The giant East Williamsburg venue that spent last year trying to convince the city it had cleaned up its act, the old Brooklyn Mirage, reopened this month as Pacha. To run security at the door, it hired a man the state attorney general’s office says ran a pattern of illegal stops and searches. According to data compiled by 50-a.org, every single one of his substantiated cases was against a Black person.
His name is Henry Daverin, and Pacha’s director of security is the job he holds now. According to the Brooklyn Paper, Daverin racked up 18 substantiated allegations of misconduct over a 14-year NYPD career, was named in 21 lawsuits that cost the city more than $1.5 million in settlements, and retired in 2022.
In 2024 the NYPD itself referred Daverin to the state Attorney General’s Law Enforcement Misconduct Investigative Office, which concluded that he “engaged in a pattern of illegal stops, searches and arrests,” was “frequently discourteous to members of the public,” and in one incident used excessive force, per the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The 50-a.org data shows every one of his substantiated misconduct incidents was against a Black person.
That record is now at the front door of a venue that draws thousands of people on a weekend, in a heavily policed, rapidly gentrifying corner of Brooklyn. The head of security is the person who decides who looks suspicious, who gets stopped, whose bag gets searched, who gets turned away. Pacha handed that judgment to someone the state found could not be trusted with it in uniform.
Local Council Member Jennifer Gutierrez said she was “troubled by these reports regarding the new head of security’s history of CCRB complaints and lawsuits.” A misconduct record that ends a police career does not end a security career. It moves from the precinct to the club.
Pacha is open now, and Daverin is on the job. If you have an experience at the door to report, the venue and Council Member Gutierrez’s district office are the two places that can actually do something with it, and a documented complaint carries more weight than a story told the next morning.
Featured image: image posted by the 100th Precinct
