The Manhattan Times

Restaurant group gives harassing notes to FBI

by Daniel P. Bader

The handwritten 3 x 5 index cards are unsigned, sent through the mail and carry messages of hate: “Stop wrecking my U.S.A.,” “Speak English,” “We don’t want you in our community” and “Don’t speak Spanish.”

On Tue., July 28 the owners of Mamajuana Café and its sister restaurants held a press conference on Dyckman Street led by activist Fernando Mateo from Hispanics Across America to condemn the notes they started receiving over two years ago and inform the community that they have brought the cards to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine if the notes are criminal.

Victor Osorio, one of the owners of Mamajuana Café, said that the tone of the notes was such that “it got to the point that we had to do something.”

In front of television crews and reporters from all over the city, Mateo blamed the notes on white renters who were forced out of downtown apartments because of rising rents.

“We as a community have the right to grow, the right to build,” Mateo said. “Washington Heights and Inwood is not the suburbs, we have a culture which needs to be respected.”

Mateo even linked the letters to city building inspectors, which he claims visited Mamajuana Café three times in one day, and a “NYPD vice squad” that had visited the restaurant.

“The same people who write these letters have access,” Mateo said. “This is what the community is. You don’t like it, leave.”

Osorio speculated that the letters may have been linked to groups that have expressed anger at the nightlife and noise that Mamajuana Café and other restaurants on Dyckman Street have brought to Northern Manhattan.

“There’s a group in the neighborhood that doesn’t want Mamajuana open. We have met them in the community board,” he said. “We don’t know if [the letter writers are] a group of the new arrivals.”

Local leaders who joined the restaurant in condemning the letters didn’t believe it reflected any group’s opinion, and speculated that the notes were generated by the same person.

“This was an eyesore for the community,” Assembly Member Adriano Espaillat said.

“We reject this hate mail.”

He supported the business going to the authorities with the cards.

“Today it’s a post card or hate mail, tomorrow it’s something else,” Espaillat said.

“Whoever is sending these letters does not represent the majority of this community,” City Council hopeful Ydanis Rodriguez said. “We are a united community.”

Since the press conference, other community entities, like Friends of Payson Avenue, Community Board 12 and the Manhattan Times have acknowledged receiving similar letters.

Friends of Payson Avenue president George Espinal said the group’s board of directors voted unanimously to turn the two notes it has received in the last year over to the FBI.

Community Board 12 District Manager Ebenezer Smith said when he started at the job in 2007 he received one or two a week, but hasn’t in recent memory.

The Manhattan Times has advised the 34^th Police Precinct that it has received letters and post cards in what appears to be the same scrawled handwriting for four years.

Some Dyckman Street area residents have speculated that the timing of the press conference is being used as a distraction from the liquor licensing process the Mamajuana group is currently undergoing for its newest restaurant Papa Sito, a Mexican eatery.

Community Board 12 has not yet given its support to a liquor license for the establishment. At last month’s CB12 Economic Development Committee meeting regarding the license the matter was tabled until the 34^th Police Precinct did a site tour of the restaurant and more information about the restaurant was available.

CB12 Chair Manny Velazquez said the board’s eventual decision on the license will have nothing to do with the letters, which he condemned.

“[The writer] does not represent a lot of what we have in the neighborhood,” Velazquez said.

Yamil Martinez, another member of the Mamajuana group, said he has contacted an FBI agent and discussed the letters. He went to the FBI and not the 34^th Police Precinct, he said because “I was advised to go straight up to the big guy.”

He denied that the press conference had anything to do with Papa Sito’s liquor license. “The neighborhood is supporting us,” Martinez said. “I think that’s just the same group of black sheep” that is objecting to it.

Karen Jolicoeur, a member of the Fort Tryon East Association and an opponent of the license, said she hopes the conference wasn’t meant to change the conversation, saying that view is “very cynical.”

“I think the letters are terrible,” she said. “I have no problem with the people who run the restaurant. I have a problem with the people who run like maniacs in front of the building.”

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.