Wall Street-area restaurant threatened, harassed by OWS

posted at 2:56 pm on November 8, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Moonbats ]   

The anti-Wall Street protesters who have made Zuccotti Park their home away from home may have some odious habits, but at least the infiltration of thousands of new area residents has been good for business, right?

Well, not in so many words. Last Friday one of the self-described 99% flew into a rage at a McDonald’s where he was denied free food. The man ripped a credit-card reader from a counter and hurled it at workers.

Today comes word of another restaurant, this one directly across from Zuccotti Park, that claims its staff is being terrorized by the protesters. The New York Post reports that Stacey Tzortzatos, owner of Panini & Co. Breads

claims she has been repeatedly harassed and threatened with bodily harm by protesters after she and her employees refused to give in to their outlandish demands.

The difficulties began when Tzortzatos decreed that her sandwich shop’s restrooms were not a public bath. Tensions escalated when demonstrators broke a bathroom sink, flooding the shop, and clogged the toilet. After having to fork over $3,000 to cover the costs of repair, Tzortzatos hung a sign indicating that the restroom was out of order, but protesters tore the sign down.

She is quoted by the Post as saying:

I have the police in here 10 times a day, [and] I’m the bouncer. I’ve been called the spawn of the devil. It’s unbelievable what goes on in here every day.

When the restaurant is closed, protesters use the façade as a bathroom. When it is open, they demand electric power to run their laptops. Says Tzortzatos, “They unplugged my ATM machine and plugged in their computers.”

Some have threatened to boycott the store for refusing to acquiesce to their demands, which last Friday included filling a 10-gallon container with water. When an employee refused, the individual who had brought in the container (described as a “crazed squatter”) began banging the container on the ground and screaming.

After another downtown restaurant was forced to lay off 21 workers last week because business had dropped off 30 percent since the beginning of the “occupation,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the police to remove hundreds of metal barricades that shop owners claimed was a deterrent to customers. Instead, the removal of the barriers seemed to be an open invitation to protesters to step up their “business” at local establishments.

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