NEW ROCHELLE, NY — In the trash, tossed out of 394 North Avenue after he was evicted, Abbas Al-Saidi left behind notebooks and scraps of paper which contain what appears to be daily ledgers for his convenience store business. They are written mostly in Arabic but I was able to translate enough of them to make out that mostly it is about tracking revenue and expenses for his business.
Daily Ldger Sheets from Store at 149 North Avenue
Items in the ledger include revenue and cost from Snacks, Drinks, Baked Goods, Dairy Products, Newspapers, Cigars/Cigarettes/Hookah, business services, payroll, EBT, equipment, DVDs. Not listed are items like marijuana and stun guns. Both items were in evidence at the store after he was shut down following a drug raid.
The biggest revenue and cost items are cigarettes and cigars. The cigar are cheap brands typically purchased to empty out and roll with marijuana into a “blunt”.
The one item that should not be there is “EBT” or Electronic Benefits Transfer or SNAP Benefits or “food stamps”. These stores either have an EBT machine and are using it to convert credit on the EBT cards to cash (at a discounted rate, 25-50 cents on the dollars), and the cash is being use to purchase products prohibited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture which runs the SNAP program.
There is one complete set of accounting records for a particular month which show that from July 16, 2013 to August 16, 2014 Al-Said made $10,252.
This look at the books suggests a pattern which should be useful to anyone investigating criminal activity in New Rochelle.
Al-Saidi has already been busted for selling cigarettes without a license, selling untaxed cigarettes and selling loose cigarettes. This is the most obvious criminal activity and one that quickly becomes readily known with any community where people are looking to buy cheap cigarettes.
As a working hypothesis, if investigators will start by tracking all stores known to sell loose cigarettes they will soon find the store is selling untaxed cigarettes. At that point, they will find the store is engaged in SNAP Benefit Trafficking. The store will be selling contraband like Stun Guns which are legal in neighboring states but illegal in New York and marijuana – the tip off being they are selling drug paraphernalia. They will be selling counterfeit goos like bootleg movies DVDs.
Having looks at three stores operating like this in New Rochelle it seems safe to say that if a store is selling loose cigarettes that it is the tip of a rather large iceberg — and it is not hard to located stores that sell “loosies”.
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