Members of the New Hyde Park Village Board and Inspector Sean McCarthy of the Nassau County Police 3rd Precinct emerged from an executive session at Village Hall on Tuesday night expressing a renewed resolve to monitor possible illegal activities at Empire Billiards Cafe & Bar on Jericho Turnpike.
“A place that’s licensed for selling alcohol has a lot of regulations to comply with and we’ll make sure they’re doing that through inspections and enforcement there,” said McCarthy, 3rd Precinct commander.
Empire Billiards, at 1215 Jericho Turnpike, has been a source of recurrent neighborhood complaints over the past decade.
Residents filled the Village Hall meeting room on May 21 with accounts of violent incidents outside the club, excessive noise and displays of drunken behavior by patrons, including urination on residents’ lawns and empty beer bottles.
“[McCarthy] believes as we believe that we can do a better job on monitoring the bar. The inspector has more resources for compliance,” said Village of New Hyde Park Mayor Robert Lofaro. “I do hope we come to some happy medium with this place.”
Efforts to reach Empire owner Sonar Singh were unavailing.
During a brief public session before the board closed the meeting with McCarthy, village resident Sean O’Connor recounted what he said was an “ongoing theme” over the past 10 years of customers from the bar throwing up on lawns and depositing beer bottles in the street and on his lawn.
“Empire has been an eyesore for me since 2003. There is a propensity for violence there,” said O’Connor, a retired New York City policeman who lives across the street from the bar.
In one incident several years ago, he said, he broke up a late night fight in his backyard where he said he found “eight guys dancing on this one guy’s head.”
He said he got his firearm from his house and held three of the assailants for 3rd Precinct police who subsequently responded to the scene.
“Empire Billiards was a problem for us a year and a half ago and then it went away,” McCarthy said.
He said a May 9 incident in which two people were stabbed and one struck with a bottle outside the bar “didn’t start with the bar” but patrons who gathered outside during a fight between Ingraham Lane residents “may have been an aggravating factor.”
During a public discussion among the board members and Tom Gannon, village building department superintendent, after the executive session, Lofaro said he understood Empire Billiards’ liquor license was up for renewal on June 30.
Lofaro said the village cited the bard for code violations during an inspection last week, but he did not think the violations would not influence the state Liquor Authority’s decision on renewing the bar’s license.
Gannon said he had found two violations during an inspection at Empire Billiard last week and he was about to send the summonses to Singh. He declined to say what the summonses are for but said Singh will be required to appear in village court on June 19.
Lofaro said the village board held a meeting with Singh in 2009 and got assurances from him that he would remedy problems at the bar. But Lofaro said circumstances at the bar didn’t change after that meeting. Last year, the board declined to renew the bar’s gaming license, making it a code violation for people to play pool in Empire. Lofaro said the board also sent a letter to Singh on April 24, 2012 directing him to “cease and desist” from operating a billiard hall.
A partition has since been placed across the middle of the bar’s interior, concealing the billiard tables from view from the front of the location.
Village attorney Ben Truncale said that partition may itself represent a violation. He said McCarthy’s comments suggested to him the bar “was off the [police] radar for awhile.”
“We have to keep banging on it,” said village Trustee Richard Coppola Jr.
