The trouble at Morna Lounge in New Bedford started not long after it opened.
The Acushnet Avenue property, once home to Tilia’s Cafe, became Morna Lounge and Grill in March 2021. When owner Mateus Barbosa appeared before the city’s licensing board months earlier, he said he wanted to attract an older crowd, and, attempting to stem concern, said the live entertainment he offered would not be aimed at young people.
It was one of what was to become many appearances before the board, some of which led to sanctions.
Just four months after the lounge opened, Barbosa was called before the board, which had received reports from city police of increased calls to the bar. Those calls included reports of overcrowding, overserved patrons and multiple fights, including one where a gun was recovered.
The Licensing Board — which had expressed fears about live entertainment at the bar leading to a recurrence of issues along Acushnet Avenue — was unhappy.
“I didn’t expect to see you here this quickly,” then-Chair Stephen Beauregard told Barbosa, according to publicly available meeting minutes. “We’re not happy with the way things are going at your establishment.”
Reached by phone, Beauregard and Barbosa both declined to comment.
At that July 2021 meeting, Barbosa pointed the finger at the owner of a neighboring business, who he claimed was the source of many of the calls to police. But Beauregard was having none of it.
“We have concrete information in front of us … of being open after hours … fights taking place … calls for service to your establishment … I don’t want to hear the nonsense,” he said, records show.
Barbosa pledged to change, telling Beauregard and the rest of the board he was committed to keeping the lounge out of trouble.
“I’m willing to do whatever we can to work closer with the police and make it better,” he told the board.
Beauregard closed the July meeting with a warning for Barbosa: “We’re not going to tolerate it …we’ve worked too hard to clean up Acushnet Avenue.”
‘The Ave’
New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell called Acushnet Avenue a “physical manifestation of New Bedford’s melting pot.” The commercial stretch commonly known as “The Ave” on the North End of the South Coast city is lined with Guatemalan, Puerto Rican and Portuguese businesses.
When Barbosa opened Morna Lounge he told The Standard-Times he wanted to bring the food and music of his home, Cape Verde, to the city. The lounge has a dining area at the front of the building with a bar and another bar, stage and dance floor at the back of the building.
“The Ave” has been a “place where people have seized the opportunities of America,” Mitchell said. There, the city has invested in redevelopment. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office pointed to improvements such as “public art, creative placemaking and rehabilitating vacant spaces in the commercial corridor.”
Now in the wake of a shooting inside the lounge that left one man dead and two women injured, city officials have been forced to take drastic action — shutting down Morna Lounge until further notice due to what Police Chief Paul Oliveira called a “history of prior incidents.”
Oliveira noted that Barbosa had been called before the licensing board five times since Morna opened.
License violations
Less than six months after the July meeting where Barbosa pledged there would be no further violations at Morna, he was back before the Licensing Board. The board called the hearing after police in October 2021 found one of the lounge’s bartenders, who appeared to be intoxicated, parked in a running car across the street from the restaurant around 2:45 a.m.
The bartender, who was the operator and owner of the vehicle, said she and her passenger were at Morna Lounge drinking. The passenger, who also appeared intoxicated, did not have a driver’s license but gave police her name and confirmed she was 20 years old. The bartender agreed she should not drive and said the pair had been sitting in the car smoking after the bar closed.
Asked how the passenger was served alcohol, the bartender blurted out, “Well, I’m not giving you any more free shots!” records show.
Barbosa told the board the bartender hadn’t been working that night but came by the bar to say hello to the staff after returning from vacation. He said he had private security at each door to prevent underage patrons, had implemented a dress code and began charging a cover fee to try and prevent trouble.
“He maintains that the passenger in the car was not in the bar or getting served,” according to meeting minutes.
In the wake of that incident, the board voted to place Morna Lounge on probation for a year and mandate all its employees receive TIPS alcohol training.
Four months later, Barbosa was back before the licensing board after a reported stabbing outside the bar around 1 a.m. on March 27, 2022. The city’s police department seized the lounge’s liquor license in the wake of the stabbing.
At an April 6, 2022 hearing, the board handed down a 10-day suspension of the lounge’s license, with four days served and six days to be held in abeyance for a year as long as no other violations occurred. The board also reissued a year-long probation and rolled back the lounge’s closing to midnight, with last call at 11:30 p.m., for a year, with six months to be served and another six months held in abeyance. The board also barred all live entertainment for a year.
“The Licensing Board is especially troubled about this event because you failed to heed the Board’s earlier warnings,” meeting minutes read. “By failing to maintain a safe premise, you have placed your license, which was on probation, at risk.”
Then, less than three weeks later, an attorney for Barbosa asked the board to modify its decision, saying he was willing to cooperate and make changes. Barbosa vowed to stop bringing in a DJ or other entertainment for the front area of the lounge and try to recruit only traditional Cape Verdean customers. He once again vowed to try and dissuade the “younger crowd” from coming to the lounge late at night.
“He sees his business as a niche, traditional Cape Verdean restaurant and that is his goal,” the attorney, Dana Sargent, wrote. “The closest similar restaurants are in Pawtucket, Boston and Brockton; therefore, his restaurant is a destination that people will travel to attend.”
Chief among Barbosa’s requests was being able to once again provide live music, without which, Sargent said, he feared his business would go under.
The board ultimately voted to extend the lounge’s hours an hour, with last call at 12:30 a.m. and closure at 1 a.m. That decrease was to be effective for three months, with nine months held in abeyance for a year. Members also barred Barbosa from providing a DJ or live entertainment on the lounge side of the property.
Morna does not appear on meeting agendas or minutes for the board again for several months.
Then, on Nov. 5, 2023, police were called to the bar for a report of a disturbance around 1:21 a.m. When an officer arrived, he found a large crowd of more than 50 people and a man lying on the ground, unconscious, outside the doorway.
“At no point did it appear that the Morna Security Team was able to effectively maintain patrons from entering and exiting the establishment, which also made securing the area for medical treatment challenging,” meeting minutes for the November meeting read, quoting a police report.
Most of the crowd gathered outside appeared to be “highly intoxicated” and did not follow officers’ directives to clear the area. Police saw one patron leaving with a glass bottle of Bud Light.
The report says disturbances at the lounge have been an ongoing issue, with disturbances reported in March, April, May, August and September of that year. The reports include individuals outside the bar with open containers of alcohol, loud music and a crowd gathered after hours.
Board members voted to send a letter calling Barbosa before them the next month. No record of the December 2023 meeting is available.
The next instance of Morna appearing on Licensing Board records came in November 2024, when it was one of several establishments listed as having violated their license. The violation at Morna took place Aug. 4 around 1:36 a.m., the minutes show.
Fatal shootings
On Aug. 4, 44-year-old Aaron Britto was found shot behind the lounge around 1:35 a.m. He was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Prosecutors have charged 19-year-old Anthony Jalo with Britto’s murder. On the night of the killing, Britto was kicked out of the lounge for smoking marijuana but later seen “ranting and rapping” outside, where a large group had gathered, according to a statement of facts filed in New Bedford District Court.
Jalo and another man, Ruben Lima, are accused of luring Britto behind the bar near the Harmony House on Earle Street, where Jalo shot Britto twice and later stole his chain necklace.
Less than six months later, violence erupted around Morna Lounge again.
Prosecutors say 19-year-old Danielson Varela opened fire inside the lounge around 1:21 a.m. on Jan. 11, killing 27-year-old Cristiano Macedo of New Bedford, and wounding two women, including a 19-year-old. Court records in Varela’s case are sealed.
In a letter informing Barbedo his business had been shut down, Oliveira blasted him for allowing the 19-year-old inside the bar that night.
“Despite his age, your ‘security’ admitted him on two separate occasions that night,” Oliveira wrote.
Darling, the spokesperson, said Mitchell and Oliveira want the Licensing Board to take a “thorough look” at Morna Lounge and “any others with a documented pattern of troubling incidents.”
No such meeting has been scheduled.
