Scores of city bodegas and tobacco shops targeted in pot raids have been ordered to remain closed for a year — despite not even selling cannabis, according to court hearings, records and industry players.
The nonsensical move is the result of a small provision in the state law that kicked off Operation Padlock To Protect, which aims to close illegal pot shops — and also granted the city’s sheriff the final call to determine which raided stores can stay open and which must remain closed for up to a year.
Some of the raided shops’ lawyers call the measure “authoritarian” and say it makes Sheriff Anthony Miranda, already mired in scandals and investigations, an unelected “de facto judge” because he can arbitrarily overrule a city administrative court.
“What’s the point of us going to these hearings?” said lawyer Nadia Kahnauth, who has represented 10 targeted stores at administrative court hearings where her clients won recommendations to reopen — only to have the decisions overruled by the sheriff.
A Brooklyn tobacco store on Fulton Street was ordered to remain padlocked for up to a year despite an administrative court hearing determining that the store was not selling cannabis at all.
“A few days or a month we could manage,” said Abdo Al Saidi, who has owned the Bed-Stuy store for a decade and a half. “But a year?”
The loss of his small business may force him to go on welfare, he told The Post.
“How will I feed my family?” Al Saidi said.
Even big boosters of Operation Padlock To Protect agree that this part of the law gives the sheriff far too much discretion and power.
“I think that [state] law has to be changed,” said city councilmember Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), who has made rooting out illicit smoke shops an almost personal crusade.
While largely supportive of the popular effort, she has tracked the rollout of Operation Padlock closely as the chair of the council’s oversight committee and has previously asked for better data reporting from the sheriff’s office and the city’s Department of Finance.
“This has to change in terms of the sheriff having the final say,” Brewer told The Post. “There’s definitely plenty [of stores] to close that are legitimately illicit. I don’t know why you have to close ones that are not.”
According to city records, the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings — OATH, which typically adjudicates fines and penalties issued by city agencies — issued recommendations to reopen 229 of the 799 shops that had hearings in front of OATH as of early October.
But the sheriff refused to allow the reopening of roughly 75 of the 229 that had been cleared, instead requiring them to remain closed for up to a year.
State officials did not respond to repeated Post requests for comment.
A City Hall rep replied to related questions from The Post only by saying that more than 1,200 shops have been shuttered and over $82 million in illicit products have been seized since the operation began in the spring.
“We will continue to exercise the authority given to us by the state to help keep our communities safe and create an environment where legal cannabis operators can thrive,” said Deputy Press Secretary Liz Garcia in a statement.
OATH hearings that dismiss the sheriff’s orders closing shops cite a range of factors: technical deficiencies, no evidence of sale of cannabis at a store, no cannabis found at a store or that a store had indeed complied with a prior cease-and-desist notice and got rid of their black-market weed.
In some cases, the raids did turn up cannabis, but often the amounts were so minor that they failed to meet a “de minimis” requirement set in state law, which is not expressly defined, critics say.
Other times, the sheriff offered odd evidence, such as a few joints found inside the backpack of a worker or, extraordinarily, in the pockets of a customer in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Regardless, many of these stores were ordered to remain closed by the sheriff.
Miranda — whose office was recently raided and is under investigation for improperly seized cash and for possible shakedowns schemes — was given these powers by the same state law which paved the way for the vaunted Operation Padlock To Protect.
The law, sponsored by strong Adams ally and candidate for city comptroller state Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar, gives the sheriff final discretion on whether raided stores can reopen — with no burden of proof required.
Rajkumar told The Post that the sheriff’s padlocking powers were needed because slapping just fines on rogue shops was “an exercise in futility,” but she also noted that she is open to improving the law.
Lawyer Lance Lazzaro, who filed a federal class-action lawsuit challenging the law and represents the Fulton Street tobacco store, said, “It’s like we are living in an authoritarian state.”
Kahnauth added, “There is no due process then, right?
“It defeats the purpose of us as attorneys presenting any viable defense,” Kahnauth said of the sheriff’s powers. “What you’re looking at doing here is major — you’re not just slapping someone with a civil penalty. At worst, it’s unconstitutional.”
Last summer, Lazarro won a state court case, which was immediately appealed, that could also undo many of the Operation Padlock closures.
According to the OATH hearing notes, the evidence for padlocking Al Saidi’s Fulton Street store was that a weed dealer entered the shop and conducted an illicit cannabis deal inside with a 20-year-old undercover officer, leading the sheriff to claim that the store sold weed to a minor.
Ironically, Al Saidi had long complained about dealers on his store’s block before the raid, the hearing notes.
The only cannabis found in the store was on the dealer, according to the hearing.
Six days later, Miranda wrote a pro-forma letter rejecting the court’s order and issuing a “final decision” to keep the store closed for one year.
On Friday, Lazzaro filed papers against the city to reopen Al Saidi’s shop.
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In The Bronx, a store owner told The Post that his Lydig Avenue store had been raided on a few occasions during Operation Padlock, with the sheriff leaving empty-handed each time.
The shop’s former owner had previously sold illegal cannabis. But when new owner, Adam, who didn’t want his last name in the paper due to fear of retribution, took over the lease in the spring, he removed all the cannabis, tobacco and vape products while awaiting a legal cannabis license from the state — yet still suffered through a string of raids.
But a raid in early August was different, starting with 10 officers who burst into the store with guns drawn, Adam said.
About 10 minutes into the raid, a smaller group of officers marched in a local drug dealer who sells weed on the same block as the store — in an effort similar to Al Saidi’s store, the shop owner said.
The store was immediately padlocked, putting him and his four employees out of work.
At his OATH hearing, Adam and his lawyer, Kahnauth, even found the dope dealer who, according to the hearing officer, “credibly testified and established that he is the neighborhood cannabis dealer,” and determined that the store was not selling cannabis, recommending its immediate reopening.
The sheriff disagreed and ordered the store to remain closed for a year.
“I lost the whole store, a good business, that didn’t have anything,” Adam told The Post. “Absolutely zero thing illegal [sic] inside the store — no vapes, no tobacco, nothing, absolutely zero.”
Adam used to have three convenience stores, but thanks to Operation Padlock, now he has none.
His other two were also shuttered in raids, but while they were allowed to reopen after their OATH hearings, in the convenience industry, customers can quickly develop new routines that don’t include your even temporarily padlocked storefront.
“I opened back up for a month, and that’s it. My business was making nothing,” he said, “I was paying rent out of my pocket.
“I’m never gonna touch convenience stores ever, because now it’s a target,” he said. “You open a convenience store, you’re a target for the sheriffs. They’ll just come and hit me any day.”
