Licensing board to owners, managers of defunct, violence-prone Union Street bar: Good luck ever getting another liquor license in this town

The Boston Licensing Board today indefinitely suspended the liquor license of the Loyal Nine, 19 Union St., after concluding bar managers and an owner lied about a violent incident involving one manager and his girlfriend and only failed to cover it up because at least one disgusted employee managed to use a phone to capture a snippet of video from the bar surveillance system.

The suspension has no immediate effect since the bar has been shut since May as its owners try to find somebody to buy its main asset - its all-alcohol license, which could go for more than $600,000.

The board also voted to lift the suspension only if neither the new owner nor any managers had anything to do with either Loyal Nine or its earlier incarnation as Sons of Boston, where a bouncer fatally stabbed a man on the sidewalk outside in 2022.

"I have grave concerns about the people involved in this license," board Chairwoman Kathleen Joyce said.

The board held its second hearing on Tuesday on the incident, after a hearing in August that was not attended by any current managers or owners - which the board scheduled after somebody sent it a video copy of video that appeared to show the bar's then manager strangling a woman in his basement office on May 14.

At the first hearing, the manager said the woman was his girlfriend, drunk out of her mind after a night of bar hopping, that he had taken her downstairs after they ended up at the Loyal Nine and she became enraged when the bartender there refused her a drink, that there was no violence involved, only that he tried to pick her up from the floor of his office after she collapsed there. The girlfriend, who also testified, agreed with his account and said she did not want to get involved with a BPD domestic-violence investigation because she was embarrassed at her behavior that night and that her boyfriend would never harm her.

Today, board members said that based on the video they got, they see it differently, that the manager was violent and said that the level of violence they saw on the video, which included apparent strangulation, meant somebody from the bar should have immediately called police, but that nobody did. Instead, somebody dropped videos of some video from the bar surveillance system with the licensing board and the BPD sexual-assault unit.

"She's lucky to be alive based on the video evidence presented to this board," Chairwoman Kathleen Joyce said.

Board member Liam Curran agreed, saying what he saw was a man trying to strangle a woman and that he did not buy the argument that the manager was simply trying to "save her from intoxication."

"That explanation does not justify the amount of physical force we saw," he said.

The bar, whose owners include long-time bar operator Derek Brady, then compounded the issue by not reporting the incident to police. As somebody who has owned several bars in Boston - as well as in Newton and Wellesley - Brady really should know better, board members said.

At Tuesday's hearing, Brady said he had limited involvement in the bar's operation and that he did not show up in the days after the incident, which Joyce countered with other anonymous tips that, in fact, Brady showed up one or two nights later - after the entire bar's staff resigned over the incident.

"He went there the next night or two nights later," Joyce said. "He was aware of this event." And as somebody who has long owned bars in Boston - and in Newton, Wellesley and Cambridge - he should know he has a responsibility to report any violent incidents on the premises to police, she said.

At Tuesday's hearing, he said he considered both the manager and the girlfriend as friends, had even gone on vacation with them, and was trying to help them as friends. Saxon said she was troubled by this apparent conflict of interest. "He wanted to protect them as friends, so he shirked his duty [as the part owner of a liquor license]," she said.

Joyce said she was also troubled by discrepancies in testimony: The bar manager said he resigned when he realized none of his employees wanted to work with him, but Brady said he was fired. The man listed as the official overall manager of the bar on Boston Licensing Board filings told a BPD sexual-assault unit detective who contacted him that he had nothing to do with the bar or the incident because he had sold his interest in the place in December, but Brady told the board Tuesday the man was, in fact, still the bar's manager at the time.

Joyce said she would carefully scrutinize Brady's "character and fitness" - as well as that of any other owners, and the manager - should they ever apply for another liquor license in Boston.

The board has the legal right to deny a license to anybody they do not find legally or morally fit to run a liquor-serving establishment.

In fact, in 2022, the board denied an application from Brady to buy the defunct White Horse Tavern in Allston for just that reason, because he had not checked "Yes" next to an application question about whether he had a criminal record, when he does, even if it dates to the 1990s and because he had not been honest about why state regulators placed an indefinite hold on the liquor license for a sushi place he owned in Cambridge - for the same checkbox issue.

"He lied or he has not been honest in his application before us," Joyce said at the time. "It would have been satisfactory if he had checked yes and explained."