Barroom Brawl

To some in the beverage industry, Boyd's hard-nosed approach harks back to the era when alcohol was held in ill repute. While Harris himself stops short of commenting on the current administration, others say Boyd seems to be swinging ABT back toward moral fervency. "John Harris believed in education and believed that as long as the businesses were training people and making a great attempt to do things right -- such as serving alcohol responsibly, keeping drugs off the premises -- then there were reasons to mitigate cases, and that people were deserving of a second chance," says Lori Chadroff, the daughter of Terminello's law partner Sy Chadroff and president of Responsible Vendors, Inc., a firm that educates businesses about how to comply with state beverage laws. "Boyd is less understanding, shall we say, of that attitude."

Adds Horace Moody, president of the Tallahassee-based Beverage Law Institute and a former ABT chief of law enforcement: "Here you have an agency that regulates an industry that generates millions of dollars for the state. John [Harris] had a very good understanding of the role the agency played in protecting that revenue. He worked with and encouraged the businesses rather than slapping them around." Under Boyd, Moody says, it has been "much more difficult to work out solutions" to administrative cases.

In a recent action involving the Cameo Theater, a solution was worked out -- but only with considerable bad blood. This past spring undercover officers from the Miami Beach Police Department, ABT, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration conducted a two-and-a-half-month investigation at the cavernous South Beach nightclub, during which time officers were able to make repeated cocaine buys.

Terminello, who represented the Cameo in the matter, says ABT's legal team approached him with an offer at the end of a two-day administrative hearing, and that after some discussion the sides reached an agreement: The division would drop the case if the Cameo paid $35,000 in fines and investigative costs, hired two more security guards, assigned at least one member of its security force to patrol the bathrooms, canceled its popular teen nights, and barred admission to anyone under age 21.

Both Boyd and the Department of Business and Professional Regulation's assistant general counsel Miguel Oxamendi refuse to comment about the settlement. "I don't want to get into the rationale for our legal decisions," says Boyd, who signed the consent order July 9.

Terminello, as usual, isn't afraid to proffer his opinion: "It was a garbage case. Pitiful!" he declares, noting that DEA agents and Beach police detectives gave conflicting testimony, specifically regarding whether the deals were "open and notorious." Terminello says he urged his clients to take the settlement because the alternative would have been -- as in the case of Chameleon Concepts -- to fight a longer battle, and Cameo owner Zori Hayon didn't think he could afford to stay out of business that long. "I feel bad now that I recommended that they take the settlement," Terminello concludes, "'cause we woulda kicked their ass on that one, too."

Cameo manager Skip Odeck says he feels as if holding a liquor license automatically comes with a presumption of guilt. He rattles off an inventory of security measures that the club, a mainstay on the South Beach nightlife scene for the past decade, has taken to fight the incursion of illegal activity: off-duty police officers, an undercover security firm, surveillance cameras throughout, a training program for employees. "We're not stupid," he snorts, pointing out that the Cameo raid followed those on the Chameleon Concepts clubs, not to mention the well-publicized (and equally controversial) busts of three other South Beach clubs nearly two years ago. "Why would we do all that if we were promoting the sale of drugs? I liken it to the Secret Service: They surround the president and someone still shot Reagan. If they'd come to us and said that we had a problem, I would've given them an office."

Echoes Chameleon Concepts' Steve Caputi: "They're supposed to help us, not act like the Gestapo. They could've picked up the phone and told us we had a problem. But they didn't want to solve the problem. They wanted to crucify and get headlines. 'Operation Bar Bust,'" he sneers. "We called it 'Operation Ball Bust.'"

Boyd sloughs off these complaints as the grousing of a disgruntled minority. "Ninety-five percent of the licensees we have are law-abiding and do the right thing," he asserts. "And then there's the five percent who always want to grumble and accuse us of being -- to use their term -- draconian. They have violated the statutes and they want a free ride on things. And I'm not necessarily agreeable to that."