A veteran Brooklyn Paper photographer was berated and attacked outside a popular Montague Street restaurant as he took photos for a story about the restaurant’s closure for health code violations.
Tom Callan, who has shot for The Paper for two decades, was on the sidewalk in front of the just-shuttered Monty Q’s restaurant on Tuesday when a man came running out of the eatery and smacked him.
“This guy came out and started yelling,” said Callan. “I told him what I was doing was legal, but he started whacking me with papers that he was holding.”
Callan kept on shooting, and the man eventually ran back into the restaurant. Callan asked for his name, but the man ignored him.
Earlier in the day, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene shut down Monty Q’s for “critical health code violations, including cockroach infestation, a non-working refrigerator and food not kept at safe temperatures,” an agency source told The Brooklyn Paper.
This isn’t the first time Callan’s been roughed up in the line of duty. In 1998, boxer Mike Tyson attacked Callan for taking his picture at the Brooklyn Marriott. The disgraced former heavyweight champ didn’t even land his punch.
Callan was beat up in the late 1980s inside the Club Wildfire bar on Clark Street after taking pictures of the strip club’s famous interior — which was featured in the movie “The Godfather.” In that incident, Callan was beaten by bar employees with a baseball bat before crawling across the street to Clark Street Station, another bar, where 911 was called and an ambulance took him to the hospital.
Callan’s camera was destroyed in that incident, the only case were both he and his equipment suffered damages.
