We previously blogged about the Well Bikini Bar and Grill avoiding having its state liquor license pulled by Alcohol and Beverage Control (ABC) over the multiple shots and beers served to the drunken driver who went on to kill Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart and two others.
However, we didn't mention anything in that post about the watering hole skating past the Covina City Council, which voted unanimously this week to revoke the Well's business
license and two conditional use permits.
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As of Dec. 2, the bikini bar will have to close, reports the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.
No one rose to damn or defend the Well at Tuesday's council meeting, and city officials said an attorney representing the bar sent a letter indicating the business would surrender
all operating rights and cease operations without challenging the
city's decision if it was given 30 days to close.
“We're so relieved that this has come to closure,” Covina Mayor Peggy Delach told the Trib.
However, it's not closure yet for the bar's owner, Douglas
Salviniski, 49; manager Angelo Capozi, 45; and six servers. They face misdemeanor charges of operating or participating in an illegal gambling operation that came to light after a police investigation sparked by the Adenhart crash.
Fresh from a beer and shot at another bar, Andrew Thomas Gallo and his stepbrother spent April 8, 2009, at the Well where, over
nearly three hours, 23-year-old Gallo drank five beers (two of them three-pint
“boombahs”) and four shots of a sake-like drink.
Despite previous DUI convictions, classes that warned the San Gabriel
resident he could face murder charges if someone died in a crash he
caused while drunk and the protests of his stepbrother, Gallo got behind
the wheel of a minivan and struck a car driven by 20-year-old Courtney Stewart and carrying, 22-year-old Adenhart, 25-year-old
Henry Pearson and 24-year-old Jon Wilhite. Only Wilhite, Gallo and Gallo's passenger Raymond Alexander Rivera survived.
Gallo was convicted on three counts of second-degree murder. He faces a maximum sentence of 50 years to life in prison at his sentencing scheduled for Dec. 10 in Santa Ana.
The ABC, which
licenses, monitors complaints and fines law-violating bars, restaurants
and liquor stores, observed security video from the Well but determined
last month there was insufficient evidence to revoke its liquor license.
But Covina Police Lt. Patrick Buchanan told the council the Well has a reputation for over-serving alcoholic drinks and that cops respond to calls there three times more than they do to similar establishments, with 142 requests for service over the past three years. Meanwhile, undercover cops received free massages while drinking at the bar, a code violation, according to Buchanan.
The city justified revocation of the
business license and two conditional use permits because
the establishment failed to keep alcohol sales at 35 percent of gross sales and operated an “adult cabaret” and massage parlor on the side, the Tribune reports.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.