The price of dreams at Sunny's

Despite the dangers of the job and the slaying of his brother, Fahim Suleiman chases the American dream in his convenience shop.

By KATHRYN WEXLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 18, 2000

TAMPA -- Fahim Suleiman is standing behind the cash register at Sunny Food Mart on W Columbus Drive this Thursday night, keeping his gaze off an angry customer and on the dollar bills she slaps on the counter for two cans of Budweiser.

"Put those in a bigger bag," orders the woman, who appears to be in her 30s and has a red bandana wrapped around her head.

Suleiman obediently pulls out the cans he had placed in brown paper bags. Into a plastic bag they go.

"Give me some matches, too," the woman says sourly, staring into his face.

"We don't have any more," Suleiman says, eyes glued to the worn counter, head cocked slightly like an apologetic child.

She snatches the bag and stomps off. Suleiman turns to his next customer, who is counting out $1.09 in change for a bottle of Natural Ice beer.

As with this store, in a tired section north of downtown, Suleiman has frequently set up shop in places that other merchants shun. Most of his customers are people surviving on government checks or hard labor. At times, drug dealers call the shots in the parking lot. And then there is the violence.

Ten years ago, a clerk who still works nights at the store was shot above his left eye.

"He still has the bullet in his head," says Suleiman.

What haunts him, though, is another shooting, one he grapples with every day, wondering if it could have turned out differently.

So why stay?

"I'm not here to fight," Suleiman likes to say. "I'm here to make money."

In the past 2 1/2 years, police have been called nearly 200 times to 509 Columbus Drive by alarms or emergency calls placed from the store or from the pay phones in the parking lot.

Police reports list burglaries, physical fights, intoxicated persons, domestic disputes, suspicious persons, traffic crashes, a prostitution solicitation, petit thefts, a missing person or runaway, disturbances.

The federal government considers working at a convenience store one of the riskiest jobs in the country. Even after Florida enacted laws to protect late-night store clerks, they are robbed, attacked and shot regularly. In 1995, the latest figures available, 18 convenience store clerks were slain in Florida.

Just how dangerous is the job?

"I wouldn't do it," said Sgt. Bob Wright, who oversees the Tampa Police Department's robbery division.

And yet for a hard-working entrepreneur, they are a fast-track to profit.

Especially in poor neighborhoods.

Retailing to the poverty-stricken is no joyride. But lack of transportation does provide for a captive consumer base that can't easily tool around town, looking for the best deals on bread and beer.

Suleiman says he adds a buck or two for items such as 12-packs of beer and cigarettes. He says his customers have no desire to shop elsewhere.

"It's not (that) we're taking advantage . . . most of these people don't want to go nowhere else."

In wealthier communities, he says, he'd have to sell twice as much merchandise for the same profit. "I would never even think of going to a rich neighborhood."

As a Palestinian, Suleiman walks a nebulous racial line, sometimes identified with the establishment, other times as an outsider.

"You be careful," warns one African-American woman in a flowered blouse.

Another woman recently accused him of being an opportunist and berated him for not doing enough for his black customers, Suleiman said. The other day, a man took it personally that Suleiman insists people pay before they pump.

"You think all black people are bad?" the man demanded.

Suleiman countered, "Sometimes you go into the best neighborhoods, they make you pre-pay, too."

But six days a week, a white, four-door 1992 Mercedes-Benz 500 is parked at the store.

It belongs to Suleiman.

Home for Suleiman used to be 6,600 miles away in a mixed Muslim and Christian neighborhood in Jerusalem. One of eight children, Suleiman followed a brother to New York City in 1986. He worked a string of jobs, some that required him to knock on strangers' doors in the humid summer months, heave heavy objects or take orders from supervisors.

He was eager to pocket profits instead of handing them to a boss. After a few years, his savings enabled him to shell out $60,000 for a store in Patterson, N.J.

"It was in a poor neighborhood, just like this one," Suleiman says.

Ground down by the urban pace, Suleiman headed for Florida six years ago, where extended family lived in year-round sunshine.

He bought a store on 15th Street in the hard-scrabble community near the University of South Florida. A few years later, he burned out again and sold.

He took a job at Sunny's after his brother, Ramzi, bought the place. He works six days a week, sometimes days, sometimes nights. Fifty-hour weeks are short ones.

You won't find slick displays and gourmet granola bars at Sunny's. Here, people buy white briefs, black hair extensions, diapers and 50-cent Blunt cigars they slit open, empty of tobacco and stuff with marijuana. Shelves are kept especially well-stocked at the beginning of the month when plenty of customers walk over or hitch a ride, flush with cash from welfare checks.

It is not yet 9 p.m., and a teenager called Shorty angles up to a pretty girl standing by the counter.

"See it?" he asks, hiking up his jersey, as Suleiman and the teenager lean in closer. His fingers trace a cylindrical protrusion jutting out of his back. "I got shot. It's still there. I'm getting it out next week." He winces. She looks impressed.

A 14-year-old mother props her chubby toddler on the counter. Suleiman gently reminds her, over and over, to hold the baby so he doesn't tumble off.

A woman with wild, permed brown hair blows in and gives Suleiman a big smile.

"I ain't going to lie. I want a stem," she says, handing him $3 for a thin, glass tube that holds a fake rose -- perfect for smoking crack.

A woman lets her young daughter choose between a blue soft drink or an orange one.

There are regulars who come in and stay, spinning their mini-dramas between the coffee station and the refrigerators. There's Oscar, who plops down on a crate and chomps with mouth wide open on any food Suleiman gives him. There's Lisa, who drinks until she's happy and can get a rise out of anyone. And there's Charlie, a Vietnam veteran who insists Elian Gonzalez grew up in a closet and is looking for a home.

"They have nowhere to go," says Suleiman, a devout Muslim. So they're welcome here.

It's not customer relations Suleiman wishes were smoother. It's his contact with police.

As a Palestinian and small-time vendor, Suleiman says he sometimes feels he doesn't get the same respect as his Anglo counterparts.

"There's a big gap between us as convenience store owners, especially foreigners, and the police or the Sheriff's Office." He wishes officers would stop by and make their presence felt.

Officials say the city has corners that need more attention than Suleiman's.

"We're extremely busy," said Sgt. Michelle Hawthorne. "We don't get much of chance to go in and chit-chat with people."

Once, Suleiman says, he called police about someone who kept dealing drugs in the parking lot.

"Cops said, "We cannot arrest him, we cannot search him,' " Suleiman says.

"So I had to make friends with him."

Suleiman knows first-hand what can happen when things go awry.

On Nov. 1, a man wearing a rubber devil mask burst into a convenience store on the north end of town. As seen on the surveillance video, the robber didn't hesitate before firing a slug from a silver revolver into the clerk's neck.

The clerk's lungs filled with blood. Two-and-a-half hours later, he was dead. He was 31 and the father of four children.

He was Suleiman's brother.

Still, Suleiman wakes up each morning and stands behind the counter at Sunny's, which he runs for another brother. Some days he fumes. Some days he grieves.

The robber was shot and killed by a Hillsborough sheriff's deputy he ambushed a few months later. That doesn't bring Suleiman any relief.

Standing over a freezer of Good Humor ice cream bars, Suleiman studies his brother's autopsy report, which he hoped would help him understand why his brother died. But it is too technical to make sense of.

"Crying helps a little bit, but sometimes it feels like the pressure is just going to blow up inside."

Suleiman's wife, Lamia, worries for his safety.

"I'm scared," she says. What happens is up to God, not them, she says.

But Suleiman says he is able to pocket roughly $3,000 a month. He wears $175 shoes by Kenneth Cole. And though the couple rent the three-bedroom apartment they share with their four children, Mrs. Suleiman doesn't have to work. Suleiman wants it that way.

He also wants out of this line of work -- "anything besides the convenience business."

He shrugs. "There's a lot of open doors, but this is what you get stuck in."

But with every nickel and dime laid on the smooth countertop, Suleiman gets a tiny bit closer to clinching the American dream.

"Me, I love United States life," Suleiman says. "But you pay for it. You pay full price. Maybe more than full price."

-- Kathryn Wexler can be reached at (813) 226-3386 or wexler@sptimes.com.

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