A look inside the official meetings Utah A.G. Sean Reyes held at his unofficial office in a private club

Down in the basement of a beige brick building across from Pioneer Park is an exclusive, secretive club where a black Chesterfield couch sat, for a period of time, beneath a placard that read “Reserved for ‘The General.’”

Over the course of the past several years, this urban speakeasy served as the satellite office for Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, where recently released calendar records show 30 scheduled meetings to discuss official state business between 2021 and September 2023. It was also the location of an unknown number of campaign meetings and personal events that were withheld from the records.

Mac’s Place touts itself as an exclusive VIP venue, a private club with no more than 300 members, that has played host to professional athletes like Karl Malone, John Stockton and Charles Barkley, as well as other high-profile celebrities from mixed-martial artists to rockers like the 1990s band Everclear, which played a show for Mac’s Place last year.

Alan Crooks, Reyes’ senior political adviser, said the attorney general began using Mac’s Place for meetings because it was less expensive than the shared office space the campaign was renting. (Financial disclosure reports show Reyes’ campaign continued to rent space in the previous office complex, but Crooks said that is just a post office box for mail delivery.)

Campaign meetings are not allowed at the Capitol, Crooks said, so if the attorney general is holding campaign meetings at Mac’s, sometimes it’s easier to have official meetings there, too, rather than go back and forth to his Capitol office.

“It’s more convenient and it’s very private, so it works out kind of nice,” Crooks said. “We see it as part of our campaign office space.”

Inside Mac’s Place

Brady McIntyre opened Mac’s Place in 2019, leaving his career in finance to build a club for business moguls, he said during a tour of the hideaway this week. McIntyre’s father — the Mac of Mac’s Place — was a “hot-rodder” and they made a side business selling vintage automotive signs, restoring antique gas pumps and selling neon clocks.

McIntyre’s father, who died in 2012, never got to see the place that has his name.

“He never would have guessed that I would do something like this in a million years,” McIntyre said. “I was a financial adviser, a suit-and-tie guy for a big firm, and I just kind of got burnt out and had this weird, random idea.”

From 300 South, the only sign that Mac’s Place is even there is a green door with a shamrock and the word “Deliveries” painted on it. Inside, there is a long, narrow hallway that leads to a flight of stairs into a courtyard just outside the club.

Antique signs and historical posters hang on the brick walls of the warm, dimly lit room hosting rich leather Chesterfield sofas and wooden floors. Members pay between $399 a month for individual memberships and $50,000 a year for corporate memberships to access Mac’s conference space, barber and massage services, and a shoeshine stand.

Despite the rustic bar and speakeasy vibe, Mac’s doesn’t serve anything harder than soda, although members can bring their own alcohol. Membership is capped at 300 people, but currently has about 200, McIntyre said. And contrary to a popular myth, he added, it is not a “gentleman’s club” — it has female members.

Shortly after opening, McIntyre said, he was reaching out to people he thought might be interested in joining. His wife had encountered Reyes through her job in law enforcement, so McIntyre said he messaged him on LinkedIn, and the attorney general joined not long after.

Reyes does not have an ownership stake in the club, McIntyre said, and pays the same membership fees as any of the other patrons.

Reyes’ campaign finance reports, however, do not reflect membership payments to Mac’s. Crooks pays the member fees, he said, while the campaign picks up the extras, like meals and tips for the barber.

According to his reports beginning January 2020, Reyes’ campaign has made 92 payments to Mac’s Place for a total of $10,760, ranging from regular $1 payments listed as “office supplies” and “subscription” to a $2,365 payment in April 2021.

Beginning in October 2022 through June 2024, the campaign made regular $100 payments that were listed as “rent.”

Rep. Andrew Stoddard, D-Murray, who is a lawyer and frequent critic of Reyes, said it seems unusual for the state’s top legal officer to be taking official meetings in an exclusive private club.

“If a lobbyist invites me to lunch, it’s out in public. I would never consider having a meeting at a private bar,” Stoddard said. “To me, every single thing that comes out is one more confirmation that good decision-making is not one of the skills he possesses. … The whole thing is just sleazy. To me, it speaks more to a mafia boss than an elected official.”

McIntyre has heard the “mafia boss” line before, and it makes him cringe.

Reserved for ‘The General’

In April, attorneys for a group of women accusing Tim Ballard, the founder of the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad, of sexual assault and rape alleged in court filings that Ballard arranged a penthouse with women and cocaine at Mac’s Place. In the filing, they refer to the club as the unofficial office for the attorney general where he takes meetings “like a mob boss” on a leather chair that was a gift from rapper Kanye West.

McIntyre said the stories are “wildly fabricated,” but it has still hurt his business and, more importantly, he said, hurt his kids, who heard the whispers at school about their dad’s club.

“I’m not a political guy. I’m a nobody just with a random idea,” McIntyre said. “Some of the stories that have gone out that have mentioned us in a light that’s so wildly fabricated it blows my mind that that stuff would go out there without any attempts from the media to validate it.”

Ballard’s organization did have a membership for a short period years ago and held a few meetings in Mac’s conference room, McIntyre said, but he can count the times he was there on one hand. McIntyre has posted pictures of himself with Ballard on social media and voiced support for OUR. While there is a penthouse available to Mac’s top clientele, McIntyre said, Ballard never had access to it, nor did Reyes, and he would never allow wild parties to be held there.

There was also no Kanye West chair, he said. There was a placard over one of the sofas that said “Reserved for ‘The General,’” but it was made by a member — who actually didn’t like Reyes’ politics — to needle the attorney general.

“He made this flashy gold plaque, right? And he says, ‘Tell the rapping attorney general that this is bling for him, because he likes bling, and you have to hang it up,’” McIntyre said. “So it was an inside joke.”

After stories about Reyes’ supposedly nefarious hideaway began to circulate, the sign was taken down.

“These stories have just gotten so blown out of proportion. If you have a controversial issue, I think it’s easy to take a private space that is private on purpose and paint that with whatever brush you want, and I think we’ve been painted with a pretty bad brush,” McIntyre said. “People say, ‘Well, I know this little bit about it, so I’m gonna fill in the blanks,’ and that just gets blown way out of proportion. It just goes crazy.”

In December 2021, McIntyre posted a picture of Reyes in the attorney general’s office pinning a button on his lapel. McIntyre said he had been sworn in as a “deputized special agent of the Utah attorney general.” He said the most important part to him about the honor was the “friendship with a really stand-up guy” in Reyes and joked that maybe it would get him out of some speeding tickets.

Business executives and Canadian truckers

According to more than 9,000 pages of Reyes’ calendar invites released to The Salt Lake Tribune this month, Reyes’ meetings at Mac’s Place included business executives, advocates, the state treasurer and members of the attorney general’s staff. The calendar invites were released after a year of refusal and litigation by Reyes’ office to avoid releasing the documents, culminating with a judge ruling in the news media’s favor.

In the settlement agreement, the attorney general’s office said, “the calendar documents may include events or items that the attorney general did not attend or participate in but gave him an awareness of the events’ occurrence.”

Two individuals who spoke to The Tribune said they were uneasy with Reyes suggesting Mac’s Place as the spot for their meeting. The Tribune has agreed to not identify them because they could still have business with Reyes’ administration and are concerned about possible repercussions.

Reyes, they said, gave them a tour of the club — showing them the conference space, the barber chairs, massage tables and bragged about celebrities who had been to the venue. They don’t just let anyone in, they remember Reyes saying. “You have to be the kind of person we want. It was very much ‘we.’ There was never any point that this wasn’t Sean and Mac’s club,” one of the visitors said.

One of the selling points Reyes highlighted was that the conference rooms were totally soundproof with no cameras “as opposed to the A.G.’s office,” the visitor said. Reyes suggested they should pony up for a membership, but neither of them did.

McIntyre said the club’s conference room is not soundproof and that there are cameras inside. He added that there are massage chairs, like ones seen at an airport, but not tables.

Many of the meetings Reyes scheduled at Mac’s Place were with executives of companies who, according to the records, appear to have been promoting their products to the attorney general — such as a Utah-based corporate training company; a free streaming platform; the makers of a rapid-DNA testing product; developers of a cellphone designed to shield kids from adult content; manufacturers of surveillance cameras; and a corporation that owns and rents 2,000 homes in Utah.

Reyes’ calendar invites show events scheduled to record podcasts and video messages and a meeting with State Treasurer Marlo Oaks. The attorney general’s staff was slated in 2023 to do “casework” at Mac’s and there was a 2022 meeting in which Reyes and his investigators were scheduled to discuss potential “action” involving an online crowdfunding company.

In October 2021, Reyes scheduled a meeting with Redge Johnson, then the director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office and now deputy director at the Department of Natural Resources, and Don Peay, a founder of Big Game Forever, a group that has received more than $5 million from taxpayers to lobby to have wolves removed from the endangered species list. The topic of the meeting was intended to be state policy on wolves. An audit last month said it is unclear how the money has been spent and said Big Game Forever had refused to disclose its expenditures.

In February 2022, Reyes scheduled a meeting at Mac’s Place with the head of the office’s criminal investigations to “discuss potential action on the GiveSendGo situation.” Days earlier, the online fundraising platform, similar to GoFundMe, had experienced a series of data breaches that included releasing information on donors to a Canadian truckers protest, where drivers shut down highways to protest COVID-19 vaccine requirements.

The following month, the records show, Reyes meeting with executives from Progressive Leasing, a Utah-based “virtual rent-to-own” company. In August of that year, the Pennsylvania attorney general brought a case against Progressive, accusing the company of misleading consumers. Earlier this year, Progressive agreed to cancel debt collection on some outstanding debts and pay $850,000 in restitution. In 2020, the company paid $172 million to settle a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission to settle similar claims.

In July 2022, Reyes scheduled a meeting at the club with Kimberly Fletcher, founder, president and CEO of Moms for America, a national organization that advocates for school choice, restrictions on transgender athletes and against critical race theory. Fletcher spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 5, 2021, and the group has been called an anti-government extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center for, according to the SPLC, trying to root out diversity in classrooms.

Derek Brown, the Republican attorney general-elect who will replace Reyes in January, said he will not be continuing the Mac’s Place tradition for two reasons. First, he said, he’s not a member and doesn’t plan to purchase a membership.

And the second reason: “I prefer Crown Burger.”

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.

Correction • Nov. 25, 10:30 a.m.: The story has been updated to reflect that some Mac’s Place members can use a penthouse, but McIntyre said he would not allow parties there. The story has also been updated to include McIntyre’s description of the club’s conference room and amenities.