Red Mill - changing hands?

Peg & Ted's Red Mill appears to be changing hands. Or, at the least, the name is changing, which doesn't necessarily mean that the ownership or management is changing.

What's the Red Mill? It's a bar at 1040 Lake Avenue in Woodstock.

It's newsworthy for several reasons, number one being that it's what I would call a "cop bar." A "cop bar" is where cops hang out and "things" happen that never get reported to the police - officially. A few examples ...

In January 2007 a McHenry County Sheriff's Department sergeant had a birthday party at the Red Mill. One sergeant got so drunk he could not walk unassisted to a vehicle. His girlfriend was not so drunk, and she drove. They were followed by two other deputies, who also had been drinking. When the first car weaved off North Seminary onto an embankment and back onto the roadway, the driver of the second car flashed the headlights until the first car stopped and told the woman driver she could not proceed. (This was not a traffic stop; just one friend stopping another.) The sergeant became belligerent and pushed down one of the occupants of the second car, also a deputy. That deputy reportedly was prevented from calling Woodstock Police.

It all got covered over. When I received a call about it, I went to the Woodstock PD chief about it; he'd never heard about it. He sent a detective to MCSD, who came back empty-handed. No reports, no arrests. Did someone at MCSD lie to the WPD detective? Three supervisors at MCSD got 30-day suspensions - all handled quietly and out of the public view.

Then, in September 2009, after Sheriff Keith Nygren attempted to intimidate me in the Jewel-Osco parking lot by pulling in alongside my car in a distant area of the parking lot, he apparently told a Northwest Herald reporter that he had seen my car in the Post Office parking lot and in the Red Mill parking lot, as if I had been following him. The reporter was generous to Keith in his story and did not mention the Red Mill by name, just calling it "a restaurant." But the reporter had told me it was the Red Mill. And I told him that my car - the red Beetle - had never been in the Red Mill parking lot. Not even once!

OK, yesterday it was, in case anyone is keeping score. For about 60 seconds, while I photographed the new temporary sign above. And I have no idea whether Keith was there at that time.