Show me the money!

Big news, people.

The Martini Shaker, home to so many shameful evenings and questionable ethics, has been sold. After a good year or so of sliding down the cliff side of bankruptcy and poor management, the venue has folded its hand and given in. It means a new name, a new menu, a new look—but most importantly, it means that all the dirty little secrets that went unpublished thus far (for fear of the health inspector or the Boston Police Department coming down on our heads) are fair game. We shall begin our trip down memory lane with a classic relic of full-scale disgrace in the Martini’s recent history: Halloween 2009.

The evening began innocuously enough. Alice and I showed up early to help tape the tacky Bacardi-sponsored decorations to walls and mirrors and begrudgingly shove ourselves into our mandatory costumes, the DJ arrived with his equipment, and all the dining room tables were whisked away to any spare space in the building.

We opened the doors, the usual refuse poured in decked out in his-and-hers costumes and skanked out variations on anything and everything, tossing the twenty-dollar covers at us faster than we could slap on wristbands. For five straight hours we saw nothing but the occasional bad dance move as we looked up from taking cash, counting it, and handing off wads of it to a manager when the feeble moneybox started to overflow.

As the end of the night drew near, the crowd thinned and my makeshift coat-hanger-wrapped-in-saran-wrap fairy wings were beginning to seriously pinch my shoulder blades. Last call came and went, and I stayed, helping clean up as I sipped a monster rum and coke from the bar. I left with the rest of the staff around 2 am, and we competed on the crowded downtown street for cabs—an impressive feat on that particular night of the year.

It wasn’t until the next morning when, nursing a rum and coke headache and lying in bed, that my phone buzzed on the nightstand and it became the most momentous Halloween of them all.

It was Alice, working the brunch shift.

After we had all left for the night, the post-Halloween dawn breaking and my body glitter glinting off of all of my clothes, we had been robbed. Not just angry-employee-siphoning-off-funds robbed, but good, old-fashioned, held at gunpoint robbed.

Apparently.

The story came together in bits and pieces, but here was the general gist we managed to cobble together: Jared, a manager at the time, had been downstairs in the office counting the nights money and locking it away in the safe at around 3:30 or 4 am. Suddenly, a man in fatigues and a ski mask burst into the room (through the locked doors upstairs, and the door to the basement that is supposed to be locked, and the actual door to the office) and demanded that Jared hand over the dough. The way it was told, the masked gunman was quite the sweetheart, apologizing and shaking during the entire encounter, and only tied Jared up for good measure before bounding into the night. Oh, that is, after he disabled our security camera system. Undoubtedly a straight-A student in burglary school.

Now, this was all well and good as it spread like wildfire along the Martini grapevine, and tales of the ligature marks on Jared’s wrists and his two-week vacation soon after were all accepted with nary a whisper of doubt. The original sum the staff understood to be stolen—after harassing the other managers nonstop for information—was a petty $1,600.

The truth? Try adding another zero. Now the elaborate robbery began to make some sense.

Weeks passed and no progress was made on the case. Jared began spontaneously offering a clean-cut version of the story without being prompted, and soon the familiar Martini theories began to emerge. Wouldn’t it make sense for our penny-pinching owner Jack Bugiardini to orchestrate the robbery, allowing him to take a profit under the table while insurance paid for the theft? Wouldn’t involving Jared, a single father with bills to pay and a financially colorful past be a simple way to up the authenticity?

Why yes, yes it would. Even stranger was Bugiardini's uncharacteristically stoic response to the robbery.

It’s likely that we’ll never know whether or not Jack Bugiardini managed to rob his own establishment that night, with the help of someone on the payroll. But for those of us who have seen enough CSI reruns to guess that the ligature marks on Jared’s wrists were in the right spot to be self-inflicted, it set the Martini soaring to new heights of sleazy.

And that, as Sherlock Holmes once mused, was the curious incident of All Hallows Eve 2009. Or something like that.