Men behaving badly: Women get punched at Back Bay club, Dorchester lodge

A man went up to a table where two women and a man were sitting at Storyville, 90 Exeter St., on the night Feb. 8 and asked one of the women to dance. She refused and the guy responded by punching her in the mouth three times and then ran out, police told the Boston Licensing Board today.

A police detective said he's managed to track the guy down and that he now faces criminal charges for the incident, which a bar manager said happened in roughly 15 seconds. The victim got herself to the hospital for treatment.

A man punched a woman in the nose on the night of March 10 at the MWGW Carver Grand Lodge, 70 Talbot Ave. in Dorchester, in an incident that ended with the man smashing a chair across the face of a lodge bouncer, leaving him with a large gash above his right eye and bleeding all over his clothes.

Unlike in the Storyville incident, the two were well acquainted - the man is the woman's cousin.

The woman testified her overly possessive cousin has never liked her boyfriend and has been trying to break them up for months. She said she and her boyfriend are regulars at the lodge and that her cousin would show up with his girlfriend and stare at her and video her and put the videos on Facebook to embarrass her.

On March 10, she said, her boyfriend's father also went to the lodge, where the cousin told him he wanted to "squash" the feud. The father was good with that, but her boyfriend wouldn't shake her cousin's hand. Her cousin simmered much of the night, at one point coming up to her and demanding she leave her boyfriend because "you're my cousin and you're going to do what I say." When she told him to leave her alone, she said, he punched her. Lodge security separated them, but escorted neither out.

Around 1:30 a.m. a police detective told the board, the cousin charged at the boyfriend. A bouncer moved to intervene, which is when the cousin smashed the bouncer in the face.

Board Chairwoman Christine Pulgini asked the woman a couple of times if she feared her cousin and needed help, but the woman said she's a big girl and is not afraid of him, and that his mother and her mother have smoothed things out. The bouncer, however, wants criminal charges brought against him, a police detective told the board.

A club manager said the cousin had been barred from the lodge months ago and that he was surprised to learn security had let him in that night. Pulgini said the guy had apparently gotten in before that night and faulted the lodge for not calling police as soon as security realized he had punched his cousin - doing so might have forestalled the later incident with the chair and the bouncer.

The board decides Thursday what action, if any, to take on the two incidents.