Job you probably don't want: Overnight clerk at an Egleston Square gas station

A clerk at the Egleston Square Citgo station got the station in trouble when he refused to hand a customer back his credit card and driver's license - at first, even after arriving police officers told him to.

The owner of the Washington Street station, Michael Levy, was before the Boston Licensing Board today to answer charges of failing to return a credit card to a customer and failing to cooperate with police because of the July 10 incident. The board has oversight because the station has a common victualer's license to sell food items.

The hearing ended with a shouting match between Levy's lawyer, Michael Murphy, and Boston Police Sgt. Sean Smith over the question of whether the clerk recently quit because he couldn't take the pressure anymore or because he was fired.

Smith blamed the problem on a lack of training: He said that when he arrived on scene after two other officers had been unable to get the clerk to hand the cards back, he learned over the course of a 20-minute conversation that the man was a recent immigrant and new to the job and didn't realize he should have called police at the first sign of trouble - and given the man the cards back, rather than trying to hold them for a station manager.

He praised the clerk's work ethic and willingness to put in overnight hours at the busy station and said that, as a first-generation American himself, he understood the man's difficulties. He added the man agreed to handle things differently in the future. "Once he got that message through, he was fine," Smith said.

Levy and his manager, however, said they are constantly training their workers to call police if something seems wrong. In this case, they said, the worker seemed to panic a bit. The customer tried to pay for cigarettes three times with a debit card, but he couldn't get the PIN right. Then he dashed outside and came back with a credit card, but the name didn't match that on the driver's license he showed as ID. Meanwhile, a number of other customers in line behind the guy began getting impatient and started telling the clerk to just give the guy the cigarettes, they said. It was actually the customer, not the clerk, who called police.

The man left the job this past weekend, the reason for which sparked the shouting: Levy said the man simply up and quit because he could no longer take the pressure of the job - even after the station agreed to get him off the early-morning shift. Smith, however, said Levy had told him in the hallway he had fired the man.

The raised voices came after a somewhat testy, if lower-toned, debate between Murphy and board Chairwoman Nicole Murati Ferrer on what sort of punishment, if any, the station should face for the incident.

Murphy said that businesess with "just" a common victualer's license, as opposed to a liquor license, should only face punishment if the incident was part of a pattern of problems. He said this was the first such incident at the station.

Ferrer, who gave no indication how she would vote on the citation, however, told him she was very concerned that the employee didn't call police and that he refused, at least at first, to cooperate with them. "I don't care that it is 'just' a common victualer's license," she said. "The rules of this board are meant to be followed. By everyone."

Although the board typically rules two days after a hearing, this case could be held off a week or two to allow commissioners Suzanne Ianella and Milton Wright, neither present today, a chance to listen to a recording of the hearing.