By Conor McCormick-Cavanagh, Westword |Roo-Bar Lounge, a hip-hop club at 3480 Park Avenue West, will have to defend itself against charges by the City and County of Denver that it’s committed multiple code violations. On November 10, the Department of Excise and Licenses sent Roo-Bar owners Jugurta Tighrine and Danny Safieddine an order to show cause, notifying them of a December 1 hearing where they would need to respond to allegations that the venue allowed disorderly conduct and had unlicensed security guards on the scene.
“They don’t want hip-hop. They think they are going to cause trouble,” says Tighrine, who opened the club with Safieddine last November. Roo-Bar has gone through several iterations and locations over the past two decades; over that same period, many hip-hop clubs have come and gone in Denver. Some, such as Beta Event Center, were shut down by the city.
The Roo-Bar show-cause order lists a series of reported violations stretching through the year.
In January, Denver Police Department officers responded to a fight involving ten people. Savino Aragon, a patron of the club, was apparently upset when a woman he was with was not allowed back into the club. That woman pushed another man in the club’s parking lot, and then Aragon punched a security guard twice, which led to the guard punching Aragon. After that, Aragon and the woman he was with started to fight other patrons, ultimately leading to Aragon getting punched several times in the face by an unknown man. “Despite providing the surveillance video to law enforcement, the license establishment was not being cooperative in assisting law enforcement in their investigation of the incident,” the show-cause order notes.
“As you know, people are fighting inside the airport, inside planes, everywhere. I saw a fight on the train, the one to the airport,” Tighrine responds.
The next incident cited in the order occurred in February, when police conducted a liquor license and business license check at Roo-Bar. Two security guards working there that night — both of them from a company called Hightower Security — were unable to show security guard licenses and admitted to not having them, according to the city. One of those guards was wearing “a tac vest covering his upper torso” and had a “knife in the front pocket of the tac vest.”
“I hired Hightower. I’m not responsible for any of those guys,” says Tighrine. “I pay Hightower. If anything happens, it’s on them.”
That same night, a manager named Nicholas Montanaro told Denver police officers that he “was aware of a situation in which a firearm entered the licensed premises through a hole in the patio,” the show-cause order notes. Officers then saw “a patron freely exit through an unsecured door on the patio and attempt to re-gain entrance.”
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https://www.westword.com/news/denver-hip-hop-club-roo-bar-crackdown-15445505
Photo: https://www.instagram.com/roobarlounge/?hl=en
[Thanks to Alex Teitz for contributing this article! http://www.femmusic.com]
November 17, 2022| Colorado Music-Related Business| Barb Dye