How do you catch fake IDs as a bouncer?

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with former bouncer Rick Rosner, who worked the doors of bars from 1980 to 2005 and intercepted roughly 6,000 fake IDs. Rosner describes how bar culture shifted from cheap drinks and in-person hookups in Boulder and Los Angeles to today’s online social scene. He explains how changes to U.S. drinking-age law reshaped access, and how his job required vigilance not only to stop underage drinking but to protect young women with limited experience discerning predatory behavior. Rosner recounts chaotic nights catching dozens of fake IDs and navigating tensions between nightlife and neighborhood norms.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you catch fake IDs as a bouncer?

Rick Rosner: I worked the door at bars from 1980 to about 2005, and I caught around 6,000 fake IDs.

The bar business has changed, and IDs have changed, as has the reason people go to bars. In the eighties, bars were where everyone went to try to hook up.

Alcohol was cheap. During happy hour, if they had two-fers, you could buy two bottles of beer in Boulder, Colorado for a dollar. Sometimes they had four-fers where you could get four drinks for the price of one with well vodka. You might be able to buy four cranberry-and-vodkas for two or three dollars.

Now a single artisanal cocktail might cost you $19 in Los Angeles.

People generally do not go to bars to try to get laid anymore. Some people still go to clubs, but most hooking up now happens online. Back then, bars — at least the ones I worked in — were more crowded than most bars are now. I worked in a beer garden called Anthony’s Gardens at the Hilton Harvest House in Boulder.

It was a five-acre beer garden with several bars set up both outside in the garden and inside the building. On a Friday afternoon in the summer, 2,000 people would come to get drunk, hit on each other, and sometimes do cocaine. There was a lot of cocaine. On football Saturdays, when there was a game at Folsom Field, the University of Colorado’s football stadium in Boulder, we would have around 10,000 people spilling into the garden when the game ended.

Colorado cared about underage people getting served; you could get in real trouble. Other states were more lenient. New York City, for example, has always seemed relatively easy for underage people compared to many other places in America.

But Colorado was reasonably strict. Los Angeles, where I did most of my door work, was especially strict, particularly because of one bar I worked at — Mom’s Saloon — which was in a wealthy neighborhood in Brentwood, Los Angeles, across the street from Mezzaluna Trattoria, the San Vicente Boulevard restaurant where Nicole Brown Simpson often dined and where her friend Ron Goldman worked as a waiter. They were both there on the night of June 12, 1994, before they were murdered outside her nearby home. The neighborhood hated having a semi-dive bar nearby where people could dance, and they were constantly trying to get it shut down. Undercover cops would come in and try to catch underage drinkers.

We had to be extremely conscientious. Catching fake IDs was my favorite part of working the door. At the bars where I worked, maybe one person in ninety was trying to get in with a fake ID. On a busy night in a bar that held a couple hundred people, like Mom’s Saloon, I might catch five fake IDs — sometimes more. Once, we were called in as a substitute security crew for a bar near Pepperdine after the entire security staff walked out in a mutiny. They called in a bunch of people from the Sagebrush Canteen to cover for the night. Apparently that bar had been letting in a huge number of Pepperdine students with terrible IDs, because I caught thirty-eight fake IDs that night. I think that was my all-time record for a single shift. It was chaos; all these people — maybe ten percent of the crowd — were trying to get in with fake IDs.

Rosner: Their customers suddenly were getting turned away. There is a clear reason you do not want to let underage people into bars. The most immediate reason is that you do not want them getting drunk and driving or doing something dangerous. The assumption is that younger people are more likely to make reckless decisions.

In the 1980s and earlier, some states in the United States served 3.2% beer to people 18 and older while reserving full-strength alcohol for those 21 and over. Colorado was one of those states. I started working in a beer bar where you only had to be 18.

But in the mid-1980s, President Reagan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which pressured every state to raise the drinking age to 21 by threatening to withhold federal highway funds. As a result, the entire country shifted to a drinking age of 21, and it has remained that way ever since.

The logic was that you do not want a 16-year-old to be drunk, because they will do reckless things compared to a 21-year-old. But I think something even more important than the drinking is that an underage girl cannot tell who the dangerous people are in a bar. A 19-year-old girl who is excited about being in a bar might get picked up by a complete loser who could be dangerous.

We have talked about this before. The beer garden I worked in was enormous — five acres, which is about 200,000 square feet — with a perimeter close to a quarter of a mile. People figured out ways to sneak in. We caught a lot of fake IDs at the entrances, but people also found ways around the edges.

I would walk through the bar, and I knew who the creeps were — the guys who never went home with anyone night after night. They radiated a kind of unpleasant energy. But every once in a while I would see two or three of them clustered together, and I knew that at the center of that group would be an underage girl. She lacked the protection or discernment to recognize creeps. She would be happy to be talking to these guys who might look acceptable on the surface if you were inexperienced — like the guy who showed up in the same shirt every night: a shirt with a laced leather front, showing off his chest.

It looked unusual even then — this was decades before Game of Thrones — and it was especially creepy once you realized that was his only “going out” shirt. That guy and a few others could not talk to women over 21, because someone with more experience could quickly tell something was off. But a 19-year-old would not necessarily see that yet.

So I would find the young woman at the center of the cluster, check her ID, and often kick her out. Sometimes she did not have ID at all, and sometimes she would show me something fake.

You see the problem now.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

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