The Wine Bar Clause

Judge Kathleen Galen signed a contract with her own city promising she would never do one specific thing with a liquor license. As a sitting judge, she did it anyway. The Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission admonished her quietly. The attorney who represented her in the fallout now sits as her courthouse magistrate, and her re-election committee has told the state for six straight years that it does not expect to spend more than a thousand dollars.

A Restaurant, a Contract, and a Signature

Cork Wine Pub opened in Pleasant Ridge in November 2010, at 23810 Woodward Avenue, on the strength of a Class C liquor license issued from the city’s own quota. By January 2013, the license belonged to Detroit Celtic Entertainment, Inc., a Michigan corporation with two shareholders. Meredith Marie Walsh held 50 percent and served as president. Kathleen G. Galen held the other 50 percent and served as vice president. The real estate itself, at the same Woodward Avenue address, was owned separately by Walsh Realty Investments, LLC, controlled by Walsh’s sister, Kelley Walsh.

On January 17, 2013, Meredith Walsh and Kathleen Galen each signed an Operation Agreement with the City of Pleasant Ridge, in their own names and as officers of Detroit Celtic Entertainment. The agreement was the price of the city’s approval to transfer the license to their corporation. It laid out hours, parking, entertainment restrictions, and one provision that would matter a great deal later: what the corporation was required to do with the license if the restaurant ever stopped operating.

Galen did not sign this agreement as a passive investor and walk away. A December 2013 letter to the city requesting expanded hours carries her own signature, over the title “Kathleen G. Galen, Vice-President, Detroit Celtic Entertainment, Inc., dba Cork Wine Pub.” She was an active operator of a liquor licensed business in a city outside the district where she would later sit as judge.

The Clause Galen Broke

Section 6 of the Operation Agreement is direct. If the restaurant ceased operating for more than 30 consecutive days, the corporation was barred from placing the license in escrow with the Michigan Liquor Control Commission. Instead, it had to surrender its rights to the license and request that the license return to the city’s available quota. The only exception was a declared emergency, such as a fire or weather event, and even then escrow was capped at 120 days before the corporation had to request cancellation. Section 7 repeated the same prohibition for any circumstance in which the corporation no longer needed or could use the license. The word used throughout the agreement is not a suggestion. It is “shall.”

Cork stopped operating. The two accounts of exactly when differ by roughly a year, landlord Kelley Walsh has said the business had been closed since March 2019, while the city’s own outside counsel wrote in 2022 that it had not operated since 2020, but neither account disputes that the closure ran well past the 30 day threshold the contract set. At some point after that, Kathleen Galen placed the Cork Wine Pub liquor licenses in escrow with the MLCC. That act was the precise thing Section 6 told her, in her own signature, she could not do.

What the City’s Own Lawyer Found

By the summer of 2022, Kelley Walsh had reached her limit. As landlord and the business’s main financial backer, she had personally loaned Detroit Celtic operating funds and held a promissory note from the corporation. No payments were made on that note or on the lease. Walsh Realty issued a termination notice in 2018. With the license sitting in escrow rather than returned to the city as the contract required, Walsh could not put a new tenant into the building or resolve the license’s status. She asked the City of Pleasant Ridge to intervene.

The city’s outside counsel, Gregory K. Need of Adkison, Need, Allen & Rentrop, laid out what his office knew in a July 6, 2022 letter to the City Commission. Galen, he wrote, “has not responded to any of the communications from Kelley Walsh, her sister, or attorneys representing the Walshes.” He noted that Galen had placed the license in escrow “notwithstanding” the Operation Agreement’s express prohibition. And he disclosed something else: about a year earlier, in 2021, his own law partner, Kelly Allen, had represented Kelley Walsh in the dispute and corresponded directly with an attorney representing Galen. That attorney was Mark Makoski. No resolution was reached, and the matter went quiet until Walsh escalated it to the city in 2022.

Need laid out three options for the Commission on the July 12, 2022 agenda: do nothing and let the parties litigate it themselves, have his office try to broker a resolution with Galen directly, or declare Detroit Celtic in default of the Operation Agreement and ask the MLCC to remove the license from escrow. The public record does not show which option the Commission chose, or whether the license was ever returned.

The Confidential Match

Michigan does not publish the names of judges who receive a Judicial Tenure Commission admonition. What it does publish is a description of the underlying conduct, stripped of identifying detail, in the Commission’s Annual Report. The 2024 Annual Report describes a matter that lines up with the Cork Wine Pub facts on every point that can be checked: a sitting judge who operated a liquor licensed business outside the county where she presides, who placed the license in escrow in violation of a binding agreement with the municipality, and who remained a corporate officer of the business after taking the bench, in tension with the Code of Judicial Conduct’s limits on judges holding outside corporate office. The matter was resolved through a confidential admonition, conditioned on the judge relinquishing her corporate role and disposing of the license.

Every element of that description has a paper trail sitting in a Pleasant Ridge City Commission packet: the corporate office, the escrow, the city outside the district, the agreement that barred exactly what happened. Clutch Justice is not asserting that the JTC named Galen. The Commission’s own confidentiality rules make that impossible to state directly. What can be stated is that an independently documented, publicly available fact pattern from Galen’s own business dealings matches the anonymized description in the Commission’s own report point for point, and that no alternative candidate has surfaced in years of the Commission’s reporting that fits as cleanly.

The Magistrate Who Represented Her

Mark Makoski is not a bystander to this record. The city’s own outside counsel identified him, in writing, as the attorney representing Kathleen Galen in the Cork Wine Pub dispute in 2021, corresponding directly with opposing counsel on her behalf. Makoski now serves as magistrate in the 38th District Court, the court where Galen sits as judge. And a recent campaign mailer for Galen’s re-election lists its paid-for-by address as 28479 Hoover Road, Warren, Michigan, the same address independently tied to both Galen’s own pre-bench law practice and to Makoski’s pre-bench practice in State Bar and public directory records.

None of this alone proves coordination beyond what the documents show. What it shows, without inference, is a closed professional loop: the lawyer who fought her landlord on her behalf is now an officer of her court, and her campaign for re-election to that court is registered at an address tied to both of them.

A Committee on Waiver

Michigan allows a candidate committee to file for a reporting waiver if it does not expect to raise or spend more than 1,000 dollars for an election, exempting it from the itemized campaign statements every other committee must file. Kathleen Galen’s committee, ID 519668, formed April 24, 2020. Its reporting waiver was granted December 16, 2020, and Michigan’s own Bureau of Elections lists that waiver as active today, with the committee still listed as active as well.

A waiver certifies an expectation, not a fact checked at the time it is filed, and Michigan’s own guidance says a committee that exceeds the 1,000 dollar threshold is expected to resume detailed filing. A printed, full-color campaign mailer, the kind distributed under the “Committee to Re-Elect Kathleen G. Galen” line and mailed to Eastpointe voters ahead of the November 2026 election, is not free to design or print. Whether that spending is consistent with a five-year-old certification that the committee does not expect to cross 1,000 dollars in an election is a question the public record raises and does not answer. It is the kind of question the Bureau of Elections, not a news outlet, is positioned to resolve, and it deserves to be asked directly rather than assumed.

Why This Matters Now

Kathleen Galen is on the November 3, 2026 ballot for re-election to the 38th District Court, opposed by Richard Goodman. Goodman has separately filed complaints with the Judicial Tenure Commission and the Attorney Grievance Commission alleging that Galen and her brother, attorney James L. Galen Jr., used months of litigation to try to remove him from the ballot over a residency challenge that a Court of Claims judge dismissed with prejudice on August 31, 2026. Those complaints are pending and confidential, and this piece does not rely on them for anything stated above. The Cork Wine Pub record stands on its own, built entirely from a Pleasant Ridge city commission packet, a state licensing agreement carrying Galen’s own signature, and Michigan’s own campaign finance database.

What the two matters share is a pattern worth naming plainly. A judge who signs a binding agreement and later breaks it as a sitting officer of the court. A confidential discipline system that keeps her name out of the public record while leaving the underlying facts traceable to anyone willing to read a city commission packet. A campaign apparatus, from the attorney representing her personal disputes to the address on her own literature, that keeps circling back to the same small set of people. Process is not a technicality. It is the only thing standing between a judge and the public accountability the office is supposed to answer to.