On the afternoon of Friday, May 30, Dave Patton, Harrisburg’s codes administrator, walked into the T-Mart convenience store and asked to see its health license.
As a business, the T-Mart, at the corner of N. 3rd and Herr streets, was in some ways typical of its environs, the patchy commercial district north of Forster, in the city’s Midtown neighborhood. Across Herr Street is a new Moroccan restaurant; across 3rd, takeout Chinese. Further down the block is a diverse array of businesses, including a trendy pasta place, a greasy spoon, a barber and a pawn shop with red and yellow banners saying, “We Buy Gold.” The T-Mart was just one more business in the mix, carrying the usual corner-store fare: cigarettes, cell phones, candy, toilet paper, over-the-counter painkillers.
In other ways, though, the T-Mart stuck out like a sore thumb. Not long after it opened, in early 2012, the store erected a wooden produce stand along one of its exterior walls. Often, the stand was empty, but when it did have fruit, it was of questionable quality. “It looked like the stuff that fell off the back of the truck,” one neighbor told me. Then there were the windows. Initially, the owner filled them with flyers and ads, so that it was difficult to see into the store from outside. Then, starting sometime in 2013, they kept getting busted in. That October, and again in January and May of this year, police got reports of someone smashing the glass in the shop’s front door.
On May 12, someone threw a brick through one of the main windows, and, shortly afterwards, large plywood panels appeared, covering all the glass on both sides of the door. Now there were no views into the building whatsoever. As one neighbor put it in an email to the city, they made “an occupied store look abandoned.” (Cigarettes, other unnamed items and a total of $850 were reported stolen in connection with these break-ins, according to police reports.)
But the T-Mart’s most unusual feature was the traffic outside its door. Particularly beginning in the winter of 2014, neighbors frequently witnessed what they took to calling “curb service”—a car would roll up, and someone would come out of the T-Mart with what looked like a Styrofoam takeout tray in a plastic bag. The store, however, didn’t sell prepared food. The T-Mart also started to keep irregular hours, which led to another strange phenomenon. People would hover outside the entrance, waiting for it to open. Neighbors found this odd, because there were other convenience stores a few doors away, selling substantially the same items. “If you need a cigarette, it’s over there. If you need a Coca-Cola, it’s over there,” David Botero, a police department community liaison who monitored concerns about the T-Mart, told me. “Why are you waiting for this store to open, and why is there a line of people to come into the store?”
Prior to Patton’s visit, the T-Mart had already been cited a few times for various violations. In April 2013, the store was caught selling cigarettes without a license, while, more recently, earlier in May, it got nabbed for illegally selling individual cigarettes out of the pack, also known as “loosies.”
When Patton entered the store on May 30, the owner, a Nepali man named Tika Siwakoti, wasn’t there. But the man behind the counter, whom Patton took to be an employee, starting digging around in search of the license. “Nah, don’t bother,” Patton said after a moment. “I know you don’t have it.” In fact, Patton’s question was only a test; he’d looked up the T-Mart’s records at his office and knew that Siwakoti hadn’t renewed. In addition, the shop owed a couple hundred dollars in overdue mercantile taxes.
As it happened, another man in the store was on the phone with Siwakoti at that moment, and he passed the phone to Patton. “You have til Monday,” Patton told him. Siwakoti started to protest, but Patton held firm. “I don’t think you’re feeling me,” he said. He told Siwakoti that if he didn’t update his license and get current on his taxes, the city would shut him down.
One of Mayor Eric Papenfuse’s first actions in office was to promise a new approach to crime. He made Thomas Carter, a soft-spoken and courteous 26-year veteran of the force, the permanent police chief—he had been holding the position in an interim capacity—in a decision Papenfuse later called “the most important” of his first year. He also engaged Robert Martin, the longtime chief in Susquehanna Township, to consult Harrisburg in adopting “community policing” techniques. (Martin and those efforts were the subject of a profile in this magazine’s March issue.)
“Community policing” is an umbrella term for methods that are meant to improve a department’s relationship with the public. That might make it sound like a branch of marketing, and indeed, David Botero, whom Papenfuse appointed in January under the title of “community policing coordinator,” sometimes speaks of the police department’s “brand.” (In a past life, he worked at an ad agency.) But to its adherents, community policing is also about good police work. A department that has positive relationships with residents, they believe, will ultimately pick up better tips, catch more criminals and generally have an easier time doing its job.
In the case of the T-Mart, neighbors stepped up their involvement in mid-May. “People reported suspicious activity there,” Botero told me recently. “Then, when we looked into it; ‘suspicious’ turned out to be pretty legit.”
Jonathan Hendrickson, the president of Midtown Square Action Council, one of the neighborhood groups that corresponded with Botero, said that, in the preceding weeks, the situation outside the store had worsened dramatically. “We kind of called an emergency meeting, because there were some things that just had been getting really shady,” he told me.
One neighbor complained she’d been solicited for sex in front of the store. Another neighbor, fed up with what he saw as blatant evidence of drug dealing, had created around a dozen flyers advertising an “Open Air Drug Market,” which he posted on telephone poles in the neighborhood. The flyer showed a skeleton figure hawking “diesel” and “hard”—nicknames for heroin and crack cocaine, respectively—and provided T-Mart’s name, address and phone number. (Aside from Hendrickson, neighbors I spoke with asked not to be identified.)
On the morning of May 30, a neighbor emailed a contact in the mayor’s office with a complaint about the T-Mart’s boarded-up windows. The mayor’s assistant forwarded the complaint to several officials, including a police captain, Patton from codes and Botero. Within a few hours, Patton had made his visit to the store and reported back on the thread. Botero replied three minutes later. “Thank you; and excellent—great job, DP!” he wrote. He asked how much he could share with the Midtown group, which he planned to meet the following Monday. The group was “[v]ery political, very vocal, very connected,” he added. “They will be asking about this property.” (The city produced the email chain in response to a right-to-know request; the neighbor’s name was redacted.)
Initially, the city seemed to think the extra scrutiny would be enough to close the shop. “We were planning to shut everything down,” Patton told me. But, the following Monday, to his surprise, Siwakoti showed up in city hall to renew his license and pay the taxes. “We kind of had to go to Plan B,” Patton said.
“Plan B” was the codes enforcement equivalent of a full-court press. Over the next three months, the city applied every kind of pressure within reach to drive the T-Mart out of the neighborhood. In June, another police officer caught the store selling loosies. In July, and again in August, a codes inspector cited the owner for the boarded-up windows, this time filing the charges in “housing court,” a concept Papenfuse revived this year as part of a crackdown on blight. Both times, the judge, David Judy, handed down a $600 fine.
On Aug. 5, a codes inspector and a city health officer showed up at the T-Mart together and found myriad violations. The health officer’s report noted the lack of soap and paper towels in the bathroom, expired Similac baby formula for sale, and “evidence of pest on food shelving,” among other offenses. The codes report was even more voluminous. It cited exposed wiring in an electrical box, a padlocked exit door, a fire extinguisher with expired tags, one emergency light blocked by boxes and another inoperative, and a dozen other violations. Additionally, it noted there were still boards on the windows.
Meanwhile, the neighbors and Botero were in touch with the landlord, a man named Geoffrey Rhine. On May 27, Rhine had sent a termination notice to the T-Mart, which referred to lease violations as well as “complaints from others in the nearby neighborhood about the impact of activities in and around T-Mart.” On Aug. 12, he sent a second notice, ordering Siwakoti to vacate by Sept. 15. Nonetheless, by early October, the T-Mart had still not left the premises.
On Oct. 7, Hendrickson of Midtown Square Action Council sent a letter to Rhine. He claimed that, following the health inspection, the shop had switched from selling food to selling clothing and “‘burner-style’ cell phones.” He added that the neighborhood group was trying to help find a new tenant for the space, but asked Rhine to initiate eviction proceedings in the meantime. “We can do little while the property remains a blighted source of drugs and decay within our neighborhood,” he wrote. Finally, one week later, on Oct. 14, Rhine filed for eviction. “He took one for the team,” Botero told me. “He could’ve played dumb, but he did the right thing.”
Siwakoti’s eviction hearing took place on Wednesday, Oct. 29, in District Justice Barbara Pianka’s courtroom in the Uptown Shopping Plaza. At 9:30 a.m., Rhine was already there, sitting just inside the door with his hands folded in his lap. Siwakoti arrived 15 minutes later, in a tan sports jacket, light brown corduroys, and a tan ball cap with a Yankees logo. It looked as though he hadn’t shaved in several days. He spotted Rhine, walked over to him and shook his hand. “Hi, Tika,” Rhine said. Siwakoti checked in at the counter, took a seat and began reading from his phone.
Just before 10, a clerk called them into the courtroom. After a short wait, during which neither of them spoke, Pianka entered in her black judge’s robes and took her seat at the bench. Rhine, in his complaint, had not asked for any money beyond court costs; he simply wanted the eviction. He began by referring to a paragraph in Siwakoti’s lease, which required compliance “with all statutes, ordinances, and requirements of all municipal, state, and federal authorities.” Pianka stopped him, asking whether Siwakoti had a copy of the lease.
“I misplaced the lease,” Siwakoti said quietly. “I lost it.”
Pianka left to make a photocopy so that, she said, Siwakoti would “know exactly what’s taking place today.” When she came back, she handed the document to Siwakoti, who began to protest. “Your Honor, it is not really failure,” he said. “What happened was—” Pianka cut him off, telling him that Rhine had to finish the complaint first.
Rhine picked up where he’d left off. In addition to the paragraph about compliance with local ordinances, the lease, which was dated Nov. 12, 2011, contained an option to extend the lease an additional two years, which had to be exercised by Sept. 15, 2013. Siwakoti, Rhine said, had never exercised the option. He reviewed a series of documents he’d attached to the complaint, including Hendrickson’s letter, his termination notices, and the failed codes inspections. He also included an email he’d sent Siwakoti on Aug. 1 about reports that boards were still up in the windows. “Please make immediate necessary window repairs and get the boards removed,” it said. It also suggested that Siwakoti contact Botero and neighborhood groups “on how to work together to eliminate the undesirable drug trafficking and loitering in the area around the building.”
Once Rhine had reviewed all this, Pianka gave Siwakoti a chance to speak. He began by defending the presence of the boards in the windows. “The store got broke in five, six times,” he said. “Six glasses was broken. I had to board that up til I fixed that. It is not a magic to fix six glasses in a matter of weeks.” He said the repairs had cost a total of $3,200. As for the violations, he said, everything in his store was up to code except for a piece of exposed wire in the ceiling, which he only learned was a violation when the inspector pointed it out. He said he had “never received any letter” from the neighbors, but that whatever it said was “totally, absolutely false.” He dismissed the idea that people gathering on the corner was evidence of wrongdoing, noting that sort of thing happens anywhere there’s a business. “This is a court,” he said. “People have to come here, they’re going to gather outside.” There were “absolutely no drugs” and “absolutely no kind of any illegal solicitation” inside or outside his store, he said.
When he was finished, Pianka asked Rhine if he had any questions for Siwakoti.
“No,” Rhine said.
“Anything else I need to be made aware of today?” she asked.
Rhine confirmed that he wasn’t seeking money damages, only an eviction and payment for his court costs. Siwakoti said that, because he’d lost the lease, he wasn’t aware of the deadline for the extension. Then he digressed into a discussion of rent. He spoke quietly, and his syntax was hard to decipher, but he seemed to be saying that, if Rhine wanted to negotiate a higher rent payment, he was open to doing so. Finally, he returned to the codes inspection. When a codes inspector found something wrong, he said, that was “not a violation—that is ‘need to fix.’” Every problem that had been identified, he said, he had since resolved.
Outside the courtroom, I introduced myself to Rhine. Botero had referred to him as the “unsung hero” of the story because he had cooperated with the city and neighbors. I wanted to know: did he see things the same way? Rhine, who grew up in Camp Hill but now lives outside Philadelphia, said he’d be willing to talk, but added that he didn’t want his name to appear in the story. When, in a follow-up call, I told him I couldn’t grant that condition, because his comments were made in a public forum, he declined to be interviewed further.
On a rainy day in late October, I met Botero outside the T-Mart on 3rd Street. He rolled up in a white police caravan—an airy, rattling vehicle he described as a “lunchbox.” When I climbed on board, he offered me a McDonald’s coffee from a tray of them on the floor between the driver’s and passenger’s seats.
Botero isn’t a cop. He doesn’t carry a badge or a gun, and he has no background in police work. A New Jersey native of Colombian descent, he has an olive complexion, clear blue-gray eyes and short black hair, specked with gray. In his role as an intermediary between citizens and police, he tries to be both a cheerleader and a friend. He maintains a huge network of contacts—buddies, acquaintances, people he’s given one-time favors. He’s conspicuously informal, identifying himself in email signatures as “community peace dude.” Whenever possible, he tries to inject excitement into the enterprise. At the end of our first phone call, he asked me to email him my contact information. He wrote back with an immediate one-line reply: “giddy up!”
To Botero, the T-Mart episode represented a classic case of neighborhood intervention. On the phone, he’d praised the Midtown neighbors, saying he wanted their efforts to be a “blueprint” for other neighborhoods. “They helped us to stay focused,” he said. In the car, he elaborated. “Four or five years from now, when things continue to change, I’m gonna look back at this T-Mart,” he told me. “Because other neighborhoods that have, quote-unquote, ‘T-Mart,’ those nuisance businesses? If it’s happening there, it’s because the neighborhood allows it to be there. Midtown clearly does not have any tolerance for that. And they did something about it.”
As we talked, Botero spotted a woman laden with shopping bags on a street corner, looking forlorn. He pulled up beside her, rolled down the window, and called out to offer her a ride. She was on her way to a department store in Kline Village and had missed her bus. It was raining, and, after a moment’s consideration, she climbed on board. Botero can talk to anybody, and, in no time, the two were chatting amiably—about bus routes, their churches, their opinions of local media. After driving 15 minutes out of his way, he dropped her off at the store’s front door. “That was God right there,” he said as we drove away. “This is not politicking, because it’s not an election week,” he added. “It’s got zero to do with that. She will go to Hillside”—her church—“and she will say, ‘You know what? Some nice officer came and got me.’ That’s all I care about. And that’s branding. That’s my goal.”
We returned to the topic of the T-Mart. I wanted to know whether the neighborhood involvement had actually solved the problem. The city had driven the store out of a particularly active neighborhood—wouldn’t it now just take up residence somewhere less vigilant? “The cool thing about this is, what it isn’t, it’s not ‘Not In My Backyard,’” Botero said. “Because he’s not taking it to the West Shore, he’s not taking it to Derry, he’s not taking it to Uptown. He’s just kicked out, period.” He said he would hold up the story as an example for other neighborhoods, to show them that they, too, had the ability to control the activities on their street corners. “I’m going to Southside, going to all those places, saying, ‘We did it here.’ Not because they’re white and because they’re homeowners, but because they cared, and they did something about it,” he said. “And we, the city, stepped in and did it.”
A week after his eviction hearing, I called Siwakoti. He picked up on the third ring. I told him I was a reporter interested in his version of events regarding neighborhood complaints about the T-Mart.
“That is not ‘neighborhood,’” he began. He claimed the people complaining about his store were not actually residents of the neighborhood, adding he was a victim of “racial hating.” “They are white,” he said, so officials “are going to listen to them, not me.” He also felt he’d been unfairly targeted over violations, and that neighboring businesses had not received the same scrutiny.
While we were speaking, I heard Siwakoti field what sounded like a sale. “3.99,” he said. “Plus tax.” I asked whether he was in his store. Yes, he said, the store on 4th Street. In addition to the T-Mart at 3rd and Herr, Siwakoti until recently operated two other stores—one at the corner of 4th and Harris, the other on Locust Street downtown. (He was evicted from the downtown store on Oct. 30, for apparently unrelated reasons; the complaint, by a different landlord, claimed he owed $3,500 in rent.) I asked if I could come over, and he said that would be fine.
I pulled up in front of the store around 10 minutes later. The door was open, but the lights were off, and Siwakoti stood on the stoop, smoking a cigarette. He said he was having electrical problems and that someone was coming to make repairs.
We talked outside for around 40 minutes. In that time, perhaps a dozen different people approached the store. One identified himself as a student in a forklift operating class in the HACC parking lot across the street. He came to buy a knit cap. Others came close, peered through the open door into the dark shop, and then walked off. For the most part, Siwakoti didn’t acknowledge them.
There were, however, exceptions. At one point, a forest green van pulled up and a middle-aged man, wearing a hoodie and a gold chain, climbed out. He entered the store and, a minute later, reemerged with an orange drink and drove away. Siwakoti didn’t say a word. I asked if the man worked for him. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve been robbed at gunpoint more than hundreds of times. So I asked this guy, he doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs, can you help me, stay around me?” On another occasion, a sedan rolled to a stop in front of the store with the windows down. A man leaned out and told Siwakoti to close the door, so that people wouldn’t think the store was open. Then he drove on.
For most of our conversation, Siwakoti spoke freely, even emphatically, about how he’d been mistreated. He dismissed the citation for expired baby formula, saying it was only one can out of 15 on the shelf, and he would never have sold it if someone tried to buy it. He also complained that a TV news story about the T-Mart didn’t accurately portray his statements. (The story, which ran on Channel 8, introduces the T-Mart as a “nuisance business” that “voluntarily” closed.) He seemed particularly agitated by the accusation about sex solicitation, which he said occurred everywhere. “That happens in front of police building, in front of MLK Government Center,” he said. “If my customer winds up being prostitute, that’s my fault? Prostitutes don’t go to city hall?”
But then, at the end of our conversation, he suddenly started to withdraw. He said he didn’t want his name in the paper—it was too late for his business, and quoting him would only damage him further. He said the police and the city, who were already against him, would come after him for what he’d told me. “They will chase my ass out of town,” he said.
Two guys who had walked up and found the store closed had been hovering nearby. When I wouldn’t consent to not printing anything he’d told me, Siwakoti called at them so that he could have a “witness.” They ignored him. Finally, he called out, “Hey, deaf!” One guy walked off, but the other turned around and came over. He was young, perhaps in his late 20s, and wearing a varsity jacket and a ball cap.
I expected Siwakoti to explain his demands, but instead, they just talked about the T-Mart. The young man, who seemed familiar with the situation, waved the allegations of drug dealing aside. “Only drugs I know is medicine,” Siwakoti said. “They said I was selling heroin. I don’t know what is heroin!” He laughed.
The young man started to say something about how “they” had targeted the T-Mart and broken its windows, but when I pressed him, he wouldn’t say who. He stepped out into the street. “Tell them the real reason all those people went in there,” he said finally. Siwakoti was silent. “He was selling loosies!” the guy said.
After our conversation, I went to get lunch. An hour later, on my way back to work, I drove past the 4th Street store. The lights were on, and the door was open.
