Last Call for Liquor Cops : Law enforcement: Budget cuts take big toll of ABC investigators who are credited with curbing crime in bars. Local police fear the consequences.

They’re the kind of guys who go to topless bars and scrutinize the other men. They sit outside convenience stores in their battered van and wait for thirsty teen-agers to buy beer without proper ID.

Sometimes, Steve Ernst and Dave Gill even barge into mom-and-pop pubs, walk right behind the bar, and put their flashlights to bottles of liquor to see if there are bugs floating in the booze.

They’re investigators for the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. On the streets, though, they’re known as liquor cops. Booze busters.

For more than two generations, their tiny staff has drawn the line on which bars and drinking establishments can go into what San Diego County neighborhoods. They’ve guided law enforcement officers through the bureaucratic web of the state’s complicated liquor laws.

Using the threat of license revocation, they’ve put the squeeze on bar, restaurant and liquor-store owners for such infractions as selling alcohol to minors and obviously intoxicated patrons, watering down drinks and running rowdy bars.

And they’re forever on the lookout for heavier crimes such as gambling, prostitution and narcotics being run out of neighborhood hangouts.

Now, however, it’s last call for Ernst and Gill. Thanks to a budget-cutting plan proposed by Gov. Pete Wilson, two-thirds of the state’s liquor-law enforcement officers are being laid off.

The cuts would trim ABC’s $23-million annual budget by 23%--a move designed to save the state $5 million in salaries. Under the plan, the number of investigators statewide will drop from 203 to 54--fewer than one investigator for each of California’s 58 counties.

In San Diego County, ABC’s staff of 10 is being sliced to three investigators, who will handle the mountain of license renewals and application paperwork instead of hitting the streets.

Meanwhile, the agency’s tiny San Marcos bureau is being closed entirely. At the same time, investigators say, the domain of the area office will be increased to include Imperial County and parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

It all leaves investigators like Gill and Ernst wondering what went wrong.

“I honestly used to believe that the job I did here made a difference,” said Gill, a 34-year-old supervisory ABC investigator. “We’re the ones who made sure that a topless bar didn’t go in next to a day care center or a church, ensuring that the integrity of a neighborhood was left intact.

“I’m afraid this place is going to turn into a rubber-stamp agency, a place where bar licenses will go to any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants them. Because, if no one is there to mind the chicken coop, the foxes are going to be out there.”

Ernst said the owners of less-reputable bars are buying drinks for the house because they’re so happy to see ABC investigators go. And he made a prediction: “It’s going to be out of control, I can guarantee you that. It may take a while, but it will happen.”

The investigators aren’t the only ones who are wary. The cutbacks have been assailed by politicians and law enforcement agencies statewide as well as groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Both San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen and Sheriff Jim Roache have written critical letters to the governor about the reductions.

The ABC layoffs even have been opposed by beer and liquor retailers, brewers and other industry officials--who say that poor enforcement of existing rules is plain bad for business.

Nobody, however, feels worse about the cuts than veteran ABC staffer Pete Case. He has devoted nearly half a century to ensuring that bars and restaurants are run right and stay in the right hands, only to see his agency crumble around him during his last month on the job.

“I feel lousy,” said Case, the local ABC district administrator who retired two weeks ago after 42 years with the agency--more than 28 of them in San Diego. “After all this time, after all we’ve done to put licenses into the right hands in the right places, the whole thing is tumbling down.”

In 1970, with only 2,400 licensees, the local ABC staff numbered 16. But, as the number has grown to more than 5,000 license-holders, the investigative staff is now dropping to three. As a result, the wait for liquor licenses will be delayed from several weeks to as long as 10 months.

Far worse, however, is that the few remaining ABC staffers will not be able to keep a close eye on the type of people who open bars. The result, Case said, is that “organized crime will have a field day.”

“Prostitution and drugs, that’s what these changes will bring,” he said. “There’s no place sweeter to launder money than owning a bar. There’s lots of bad people out there--people with lots of money to invest in a bar, who have been waiting for this day to happen.”

Meanwhile, Ernst and Gill wait for their pink slips. Both veteran ABC supervisory investigators, they are now halfheartedly looking for other jobs, considering other options.

On a recent Friday night, as they prepared for one of their last undercover runs of area bars and restaurants, they told war stories of a different sort. Bar wars.

Like real cops, the pair often carry handguns on their undercover rounds. They develop sources and run surveillance operations. They follow up on tips from anonymous letters and phone calls. And they work long, often odd, hours.

In the past, they have busted underground parties like the one billed as “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” where some enterprising entrepreneurs threw an illegal after-hours, pay-at-the-door bash at a Sorrento Valley health club, serving up drinks to minors at an all-night scene that featured kegs in the weight room and dancing on the racquetball courts.

They have scoured topless bars, making not only sure that dancers follow rigid ABC rules involving their routines and proximity to patrons, but also that drinks aren’t served to overly intoxicated customers--a charge that ABC takes seriously. Conviction for offenses such as serving to minors or intoxicated patrons often brings fines and at least a 15-day liquor license suspension for a first offense and a possible revocation for repeat offenders.

Recently, Gill teamed up with San Diego Police Department vice detectives on a four-month investigation of three bars for narcotics sales--a sting that resulted in the arrests of both patrons and employees at bars in downtown San Diego and Pacific Beach.

As their own team, Gill and Ernst have investigated illegal betting pools in Escondido, unlawful dice games, liquor label-changing and watered-down drinks in east San Diego and prostitution rings in downtown bars.

They’ve watched as a bartender tapped the shoulder of a patron so inebriated he had fallen asleep at the bar--asking the groggy man: “You ready for another one?”

Along with their own investigations, they follow up each year on hundreds of reports of illegal activity in bars, convenience stores and restaurants filed by San Diego police and other agencies, as well as conduct background probes of would-be bar owners applying for liquor licenses.

Police and ABC investigators complement each other, Gill said. “The police charge the people involved, and then we go after the owner of the bar for things he either knew about or should have known about,” he said.

“We’re the only agency that can revoke a bar’s liquor license. There could be 10 arrests a week made for prostitution at a bar, and the police couldn’t close the place down. That’s been our job.

Ernst, holding a stack of police reports, added: “We have the strings on the licenses. But that’s going to change. There isn’t going to be anybody around to even read these anymore.”

One of the investigators’ biggest concerns, however, has been the sale of alcohol to minors. More than 50% of the hundreds of cases they worked last year involved such sales.

In the past, Gill and Ernst have sponsored seminars on how to detect false identification, confiscated hundreds of phony IDs--anything from cheap photocopies of licenses, to IDs with dates changed with a creative use of scissors to an identification with a boy’s name and a girl’s picture.

They’ve also busted countless liquor store clerks for illegal sales--like the guy who sold beer to a minor who had used his 52-year-old mother’s driver’s license as proof of age.

“It takes a bit of practice to really know how to read an ID,” Gill said. “The problem is, there’s not a lot of rocket scientists working in these stores in the early-morning hours when kids buy liquor.”

The investigators have heard all the excuses from owners who accept fake IDs. Their favorite is a variation of the “the dog ate my homework” lament--the guy who said his dog had just died, and he was so upset he didn’t think to look at the license.

On the street undercover, Ernst and Gill appear the unlikeliest of liquor cops. With his shoulder-length curly hair, Ernst resembles singer Cat Stevens--and the bespectacled Gill his gangly, academic-looking sidekick.

Years of bar patrols have taught them a few things.

Among bar patrons, they simply don’t command the same respect as uniformed police officers. So they never turn their backs on anyone whose party they may be spoiling.

And they never order mixed drinks. Only bottled beer. During a routine check at a University Avenue bar, Ernst showed why. Using his flashlight, he took less than five minutes to confiscate a dozen bottles of liquor that looked more like murky, stirred-up river bottoms with their floating bugs and debris.

“The bugs are attracted to the sugar in the alcohol,” said Ernst, 33, a nine-year ABC veteran. “It’s not really a big thing--we usually just confiscate the bottles without citing the bars. But it’s one way we let owners know we’re out here. And that we’re watching them.”

Bugs or no bugs, Sacramento officials have been quick to say that the passing of investigators like Ernst and Gill will have little effect on the agency’s enforcement efforts.

“We’re not going to have Barbary Coast, 1880s-style, liquor laws in California because of these layoffs,” said Bob Pipkin, a spokesman for the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, which oversees the ABC.

“We’ve got seven attorneys statewide who are still going to go after bar owners for administrative actions--they’re not going to be sitting around playing pinochle. We’re not throwing open the floodgates to these owners, saying, ‘Anything goes.’ It’s simply not the case.”

But San Diego Police Lt. David Bejarano said his unit’s vice narcotics efforts are patterned after those of the ABC. The department’s enforcement efforts will suffer without the ABC around, he said.

“We can make all the arrests we want,” he said. “I just don’t know who’s going to go after the licenses of these bar owners, the job the ABC has been doing all along.”

Smaller cities will be even worse off, said Carlsbad Police Lt. Don Lewis. “For cities with not as much vice punch as the bigger ones, they (the ABC investigators) certainly will be missed,” he said.

Lt. Scott McClintock of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said he’ll miss the investigators for their service as guides through the labyrinth of complicated state liquor laws.

“Those liquor laws are a bulky, burdensome, complex bunch of legislation,” McClintock said. “Those guys have helped us weed our way through those laws so many times. I don’t know if we have the resources to do it by ourselves.”

But the biggest regrets over the ABC cutbacks came from a cadre of San Diego police officers who on a recent Friday night patrolled the parking lot of the Red Onion Restaurant, a popular Mission Beach nightspot.

“How can they do this? The ABC is one of those agencies they should build up, not shut down,” said Sgt. Terence DeGelder. “I’d shut down the forest service first. Trees don’t drive drunk.

“But these kids do,” he added, motioning to several youths in the crowded parking lot. “And these ABC guys are some of the only hope we’ve got left.”

Inside the bar, which has been cited for running an unruly premises and doctoring its books on liquor sales, Ernst and Gill checked the IDs of several youthful-looking patrons. The manager tailed them like a nervous party host, passing the word to bouncers and bartenders alike: The booze busters are here.

When informed of the investigators’ presence, manager Brett Carr sniffed: “They do what they gotta do, we do what we do.”

On this night, though, the liquor cops were easy on the bar. They wore their blue “Police” jackets and identified themselves at the door. On other nights, with other owners, they haven’t extended such courtesies.

“Most times, we come and go like a thief in the night,” Ernst said with a sardonic smile. “And now we’re gone for good.”