A typical Saturday night at Lucky’s on Bell Boulevard. Not Clear Cut But even with training courses, establishments selling alcohol are not immediately exonerated if an accident occurs. An incident after a New York Giants football game in 1999 is perhaps the most notable case that deals with Dram shop laws. Daniel Lanzaro guzzled beer during the game at Giants Stadium before driving home and crashing into the Verni family, who was on its way home from pumpkin picking; 2-year-old Antonia Verni was paralyzed from the neck down. Aramark, the company in charge of concessions at Giant Stadium (and also Shea Stadium), was initially hit with the $135 million verdict after a jury found that the beer vendor at the stadium had violated the two-beer-maximum policy and also continued to serve Lanzaro when he was already intoxicated. Last August, however, that verdict was overturned by a judge who ruled that testimony about the stadium’s bacchanalian atmosphere was inadmissible, news reports said. Even with an overturned verdict, the case jolted the concessions industry and brought new attention to the alcohol server training programs, like TEAM – Techniques for Effective Alcohol Management – which provides stadium vendor training for all the major professional sports leagues. Jill Pepper, TEAM’s executive director, said while the Verni case did not increase the volume of TEAM training, it provoked some stadiums to implement stricter enforcement of policies. At some stadiums, employees must sign an agreement before every game that states they are aware of alcohol serving policies. In 2000, TEAM, with the help of TIPS, took its program to the next level by adding an exam to its program as a way of documenting that employees not only attended the course, but retained the skills and information from it, Pepper said. In Borough Bars From the ballpark to the bars of Queens, questions surface about how well bartenders are trained at the local and small business level. At Brian Dempsey’s on Bell Boulevard in Bayside, bartender Mariesa Stewart said she has been serving beers since her teen days in Ireland. “It’s natural for me,” she said when asked about any formal training. While she said she doesn’t have to refuse patrons alcohol much because “Bell Boulevard is pretty tame,” not all nights end smoothly. “I had a guy vomit on the bar,” she said as she scooped ice and poured drinks on a recent weeknight. Across the street at Winnie Ranegans, Jennifer Koester went to a bartender school in Manhattan where she said she had training to identify an intoxicated patron and said she is aware of the bar’s potential liability if a patron drinks and drives. “Sometimes you’re like, ‘Sorry I can’t serve you.’ Sometimes people get angry,” she said, which is why other methods also work. “Everyone knows each other. It’s a matter of ‘can you talk to your friend?’” she said if a patron becomes disgruntled over her refusal to pour another. Koester also said that abundance of transportation in the area—the Long Island Rail Road, multiple cab services and the bus—means that people usually do not drive to the bar and may even walk if they live in the neighborhood. She noted that accessible public transportation combined with frequent police patrols of the boulevard deter drunk driving. Back at Dempsey’s, glasses clink together and bellowing laughs rise from the bar. A customer jokes with Stewart that when someone throws up on the bar she should make sure she doesn’t use a good rag to clean it. He lets out a chuckle as Stewart races back and forth behind the bar, slapping down drinks and cracking open bottles of beer. With the chatter and busyness of bar, she doesn’t hear him.

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