VIOLENT CECIL SCARED POLICE

Report Details Arguments To Shut Tavern

The danger got so bad inside the Cecil Hotel that the police stopped
using it as a training ground.

The notorious building at the edge of downtown had been a regular
spot for undercover officers in training, to hone their covert skills.

They practised the art of drug deals, learning how to buy rocks of
crack cocaine and gather enough evidence to make their case in court.

But that didn't happen this year. The Cecil was deemed too unsafe,
even for the police.

"It's a very violent place,"one undercover officer testified at the
hearing that led to the Cecil tavern losing its business licence
earlier this month.

That was just one of the revelations in a document obtained by the
Herald detailing the litany of arguments made both for and against
the Cecil at the closed-door licensing hearing.

The report offers the first expansive look under the roof of the
building most Calgarians know from the outside, but relatively few
have seen from the inside.

It wasn't just training exercises that saw undercover police set
foot in the Cecil, the report shows.

The Cecil and its streetscape were the target of at least three
recent undercover police investigations, one of which yielded 49
arrests and nearly 150 charges.

Four undercover officers testified they either bought drugs or
watched deals happen in and around the Cecil several times. Within
20 seconds of being at the site, testified one officer, people would
be asking if you were looking for "food"--the street lingo for crack cocaine.

But perhaps the most incriminating evidence at the hearing came when
the spotlight was put on the Cecil's staff.

"There have been doorman(sic) who have allowed transactions to occur
immediately in front of them outside, and there has never been any
prevention,"one undercover officer said.

Another described buying a rock of crack cocaine in plain view of a
bartender. Right then, two men sat down next to the officer, flipped
over a table and pulled out a baggie from the table's centre stem.
It was full of what appeared to be crack cocaine.

Bar staff were more than just passive observers, police alleged. One
officer watched a bartender split a sum of cash with someone who had
just sold drugs.

Another undercover officer recounted telling the same bartender he
was looking for crack cocaine. The bartender ended the conversation
by saying he would see what he could do for the officer.

What's more, an informant told police the Cecil's staff was involved
in drug dealing.

Even those who testified in de-fence of the Cecil acknowledged how
crime saturated the area.

A Cecil patron for 40 years, who is also a retired Calgary police
officer and now an Alberta sheriff, talked about how stolen goods
were regularly available inside the bar.

"It's like a Wal-Mart, if you wait long enough, you can buy
something off them, from clothing to meat, you name it," he said.

All the criticism was too much for Cecil management to take.

Sam Silberman, the Cecil owner who has run the building for al-most
30 years, insisted at the hearing the bar staff didn't see any
blatant drug dealing, and that any staff accused of being involved
with drugs had been fired.

He pointed the finger at the users and dealers who kept disobeying
his orders to stay away.

"These people, I call them cock-roaches, they'll move away for 20
minutes, half an hour; they'll go and hide somewhere, and as soon as
the police cruiser is gone, they're right back," he said.

The Cecil's bar manager said likewise, arguing anything illegal was
mostly happening outside the building. But he admitted he had never
seen "this serious of a drug problem" in a bar.

When the Cecil's lawyer asked him whether he would ever raise
questions of drug dealing with the police, the manager didn't hide
his hesitation to do so.

"On that note, you have to be very, very careful, because if you get
classified as a rat in that bar, I wouldn't be able to walk out to
my vehicle at night, if that was the case. My life would be in danger."

In the end, it was the apparent danger at the Cecil that did it in.

Despite Silberman and his staff's assertions that the problem was
not the building but the area around it, Marc Halat, the city's
chief licence inspector, ruled the bar posed too much of a threat.

The Cecil had become a burden for taxpayers, he wrote, pointing to
police statistics showing they had almost 3,800 calls for service at
the building from January 2005 to June 2008.

But perhaps one of the turning points came later in the six-day hearing.

After listening to Cecil staff members say they were doing
everything they could to shoo drugs away from the 1912 hotel, one
police officer took it upon himself to do a stakeout from the roof
of the nearby YWCA building on Nov. 1.

In a two-hour span, he snapped pictures of apparent drug dealing in
the Cecil doorways and a Cecil security employee doing little -- if
anything -- to turn away people who management said had been banned
from the tavern.

"The photos demonstrate that, although the individuals . . . have
been 'barred' from the Cecil Hotel, they're able to come and go from
the inside of the bar despite the action taken against them," Halat wrote.

"This information . . . contradicts the evidence put forward that
things are under control at the Cecil Hotel."