The Maui County Liquor Control Board of Adjudication recently fined the South Shore Tiki Lounge in Kihei $2,000 for serving an intoxicated customer.
Strangely, about the only point not contested by either side was that when she walked into the Tiki Lounge sometime around midnight on Oct. 17, 2005, Pikake Shores was a “3-4” on a sliding scale of drunkenness, with one possessing the sobriety of a Catholic School nun and 10 being Nick Nolte. But what exactly Shores drank at the Tiki Lounge—the critical question of the complaint—is very hard to say.
Bar manger Renie Hamayelian emphatically testified that he served Shores one shot of Patron and nothing else. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jeffrey Temas disagreed. Reading straight from LC Investigator David Olsten’s Nov. 21, 2005 report, Temas told the Adjudication Board that once inside the Tiki Lounge, Shores consumed “five shots of Patron” and “three to five bottles of Heineken”—a huge amount of alcohol that he insisted Shores downed “in an hour.”
The problem is that Temas read from just part of Olsten’s report, the first page, in fact. But further on in the report—which is based almost entirely on Shores’ statement—Olsten reported that while at the Tiki Lounge that night Shores consumed far less alcohol: “2 shots of Patron tequila and 4 Heineken beers.”
While there’s no question that four Heinekens is within “three to five,” there’s a huge difference—trust me on this one, people—between two shots of Patron and “five.” Yet this considerable discrepancy in the report never came out during the Sept. 7 Adjudication Board hearing.
Had Tiki Lounge pled not guilty instead of no contest, this point would undoubtedly have been a core part of their case. But after the hearing, Tiki Lounge general manager Terry Richardson said that the establishment was gun-shy following their unsuccessful attempt to fight their last case before the board and didn’t want to repeat the experience.
-Anthony Pignataro
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