Why the booze bureaucrats keep nixing a bar application in the Point

   Milton Greenberg's empty premises on gritty Centre Street in Point St. Charles, Montreal has been vacant for quite some time but its longtime owner Greenberg (aka 115025 CANADA INC) really wanted to sell it. But in order to get a decent price for the property he thought he should have a tenant in it.
  Greenberg had a guy. Or so he thought. Although extremely keen to open a bar here, Greenberg's guy was a man with a past.
   Ahmed Youssef Soulieman told the provincial booze bureaucrats that his proposed D Bar would appeal to a mature crowd and he would personally DJ music ranging from Blues to Jazz.
   He reeled off a list of things he would do for the club. He vowed to install surveillance cameras, an alarm system, panic bars on the doors and all the mod cons for a bar with a capacity of 215.
   However the police also testified at his application hearings and reminded the authorities that his previous bar, the Ivory Bar on Notre Dame saw- from April 1995 (under a different name) to February 2002 - arson, murders, minors being served, overcrowding and street gang presence.
  In the early years of his Ivory Bar Soulieman believed that the police were picking on him due to his ethnicity and complained to the government and got local black rights advocate Dan Phillip to go to bat for him in 1999.
   In December 2001 gunmen entered the Ivory Bar in St. Henry and shot two patrons dead while about 30 witnesses claimed they didn't see a thing. So it was no shock when authorities finally shut the bar down in February 2002 by ordering its license revoked.
   Soulieman supposedly went to work as a welder but he wanted back into the bar biz. So from January to June 2008 Soulieman went to hearings on his application to set up the D Bar on Centre Street. In spite of his promises and well-stated intentions, the booze bureaucrats eventually turned him down.
   But that didn't solve Greenberg's vacancy issue. In July 2009 David Sabbah, who owns a garage, applied to open a bar at the same location. Sabbah's garage is in a building owned by Milton Greenberg and the two have been friends for 30 years. The booze bureaucrats asked Sabbah if he knew Soulieman and he replied no. Sabbah later recanted and said that Soulieman was Greenberg's chauffeur.
   Sabbah told Quebec's Board of Alcohol Race and Gambling (RACJQ) that Milton had offered him a deal: free rent for the bar on Centre until the bar started making money. The only condition: Sabbah would have to hire Soulieman to work in the bar. That part was non-negotiable. Greenberg told Sabbah that the idea was to have a bar there for a few months so the property could be sold a higher price.
   The authorities told Sabbah that there was no way he'd get a booze permit if Soulieman was anyway involved in the bar.
  Sabbah told the authorities: "give me the license and you can revoke after a few months." Why? "Because Soulieman will be there."
   The RACJ refused Sabbah's application as well.
   As someone pointed out in the comments, the space had - from April 2003 - been the site of a politically-oriented bar which moved out after they couldn't afford an increase in the rent, reportedly to $3,000 a month. The was a well-attended march and a sit-in at the premises which the police allowed until the owner complained and how them turfed out.