Last summer, faced with a raft of complaints about rampant public intoxication, urination and drug use by a group of people who congregate in the parking lots and alleyways on Adams St., Greenport village officials passed an anti-loitering law and posted large signs 0n Front St. forbidding loitering.
Encouraged by the move, some Front St. business owners put in new lighting, security cameras and fencing to try and dissuade people from hanging out in the alleys between Adams and Front St. and urinating in the parking lots and on the sides of local businesses.
Nearly a year later, according to interviews with residents, business owners and local law enforcement about the individuals who make Adams St. their home base in warm weather, very little has changed. If anything, they said, it has gotten worse.
Front St. Station restaurant owner Sharon Sailor said she sometimes feeds some of the same men who later that day will be intoxicated and urinating on the side of her restaurant.
“It’s kind of a Catch-22,” Sailor told the North Fork Sun. “I try and help them as much as I can, but everybody knows the effects of addiction. I feel bad but you know what’s going to happen. It’s going to escalate until they do something horrible, like in the city.
“And then they’ll go to prison forever and their mental health needs and addiction needs aren’t going to be addressed there either. So it’s as much of an injustice to them as it is to us.”
Earlier this month, Roberto Bachez-Reyes, 44, was arrested for allegedly brandishing a machete and threatening construction workers who were erecting a new fence between a private residence and a section of the Adams St. village parking lot where the men congregate.
Last month, an Adams St. regular named Noe Pacheco, who has frequent run-ins with Southold police — mostly for public intoxication, trespassing, shoplifting and harassment claims — is alleged to have forcibly kissed a 13-year-old girl on her bicycle in front of the Handy Pantry in Mattituck, according to police reports.
Many of the business owners who are most impacted by the round-the-clock drinking and drug use — including Sailor and Noah’s restaurant owner Noah Schwartz — said they are deeply conflicted about the situation. They feel for anyone struggling with substance abuse. Yet both said they’ve reached a breaking point and don’t know where else to turn.
Earlier this month, Schwartz paid to have a new fence erected where a previous one had been damaged and degraded by urine and vandalism.
“They don’t just camp out or hang out or just urinate all over the fence,” he said. “They lean on it and pull boards from it and stuff beer bottles through the holes onto our property and just vandalize it. We’ve talked to the mayor. We’ve talked to Village Hall, to the police.
“We’ve been to the meetings where they passed the [anti]-loitering law,” he continued. “But the dereliction of village property spilling onto private property, our property, just got us to our wits’ end.”
On May 6 around 3:30 p.m., Schwartz said, Bachez-Reyes brandished a machete and threatened to kill not just the construction workers but Schwartz himself.
“He’s like, ‘I’ll come back. I’ll knock this fence down. I’ll f—ing kill you guys. And he threatened my life too. He said, ‘I know the guy who owns the store. F— that guy. I’ll kill him.’
“When we filed the police report, the two guys working on the fence said they would press charges, which is what some other people haven’t been willing to do when they file a report against these guys.”
Bachez-Reyes was eventually arrested, processed and released.
“That got him off the street for a whole day and maybe one night,” Schwartz said. “But that next morning he’s back at the liquor store buying a pint.”
Schwartz said he fields complaints from his diners “all the time.
“’Where else can we park? How can the village allow this back there?’ It’s crazy … you don’t want to have to keep giving your customers the same answer: ‘we’re trying to clean this up.’
“But it shouldn’t be up to us to clean it up either.”
Repeated efforts over several days to interview the men who congregate on Adams St. were unsuccessful.
‘Highly intoxicated’
Pacheco, 39, is well-known to police, according to public records requests. In the past year, Southold police have had 58 interactions with Pacheco, mostly for alleged public intoxication, harassment and theft. He’s been issued nearly a dozen code violations for drinking in public and arrested five times in one year.
Pacheco has been banned from the Greenport 7-11, from the Mr. Roberts convenience store and from his sister’s Greenport apartment. He was subsequently banned from her entire Front St. apartment building, after — witnesses told the North Fork Sun — he repeatedly turned up there, intoxicated, and both urinated and defecated in the building hallways while he waited for his sister to come home.
“I’m a single mother,” Nancy Pacheco said in an interview last week. “I’ve got to protect my family. He can’t come here anymore. He drinks too much.”
Intoxicated and fleeing his sister’s Front St. apartment building in March, according to a police report, Pacheco was struck by a car and later hospitalized. Last Fourth of July, police were called to Greenport’s Fifth St. beach, where they found Pacheco intoxicated in his only his underwear. In August, according to another report, he was banned for the day from Mitchell Park after complaints that he was urinating at the beach there.
Sailor said Pacheco has tried to kiss her, too, after she’s given him French fries. He even turned up inside a trailer on her Mattituck property one morning recently.
“It was like five in the morning, and I went to take the dog out and he jumped out of the trailer. I screamed and he ran.”
Schwartz knows Pacheco, too, and despite all the problems he’s had with the men from the Adams St. crew, he still feels for him.
“In the past, when he was sober, he was a decent worker,” Schwartz said. “I don’t think he ever worked for me, but I still know him and so do people who work here and it makes it hard to try to police these guys myself. We know who they are, and have seen them when they were not as bad as they are now.”
In an audiotaped interview last week in the Adams St. parking lot (listen to excerpt below), Pacheco appeared coherent and answered a couple of questions.
Told that he’d been accused of forcibly kissing the young girl and asked what happened, he replied, “I don’t know. I was drunk. I’m so sorry for that.”
In a subsequent interview an hour later, he was too intoxicated to answer questions.
‘Quality of life’
Southold Town Police Chief Steve Grattan said Pacheco is well-known to local law enforcement. In addition to the 58 interactions with police in the past year, Pacheco’s has been the subject of 60 additional incidents going back to 2008.
“That’s more than 100 interactions and that’s concerning,” Grattan said. “I’ve known Mr. Pacheco for a long time, and I’ve always known him to be an alcoholic. He causes disturbances a lot of times based on his level of intoxication — even if it’s just him stumbling into the roadway or refusing to leave an establishment or stealing beer out of a store. So it’s concerning to see that he allegedly made advances on a 13-year-old.”
Grattan said that police are regularly called to respond to the Adams St. parking lot, but that in most instances officers themselves must witness illegal behavior in order to take action.
“Misdemeanors don’t have to be witnessed. We can have a complaint, get a statement and proceed with a charge based on that,” he said. “But any violation has to be witnessed.”
Urinating or defecating in public, disorderly conduct and harassment are all violations that must be witnessed by law enforcement.
“Which can be certainly difficult,” Grattan said,” because if these individuals know that our officers are present, or they see the uniform, then they’re not going to be inclined to harass people in front of the officer.”
Public intoxication is neither a crime nor a code violation.
“There is a penal law violation for being impaired in public under the influence of drugs, but not alcohol, and 90% of the time, these gentlemen are impaired by alcohol.”
The chief said he understands the community’s frustration.
“I get it. It’s unsightly. It’s quality of life … but there’s not necessarily a mechanism for us to enforce unless [officers] witness the act.’”
He said that while police can issue town and village code violations, “generally, we want town code enforcement officers to enforce town code and village code enforcement — I know they don’t have one now — but village code enforcement to enforce village code.”
The village has been without a full-time village code enforcement officer since last fall.
Beyond policing, Greenport’s all-volunteer fire department is often called to medical emergencies involving drug or alcohol overdoses. Of 1144 calls last year, 70 of them were for alcohol or drug overdoses, according to Greenport Second Assistant Chief David Nyce — which is more than 6% of all EMS calls in the Greenport Fire District.
“We have a single apartment here in Greenport that [prompted] 45 [emergency] calls last year,” he said. “Some of it was for alcohol, and some of it was for drugs.”
Citing HIPAA privacy laws, Nyce declined to identify the address of the apartment.