The 21st Amendment legalized alcohol sales in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean anyone can sell alcohol as they wish.
Jared Williams, a 33-year-old man from Sandy, Utah, was arrested and charged June 13 with a misdemeanor of running a business without a license. The business in question – a speakeasy selling alcohol that was run out of his home garage. Williams, who has pleaded not guilty to the charge, faces up to six months in jail and a maximum fine of $1,000.
Williams and his father had allegedly been running the “Dog Bar” – named after the bull dog painting on the door – for the past six years.
He was finally caught when an undercover police officer visited the bar and was served alcohol illegally. The police also seized 106 bottles of liquor, 77 cans of beer, a Jagermeister shot machine, plastic shot cups, receipts, a cash register, two calculators and nearly $750 in cash from Williams’ home after an undercover investigation into the bar one week later.
“Adults can have parties and hang out. There’s nothing wrong with an adult having an adult beverage,” Sandy Police Sgt. Jon Arnold told the Associated Press. “But obviously when you have a bar in a neighborhood, that creates problems…Sometimes people don’t make good choices when they are out drinking alcohol.”
The affidavit for the search warrant said that a Sandy resident tipped the police off about Williams’ speakeasy. According to Dwayne Baird, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Public Safety, Utahns take pride in their neighborhoods, especially given that the majority of residents belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a religious affiliation that forbids its members to drink alcohol.
“If [Utah citizens] hear that some guy has decided to open a bar on their street, neighbors there are going to say, ‘Not in my neighborhood you’re not,'” Baird told the AP. “With the culture that we have here you are not likely to get away with it.”
