revive the Pink Pony, a Cross Lanes strip club made notorious by a 2003 incident involving Powerball winner Jack Whittaker, encountered another setback this week.

On Tuesday, Kanawha Circuit Judge Carrie Webster upheld a 2009 ruling by the Kanawha County Board of Zoning Appeals, which denied the club's efforts to get its liquor license reinstated.

The club lost its license in 2003, not long after Whittaker said club employees drugged him and took a briefcase containing $500,000 from his car. Charges against two club employees were eventually dropped.

The club's owners reapplied for the license in 2008 after the required five years had lapsed.

Those efforts were initially rebuked by the county Planning Commission, which concluded that opening a new the strip club in the Pink Pony location would violate a county ordinance that prevents adult businesses from opening within 2,000 feet of a business that serves alcohol. The strip club's location on Goff Mountain Road is within 2,000 feet of a TGI Friday's restaurant, which serves alcohol.

In an appeal to the Board of Appeals, the club's owners maintained that they were not opening a new business. The club had remained an adult business, albeit one that did not serve alcohol, and its liquor license should be grandfathered in, they said.

The Board of Appeals concluded that the club had been inactive for a period of at least a year between 2003 and its application for reinstatement, which legally constitutes abandonment of the operation of an adult establishment.

After a hearing in February, Webster ruled that the club had provided "not even a scintilla of evidence to counter that a vacancy of nonconforming use had lasted at least one year."

At an earlier hearing, John Rutherford, chief deputy of the Kanawha County Sheriff's Department, testified that deputies routinely observed no activity at the Pink Pony. He said that the department had removed the location from Metro 911's rolls because the location had gone more than two years without a call to 911.

Some of the documentation presented by the Pink Pony's representatives indicated that the club went from 33 employees to one male employee, Webster noted.

Reach Andrew Clevenger at acleven...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1723.