Bars Face NFL’s Legal Blitz : League’s Game Plan Is to Tackle Screenings of Blacked-Out Contests; Targeted Owners Just Trying to Avoid a Sack

Carlos Suarez contends that he’s being exploited by a big and powerful adversary, one that has millions of dollars and teams of attorneys “ready to put the squeeze on until I pay.”

Suarez’s opponent has forced him to hire his own attorney or risk losing as much as $200,000 in U.S. District Court, where last week the National Football League filed suit against Suarez and 19 other owners of area bars and restaurants.

“I’ll probably pay them something,” said Suarez, who owns the Player’s Club on Main Street here. “I can’t afford not to. I just don’t need the hassle. I feel like David going up against Goliath.”

For years, the NFL has targeted bars and restaurants that somehow found a way of showing games that did not sell out 72 hours before kickoff and thus were blacked out within 75 miles of where the game was being played. But in recent weeks, the league has been especially vigilant.

Since the start of the football season, similar suits have been filed in Cleveland, Miami, Detroit, Houston and New Orleans. In each area, the league alleges that bar and restaurant owners unlawfully “intercepted, received and/or exhibited” one of its games.

In an era of spiraling costs and escalating player salaries, league officials say they have to be ever protective of their primary source of revenue--television--even if it means hiring former FBI agents to ferret out violators of the blackout rule.

Unbeknown to Suarez, his problems with the NFL actually started Sept. 25, when his satellite dish picked up a “raw feed” of a blacked-out Los Angeles Raiders home game.

He says he’s also being sued for a second incident Oct. 2, when the first 25 minutes of a blacked-out Los Angeles Rams game in Anaheim Stadium popped up on television screens in the Player’s Club.

Like everyone else named in the 21-page action, Suarez pays a fee to receive NFL games via satellite, and, he says, it’s the league’s obligation--not his--to scramble the picture on blacked-out telecasts.

“To cite me for showing the first 25 minutes of a game that they were obligated to scramble, well, that sounds to me like entrapment,” he said. “The fact that they committed a technical error is no reason for me to be sued.”

And, technically, said Frank Hawkins, legal counsel for the NFL, he is right.

“But to our knowledge, there were no encryption failures during that week,” Hawkins said from his New York office. “We don’t think it happened that way, based on our preliminary review before filing the lawsuit.”

In any event, Hawkins said, Suarez is bound by law not to show any portion of a blacked-out game, regardless of how he receives it.

“If a 500-seat bar shows games and charges for it, and you end up with 1,000 empty seats,” which is often the case at both Anaheim Stadium and the Los Angeles Coliseum, “then it hurts the NFL,” Hawkins said.

He contended that some of the bars named in the suit had used elaborate, black-market equipment to pick up Channel 39, an NBC affiliate in San Diego that often shows Raiders home games. Such was the case Sept. 25.

“As long as you’re using an ordinary home antenna and not charging admission,” meaning a cover charge, “then we have no problem with it,” Hawkins said. “But at one of the bars cited, our expert said, ‘They have the biggest mother UHF antenna I’ve ever seen,’ oriented to San Diego for one purpose--to break the blackout.”

Named in last week’s action were the following Orange County establishments: Blackie’s by the Sea in Newport Beach; Lamppost Pizza in Orange; Lockeroom Sports Bar in Orange; Out of Bounds in Huntington Beach; Roundtable Pizza in Orange; Texas Loosey’s in Fullerton; the Warehouse in Newport Beach; and Suarez’s Player’s Club. Twelve Los Angeles-area bars also were cited.

Suarez later learned that the NFL had hired former FBI agents to check on his establishment and the others named in the suit in an attempt to catch violators. The suit alleges copyright infringement and violations of the Federal Communications Act and asks for $200,000 from each of the 20 bars.

“Can you believe it?” Suarez said. “They were using (former) FBI agents. Maybe they could hire the KGB next.”

Hawkins conceded that the league had hired former FBI agents in gathering data for the suit but said it would be unfair to use the words monitor or spy in describing their method of investigation.

“The word monitor is unnecessarily pejorative,” he said. “We hired former FBI agents to visit the bars. There was no big brother here.”

But Suarez and the other Orange County merchants interviewed last week say the NFL’s tactics feel like Big Brother. Some complain that the league has done a poor job of explaining the do’s and don’ts of its complicated policies.

Reasons for the lawsuits vary from place to place. Some bars are being sued for signing up for a $99 residential rate--instead of the commercial rate, as high as $2,500--for an annual subscription to a new service called NFL Sunday Ticket. The subscriptions allow access to every game every Sunday, except those falling under the blackout rule.

Suarez says he has “no sympathy” for business owners “who would try to cut corners like that. I pay the full rate. I’m completely legal, completely kosher.”

But other merchants, such as Ron Walton, the owner of Texas Loosey’s in Fullerton and Torrance, said that, in ordering the service, he was never told there was one rate for homes and another for bars and restaurants.

After the suit was filed, “I called up and said, ‘OK, no problem. Let me send you a check for the higher amount,’ ” Walton said. “You know what they said? ‘What can you pay us in a settlement?’ ”

Norm Lebovitz, president of the Assn. for Sports Fans’ Rights, a national organization based in San Diego, said he viewed the NFL’s latest round of suits as “harassment, entrapment . . . and in my view, the defendants--not the plaintiffs--deserve punitive damages.”

In 1990, Lebovitz led a nationwide boycott of Anheuser-Busch and the Miller Brewing Co., two of the league’s biggest sponsors, in a successful attempt to curtail the scrambling of games televised via satellite. The moratorium on scrambling was lifted Sept. 4 with the introduction of NFL Sunday Ticket.

“Are these people supposed to be lawyers?” Lebovitz said of Suarez and the other defendants. “Are they supposed to turn the television off because the NFL failed to scramble a blacked-out game?”

Technically, said Hawkins, the NFL’s lawyer, they are. The law prohibits them from showing any portion of a blacked-out home game.

“I think it would be very proper at this point for the NFL to come right out and say what it wants,” Lebovitz said. “Do they want to own half the bars and restaurants in this country? Why don’t they save us all the frustration, aggravation and legal fees we have to spend by being up-front and honest now? Just come out and say it and quit beating around the bush.”

The manager of Roundtable Pizza in Orange, who asked not to be quoted by name, said he showed the blacked-out Raiders home game Sept. 25 by picking it up from an NBC affiliate in Atlanta, which he receives as part of a legal satellite subscription package called Prime Time 24.

But Hawkins maintained that only residential subscribers in so-called “white” areas--those without access to a clear signal from a network affiliate--are allowed to receive Prime Time 24.

He said the bigger problem of businesses hoping to pay the cheaper residential rate is “widespread throughout the country.” The NFL will continue to protect its legal copyright, he said, rather than “take the risk of having our product compromised.”

But Lebovitz, the fan’s advocate, scoffed at such a notion, saying Orange County businesses were merely the latest in a nationwide list of targets.

“They’re going to say they’re trying to protect the industry,” he said of the NFL. “And I say to that: B.S. What they want is money, and this is nothing more than a scare tactic. This is done to bring the average guy in line.

“They know no organization out there can match their money or their power in Congress. Congress is responsible for this too, for allowing this type of harassment. The NFL is not the people--we are. Where is Congress in all this--getting tickets for the next Super Bowl?”