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Troubled Cleveland Circle pizza place has hours rolled back, and it wasn't even because of the fight that ended with a grandmother lying on the floor, bleeding from her face

The Boston Licensing Board this morning rolled back closing time for Agoros Bar and Grill, 356 Chestnut Hill Ave., from 1 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. after BPD detectives found yet another underage BC student with a drink inside, on Oct. 22 - the eighth such violation since the place opened last fall.

"This is the eighth time we've had you in front of the board," board Chairwoman Christine Puligini told co-owner Dimitrios Liakos, noting the incident, involving a 17-year-old who used her 22-year-old sister's driver's license to purchase a tequila shot, occurred less than two weeks after the board had put Liakos on official notice it had had enough.

The board interrupted a separate hearing on a fight on Nov. 10 that ended with a 75-year-old woman lying on the floor, a stanchion atop her, blood streaming out of her nose and mouth - and her daughter's boyfriend, himself 60, with blood coming out of his newly split ear.

Pulgini continued that hearing until sometime closer to BC commencement in the spring, so that the grandmother and the man could attend a hearing to testify - from California and North Carolina respectively. This morning, another one of the grandmother's daughters, who flew up yesterday from New York, and her granddaughter, did testify - as did Liakos and a pizza-place security guy.

The two sides gave dramatically differing accounts.

The daughter and granddaughter testified today that they had gone to Agoros for a family celebration - the grandmother wanted to see her granddaughter before she graduated BC. They chose Agoros specifically because "we love to dance," the daughter, herself 53, testified. She said they'd had a good time dancing - and had even danced with three young men who asked if they could join them.

But things soured when the family gathered for a group photo and one of the men tried to photobomb them. She said her sister's boyfriend had words and pushed him out of the photo. About an hour later, she said, as they were getting ready to leave - with a pizza - the guy rushed her sister's boyfriend and swung at him and sliced his ear open, she said. Somebody pushed the grandmother and she fell to the ground. And then a metal pole fell on her. The woman said she quickly got on the ground to protect her mother, now bleeding profusely from the face.

"She looked like she'd been in a horrible fight," the granddaughter said of her grandmother.

Once everybody was back up, the woman continued, somebody from Agoros gave them some ice and napkins, then somebody else brought the photobomber over. And the first thing he said, she said, was "I didn't have a knife." Then he apologized. Liakos told them they had to leave immediately, she said. Both she and the granddaughter said he refused to call 911.

She said they took an Uber to their hotel in Brookline, where they called 911 - and were met by Brookline police and EMTs.

A BPD sergeant testified the first he head of the incident was when a counterpart in Brookline called him. He responded to Beth Israel Hospital, where the boyfriend was getting 12 stitches in his ear.

Liakos and the bar security guy said the older man in the party - the sister's boyfriend - was the aggressor at the end of the evening.

"He pushed the young man," the bouncer said. The young man pushed back, causing him to fall and pushing him into the grandmother, knocking her to the floor. And as the older man fell, he knocked over a metal pole holding up the pizza place's tablet-based ID checker, slicing his ear on one of its hard metal edges and pushing it onto the face of the grandmother on the floor.

He said he rushed over, got the pole off the woman and then stood between the two parties to separate them. He said there were not two other young men accompanying the guy who'd been pushed and said he thought he'd successfully diffused the situation - he said the young guy and the older guy even shook hands.

He said he did not see any blood.

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Comments

What a mess.

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Why isn't it happening in other places if "nothing we do helps the problem"?

It is almost as if these jokers don't get that they could get shut down or something.

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Other places would have been shuttered several violations ago.

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What is the penalty for kids caught using a fake ID? Do they often get expelled?

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But the people with the fake/bogus IDs always have to show up in court to face criminal charges.

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Whatever goes in that spot and serves alcohol causes problems. So easy solution, let a non-alcohol serving restaurant take the spot. Something akin to Chippotle or the like which can make a profit without needing to sell alcohol.

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People cause problems.

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Yeah a chipotle in Cleveland Circle couldn’t cause problems. If you don’t consider a massive norovirus outbreak a problem I guess.

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I'm not supporting this place at all but replacing it with a front that sells wraps full of rice for some conglomerate isn't a good answer.

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n/t

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But you might as well say it's a good place for a McDonalds. (Who actually is the parent company of one of these wraps o rice places, but I forget which one.)

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n/t

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Because that's an automatic hearing. And he's been to plenty of those.

What do I know? I've only pointed this out a dozen (expletive) times. You want to get off your ass and fix this, Walsh?

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That alone should have meant a 911 call.

What cornhole did you fall out of?

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I think his point was that by creating a rule where any time an establishment calls 911, they are automatically subject to a hearing, the city has disincentivized owners to do the right thing. If there's a problem juussssst minor enough to hope the patron goes home and doesn't report them, owners will be tempted to not intervene in order to avoid that hearing.

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The BPD isnt these bars personal security team. If they responded to every little skirmish that goes on in all these bars every night, how many cops will it tie up? The owners and managers need to control their establishment, and if they cannot, then being grilled by the licensing board sounds plenty fair.

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I don't understand how this place already has 8 violations in their first year and they still have a liquor license.

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I remember the last post on UHub about this place and I suggested that they pull their liquor license then. And I got a lot of push back.

Soooo, how long do we wait? The owners appear not to be sincere about the correcting the problem. Eight violations and counting...

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Which I didn't get into in my original post because I was obviously fixated on the other hearing, but ...

They're trying, they really are, they said. Why the very night the detectives walked in, they were using their new fancy-shmancy ID scanner, the one with facial-recognition software and it said the 17-year-old kid holding the ID was a match to the driver's license showing the 22-year-old sister because, really, they look so alike. At this point, the attorney presented the board with a photocopy of a Facebook photo he'd found of the two of them posing on a rock or something in a field and said they sure look the same to him. Plus, she had backup ID, he said.

Unfortunately for him, the BPD detective said he didn't think the license photo looked like the kid.

Obviously, the board didn't buy it, either.

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Of course the cop would say that. What else would he say? You're right, my bad, you couldn't have known, please cancel the ticket?

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He walked in, saw the girl, asked for the ID she got in with, and asked her some set of questions that exposed she had her sister's ID and was drinking illegally.

He was able to crack the case and give her a court summons. They weren't.

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I think part of the problem is that the photo on your driver license is too small.

The photo should take up like 80% of the front of the card, not 20%. There's room for the address and miscellaneous info on the back. Don't need it on the front.

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When I lived in CA, you had to give the DMV your thumb print to get a license. So add thumbprints to licenses, start scanning thumbs for bar entry and comparing against the DMV database for age. Done.

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Why do you want for government to have your thumbprints so that you can drink a beer? What do you fear?

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But factually, the license is to drive. It's a convenient and legal item to prove age. One could also use a passport or Mass ID to prove age if one does not have a license.

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think adding thumbprints to licenses is a good idea.

But in some states, either you give your thumbprint or you do not get a license. For persons presenting a license of a state that participates in biometric recording, they should scan thumbprints at bars.

(I often found it ironic that it was California taking the thumbprints, after they stood on such ceremony of issuing licenses to illegal immigrants and being a sanctuary state, thus making a lovely database of the thumbprint of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to be used for who-knows-what purposes in the future.)

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Live around the corner and went there once with a girl I was seeing. Handed the bouncer our IDs, he gives them back, does a full windmill windup, and slaps my girl on the ass as we walk past him, then was shocked when I turned around and yelled at him. Never again.

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I'd've called the police for sure. No one should get away with that shit.

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