Both Boston Police and the owner of Stats Bar and Grille, 77 Dorchester St., are mystified about an incident last month in which a credit card being held for a man running a tab disappeared, was used to charge $1,200 worth of stuff at the South Bay Target, then reappeared at the bar a couple hours later.
Credit-card thieves don't normally bother to return the cards, C-6 Sgt. Det. Kenneth O'Brien told the Boston Licensing Board this morning. "It's all very perplexing," agreed Karen Simao, attorney for Stats owner Jim Statires - who said he's never seen anything like this in his ten years in business.
O'Brien said Target got a really good surveillance photo of the guy after he charged the merchandise - but that nobody at BPD recognizes the guy. "We're at a dead end right now," he said.
He added that Target doesn't know whether the guy presented the actual card or just lifted its numbers and used those, which might explain how the card showed back up at Stats - it might not have ever been physically removed from the bar, just lost there on a busy night when waitresses were holding dozens of cards for individual tabs during a charity fundraiser.
Statires said both he and Boston detectives reviewed video from the bar in general - and the particular waitress station where the card was stored - and didn't find anybody who looked like the guy in the Target video in the bar at all, and didn't see anybody who wasn't an employee rifling through the waitress station.
The owner of the card also testified at the board hearing on the incident and said it was only luck that he was even able to figure out what had happened: He decided to leave early and when the waitress couldn't find his card, a manager brought him downstairs to check his credit-card account online to see if his card had been used - which it had.
Had he stayed later, he said, the card might have reappeared and he wouldn't have realized his card had been used illicitly for several days, and by then might not have associated the theft with the bar.
The licensing board decides Thursday if the bar is at all responsible for the incident and, if so, whether to levy any sort of penalty.