North Wildwood targeting half-pints
Starting Friday, visitors will zoom down the Garden State Parkway in droves, filling up the beaches, boardwalks and bars to kick off the summer season at the Jersey Shore.
Starting Friday, visitors will zoom down the Garden State Parkway in droves, filling up the beaches, boardwalks and bars to kick off the summer season at the Jersey Shore.
Bar owners in North Wildwood will welcome them with cold pints too, as long as they're 21.
"If you're not 21, don't bother," said Romolo Leomporra, manager at The #1 Tavern. "Underage drinking has always been part of the business, but now we're doing something about it."
Leomporra and other members of the North Wildwood Tavern Owners Association gathered outside Westy's Irish Pub on Olde New Jersey Avenue yesterday to instill a healthy sense of fear and paranoia to anyone thinking of using a fake ID this summer.
"We are here to educate and we are here to send a message," said Jack Keenan, the association's president and owner of Keenan's Irish Pub.
The consequences include potential loss of driver's license and a $1,250 fine.
The association also noted that anyone convicted of underage drinking is required by law to report the violation on student-loan applications.
"It's very serious and it could be very harmful for quite a while," said Keenan, a native of the Grays Ferry section of Philadelphia.
The tavern owners' stance, they claim, isn't just a nudge-and-wink publicity stunt to appease local and state officials. They really don't want underage drinkers because the consequences are even tougher for them.
"Two people almost single-handedly ruined Irish Weekend," said Keenan's son Scott, of South Philadelphia.
Keenan's, which takes up a whole block in North Wildwood, was closed for 80 days last year by New Jersey's Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control for underage-drinking violations. The infraction closed Keenan's just weeks before the annual Irish Fall Festival in North Wildwood, which brings in more than 200,000 visitors to the small strip of bars on Olde New Jersey Avenue.
Keenan's has also paid more than $300,000 in fines while about a dozen underage drinkers who were caught in the bar and prosecuted over the last five years were fined $5,750.
North Wildwood Mayor Bill Henfey noted that advancements in technology often mean more advanced IDs. At yesterday's news conference, nearly 175 fraudulent IDs were on display, mostly from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware with a rare California or South Carolina in the mix.
Most of those IDs, Keenan pointed out, weren't fake but were real and fraudulently used, made by either PennDot or the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission and often passed down to brothers and sisters.
Conversely, Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett announced the arrest earlier this week of 45 individuals in a fake-ID investigation, claiming that lax PennDot security contributed to the issue.
To counteract the new technologies, bars in North Wildwood are using UV lights and card scanners, and owners are teaching bouncers how to better detect fake IDs.
If they catch someone, Jack Keenan says, the wrist-slapping days are over.
"When we identify an underage drinker and confiscate his or her fraudulent ID, it's important that the police respond to the scene as soon as possible," he said. "Otherwise, that young person disappears into the night and probably acquires a new fake ID the very same night or the next day." *
