From yesterday’s AJC on illegal tax-free stores set up in residential units by illegal aliens.
When residents of Wynscape apartments wanted phone cards to call Mexico, El Salvador or Honduras, they didn’t need to leave the north DeKalb County complex: A woman sold them out of her unit.
They could buy beer, too. All it took was a knock on the door of another of the 272 apartments.
Jesus Morales, a licensed produce vendor, offers a delivery service popular among Hispanics who don’t drive and prefer to deal in cash. While Morales has never been robbed, a recent double murder illustrates the dangers owners of unlicensed shops face.
“I don’t understand the mentality. We sold a few sweets, for so little money.”
ALEJANDRINA SALGADO, Woman whose son and husband were killed by robbers at their unlicensed candy store
Here, where many residents don’t drive and cash is king, an underground marketplace has thrived.
But two murders at the complex’s unofficial convenience store — a second-story unit that offered items from batteries to lime-flavored potato chips — has shed a tragic light on the shadow economy familiar to new immigrants in Georgia.
Two young men wearing jeans and hooded sweatshirts entered the apartment on a Saturday night, pretending to be customers. They pulled out a gun, and a struggle ensued.
Shot dead were Honduran immigrant Jose Roberto Nuñez, 49, and his 14-year-old son, Daison.
They died trying to protect the side business that helped supplement Nuñez’s spotty house-painting in-come. Nuñez’s wife, Alejandrina Salgado, who was awakened by the commotion, found her husband and son bleeding on the kitchen floor.
Days after the murders, a still-dazed Salgado walks across that same linoleum, between candlelit memorials featuring photos of the dead. White rose petals form crosses where her husband and son took their last breaths.
The barrel of a gun was nothing new to the family of seven. This was the fifth time the apartment had been robbed, Salgado says.
Shortly after moving here eight years ago, Salgado says gunmen burst in and demanded cash. “They dragged me around like this,” she says, pulling her hair. The perpetrators were later caught and sent to prison.
The kitchen snack bar was robbed four more times, including once in 2006 and again a few months ago, she says. But by then, the family of seven needed the extra income more than ever, Salgado said. Painting jobs had grown scarce for her husband, who had recently joined day laborers on a nearby street corner to find work. Though Hurricane Mitch wiped out their village, prompting their move to Atlanta, the family didn’t apply for the temporary legal residency offered to Hondurans displaced by the 1998 disaster.
Salgado glances up at a photo of a smiling Daison, who loved to box and spend time with his girlfriend from Sequoyah Middle School. “I don’t understand the mentality,” she says. “We sold a few sweets, for so little money.”
Operators of unlicensed businesses are easy prey. Thieves assume they have cash on hand. There are no security cameras. And in many cases, the owners are more reluctant to call police.
Just a mile from Wynscape, a Baptist pastor from Mexico was shot dead while selling watermelons from his truck in Chamblee. Juan Morales died on Aug. 2, his 39th birthday. Chamblee police have made no arrests.
DeKalb police also don’t have any suspects in the Wynscape shootings, which included a third victim. A friend of the Nuñez family also was shot and remains in critical but stable condition.
The attacks come amid grim times within Georgia’s underground economy, said Jeffrey Humphreys, director of the University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth. Roughly half of the state’s nearly 1 million immigrants are estimated to be in the country illegally. And more than a few have been filling unofficial jobs in construction and landscaping, Humphreys said.
But 2007 saw a historic drought and a downturn in the home-building industry. “That’s a very cruel combination for the underground economy right now,” he said. “People are desperate.”
Immigrants account for a small percentage of off-the-books commerce in Georgia, he said. Even so, demand for the services of a shadow market appears to be rising in increasingly isolated immigrant neighborhoods such as Wynscape. Traffic on
I-85 roars past the aging brick buildings off Shallowford Road, but fewer residents are driving these days.
A new state immigration law has made it harder for illegal immigrants to obtain license plates. And some fear deportation for traffic violations.
So for many residents here, the Nuñez family store was a welcome convenience.
Manuel Morales, who no longer drives, said grocery shopping isn’t easy. He sometimes walks across the I-85 overpass to a Publix. But staples from his native Mexico are a $10 cab ride away on Buford Highway.
And every evening, he keeps his eyes peeled for the box truck with two poblano chile peppers painted on the side. Jesus Morales, whose mobile fruit and vegetable stand is a licensed business, fields a flurry of calls from customers wondering what he has on board. Residents buy eggs, fresh tomatoes and paper towels. In 10 years, he says he’s never been robbed. Of course, Morales’ operation is legit. He keeps his business license on hand, is often surrounded by customers and wouldn’t hesitate to call police.
In the wake of the double murder at Wynscape, residents came forward to report the apartment that sells beer and the one with phone cards, said Sara Naranjo, a leasing agent with the company that manages the complex. Management ordered renters there to stop the sales, she said.
Anti-illegal immigration activist D.A. King said “illegal immigration is a crime, and it breeds more crime.” Police too often turn a blind eye to underground businesses in immigrant neighborhoods, he said, passing them off as part of the culture. “If law enforcement was fulfilling their duty,” said King, president of the Dustin Inman Society, “maybe these two people would still be alive today.”
At a laundromat across the street from Wynscape, construction worker Hector Cabrera said kitchen snack bars and mothers selling soup on the side aren’t the problem.
“That’s a way of survival.”
The robberies and murders would wane, Cabrera said, if police took crimes in the Latino community more seriously.
Officer Jose Ayala, Hispanic community liaison with DeKalb police, barnstormed 48 apartment complexes this summer, reassuring Spanish-speaking residents that they can tell police about robberies without fear of deportation or gang retaliation.
Standing outside the Nuñez family apartment last week, Ayala looked up at the giant black bow hanging above the entrance. Everyone knew the candy here was a bit more expensive. But they never imagined the price of convenience would be so high.
