Towards A Theory Of Broken-Windows Drinking: The Importance Of Staying Away From Bars That Substitute Svedka For Ketel One, Smirnoff For Grey Goose

Not only do they employ felons and have a history of gruesome sex-related murders at their other establishments but the owners of the bar where John Jay student Imette St. Guillen was last seen alive also play terrible music and engage in unscrupulous bartending practices:

Michael Dorrian huddled at the end of the long wooden bar with a group of male friends who were joking with him and slapping him on the back, as if keeping their chins up could dispel the ignominy of this crime and the mounting demands to shutter the bar.

“I can’t say anything about anything,” Michael responded with an exasperated shrug, his face flushed, when asked about the public crucifixion of his family’s bar dynasty.

State Liquor Authority records, though, have plenty to say. The files for the Falls and other bars and restaurants owned by members of the Dorrian family reveal that since 1996, the SLA has fined the family’s enterprises a total of $29,500, for 19 offenses.

Nine of the incidents took place at Dorrian’s Red Hand, the Upper East Side drinking mill made famous by the so-called “preppy murder” in Central Park. As many have noted, that 1986 killing bears an eerie similarity to the police’s primary theory about St. Guillen’s; it involves yet another beautiful young woman — Jennifer Levin — who was strangled by a man she’d met at a Dorrian-owned bar.

Family patriarch Jack Dorrian courted controversy when he put his family’s East Side townhouse up as collateral on $150,000 bail for Robert Chambers. Chambers was 19 at the time he killed Levin, but was nonetheless considered a regular at the bar.

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SLA records indicate a continued slew of offenses, some standard for a bar, others more likely to halt a raised glass. The Red Hand has been popped numerous times for noise and disorderly premises — no big surprise for a saloon — but in 1998 was also cited for a violation known as “improper brand label.” An SLA spokesperson explained that the bar had substituted one brand for another.

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Rebar and Suite 16, two former Chelsea nightclubs that Michael and brother John Dorrian operated at 127 Eighth Avenue under the corporate name Mac Daddy Inc., were together cited 10 times for violations that included “refilling/contaminated bottles” and selling to a minor. Rebar was cited for four assaults or altercations there between January 1998 and November 1999.

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“It’s like they see themselves as above the law,” says Soho resident Sean Brady, who lives behind the Falls. Brady says he spent months complaining about the Falls’ loud and “egregiously bad” music, which he hears all night long because his loft shares a side wall with the bar.