Barroom Brawl

If it's only five percent who are making noise, it's a very noisy minority. According to James Greer, chairman and CEO of Florida Beverage Law Consultants, lobbyists for the powerful beverage industry have put pressure on the state legislature to reduce or eliminate the police powers of beverage agents, essentially reducing ABT to a licensing and taxing authority. "And of course," Greer says with a chuckle, "the division went crazy."

Terminello adds that there's also an effort afoot to provide more relief for bars and clubs that have been busted. He believes businesses that have received an emergency order should get an immediate opportunity to show that the alleged emergency conditions no longer exist. (Proof in the case of Cafe Iguana and Marsbar, for example, would be that the bathroom attendants had been fired.) The license would then be returned, pending the outcome of an evidentiary hearing. The attorney says three legislators are very interested in the proposal, but he refuses to name them.

Meanwhile, a group of Miami Beach licensees has found a modicum of relief elsewhere: local police. Notwithstanding the recent scandal involving corrupt cops allegedly extorting payoffs from illegal after-hours clubs, Steve Polisar and Woody Graber, chairman and vice chairman of the Miami Beach Entertainment Association, speak of a newfound "spirit of credibility and cooperation" and "an honest line of communication" between the police department and the club world. That relationship began after three raids on South Beach clubs around New Year's Eve 1995. In each case officers stormed the clubs late at night, at the height of the party hour.

The timing of the raids caused an uproar among club owners and had the remarkable effect of coalescing a normally competitive community. Representatives from South Beach clubs held a series of meetings with local police officials. The first order of business was to discuss the manner in which emergency orders were served. The ABT has maintained that its agents must perform their operations at the busiest time of night if they're to have any chance of apprehending drug suspects. But Graber and Polisar argued that the economic damage to the city caused by bad publicity would far outweigh the good of a few arrests.

"We felt -- and ultimately they agreed -- that it's self-defeating to hurt the whole district in exchange for getting publicity that they were successful in accomplishing a bust on a particular club," says Polisar. "The long-range situation could be better served if there is communication to the club before there's an investigation, thereby giving them an opportunity to correct the problem on the assumption that they are responsible owners. It's in the better interest of the state and the clubs if there's an honest attempt to correct the problems."

Well, to a point, says Miami Beach Assistant Chief James Scarberry. While he agrees that the relationship between the police and the entertainment industry is healthy, he doesn't want to leave the impression that the department is soft on beverage-law violators. If a "legitimate" criminal complaint is brought to light by a "legitimate" source, then police will open an investigation without notifying the target. "But if we are receiving nothing but miscellaneous, anonymous information about criminal activity, then we'll contact the club and tell them," Scarberry explains, adding, "We don't have a goal of closing clubs on South Beach."

Whatever rapport may have been reached in that corner of clubland, the closings there and elsewhere in the county will inevitably continue. Owing to its sheer volume and variety, Dade's nightlife scene has always stood apart from what goes on in the rest of the state. Not surprisingly, the local ABT bureau is Florida's biggest and busiest, filing more emergency orders than any other. Indeed, ABT officials in Tallahassee seem almost perplexed by the ruckus being raised in the South Floridian Gomorrah.

"We do so many of these cases around the state, and I'm still amazed people down there make such a big deal over the closing of a bar," notes department assistant general counsel Miguel Oxamendi, sounding somewhat bewildered. "It becomes a front-page deal!" As far as he can recall, says Oxamendi, the only other place a club- or bar-closing garnered TV news footage was in West Palm Beach -- "and that was only for five seconds.