The guy before him got punched in the face and robbed of his car when delivering pies to the Boulevard. But Hassan Iajour, a Moroccan immigrant working long days delivering pizzas in order to send money home to his widowed mom, says he isn’t afraid.
Iajour, who’s 30, removed a long Maglite flashlight from the passenger seat of his Nissan Maxima to let this reporter along for a ride Thursday evening, as the city experiences a rash of attacks on pizza deliverers.
“Some of these houses I go to are really dark,” he explained.
Making his first run of the day on a below-freezing evening shift, he turned up the heat, turned on his GPS, and headed out to Newhallville with a single pizza pie.
Iajour moved to the New Haven area from Morocco six years ago. He just started a new a delivery job for Alpha Delta Pizza on Howe Street. After stints as a dishwasher and factory worker, he keeps coming back to delivering pies — even now.
Since Oct. 24, at least 25 people have been robbed while making fast food deliveries to New Haven homes, according to police. Calls usually come from cell phones. Some perpetrators hit several victims in one night: At one location on Elm Street, callers mugged deliverers from three different restaurant in the same night.
Some give up the food and get away safely. Some get pistol-whipped. Others lose their cars.
“This is scary stuff,” said Officer Joe Avery, who’s in charge of the city’s crime prevention outreach. “It’s only a matter of time before someone gets seriously hurt.”
From Iajour’s point of view, attacks are just one of the many unstable aspects of the job. Drivers go out on the streets largely without protection — often using their own cars and cell phones, putting themselves at risk. Back when he worked for Domino’s in West Haven, two guys with guns leapt out from a tree and ambushed a buddy of his.
Iajour pointed to a scar on his head from a summer night four years ago, when he got into a crash while on the job. His vehicle was totaled, his knee wrecked. He landed in the hospital for four days. Back at work, employers turned their backs: “He wasn’t working for us,” they claimed.
With no health insurance, and no family around to lean on, the wreck hit him bad. It turned him off to the delivery life. “I stopped doing it. I didn’t like it any more,” said Iajour in an understated, soft-spoken tone.
The middle of seven children, he came to America because there was “no work back at home.” It hasn’t been easy sticking it out, alone, especially when his father passed away and he missed the funeral. “That tore me up,” he said.
All along, he has been sending checks home to his mom — “even on the hardest days.” After quitting the delivery job, he went to work for a factory, operating machinery, with shifts sometimes running until 4 a.m. When he tried to leave the business to be a truck driver, he failed a physical test and ended up back on the pie-serving circuit.
“Sometimes, you feel like you free,” he said, driving through the quiet streets of Newhallville, where a few windows shone with Christmas lights. “No boss watchin’ you. But sometimes customers give you a hard time.”
He got out on dark Newhall Street with the pie. Besides the bright white pelicans guarding the gate, the house looked dark. Three men in hoodies walked in the shadows about a block away. He rang up the customers on his cell phone. After a couple minutes, two young boys came down. The boy handed over some cash and ran back upstairs with the receipt between his teeth.
“They send the kids ‘cause they don’t want to pay nothing,” grumbled Iajour over another nonexistent tip. On a usual delivery job, he makes $7 or $8 an hour. He pays for his own GPS, phone, car and gas. Most of the time, people don’t offer him much —“no tip, no hello, no goodbye, nothing.” Sometimes — like at one house he drove to in Sunday’s treacherous ice storm, when cars skidded out left and right — he shows up to find the person has no money at all.
In that case, the call had come from a hungry young woman who ended up turning him away.
Iajour said he’s never been trained in how to protect himself from a more malicious setup.
In the wake of the rash of muggings, the cops have been trying to alert food delivery people to take precautions against thefts. Among the suggestions: Don’t deliver to the rear of buildings; don’t accept orders via cell phone calls; and “make people come out to the curb” to pick up their food, so the delivery person has a chance to check them out first. The cops have even translated a written version of this alert into Chinese and distributed them to Chinese food delivery outlets.
Avery, the police crime prevention specialist, said he’s sent out the notice twice already, but he still sees victims making the same mistakes. “We sent the warning, but for some reason they’re not receiving it well.” A lot of the businesses rely on delivery for the bulk of their revenue, Avery said, so they don’t feel comfortable refusing orders just because they may be from a cell or pay phone. Avery said they need to at least educate drivers and consider safer protocols. “They need to weigh the risks.”
Iajour said he’s comfortable with the level of danger of the job.
“I never get scared,” he said, pulling back up to Alpha Delta Pizza, where the kitchen crew was cutting slices of sizzling shawarma for his dinner. “I know I’m going to die one time, just one time. I don’t know when, but it’s going to happen.”
He plans to stay until he saves up enough money to bring back to his family. “When I get what I need, I’ll go home.” Until then, he’ll likely be driving the streets with hot pies.