I don’t know if they are deductible from Minnesota state taxes, but definitely not from federal taxes.
IRC § 162 - Trade or business expenses
TIL you can be charged in court for a crime that occurred without your knowledge 1000s of miles away
And there are fines, and there are fines. I see some companies get multimillion dollar fines. That would be way too high for a pizza joint, but somewhere in there is a middle ground with a sweet spot. Or, again: just pull the liquor license after X number of infractions. Isn’t that the simplest and most logical remedy of all?
The real crime is selling Michelob Golden Light Draft beer.
“Mark against”? In Texas, that is grounds for revocation of the license, and that would cost him a big chunk of revenue.
And clearly Minnesota and a lot of other people think that providing alcohol to minors who then sell said alcohol to other minors is bad enough that criminal charges should be on the table. You don’t seem to have any good argument for why this shouldn’t be handled as a crime, and most people agree that the situation involved is definitely criminal.
So you want a more severe punishment with less ability to defend/appeal than the criminal case? I’m really confused by what you’re even looking for here.
Except that’s exactly what you did in the first part of this post, where you said that the owner shouldn’t face criminal liability for participating in and encouraging criminal wrongdoing (namely providing alcohol to minors who then sell it to other minors).
And I say you’re nitpicking. You didn’t just learn about this situation. You learned about it and said you disagreed with it. You made it clear that you don’t think it should be possible to charge people like Kalil with a crime. That’s immunity in any normal sense of the word.
More severe? Huh. I guess MMV, because were I a busy millionaire, living across the country, I would rather lose the license and let the place just serve pizza and soft drinks, rather than be hauled into criminal court. Seems unlikely in the former case that it would make a big splash in the news or that my kids and their peers would hear (probably distorted) stories.
I have an investment my grandparents left me. It’s a small share of a partnership that owns an apartment building in upstate New York. Every year the management company sends me and the dozens of other partners a letter with a description of the amount of rent they have taken in, and their outlays for repairs and utilities and so on. What’s left is divvied up to the partners and I get a check for a couple grand. I have never seen this building, except photos online. Were I to be sent a summons to criminal court in NY because of something the local management did, I would be very upset. I would much rather the investment just lost much or even all of its value.
No, legal immunity would include immunity from civil suits or regulatory actions. And I never said even criminal liability should be off the table if the owner actively conspired with underlings to commit crimes. So your description of my position was a strawman.
Okay, but I’m sticking with what I’ve said. I think that when most people talk about immunity, they’re talking about immunity from criminal charges not immunity from civil lawsuits or regulatory actions.
Yes, your solution of losing a liquor license means thousands of dollars gone immediately, and the short-term cost can go up to tens of thousands of dollars when you look at the total cost of getting one, cost of bar equipment, contracts with suppliers and so on. And it very likely means that the whole place goes out of business, because getting a liquor license involves enough work that a business that has one usually has it’s profitability centered on alcohol sales. And you’d still have to get ‘hauled into’ an administrative hearing for it to all happen. You seem to have some super-big hangup about getting summoned to court for a fine, but I don’t think most people consider getting summoned to an administrative hearing for a much bigger fine and probable loss of the entire business is better than showing up to a judge, saying some “I’ll fix this”, and paying a much smaller fine. And you seriously think that a public figure hiring kids to sell liquor to kids with no adult supervision would’t make the news at all just because it’s handled at an administrative hearing instead of a court hearing?
And really, if you’re happy with a restaurant that sells pizza and soda, why not just open that in the first place instead of spending a lot of money and effort to get a liquor license that you supposedly don’t care about? There’s nothing that forced him to get a liquor license (though it is generally quite profitable), and it’s not like they happen by accident - you don’t fill out your property tax form and then find out that you’ve won a drawing for a liquor license, you need a lawyer and lots of effort.
But that’s not what happened here. He got a summons to criminal court because of something HE DID. He got a liquor license, then used it to provide alcohol to teenagers who sold it to other teenagers. When he got the liquor license in his name, he made himself THE local management for anything involving alcohol sales. If you just want to invest money, there are lots of ways to do it that don’t involve criminal liability - but getting a liquor license in your name is not one of them. You seem to want to ignore that he wasn’t just a distant investor, he took optional steps to make himself legally responsible for handling alcohol sales properly.
In this case, the owner actively committed crimes and conspired with underlings to commit crimes. You seem to think that supplying minors with alcohol and place to sell alcohol to other minors with no adult supervision isn’t a crime, but it just is. And it’s not a controversial or obscure law, pretty much everyone in the US thinks this is something that should be illegal to do, even people who think alcohol laws should be loosened a lot.
Generally the law requires a certain level of reasonableness. Is it reasonable that the owner of the restaurant has no one in charge but a dumb 19 year old? Has the employee been properly trained to card?
I discuss it more below, but “investing in a chain of restaurants” does not have to be materially different from “buying stock in Pizza Hut”.
Your liability is dependent on the legal structure of the partnership (S-corp, LLP, etc). This is what is meant by corporate “personhood”. If you are merely a shareholder in a corporation that owns the apartment, you generally aren’t personally or criminally liable unless you happen to be an officer in that corporation. Like I can’t get sued personally if Ford makes an exploding car and I happen to own shares of the corporation.
IANAL, but that is why we have them. So you can invest a couple grand in your friend or family’s business without being criminally responsible if it turns out they were smuggling crack through it.
I find it interesting that the Complainant (police officer) electronically signed the complaint on 11/7 but the Prosecuting Attorney who approved the complaint electronically signed it on 11/3. Is this normal, or a goof that the lawyer will use to get the complaint thrown out?
I agree with most of your post, but do you have a cite for that?
No, I don’t have a cite backing my claim that most people in the US think that selling alcohol to children in general* is something that should be illegal. If you want to think that something is the law (and enforced) in all 50 states, is fully accepted by the courts, generates no significant public opposition, has no lobby opposing it, and has not had repeal proposed in any serious legislation is not supported by almost all Americans, I can’t stop you from believing it. Note that there is a significant minority of people who think the drinking age should go from 21 to 18, but that’s a different question.
*Some states allow selling alcohol to a minor with parental approval or for highly specific circumstances like culinary school, but none just let a bar start handing beer to a 17-year old like in the story.
Yes, he’s either supposed to vet them or have procedures to vet them. He agreed that this was a reasonable precaution when he acquired the liquor license, if he didn’t think he could follow the terms of the license then he shouldn’t have lied on his application.
I didn’t see this before, but it’s perfectly possible to INVEST in a chain of restaurants without any problem. The problem is not investing, it’s acquiring a liquor license in your name, which then makes you the person responsible for compliance with the terms of that license. You can set up a corporation and have the corporate entity hold the license, or invest in a sole proprietership and have the manager hold the license, so something else along those lines. The one thing you can’t do is be the person who tells the State “I am responsible for ensuring compliance with alcohol laws”, then not be responsible for ensuring compliance.
The opinion that is almost unanimous here surprises me in its very near-unanimity. I would have predicted it to be in the range of 40-70%. By contrast, the three Star-Tribune sportswriters who host my Vikings podcast laughed it off as kind of an absurdity, saying things like “for those who didn’t see the story, Kalil is in trouble for a beer sale to a minor in a pizza joint he owns, even though he wasn’t even there at the time”.
It’s definitely not like that. It’s not a publicly traded financial instrument. At one point I was strapped for cash and inquired about selling it, and found out that my only real option was to sell it to one of the other partners, but the going rate when this had been done in the past was something like three years’ worth of distributions, and I found that absurd.
Again, this is a pizza joint that apparently didn’t even have beer on tap but just some cans or bottles in a cooler. So all that stuff you’re saying looks like hyperbole to me.
There’s a possible penalty of jail time for this criminal charge, even if in practice that doesn’t happen. And you’re telling me that if it were only an administrative hearing and Kalil said “screw that, I’m staying with the team and the lawyers can handle that” that he’d then face contempt of court charges and be arrested in North Carolina (or the next time he crossed paths with the law inside the state of MN)? I find that hard to believe, and outrageous if so.
Based on the way the Star-Tribune reporters were talking, I don’t think people here in Minnesota generally think Kalil “hired kids to sell liquor to kids with no adult supervision”. Hell, look even at the lede of the article:
Then from later in the article, the reporter seems to be underlining the incredulity, like he’s rolling his eyes as he types it up:
The story features no quotes from police or other officials justifying the arraignment in the terms we see so prevalent here. So I’d wager that no, if it had not been a criminal charge, people would not be likely to care at all.
I’ll take your word for it that this is the law–but I don’t think it’s the way most people think it is or ought to be. I think most people think that in response to this, an absentee owner like Kalil should fire the general manager and tell their replacement to clean things up. Then if it happens again and again they might look askance at Kalil. But assuming this is the first time there was a bust, I just don’t think this is how most people think it should work.
And in fact, if he is legally “THE local management for anything involving alcohol sales”, he shouldn’t have been granted a liquor license as an NFL player who is extremely busy and often out of town. And then he definitely should have lost it when he went to another team across the country. If the liquor board really looks at it this way, they should insist that license holders live nearby and inspect their premises regularly at the least. Right?
I don’t know where you’re getting this. Even with the new information that has come out, I haven’t seen any evidence that this is true. It may secretly be the case (although I doubt it), but where’s the evidence? It looks to me like he was pretty hands off, which makes him negligent at most, not an active crime committer and conspirator.
There are plenty of crimes for which negligence is not a mitigating factor. While I don’t agree with how uptight America is about all of the drinking laws, anyone who is thinking about owning a restaurant with a liquor license has got to be almost willfully ignorant to not know that you’ve got to be very careful.
The vast majority of corporations are not publicly traded, and a lot of them have restrictions on who shares can be sold to.
Wrong. As I’ve said before, it’s perfectly possible for a competent adult to set up procedures and hire management that run a business in a way that doesn’t result in 17-year-olds selling beer to 19-year-olds with no 21-year-olds even working on premises at the time. Lots of people manage to do this without getting hauled into court for underage sales, so the liquor board has no reason to say ‘oh, you travel? DENIED’, and instead rely on prosecuting the few people who take on the responsibility of a liquor license but fail to live up to their promise.
I’m getting this from the story you posted, and you’re simply completely wrong about his involvement here. He GOT A LIQUOR LICENSE, which you seem to ignore over and over. That license is what allowed the place to get ahold of the alcohol at all, which the kid then illegally sold to someone underage. Without the license, the shop couldn’t legally buy the alcohol in the first place. Getting a liquor license is an active process, as I’ve said before, you don’t just turn up at the DMV and accidentally get one when you renew your driver’s license. That is completely hands-on, and makes him an active crime committer and conspirator.
Also not sure where you get the idea that being negligent, especially with alcohol sales to minors, is a defense to criminal charges. There are a huge number of crimes that you can be charged with that negligence isn’t a defense to.
Another strawman! I was specifically disputing your claim of active conspiracy, not whether negligence can be criminal—since it obviously can in cases of vehicular homicide and reckless endangerment and so on.
What “strawman”? You stated that he was ‘negligent at most’, and I pointed out that ‘negligent at most’ isn’t actually a defense against criminal charges. That’s not a strawman, responding specifically to the word you wrote is the opposite of a strawman. And you seem to be ignoring that I explained the multiple, major active steps he took to enable to criminal behavior - there would be no alcohol to sell without his action of acquiring a liquor license and using it to provide the alcohol that the teen sold.
But I didn’t say it was. Look, I can understand how you made that erroneous inference, based on the fact that I disputed the criminality in other posts. But if you go back and look at that post, I was arguing something much more limited and specific. Maybe it seems weird to you, but I’m quite capable of making a tangential side argument that is not in the service of a larger point that I had been arguing earlier.
The responses I got on Facebook anecdotally reinforce my sense that the unanimity here is odd. It was however not unanimously the other way, either. Names changed to protect the guilty and innocent alike: