A Staten Island bar owner stole $1.4 million from the clothing business he worked for to run his ostentatiously named watering hole and fund a lifestyle featuring brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Glenn Jakers, a co-owner of “The G.O.A.T.” bar in Dongan Hills, was siphoning money from Eric Javits Inc., a Queens apparel company where he worked as controller to fund the failed tavern, as well as pay personal expenses and buy luxury items, according to prosecutors in Queens.
The bar’s Richmond Road location has a colorful history, with a past incarnation of the pub featured on the reality show “Bar Rescue” a few years before taking on the “Greatest of all Time” moniker. The G.O.A.T. shut down in 2022 and has since changed hands, State Liquor Authority records show.
Jakers, 61, of Staten Island, was charged Monday with grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property and criminal possession of a forged instrument.
He worked as the apparel company’s controller from November 2014 through May 2020, drafting checks to vendors.
Starting in 2015, he began cutting checks to himself, prosecutors allege.
Investigators found at least 150 unauthorized payments, totaling nearly $1.4 million, either to his own accounts or to a business account tied to the bar.
He also transferred cash from the apparel company owner’s PayPal account to his own, and directed payroll funds to himself, prosecutors allege.
Jakers’ ill-gotten money went to steakhouse dinners, bought Apple, Louis Vuitton and Gucci products and more than $20,000 in purchases from ticket seller StubHub, prosecutors said. He spent roughly $32,700 at a liquor store and more than $37,600 on Amazon, prosecutors allege.
“This defendant is accused of lining his own pockets at the expense of a company operating in Queens,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement Wednesday. “We will not tolerate our businesses becoming targets of theft, whether at the retail level or by company employees.”
Jakers was ordered released without bail after his arraignment Monday. He did not immediately return a message seeking comment Wednesday.
The G.O.A.T., at 1674 Richmond Road, was once home to a dive bar named “Rhythm & Brews,” that got a reality TV facelift after being featured on Spike TV’s “Bar Rescue” in 2014.
The episode showed Rhythm & Brews falling on hard times because a so-called biker gang had started using it as a hangout, and the show’s crew helped its then-owners transform the place into a wine-focused restaurant called “5th and Vine.”
The Staten Island Advance chronicled what happened to the place after that — including when a 2016 visit by the city Health Department shuttered the joint.
In 2018, the new co-owners, Jakers and Chris Shaleesh, announced they were opening “The G.O.A.T. ”
Shaleesh described a colorful menu complete with a multi-hued “Unicorn Grilled Cheese” and a 1920s style beer tub on wheels, complete with “a mannequin with the logo ‘Make Staten Island great again’ on her two-piece bikini,” the Advance reported in 2018.
Shaleesh didn’t return a message seeking comment.
The G.O.A.T. closed down in 2022. The location is now home to a new bar, the Cypress Hall Social Haus, with new owners, the Advance reported.
