This may start to sound a little bit familiar.
It this week’s viral video we find a shirtless man rampaging against the tables, chairs and umbrellas occupying a local restaurant’s outdoor patio.
He doesn’t simply overturn the tables and chairs, he attacks them the way an enraged bull attacks a toreador.
Here he is flipping a table, umbrella and all. Here he is, picking up a chair by the leg and flinging it across the patio.
He paces and kicks at anything in his path. More tables are flipped and more chairs flung. The patio, awash in the warm glow of about four dozen lanterns, becomes the scene of slow-motion carnage as the shirtless man stops from one corner of the patio to another, taking out his secret wrath on furniture that had been so lovingly arranged during business hours.
After two minutes, the vandal pauses to light a smoke. He inhales deeply, looking over the carnage he has wrought before stumbling away.
A short time later, he arrived at another local business, where more mayhem was reported.
The video in which 50-year-old Stephen Tardif is seen rearranging the patio furniture was shot at Legends Sports Bar and Grill, which earlier in the month was the scene of one of the more daring dine-and-dashes in city history.
When Devin Skehan chow hounded his way through the finer restaurants in the Twin Cities, it became a sordid saga in which a serial restaurant dinner thief was revealed. Local business owners celebrated the arrest of Skehan because a common disruption had been eradicated.
But at Legends — and at other local businesses including restaurants, variety stores and beer shops — Stephen Tardif was a different kettle of fish entirely.
For as long as anybody can remember, Tardif has been causing trouble at Legends, mostly in the off hours, but not always. In one case a short time ago, he was reported to be spitting on the restaurant windows while diners ate inside. In another, Tardif was said to have spit directly on a guest.
When Legends owner Melinda Small posted her latest video of Tardif blowing through her restaurant, other business owners began to pipe in. So did a whole bunch of ordinary people who had encountered him raising one form of trouble or another in a variety of places.
For days, there were no end to reports of the man’s unique kind of disturbances all over the city. Tardif had been causing trouble practically everywhere that commerce is done around these parts and yet there he was, still stumbling the streets a free man.
“Why don’t they arrest him?” many people cried, and the answer was soon forthcoming.
Oh, police arrest Stephen Tardif, all right.
In the past two years, Tardif has been arrested roughly 50 times in Lewiston alone, mainly on charges like disorderly conduct, criminal mischief, burglary and trespassing, to name just a few.
Tardif also gets arrested quite a lot on a particular charge that has become a kind of working joke among people who crunch numbers coming out of the county jail: namely, violating conditions of release.
Most of you know how this works. When somebody like Tardif is arrested, he is taken to the jail for a short time, but then released on the promise that he will commit no further crimes.
However, since the start of this year alone, Tardif has been arrested 18 times, including more than a dozen counts of violating conditions of release.
Many have complained, in public forums and elsewhere, about the courts releasing repeat offenders too quickly no matter how many times those suspects are arrested. The district attorney, who has attended some of those forums, has explained that his office is badly understaffed: There are not enough prosecutors to keep up with current case loads.
The violating conditions system is one way for the courts to keep inmates from piling up at the jail, but many see that system as dangerously flawed. They point out that getting someone like Stephen Tardif to agree to a bunch of conditions has historically not worked at all.
Over and over again, people like Melinda Small have to clean up after Tardif at the business she’s worked so hard to build. She can call the police every time it happens. She can file complaints and scream into the abyss.
“What would you all do if this was your home, your patio area?” Small wrote on Facebook. “And you hear, we are sorry, you can file a complaint and go to court. Yet, he’s done it 100s of times, you’ll be wasting your time and energy. What would you do?”
Over the past couple weeks, Small’s been enlisting the help of everyone she can to take on the matter of repeat offenders targeting businesses.
She called the mayor. She called her local representatives. She’s called the district attorney’s office and anyone else she can think of who might see what she sees: an absolute menace to society who is set free so regularly, he might as well have a revolving door named after him at the county lockup.
In response, Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline, himself, got in touch with the district attorney, the police department, the Androscoggin County Sheriff and anyone he could think of that might be able to help.
“Situations like this are extremely frustrating for business owners and cause harm in a variety of ways,” said Sheline. “I really appreciate the excellent response from the Lewiston Police Department, the DA’s office, and the Sheriff’s Department regarding this case.”
The group effort paid off. The next time Tardif was arrested — reportedly while raising hell in the area of Marden’s on Main Street in Lewiston on July 12 — the revolving door was nailed shut at last. Instead of being released, Tardif was ordered held at the Androscoggin County Jail in Auburn on $260 bail.
So far, that $260 bail has been enough to keep Tardif locked down and the people who run restaurants and stores around the city say they are breathing a little easier.
To the local business community, it felt like one small victory.
But of course, as it was with the now infamous dine-and-dasher from a couple weeks ago, the story doesn’t end with a single arrest.
It doesn’t end with Melinda Small and a bunch of other restaurant owners doing wild victory dances on their tabletops, either.
Small, for one, doesn’t simply want Tardif locked away in the deepest, darkest cell, the key thrown away forever. She would like this to be a catalyst for something better. Maybe, she reckons, getting locked up with actual bail keeping him inside might serve as a wake-up call for Tardif, and an encouragement to change his ways.
You know who hopes this as well?
Tardif’s family. According to his sister Linda, Tardif suffers from mental health issues and has been destructive his whole life. While the public is fairly new to the trouble the man presents, his sister has been dealing with it for decades.
Family interventions haven’t helped. Pleas from the people who love Tardif have gone nowhere, and now Linda finds herself reading about her brother’s exploits every time she opens Facebook.
“I just want to reiterate that no one in the family enables him to do these drugs or alcohol,” she says. “We do not give him any money as we know what he would spend it on.
“We have all had multiple discussions with him advising him that he needs help for his mental illness,” Linda says, “however he will not listen as he feels he is not the problem. He needs to be in jail without bail long enough to be given the necessary medications he needs to rehabilitate him.”
As part of her appeal to help her brother, Linda sent City Councilor Susan Longchamps — a business owner herself who has stepped up to help with the matter — a full history of what the family has been dealing with.
And just like that, there were suddenly, not just one or two people working to unravel the troublesome knot that is Stephen Tardif, but many.
Just like that, instead of calling for his head, people were actually pulling for Tardif and honestly hoping for him to get well.
You’ve got to admit: as twists go, that’s a pretty good one.
But as Tardif weighs his choices, he should keep one thing in mind: the local business community seems to have lost its taste for staying silent and for looking the other way when troublemakers run amok.
The local business community, it seems, has decided to stand up for itself.
