It has been eight days since Konrad’s Sports Bar served its last drink.

As word of the bar’s closure spread, mourning students laid flowers on Marshall Street. The word ‘bummer’ is still written on the glass door – below the three-page liquor license suspension that’s taped up from the inside – with countless signatures scratched into its white, spray-painted letters. For the Konrad’s faithful, this is the end of an era.

The New York State Liquor Authority suspended the bar’s liquor license on April 28, all but sealing its demise, after weeks of speculation about the establishment’s future in the wake of the Operation Prevent raids. The lingering question is whether Marshall Street will be better off without Konrad’s.

For those behind Operation Prevent, the state-funded initiative to curb underage drinking and fake ID use in the university area, this has been a long time coming. Police have charged the bar’s patrons with 108 of the operation’s 194 counts of possession of a forged or fictitious license. Konrad’s has been a target of Operation Prevent since the program’s inception – officers swept the bar in the first raid on Feb. 8, 2003 – and it has become the first major casualty.

‘We were really upset that we didn’t have our last happy hour,’ said Nicole Wall, a senior magazine major, who was celebrating a friend’s birthday at the bar on its last night.

She and her friends threw a faux-Konrad’s party at their house on Friday, inviting many of the bar’s employees and regulars. Konrad’s holds a unique place in the hearts of many seniors – it opened their freshman year and closed just 12 days before graduation.

The word from Konrad’s is that the police unfairly targeted the bar, which is in a prominent location on Marshall Street and, students say, has a reputation for attracting underage patrons and being easy on IDs. Wall says the same amount of underage drinking occurs at the other bars near campus. Konrad’s, though, has been raided the most.

Many students doubt that Operation Prevent will have any real effect on underage drinking. If anything, they say, it will push the parties to Armory Square or student houses. Students are often offended by the organized police action to stop them from drinking, but some say the raids have made them think twice about going to the bars.

‘This whole bar raid process, it’s flawed from the very beginning,’ said John Cadorette, the owner of Konrad’s. He said he has no plans to reopen the bar or build another business near campus.

Cadorette, an SU graduate, opened Konrad’s in August 2000 at 113 Marshall St., the location of the defunct 44’s Tavern. That bar – the students of the time affectionately called it Fours – flirted with legal trouble in 1998, when a 19-year-old SU student drank there and ended up in Crouse Hospital the next day with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.46 percent. Investigators found no evidence that the bar had knowingly sold alcohol to the underage student.

The New York State Department of Taxation shut Fours down for three days in March 2000. The owner quickly settled the dispute, which amounted to over $100,000 in sales tax debts, but the bar closed for good that spring.

Cadorette and co-owner Walt Kurfis, another former student, named the new bar after their friend, fullback Rob Konrad. The owners wanted to maintain the sports bar tradition, Cadorette said, and they also considered naming the bar McNabb’s, after the former SU quarterback.

Konrad, who now plays for the Miami Dolphins, is the most recent player to wear the fabled No. 44 on the SU football team. He has no stake in the bar itself, other than agreeing to the name, but he is still close with the owners, Cadorette said. And though the founders created Konrad’s to maintain the Fours tradition, at least one drunken ritual was lost in the switch.

The new owners agreed to eliminate Split Day, a tradition in which patrons woke up early, bought cases of cheap beer at Fours and competed to drink as much as possible. Cadorette said the line of students waiting for the bar to open would extend around the corner and down South Crouse Avenue by 7 a.m.

‘Not a lot of good things happened at 44’s,’ said Jerry Dellas, president of the Crouse-Marshall Business Association.

When Cadorette took over in 2000, he said he and Kurfis were ‘trying to make a nice bar again,’ and he condemned the destruction that often accompanied Split Day.

If Konrad’s inherited anything from Fours, it was its widespread reputation as an underage bar. Cadorette said he tried to get tough on underage drinking and that Konrad’s is the only bar on campus that consistently checks IDs with an electronic scanner.

Despite those efforts, the bar couldn’t shake its underage crowd. Officers confiscated 51 fake IDs in a raid on Feb. 8, 2003. They charged 55 people with possession of a forged or fictitious license in this year’s April 1 raid, the largest round-up of any Operation Prevent action.

‘They had every warning there was,’ said Bill Nester, manager of Manny’s, an SU apparel store on Marshall Street. ‘They had plenty of time to get the problem taken care of.’

Cadorette says the Syracuse Police singled his bar out because of an argument he had with Lt. Shannon Trice, the officer in charge of Operation Prevent. He says it became Trice’s goal to shut him down. Konrad’s was the most popular bar on campus, he said, and ‘everybody wants to kill the king.’

Trice denied any personal animosity toward Cadorette and said the two had never had an argument. He said the number of violations stemming from the Konrad’s raids warranted continued action against the bar.

‘If they find a place that has a problem, they’re going to go after it again,’ Dellas said.

Operation Prevent has never aimed to put bar owners out of business, said Laura Madelone, co-chair of the Syracuse Area College Community Coalition, the group that claims to have hatched the program two years ago. Cadorette is a member of this coalition, but Madelone, who is also the university’s director of Off-Campus Student Services, said it has been years since he actively participated.

Cadorette expressed his distaste with the meetings and said the coalition misled bar owners to believe Operation Prevent would target the students rather than the establishments.

‘Every time they’ve come in,’ Cadorette said, ‘they’ve nailed me to the cross.’

Inside the bar, the smell of beer has grown stale. The stacks of blue stools barely obscure the memories of past revelers that lined the wood-paneled walls, and the deejay booth lies hastily abandoned. The spectrum of liquor bottles behind the bar still surrounds Cadorette as he pounds at the register and prints receipts, perhaps crunching the closing numbers. The fridge is still stocked with Labatt Blue.

He hopes the place will open again, even though he won’t be involved. Whatever business replaces the bar, it will have to fight the stigma of its failed predecessors.

‘In the area, we don’t need a lot of bars,’ said Dellas, who is the partial owner of Varsity Pizza and Faegan’s Pub & Caf, ‘because the majority of the people there are underage.’

Cadorette says a bar can’t survive on Marshall Street if it only serves the legal crowd. The rent is so high that the bars have to fill up every night to stay afloat, he said, and that sometimes means catering to underage drinkers. It’s part of the business plan, he said, a reality of the job.

Those students will keep coming back – deterred only briefly by Konrad’s grim fate – as long as their IDs work and the beer flows. Some say they avoided the bars in the weeks after the raids, but few say they’ve stopped going altogether.

‘I don’t really think there’s anything they can do to stop it,’ said Gerta Xhelo, a sophomore finance major. ‘I don’t think it should be stopped.’

Trice says Operation Prevent will continue and that the program’s $18,500 grant, which it received last year, has been renewed for another $4,000 for next semester. By all accounts, Konrad’s has lost this battle. But underage drinking is a far more resilient enemy than one local bar.

‘I’ll miss it,’ said Jamie Nowak, a junior education major. ‘Just like I’ll miss my freshman year.’

Asst. News Editor Terence Johnson

contributed to this report.

Published on May 16, 2004 at 12:00 pm