Owner of 'Buck Foston' Bar Wins $1.5 Million in Suit Over the Bar's Name

Baseball lovers know all too well that their is no love lost between fans of the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. The rivalry between the two teams and their fan bases runs about as deep as any sports rivalry; almost as bad as the Hatfield's and McCoy's (minus all the killing and serious violence of course).

So when a Yankees fan wanted to open a bar named 'Buck Foston' in New Brunswick where the mayor happened to be a Red Sox fan--trouble was soon to follow.

via Twitter

You would think that the city would have simply denied the bar a liquor license, but without a good reason to they couldn't (without inviting legal trouble). So it tried to put an end to the ill-named bar by dragging out the process of approving it for a liquor license--by about two years.

City officials claimed that the delay was the bar owner's fault, 61-year old Larry Blatterfein (a former IBM systems engineer). So in 2011 Blatterfein sued.

It took the court quite awhile to get to hearing the case and putting it to rest, but when it finally did last September it found that the City did violate Blatterfein's first amendment rights. He was awarded a cool $1.5 million.

Rather than drag this out any further with appeals the two finally settled out of court.

Here's the best part--good ole Larry moved to Florida while the whole mess was being litigated. So even though he never opened the bar it made him a pretty good penny.

[SWN]

Loading...