Bart, I respect you as a mod here since this is one of my favorite forums, but I respectfully disagree with you here.
I am no longer a moderator here.
Bart, I was a landlord. You absolutely cannot lock a tenant out of the building if they have a signed lease for it. You have to evict them which is either 30 days from notice or else whatever is stipulated in the lease. Call a lawyer if you disagree, I've paid several thousand dollars to lawyers already to know this professionally.
I am a lawyer. In Texas even and I practice primarily in real property and look at around 100 leases a month or so. Whether or not HEB can do what they did depends on what the lease said and the exact contractual relationship that HEB has with TGS. I don't know enough
facts to say with any certainty whether HEB can or cannot do this in this case.
All I know is that they did and the sub-sub-lessee here (TGS) is looking for a new place to have a show rather than attempting to sue HEB or Austin Markets for breach of contract. So that suggests to me that he doesn't think he has a case - especially since violating a written contract is not a tough one to prove.
Again, the lessee, APD and ATF were acting outside any authority when they threatened to shut him down.
Except according to the APD Press Release, the APD PR Officer quoted in Nemerov's article, and the ATF Officer Reyes, quoted in Nemerov's article, they never threatened to shut down the gun show or required that their conditions be adopted.
If I pay someone else to kill someone with me, I was still responsible. That is what APD did with HEB to Boedeker and is why they are responsible. APD's claim to the contrary that they are not responsible for Texas Gun Shows being banned from the Crocket Center is a lie.
If that is what you want to say, then use words that mean that. That is all I was saying. Your previous sentence made no logical sense.
Bart, you did quote it and it's right here. I already quoted it. "Only licensed gun dealers are allowed to sell firearms at the gun shows" I can't make it any more clear than that.
Except that you keep neglecting the part where APD did not insist on that condition for the show to continue, HEB did. You claim that APD required this condition for the show to continue; but the APD Public Affairs guy says that they made no such condition and that HEB was the one to insist on it. The ATF guy says "HEB reminded Boedekker FFL sales was part of the original contract."
Since he would not abide by their "suggestion", APD was able to scare HEB into shutting down his show.
How did APD scare HEB into shutting the show down? Do you think APD just strong arms a local business like HEB whenever they want? This is a Texas based company employing 70,000 workers (more than a few of them high-caliber lawyers) with $13.5 billion in revenue. A company of that size and power can sell marijuana out of their pharmacy and it would be hard for the city to shut them down. So how did Austin PD manage to scare them into shutting down the show when it was 100% legal? Not just scare them into shutting down; but scare them into violating their contract and exposing themselves to civil liability if I am to believe some of the claims you have asserted in this thread?
The Nuisance Abatement team was involved. Depending on how Austin's municipal nuisance law is written, this might be one lever Austin PD could use. After all, the city of Dallas abused this law to the degree that they got smacked down in the state legislature for wielding it like a third-world banana republic. Of course, Dallas wasn't stupid enough to try those tactics on a corporation like HEB and primarily targeted small business owners who couldn't fight back.
However, my primary point is that your "narrative" lacks some important details - one of which being an explanation of how Austin PD and ATF managed to "scare" a $13 billion corporation with no evidence or legal basis for it.
To date, no one has shown one illegal thing Boedeker has done, but he has had his livelihood shut down based on suspicion where there is no statutory authority to do so by a gang of thugs operating outside the law.
I am going to skip nitpicking the rest of your blame-slinging on this and just assume that what you really want to do is correct the problem. From my perspective, we have several problems with the conflicting narratives here:
1.You allege that Boedeker has had his livelihood shut down by a "gang of thugs operating outside the law."
What we do know happened is that HEB cancelled his lease. So that seems like the logical place to start if we want to correct this - if there is no legal basis for that cancellation and Boedekker has suffered damages as a result, he needs to recover those damages from HEB.
If there was a legal basis for HEB to cancel that contract, then about all we can do is hold HEB responsible for its corporate practices and complain to HEB.
2. You allege that HEB did this because Austin PD and ATF scared them into it, even though there is no legal basis for it.
This is problematic; because as a general rule, a local PD that tries to strong-arm a $13.5 billion corporation providing 70,000 jobs (including a good number in Austin) had better have a sound legal basis or it is going to get lawyer-piled. So if your charges are true, we should all be concerned because if they can muscle a $13.5 billion corporation with no legal basis, then you and I are screwed.
However, the evidence for this unlikely piece of the story is pretty thin. The only one making that claim is Boedeker and he doesn't offer any actual facts in support of that claim other than these parties were present at the meeting.
If you want to have any kind of traction as far as making Austin PD or ATF be held responsible for TGS losing its show, then you need to figure out what leverage they used and how - because without that information, you don't have any credible way to make this a story about Austin PD and ATF rather than HEB and TGS.
ETA: One other thing about this case - if the "public" narrative becomes "<villain of choice here> is trying to prevent firearms from being sold without background checks" then not only will nothing improve about this issue, you can actually do harm to RKBA. I get the feeling that ABC in Austin did not run with this story because they thought Boedeker was sympathetic. I think they thought it would be a great case of giving people they disliked (gun show promoters) enough rope to hang themselves. There are other good narratives here that do help us "Evil corporation/city council/cops/ATF crushes legal business because of bigotry" for example; but we better make sure we can control that narrative before we make a big issue of it.
