City vs. citizens in bar fight

For someone described by authorities as a menace who has caused a violent, criminal and ongoing "threat to the public safety and welfare," Waid Sainvil sure likes to hug.

I'm standing with him on the sidewalk when a restaurateur from down the block walks by. She gets a two-armed wraparound Waid special.

A fisherman just back from Alaska gets a handshake and back-clap, sort of a half-hug.

A somber-faced kid slouches by with his pants halfway down his butt. He jumps when Sainvil, all dreads and piercings, greets him with a shout, and, yes, a hug.

Sainvil appears to know every person who walks by his Waid's Haitian Cuisine and Lounge, on East Jefferson near Seattle University. And from students to cabbies to nurses in hospital blues, they appear to know him back.

"Maybe this is too much love for Seattle," Sainvil says when we go inside. "Maybe that's the problem."

The "problem" is one of the more perplexing stories I've looked into in quite a while. It features the people in charge — the city of Seattle and the state — saying that Waid's bar, the only Haitian place in the Northwest, is a hotbed of illegal activity and should be shut down for the good of the community.

It also features the community — not all of it but a large and diverse cross-section — saying it's actually the cops and the state harming the public. A public that, increasingly, the authorities don't understand.

"Waid's is not just a bar," says LaTanya Horace, who works for a Seattle nonprofit called Neighborhood House that helps immigrants and refugees. "It has become the community center for the biggest, most random and diverse group of cultures you could imagine.

"Why would they want to close that down?"

Let's start with some facts. The Seattle Police Department has asked the state to revoke Waid's liquor license. The state has tentatively agreed, issuing an "intent to not renew." Sainvil has appealed.

Police say Sainvil's club is a major threat to public safety — the worst in the city. They cite incidents in which minors were allowed to drink at the club, including once last December when a 19-year-old woman left Waid's, drunk, and crashed her car into a tree.

They also cite five fights outside Waid's during the past two years. In the most serious, a year ago, a man was severely injured when his head was bashed with a cinder block. Though this happened on 12th Avenue, not on East Jefferson where Waid's is located, police attributed the fight to customers who had been at Waid's.

State inspectors say Waid's had the third-most liquor-law complaints in King County last year. They ranged from the serious (serving minors) to the nitpicky (he was reprimanded twice for his bar lighting being too dim.)

Police also tried to shut Waid's in 2008, because late-night music made life intolerable for some nearby residents, some of whom say they had to move away. Sainvil spent $80,000 on soundproofing that he says fixed it.

Add it all up, city officials say, and Waid's has got to go.

"Everyone here is fully in support of this," said Kimberly Mills, spokeswoman for the City Attorney's Office. "It really has to be serious for us to move against a club like this."

Yet out where the city's worst bar would be causing the most damage, it gets surprising levels of support.

"You can ask anybody here, the businesses, the customers, everybody wants Waid to stay," says Tsedalu Kebede, who has owned Ambassel, an Ethiopian restaurant and bar on the same block, for 10 years.

"There were so many drug dealers here before Waid came," she said. (Waid's opened in 2006.) "Now it's much cleaner. I think it's mostly because of him."

About 500 people have signed a petition to keep Waid's open. A staggeringly diverse array of groups relies on Waid's as a place to meet and hold fundraisers. To name a few: doctors from Harborview Medical Center; swing-dance groups; the Environmental Law Society at Seattle U; the Jua Lekundu Foundation (for Tanzania); Seattle's Burning Man crowd; Planned Parenthood; a Gay Pride group; a belly-dancing society; a Harley biker club; and African-American fashion designers.

Neighborhood House this summer began an HIV-AIDS testing and referral program — inside Waid's nightclub.

"We do it there because we can reach diverse cultures like nowhere else," says LaTanya Horace, who runs the program. "There's no other venue in Seattle like it."

Solomon Tedlla, who lives a few blocks away, says inside Waid's is a Seattle many locals may not know exists.

"I see Russians here, Jamaicans, Latinos, all kinds of people," Tedlla says. "Everybody loves Waid."

Not everybody. In 2008, the police went after Sainvil personally. In a letter, then-police Chief Gil Kerlikowske cited "Mr. Sainvil's criminal history" as reason to shut the club. Sainvil's record consists of a DUI in 2005, a year before the club opened.

At the same time police were impugning him, Sainvil was considered credible enough to testify for police as a key eyewitness in the murder of Maurice Jackson, which happened across the street.

"I got death threats for showing up in court for them," Sainvil says. "But I did it to help put a murderer behind bars."

I've been to a lot of the city's bad bars, such as the defunct Deano's, on Madison, which was a crack den. The police's case is puzzling to me because Waid's just doesn't fit the profile.

Is it possible both sides are right? That Waid's is Seattle's most dangerous bar? And also one of its most generous?

I don't think so. Police haven't presented evidence, yet, of a single serious assault, gun incident or drug deal that's gone down inside Waid's.

Sainvil's no saint. Clearly he's got to tighten up how he runs his place. But it's also clear its closure would be a big loss.

This seems like it's about more than this one bar. But what? Why is there such an extreme disconnect between official Seattle and street Seattle?

I asked this of everyone I talked to for this story. Most offered some variation on the idea that Seattle isn't as accepting of "the other" as it likes to say it is.

"There are a lot of weirdos and artists and immigrants and people of color that hang out at Waid's," says Shannon Payne, a yoga-studio owner in Renton who hangs out there herself.

"I think Seattle's OK with that, but only in theory.

"When it comes right down to the reality of living with diversity, what comes out sometimes feels more like fear."

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.