Six days before a man was shot dead at the front door, the city ordered the owner of a Fitch Street bar to clean up his act.
The cease and desist letter, delivered to Soco’s restaurant and bar on Dec. 26, ordered owner Carlos Pena to stop serving drinks at the bar. It charged him with violating a condition of the permission he received to open the business amid neighborhood opposition.
Six days after the letter’s delivery, at 12:15 a.m. on Jan. 1, a 32-year-old man named John Brown was shot in the head right outside the restaurant’s front door at 50 Fitch St. in Westville. He died shortly thereafter, becoming the city’s first murder victim of 2010. A 19-year-old man was also shot; he was reported in stable condition Monday morning at the Hospital of St. Raphael. Police have not found the gunman. (Pictured above: The crime scene Friday morning.)
And unlike on other evenings at Soco’s, Pena (pictured) said, he had no extra-duty police officers working at the restaurant on New Year’s Eve. He said that New Year’s Eve at Soco’s was planned as a low-key event, so he hadn’t foreseen the need for extra security.
Pena said that the city’s cease and desist letter was the result of a technicality. He further charged that neighbors who have complained about his restaurant are engaging in racial stereotyping: He contended that white neighbors disapprove of an establishment that caters to black customers.
Define “Service Bar”
The Dec. 26 2009 cease-and-desist letter resulted from a chain of events that began more than a year earlier, on Dec. 9, 2008. That’s when the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) approved Pena’s request to open Soco’s with a full liquor license. Neighbors from Westville and Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) tried to stop him from opening; they feared trouble.
The BZA added five conditions of approval. Condition number four read: “Service bar only. No bar seating.” The condition was one of several designed to make Soco’s less like a bar and more like a restaurant.
According to the BZA, at a “service bar” customers cannot order drinks directly from the bartender. If a customer wants a rum and coke, she would have to tell her waiter, who would bring it from the bar to her table.
But that’s not how Pena interprets condition number four. He said the condition allows him to serve customers who are standing at the bar.
Pena said he has made sure to abide by the prohibition of bar seating. There are no stools permanently placed at his bar, he said.
That’s not what Alderman Carl Goldfield said he saw when he was at Soco’s a couple of months ago with his wife, BZA Secretary Gaylord Bourne. “There were people sitting at the bar and they were pouring drinks,” Goldfield said. “Two bartenders going full out, pouring drinks.”
No one at the bar was eating food; they were just drinking, Goldfield said. That’s exactly what neighbors and the BZA had not wanted when they approved the restaurant, he said.
Goldfield filed a complaint. His and other complaints resulted in the cease and desist letter, said Andy Rizzo, head of the city’s building department. The letter was sent out on Dec. 23 by certified mail and delivered on Dec. 26, Rizzo said.
“Specifically, you are serving customers at the bar, where only a service bar is permitted,” the letter states. “Therefore, you are hereby ordered to cease and desist use of the bar for other than a service bar.” Click here to read the letter.
Pena said the cease and desist order resulted from a technicality, a matter of “a rear end touching a piece of wood” in the wrong part of the restaurant.
“I’m not allowed to have seats,” Pena said. “And there were people that were sitting down, essentially.”
He said that some of his customers pull stools up to the bar. Pena said he wants his customers to feel comfortable. The idea that they can’t pull up a stool to the bar is “kind of an unreasonable requirement,” he said.
The cease and desist order has nothing to do with the New Year’s murder outside his restaurant, Pena said. The murder “was something that was going to happen whether they found the guy at Soco’s, or at the movie theater, or at the supermarket, or wherever,” he said. The murder victim was never in his restaurant, he said. “I’m being tried in the court of public opinion over something I had no control over. … It was a set-up, it was something these guys planned.”
Pena said that anyone looking in his window while Soco’s is closed would see stools at the bar. That’s because staff pull them up after hours to sit at the bar after customers leave, he said.
Contacted on Monday, Rizzo said a city inspector had visited Soco’s that morning. The inspector looked in the window and saw stools at the bar. Rizzo said he was passing the matter on to city corporation counsel for possible legal action against Soco’s.
No Police Presence
Pena said that he normally has off-duty police officers doing security work at Soco’s “once or twice a week.” He said his hold-down officer is Alex Sinonas. But he hadn’t called him in on New Year’s Eve because the event had been pulled together on short notice. He didn’t expect it to be a big night.
He wasn’t initially planning to open on New Year’s Eve, Pena said. The flyer (pictured) for the party hadn’t been printed until the Monday before New Year’s. It wasn’t distributed until Tuesday. “We weren’t thinking we’d get a huge crowd,” Pena said. He expected 50 or 60 people. He got about 50 people. “Not exactly something I’m going to have a cop for,” he said.
Pena said he had just his normal security detail that night — a bouncer at each of Soco’s two entrances. Customers were patted down by the bouncers, even if they just step out for a cigarette, Pena said, “to make sure every single person was unarmed.” The bar also uses an electronic ID scanner, Pena said.
Pena said that the shooting was unprecedented. “I’ve been open for a year and not a single punch has been thrown by a male in there,” he said.
Define “These People”
When he went before the BZA in 2008, Pena received stiff opposition from neighbors. They said they worried about crime and alcohol abuse associated with the new bar.
That opposition resurfaced last week following the news of the New Year’s murder, in the form of neighbors saying “I told you so.”
On Monday, Pena swung back at his detractors. He said that the opposition to his restaurant has always been a veiled form of racial prejudice.
When neighbors complained about the opening of Soco’s, Pena said, they would repeatedly refer to “these people” they wanted out of their neighborhood.
“Everybody says, ‘these people,’” he said. “Substitute ‘black.’” Neighbors really wanted to know, “How are you going to keep black people out?” Pena said.
Soco’s has never been supported by the “white liberal elite crowd of Westville,” Pena said. “They’ve never once come to my bar to support me. They’ve only said, ‘How are you going to keep those people out?’”
The crowd at Soco’s is largely black and middle-aged, Pena said. “That dude that got shot was not part of my crowd,” he said.
Soco’s customers include several aldermen and top city officials, Pena said. “These are all people who have been to my establishment.” The typical crowd is 35 to 60 years old and “all dressed nicely.”
Despite neighborhood fears that Soco’s would be a bar first and a restaurant second, Pena said that he is serving an “unbelievable amount of food.” He puts out 600 – 800 pounds of chicken every week, he said. “As a black crowd, they eat a lot of chicken.”
Because it’s a black crowd, his customers come out later and stay out later than white customers would, Pena said.
“The people I have in are good honest hardworking people. Yes, they’re black. Yes, they stay out late. Yes, they drink stuff that you and I probably wouldn’t,” but they are not criminals, Pena said.
He encouraged anyone passing judgment on him to come into Soco’s and see for themselves what it’s like.
Alderman Goldfield was among the neighbors who spoke out in 2008 against Pena’s plan at the BZA. He offered a sharp rebuke to Pena’s allegations of racial prejudice. “I would describe that as the last refuge of scoundrel,” he said.
The neighborhood opposition was based on a history of problems with previous bars at 50 Fitch St., Goldfield said. Neighbors—including Southern Connecticut State University—had objected to a Soco’s website advertising the new bar to college students. The website had encouraged students to “walk to the bar, and stumble home,” Goldfield said.
There was no racial element involved in neighborhood opposition, he said. He called Pena’s comments “reprehensible” and “utterly despicable.”
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Pena must think we all are idiots. How can he peddle this made up version of what a service bar actually is?