Covington’s alcohol beverage control administrator has recommended a 30-day suspension of Ritte’s Corner Cafe’s late-night liquor permit, following a hearing on Wednesday.
Ritte’s Corner Cafe is located at 3711 Winston Ave., near the five-road intersection in Latonia called Ritte’s Corner.
The hearing also saw recommendations for increased security at the bar in the face of an alleged pattern of violent behavior, including gunshots, either at the bar itself or in the area around it. Specifically, Alcohol Beverage Control Administrator Lydia Northcutt recommended the temporary suspension of the bar’s so-called 2:30 permit (which allows it to sell alcohol between 1 a.m and 2:30 a.m.; the owners’ regular alcohol license would not be affected), a required police detail from 10 p.m. to close from Thursday through Sunday and mandatory metal detector wands at the bar’s entrance.
The city’s Alcohol Beverage Control Board will vote at a future hearing to enact the recommendation, reject it, or alter it. No date for that hearing has been set yet.
The hearing follows the recent revocation of the liquor license for another bar called Hat Tricks, where a man was shot in May. The owners of Hat Tricks, Johnnie Riley and Will Williams, also own Ritte’s Corner Cafe.
Northcutt’s case rested on patterns she’d observed in police call logs for the bar or areas nearby, especially the city-owned parking lot across the street, since April. The log included entries for fights, assaults, rowdy crowds, fireworks and loud music. The discharge of a gun late at night in September in the parking lot was the incident that finally precipitated the hearing, Northcutt said.
“As I reviewed the call log, it seemed to be incident after incident during the late hours,” Northcutt said. “Excessive police calls and a disorderly premises is what’s showing to me.”
Attorney Jim Morgan spoke on the owners’ behalf at the Wednesday hearing (Morgan had represented them at the Hat Tricks hearing, as well). Morgan argued several points, namely that some of the incidents in the area were not connected to the bar itself, pointing to other bars in the area. Furthermore, he argued, several of the recorded incidents had not actually occurred on the bar’s grounds.
“I would ask you to look a little deeper,” said Morgan. “They’re not responsible for all the people in that neighborhood that are causing commotion, that are drinking.”
The owners spoke for themselves, as well. Riley said that following the revocation of the license for Hat Tricks, she and her co-owner had deliberately stepped up security on their own by requesting a police detail and hiring private security, all without the mandate of the city, she said.
“After Hat Tricks, we just took it upon ourselves just to do it to protect ourselves and our customers,” said Riley.
Williams said there were security protocols in place to prevent drunk people from entering the bar and that if they became drunk once inside, they were turned away.
“We’re trying to do the best we can as bar owners because we do not want what happened at Hat Tricks to happen again,” said Williams.
City Manager Sharmili Reddy did not find Morgan’s argumentation about incidents being seemingly unrelated to the bar to be convincing.
“Even if you set those calls aside and just look at the calls to your establishment, it still shows a pattern of fights and different things in the establishment, which is extremely concerning,” Reddy said. “We have so many bars in the city, which is great. We want that kind of energy in the city, but when we see these many calls repeated to the establishment, it is of great concern to us.”
Control Board Member Fritz Kuhlmann argued that the bar’s security team needed to “step up their game.” Police Chief Justin Wietholter meanwhile pointed out that even with police details on site, “as far as identifying intoxication, that is the responsibility of the establishment, not the detail officers.”
The city will announce the dates of the follow-up hearing in the coming days.
