Les mentions dans les médias

Liquor's quicker for morality cops

Swingers club says raid for unlicensed booze was a clear case of police intimidation

Par Sue Montgomery, The Gazette, 04 décembre 2002

For the second time in as many years, police swooped down on a swingers bar, terrified patrons and charged the owner and employees with selling booze without a permit.

In response, Bernard Corbeil, owner of Club l'Orage International, says he will file a civil suit against the police for the second time in as many years.

How many cops did it take to round up about 200 unarmed bottles of liquor at the bring-your-own establishment? Thirty.

(Meanwhile, two officers were sent to patrol a downtown métro station yesterday to find a purse snatcher who stabbed two women.)

"People were totally traumatized," said Jacinthe Bédard, secretary of the club. "These are Monsieur and Madame Tout-le-monde, whose faces I see all the time, and they went stone cold."

At about 11:30 p.m. last Thursday, police stormed through the front doors of the old Laurentian Bank at St. Laurent Blvd. and Mount Royal Ave. and ordered the lights be switched on and the music stopped.

The 22 middle-class, middle-aged patrons, most of whom had come in from the 'burbs for the evening to add a little spice to their marriages, went silent, horrified to be caught in a scene out of a made-for-TV movie.

Bédard said police prevented them from calling a lawyer for about 20 minutes.

"I asked them several times to show me a warrant and they refused," she said. "I had to push them to explain to people what they were doing and that it wasn't a criminal thing."

Jacques Robinette, commander of the Montreal police morality squad, said officers arrived early by bar standards so there wouldn't be many clients in the place, because that's not who they were after.
In the end, they laid 117 liquor charges.

They could have arrived in off hours, said Bédard, adding that it was a clear attempt to intimidate people trying to keep their private lives under wraps.

Corbeil, a lawyer, has been through this before and maintains he's running a private club where clients bring their own bottles, label them with their names, and no money changes hands.

Clients who run out of refreshments, or come without, can drop a donation in a pitcher for the Quebec Swingers Association in exchange for something to drink, he said.

The police made off with the cash, and left the pitcher behind, Corbeil said.

The police last paid a visit to the club April 14, 2000, just three months after it opened. They seized 40 bottles of liquor that time.
Three days later, Corbeil filed a suit against the cops for $300,000 in damages.

He says the raids are part of intimidation tactics employed by a police force that doesn't have public support in cracking down on "lifestyle" clubs.

In addition to this latest muddle, Corbeil's in the middle of defending some of those charged in the Nov. 20, 1999, raid on Club Brigitte et Michel, at Rosemont Blvd. and Christophe Colomb Ave. Sixty-nine people were charged that night with being in a bawdy house, while three others were charged with running one. The case is back in court on Friday.

It's impossible to know how many Montrealers would define themselves as "lifestylers," but Corbeil's club claims 10,000 members from all ages who are teachers, judges - and police officers.

But it's not the people or their sexual peccadilloes, the police insist - it's those bottles.

smontgomery@thegazette.southam.ca

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