Harrasment tot he Gay Community from An Undercover Homophobe Young In formant
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Off-Duty Undercover’s Identity at Issue
As NYPD pressures Chi Chiz, Sixth Precinct cop’s actions a mystery
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
As efforts by the NYPD’s legal unit to shut down Chi Chiz, a Christopher Street restaurant and bar, move into their second month, the conduct of an unidentified off-duty undercover police officer from the Sixth Precinct provides support for charges by the establishment’s owners that they are being targeted by overzealous law enforcement officials.
According to Ronelle McKenzie and Everett Ray, who have owned Chi Chiz since it opened in June 1998, the club was raided by more than a dozen police officers at about 9 p.m. on Friday evening, March 5, and served with a temporary restraining order that shut it down. The order specified allegations that on four instances between July 2009 and January of this year, police officers witnessed the sale of marijuana and other controlled substances, including cocaine, in the club.
The following morning, McKenzie and Ray went to court and succeeded in having the temporary restraining order blocking them from reopening lifted, pending either judicial resolution or, as is often the case in such situations, an agreement between the police and the club on operating guidelines going forward. Their efforts to come to a settlement with the NYPD have so far proved elusive, and Chi Chiz’s owners are next due in court on April 6.
The court’s action on March 6 allowed the club — which the owners said caters largely to African-American men, and some Latinos, of all ages — to reopen that evening at 9 p.m., about 24 hours after being shut down. Later the same night, Allen Roskoff, a longtime gay activist who had been told of the previous day’s raid, dropped by the club, where he said he was harassed by a young white man standing outside who he later learned was an off-duty Sixth Precinct undercover cop.
According to Roskoff — who was with Corey Johnson, also a gay activist and the 1st vice chair of Chelsea’s Community Board 4 (which does not encompass Christopher Street) — as they arrived at the club, the young white man was standing outside yelling, “This fag establishment should be closed.” When Roskoff and Johnson confronted the man, he responded to each of them, “You’re a faggot.”
Roskoff said he called 911, at which point the man headed east on Christopher until he arrived at the cigar store at Sheridan Square, where he went inside and changed his clothes, before hailing a cab. At that point, a squad car pulled up and the man was asked to step out of the taxi. The officer at the scene said “Oh, no” when he saw the man, whom he recognized as an undercover in his precinct, according to Roskoff, who said he was interviewed by telephone at 2 a.m. by an NYPD Internal Affairs investigator who had arrived at the Sixth.
Thomas Shanahan, who is representing McKenzie and Ray, said that he was told by Laura Mulle, the NYPD legal unit attorney in the Chi Chiz case, that the man who confronted and then fled from Roskoff and Johnson was, in fact, a Sixth Precinct cop, but that he had since been put on desk assignment. Mulle would not divulge the name of the officer to Shanahan — she advised him to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
Mulle also declined comment to Gay City News, directing the newspaper to the NYPD’s public information office, which did not respond to a request for information about the officer or his desk reassignment.
Shanahan said he has served a subpoena naming Joe Doe targeted at the unidentified officer, as well as a notice that he seeks to depose him.
The most recent court proceeding in the Chi Chiz case was a conference that ran more than three hours in which Judge Michael Stallman sought to broker agreement between the NYPD and the club owners over procedures to which they would commit in order to keep the establishment open. According to Shanahan, the police are looking for an ironclad guarantee that no drugs will be used or sold in the club, to which he said he responded, “We can’t guarantee that. When the city figures out how to keep drugs off Rikers Island, they can hold us to the same standard.”
Acknowledging that the matter may need to go to trial next week, Shanahan said, “The bottom line is the terms they are insisting on would put us out of business. This is what they wanted all along.”
To hear McKenzie and Ray tell it, that has been the case with the NYPD’s posture toward the club for years. They said they have never encountered problems when they’ve appeared before Community Board 2 as one of the steps in renewing their liquor license, but that some local residents have made their antagonism toward the club known. In recent years, they said, they have received 60 summonses, some for exceeding their capacity when they said they were in compliance, and others which they complained were not served in person.
In court papers, Ray noted of their gay African-American crowd, “We are one of the few establishments catering to this clientele in the Greenwich Village area and borough of Manhattan.
According to Ronelle McKenzie and Everett Ray, who have owned Chi Chiz since it opened in June 1998, the club was raided by more than a dozen police officers at about 9 p.m. on Friday evening, March 5, and served with a temporary restraining order that shut it down. The order specified allegations that on four instances between July 2009 and January of this year, police officers witnessed the sale of marijuana and other controlled substances, including cocaine, in the club.
The following morning, McKenzie and Ray went to court and succeeded in having the temporary restraining order blocking them from reopening lifted, pending either judicial resolution or, as is often the case in such situations, an agreement between the police and the club on operating guidelines going forward. Their efforts to come to a settlement with the NYPD have so far proved elusive, and Chi Chiz’s owners are next due in court on April 6.
The court’s action on March 6 allowed the club — which the owners said caters largely to African-American men, and some Latinos, of all ages — to reopen that evening at 9 p.m., about 24 hours after being shut down. Later the same night, Allen Roskoff, a longtime gay activist who had been told of the previous day’s raid, dropped by the club, where he said he was harassed by a young white man standing outside who he later learned was an off-duty Sixth Precinct undercover cop.
According to Roskoff — who was with Corey Johnson, also a gay activist and the 1st vice chair of Chelsea’s Community Board 4 (which does not encompass Christopher Street) — as they arrived at the club, the young white man was standing outside yelling, “This fag establishment should be closed.” When Roskoff and Johnson confronted the man, he responded to each of them, “You’re a faggot.”
Roskoff said he called 911, at which point the man headed east on Christopher until he arrived at the cigar store at Sheridan Square, where he went inside and changed his clothes, before hailing a cab. At that point, a squad car pulled up and the man was asked to step out of the taxi. The officer at the scene said “Oh, no” when he saw the man, whom he recognized as an undercover in his precinct, according to Roskoff, who said he was interviewed by telephone at 2 a.m. by an NYPD Internal Affairs investigator who had arrived at the Sixth.
Mulle also declined comment to Gay City News, directing the newspaper to the NYPD’s public information office, which did not respond to a request for information about the officer or his desk reassignment.
Shanahan said he has served a subpoena naming Joe Doe targeted at the unidentified officer, as well as a notice that he seeks to depose him.
The most recent court proceeding in the Chi Chiz case was a conference that ran more than three hours in which Judge Michael Stallman sought to broker agreement between the NYPD and the club owners over procedures to which they would commit in order to keep the establishment open. According to Shanahan, the police are looking for an ironclad guarantee that no drugs will be used or sold in the club, to which he said he responded, “We can’t guarantee that. When the city figures out how to keep drugs off Rikers Island, they can hold us to the same standard.”
Acknowledging that the matter may need to go to trial next week, Shanahan said, “The bottom line is the terms they are insisting on would put us out of business. This is what they wanted all along.”
To hear McKenzie and Ray tell it, that has been the case with the NYPD’s posture toward the club for years. They said they have never encountered problems when they’ve appeared before Community Board 2 as one of the steps in renewing their liquor license, but that some local residents have made their antagonism toward the club known. In recent years, they said, they have received 60 summonses, some for exceeding their capacity when they said they were in compliance, and others which they complained were not served in person.
In court papers, Ray noted of their gay African-American crowd, “We are one of the few establishments catering to this clientele in the Greenwich Village area and borough of Manhattan.
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