Troubled Union Street bar closed for good after incident involving its manager and his girlfriend in his basement office

The Boston Licensing Board this week heard dramatically different versions of an incident in the basement office of Loyal Nine's manager early on May 14 that led to the bar's owners deciding to shut the place for good: Either the guy was spotted attempting to suffocate his girlfriend or he was simply trying to help her up from the floor after the latest of her drunken benders at nearby bars.

A key question for board members at a meeting today: Why they found out about the incident - which led to most of the bar's other employees walking off the job the following day - via anonymous tips and video, rather than through any communications from the bar's owners, and whether the owners may have tried to cover the incident up.

At a hearing on Tuesday, both the girlfriend and the manager testified, but none of the bar's listed owners, who include Derek Brady, who owns several local bars - attended. Because of that, and because of new reports from Boston Police on the incident, details of which the board did not specify today, the board voted to call another hearing into the incident - and to require bar owners to attend.

The owners had previously said they were closing the bar permanently and selling the license to their landlord - but board members say that any disciplinary action they take would stay with the license even with a new owner.

In 2022, the board shut the bar, then known as Sons of Boston, indefinitely after a bouncer fatally stabbed a man outside and another employee helped him escape police. It re-opened with a new name in 2023, after the state Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission overturned the board's suspension because it was based on hearsay - the police officers who read accounts of the murder were not the officers who actually investigated the crime.

At Tuesday's hearing, police say they visited the bar on June 13 after receiving information from the board about the May incident, which Sgt. Det. William Gallagher described as an apparent fight between the manager and girlfriend that included him choking her.

The girlfriend, however, said that was not what happened. Instead, she told the board, she and her friends had been barhopping that night and she hadn't had anything to eat that day so she was "more drunk than usual," to the point where her boyfriend - not on duty as Loyal 9 manager that night - decided she'd had enough and needed to go home. But that made her "very upset" and she went into the Loyal 9 for another drink, only she was denied service, and "I became infuriated."

The woman, who acknowledged she was "highly intoxicated," went down with her boyfriend to his office where he tried to calm her down. She said she somehow wound up on the floor and her boyfriend began "trying to pick me up off the floor." The noise attracted somebody on staff who, police say, went downstairs and videoed something happening down there.

"I got my second wind and ran upstairs and tried to confront whoever denied me a shot," even as her boyfriend slumped in his office chair, appearing to be defeated and not knowing what to do in the situation, she said, acknowledging she has gone on drinking binges in the past, to the point of passing out on the floor at home.

Her boyfriend "never assaulted me, he never put his hands on me," she said. "His motive was to protect me, to pick me up off the floor."

"I was just trying to stop her from making bad decisions and take care of her," the manager said, denying he had struck or tried to choke her.

But after hearing all this, board Chairwoman Kathleen Joyce said the board had gotten anonymous calls about the incident, that employees seemed so frightened at what had happened, they "walked out the next day."

"Yes, that happened," the boyfriend/manager acknowledged, adding that after meeting with the owners, he and they agreed it would probably be for the best that he leave his job. But, he added, "Anybody saying anything about it was not present and was not there," that "the only people in room were us."

Board members said they were more concerned that bar owners never reported what, regardless of what happened, was a serious incident.

"I'm more concerned about management's reaction to this and it sounds like they did not react appropriately," Joyce said.

"That's not accurate," bar attorney Carolyn Conway said.

The girlfriend said management reached out to her to make sure she was OK and that she asked them not to get police involved, because "he did not do anything he was accused of." In fact, she said, after police did get involved and a domestic-violence detective called her to set up an interview and she said she didn't want to talk, the detective warned that that could mean a warrant would be issued for her boyfriend's arrest and then "she was like well see you in court."

That detective did not attend the hearing, but Gallagher, one of the department's three licensing detectives, said that after viewing the video forwarded by the licensing board, "it looked pretty serious" and warranted an investigation.

As he listened to the girlfriend, board member Liam Curran grew more and more upset.

"Management kept an obviously very, very serious matter in house and away from police," he said. Had management instead alerted police to the incident immediately, "this might not have been as big a deal. ... It might have been wrapped up and accepted as what happened."

Curran said that what he saw in the video was "100 percent" an assault; the only question is whether it was "defensible," which, he said, the woman and the manager could have shown it was way, way earlier.

Instead, the board now has to consider "an attempt by management to sweep this under the rug," he said. As holders of a Boston liquor license, they have certain obligations - including to report any serious incidents as soon as they find out about them, not a month later when the board starts getting anonymous calls, and regardless of how the employees involved feel. "Especially considering history of this place," he added.

"It's completely unacceptable," he said, telling the woman, "they've done you a disservice."