AT FIRST THE MERCHANTS WERE RELUCTANT TO TRUST BARBARA AND ME. THEY DIDN’T WANT THEIR NAMES, STORE LOCATIONS, OR FACES PRINTED in the newspaper. They were scared of retaliation. They were willing to eat the loss, chalking up the cop robberies as a Philly street tax.
But little by little, as the merchants realized they weren’t alone, the tide shifted. Every time Barbara got another merchant on board, she euphorically zipped through the newsroom looking for me, even hunting me down in the bathroom. She looked under each stall until she spotted my kid-size sneakers.
“Wendy, I just got another one!” Barbara whooped.
We’d have entire strategy meetings in the bathroom with Barbara yelling ideas at me over the stall door.
I decided to try to circle around to Samir, the Jordanian smoke shop owner who was a no-show at his lawyer’s office. I knew his name and the location of his store, and I thought maybe I could persuade him to add his voice to our story.
I found Samir’s son, Moe, at the store, and he agreed to meet me with his dad at his house later that day. Just from a brief conversation with Moe, I could tell the father and son were close and Moe was protective of his father.
That night Samir greeted me at the door, where I slipped off my sneakers before entering the living room. As soon as I sat down, his wife served me homemade Middle Eastern sweets and hot mint tea. Moe translated.
“We have other store owners who told us the same story,” I said. “They are going to go on the record and let us use their names in the paper.”
Samir and his wife looked at each other and nodded. Moe would speak on behalf of the family.
Though Samir had lived in America for about seven years, he struggled with English. Samir was a massive man, at least six feet tall, with a hulking frame, big droopy eyes, black as olives, and long ears on either side of a meaty bald head. He was taciturn and shy and kept within the half-mile between his tobacco and cigar shop and his South Philadelphia row house, where he and his family spoke mostly Arabic. He politely nodded and smiled at neighbors and customers, who by all accounts saw him as a gentle giant.
Samir spent all day and most of the night ringing up lottery and cigarette sales, crammed in the narrow aisle between the counter cash register and a wall of white shelves, lined with sea-green cartons of Newports and mahogany boxes of Mavericks. He sold loose tobacco, coffee, and trail mix. He also sold tiny ziplock bags—$5 for 100.
Two years ago, on a late December afternoon, Samir had just finished tallying about $14,000 in cash from the day’s sales when Jeff and six other cops burst into the store. Samir’s son, Moe, arrived a few minutes later. Samir had been waiting for his twenty-one-year-old son, who manned the register while Samir walked the half-block to the bank to deposit the money.
“What’s going on?” Moe asked, as a cop blocked him from going inside.
“We’ll tell ya later,” the cop said gruffly.
Moe panicked when he looked through the store window and saw his dad in handcuffs.
“I would like to know why you guys are locking up my dad for no reason,” he said. “I’m his son.”
A cop shoved Moe away from the window, and another plainclothes cop came over and said, “We’re arresting your dad because he’s selling drug supplies.”
“What kind of drug supplies are you talking about?”
“Little baggies,” the cop said.
“Those baggies that we got, we got those bags from the cigarette wholesaler, they sell them. People came in and asked for them and we got them, we started selling them,” Moe said, the words pouring out.
The cops tore apart the store, while Moe watched through the window. He grew angry and suspicious when he saw one narcotics cop with a pair of pliers in his hand. The cop reached up to a surveillance camera mounted high on the wall and clipped the wires. The cop, who wore a navy blue jacket and a baseball cap, was careful to keep his head down as he cut the wires; he didn’t want the camera lens to capture his face. One by one, he sliced the wires to all four security cameras.
Samir had never been arrested before, and he sat in the jail cell, feeling like a scared child.
When Moe opened the shop a few days later, he couldn’t see the floor because of the mounds of dumped coffee grinds, candy wrappers, and crushed cigarette cartons. Nearly 40 cartons of Newports were missing. A cigar box, which contained about $900 from the day’s lottery ticket sales, was bare, tossed to the floor. The cash register drawer sat ajar and empty, except for a few quarters, pennies, and dimes. Fourteen thousand dollars. Gone.
Jeff left a property receipt on the store counter. Moe looked at the receipt and wanted to pound the wall with his fist: $7,888. That was the amount Jeff claimed police had seized in the raid.
Samir shook his head and looked at Moe with those dark, soulful eyes. In Arabic, Samir said, “There is no way, because I know how much money I had that day. I counted it all up so I could take it to the bank and pay the wholesaler.”
Samir lost more than money in the raid. He lost his dignity. Moe, who moved to the United States from Jordan a decade earlier, had to give up his job as a satellite-dish technician to take over his dad’s store. After the raid, Samir was too scared to be in the store. Moe was twenty-three, with thick black hair, slightly gelled back. He had dark eyes and long lashes and a swagger and confidence not inherited from his dad.
“If he sees cops now, he freaks out,” Moe said. “My dad never been in jail. My dad never been in trouble. Now he’s like a little kid that got bit by a dog. He won’t go out.”
Ultimately, all the merchants decided to break their silence. Telling us what happened was their way of taking back control, of feeling empowered.