How do you spell trouble? Try Suite Ultralounge.

City officials have been trying to close this so-called "bottle club" -- a night spot where patrons bring their own booze rather than purchase it on the premises -- for more than a year. Over the last two years the club in the basement of Mount Vernon's Belvedere Hotel has been linked to a string of shootings, assaults and other crimes in the area that have terrorized neighborhood residents and led to calls for the city liquor board to yank its license. But so far a loophole in the state liquor law has allowed the club's owners to avoid cleaning up their act through endless delays in court.

Now city police commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III wants to padlock Suite Ultralounge under the city's public nuisance law. Police used the law last year to shutter a North Avenue liquor store that had become a magnet for crime and the scene of a fatal shooting, and earlier this year the department again used it to compel an East Oliver Street bar called Shirley's Honey Hole to install video cameras with a direct feed into police headquarters so authorities could keep an eye on suspected drug dealing there. (Officials later thought better of the direct feed to police HQ, but the cameras stayed.)

We hope Mr. Bealefeld succeeds in padlocking Suite Ultralounge. But if that fails, police must at a minimum require video monitoring of the establishment and its patrons. If patrons know they are being watched they may be less likely to make trouble, inside or outside the club. As things now stand, the club is a continuing menace to public safety and someone shouldn't have to be killed or seriously injured there before authorities can take action against it.