The Bowen empire-owned Riverside Tavern, perched on the old BEC property overlooking the Haulover Creek where Mapp and North Front Streets intersect in the old capital, is a club where the high rollers go. The Tavern’s prices serve as a barrier to the hoi polloi. The Riverside Tavern’s New Year’s Eve party, just as an example, cost $300 a couple.
The brawl that broke out last Friday night going into Saturday morning at the Riverside, then, featured the top of the Belizean socio-political shelf. The story is not the brawl, even though two young men were badly beaten, stabbed bloody and hospitalized, these being Myron and Luigi Marin. The story was not the bullets in the double digits (eyewitness count of expended shells) fired in the parking lot. The story was not the $15,000 worth of damage to the bar/restaurant, based on the estimates of the Tavern manager, Dustin Bowen. The story was not even the fact that one of Ben Bou Nehra’s “runners” starred in the beating and stabbing episodes, or that Eugene Zabaneh, Jr. and the Prime Minister’s youngest son were on the scene. The story was the behaviour of the Belize Police Department, who essentially tried to kill the story.
G. Michael Reid told KREM Radio this morning, more than two days after the fact, that the police weren’t treating the matter as a story because the principals in the episode had “worked things out.” Poor G. Mike! Being public relations officer for a police department which is enforcing two different sets of laws must be a difficult exercise.
Later this morning, the police top brass decided to call a press conference, hosted by controversial Senior Superintendent, Chester Williams, but the nation’s leading newspaper was not invited. Go figure! Williams said the police were not releasing the names of four men who had been detained until Saturday evening, January 12, because the two victims did not want to press charges. He said that the bullets (five, according to him) had been fired by someone in the streets outside the Riverside Tavern parking lot, hence didn’t have anything to do directly with the detainees or their presumed victims.
Any incident, no matter how small, which involves Ben Bou Nehra, is news in Belize City. One of the owners of the expensive Mirab Store, he was freed on a manslaughter charge earlier this year when some policemen suffered public amnesia with regards to his identity. Former Director of Public Prosecutions, Kirk Andersen, had wanted to charge Bou Nehra for murder in connection with the shooting death of Shawn Copious on September 17, 2005. The Police Department refused to follow the DPP’s orders, and Bou Nehra, who is considered to be “connected” to the ruling party, ended up being charged for manslaughter, after a lot of hauling and pulling. DPP Andersen ended up losing his job, and returning to his native Jamaica.