A middle-aged male, naked from the waist up, is lying on a cot in the back of one of Charles Khabouth’s nightclubs. With coarse brown hair on his abdomen, pectorals and back, he’s the sort of guy, in gay slang, who’s known as a “bear.” Alternately panting and moaning, he writhes about while club staff debate whether his overdose was caused by ecstasy, GHB or ketamine. Khabouth doesn’t panic. In the tone of someone imparting tomorrow’s humidex rating, he suggests calling an ambulance. One is already on its way. Apart from the man on the cot, no one exhibits any reaction but casual boredom. It’s the Saturday night of Gay Pride weekend, and twitching 45-year-olds are par for the course.

A trim, dark-haired man, Khabouth has a calm stillness about him even though he’s in constant motion. The situation well in hand, he continues on a five-hour inspection of the Guvernment, his 61,000-square-foot entertainment complex, ensuring that no light bulb is burned out, that the temperature is appropriately cool and that the sleek lounge chairs are arranged just so. He is so fastidious that in a back hallway, where none of his customers will ever go, he stops abruptly to scrape a sticker from the wall.

At around 3 a.m., he finally breaks for a slice of pizza in a back room. As he observes the bar staff counting fistfuls of $20 and $50 bills, a manager informs him that the twitching drug casualty jumped up and melted into the event as soon as he saw the ambulance attendants. Khabouth nods and continues to supervise the club’s closing. In fact, he doesn’t pull into his Forest Hill driveway until 8:30 a.m.

His work ethic is legendary: 70 hours is a light week; on weekends, he’ll stay at his club for 20 hours straight. In addition to the Guvernment, he’s majority owner of Ultra Supper Club, is an investor in the Pantages Hotel, owns Hugo, a men’s store in Yorkville, and is on the verge of opening a new disco in the Niagara Fallsview Casino. He’s developing a condo project on Bloor, across from the ROM, and has inked a multimillion-dollar deal that could expand his club empire stateside. Khabouth is at the centre of Toronto’s taste-making design, restaurant and fashion circles. And when you are the most powerful figure in this city’s club culture, you don’t sleep.

Khabouth’s introduction to the hospitality industry’s punishing workload came early. His father, Antoine Khabouth, managed one of the largest outdoor cafés in Beirut, while his mother, Margaret, managed the home. They had a good life, their household staffed with servants. Charles and his older brother and sister attended a French Catholic private school. But everything changed in 1970, when Antoine opened his own café. The business collapsed after only six months.

Antoine had to return to his old job, but on his first day back he had a heart attack and died. He was 45, just a year older than Charles is today. The following year, Margaret married William Nader, a successful Beirut accountant and close family friend. When Lebanon’s civil war intensified and a military draft seemed likely, Nader decided to immigrate to a city that would be safer for his stepchildren. In August 1976, 15-year-old Khabouth arrived in Toronto with his family.

They settled in East York, where Charles attended Overlea High School. Margaret wept when her youngest son accepted a job at McDonald’s—the position symbolized how far their fortunes had fallen. “I remember everyone laughing at me because the manager asked me to mop the floor and I asked him how to do it.” He shrugs. Soon he was living on his own, working three jobs (he also cleaned carpets and stocked shelves at IGA). But he knew he didn’t want to do odd jobs for a living.

Out at a club one night shortly after graduating from high school, he took in the music, the girls, the fashion. He recalls saying, “I want to do this.” He started saving, and when he was 22, he found a space for sale at 11A St. Joseph Street, north of Wellesley between Bay and Yonge, that had been a gay nightspot. Using his Audi as collateral, he secured a bank loan. With that, a few thousand in savings and money borrowed from Nader, he was able to cobble together $31,000. He bought the club for $15,000, earmarking the rest for the decor.

Khabouth renamed the place Club Z and set about trying to attract a straight clientele. “The first six months were very, very hard,” he says. “I can remember sitting on the curb at midnight on a Saturday, nobody in the club, and my head in my hands, wondering what I was going to do.” Before long, he was five months behind in his rent. His landlord sensed he had potential—he saw him as a kind of Lebanese version of Duddy Kravitz—and showed extreme patience. Desperate for some way to lure crowds over the Halloween weekend, Khabouth contacted a club promoter he knew who owned a tiger and installed the jungle cat in Club Z’s office, where it paced behind the front window. Passersby came in to check out the big game, and that night Khabouth went to bed figuring that he had at least covered his daily expenses.