Pee Party

At its weekly meeting last Wednesday, venerable members of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board paused to consider an unsavory subject. At about 2:15 a.m. on Sept. 16, 2006, a Five nightclub patron named Sasha Ramdeen was escorted out of the establishment. What happened after she was escorted out, however, is up for debate.

In an interview with alcohol administration investigators, Ramdeen said that security forcefully ejected her from the club, led her down a staircase, and sent her out the back exit.

Then, Ramdeen says, the guard peed on her.

Not only that, claims friend Ryan A. Vicente, but other guards cheered him on, shouting obscenities as he did it and saying, “This is what you get.”

Ramdeen did not appear before the board last Wednesday and did not return calls for comment, but Tim Sherman, the club’s vice president, did address the alcohol agency. He said he was “blown away” by the allegation. “It was disgusting. And I couldn’t even believe it would happen.”

Upon learning of the urination allegation, he said he immediately convened his staff to find out what happened. “What’s this about, this story? The girl said you peed on her,” he remembers saying. But security denied the incident, Sherman testified. Perhaps Ramdeen’s pants were wet because of fluid in the alley behind the club. After all, “The alleyway is used by six different nightclubs who drag their trash around out there,” Sherman said.

Board members plumbed the story to locate the source of the leak. Board member Peter Feather asked, “Is there anything you heard that indicated that the area where she was standing was wet? It would seem to be difficult to hit just the bottom of her pants.”

But board chair Charles Burger said parsing out who peed was not the point. “The issue of urination is intriguing to people,” he said, but reviewing Five’s procedure for ejecting patrons was more important. “If you eject anybody from the club, you should escort them right to a police officer,” he said.