Fight Club-Inspired 17 Year-Old Starbucks Bomber Suckerpunched In Jail
Cops busted the teenage punk behind a Fight Club-aping Upper East Side Starbucks bombing that was like a bad issue of Adbusters come to life. Well, happy endings: he got what he wanted in prison: punched. Also, Starbucks and booze?
17 year-old Kyle Shaw bragged to his friends about detonating a device that took out a few windows and some benches at said UES Starbucks in lieu of beginning some sort of Project Mayhem, a terrorist group depicted in Fight Club. The cops busted him, he got taken to the hoosgow, and sent home to house arrest on a $100,000 bail. But not before someone tried to see how legit he was about this whole Fight Club thing. In essence: the kid got socked.
The 17-year-old said he was using a jailhouse phone when a fellow inmate asked if he was in "the program" — a real-life "Fight Club" at Rikers.
The menacing query was quickly followed by a punch to the teen's face.
Emphasis mine. It's not reported whether or not said punch was retribution for violating the First Two Rules of Fight Club, but neither was the punch, apparently: as of his showing up to court, he hadn't reported the punch to authorities, so maybe he learned the first two rules!
Then again, it could've been an overzealous Starbucks employee jacked up on the sauce! They might start serving it in locations around the country, and they're testing out the new program in Seattle next week.
Starbucks is trying to brew up new business by offering bottled beer and glasses of wine at one of its Seattle stores next week — with a view toward expanding its version of European-style coffeehouses to other cities. The 16,000-store chain hopes to offer a more traditional coffeehouse, with live music and poetry readings and espresso made from a manual machine rather than an automated one. It would also offer bottled beer and glasses of wine for $4 to $7.
Maybe he was a lab rat? It's a long-shot (read: zero possibility, though, we wish) but either way, the kid doesn't have to worry about the legacy of Project Mayhem moving forward. If Starbucks ends up with their diabolical plan to infect America with booze-shilling, live-performance-having, European-esque coffeehouses that can spice up a Frappichino to go with that open mic, Mayhem will run awesomely, absolutely wild.