Ex-Restaurateur Slammed As Conman

A former Long Wharf restaurant owner has come under fire for allegedly stealing from both his employees and investors.

Those allegations are detailed in a March 1 arrest warrant affidavit by a West Haven police detective. They were also publicly declared during a Wednesday afternoon protest organized by local workers and members of Unidad Latina En Acción (ULA), a grassroots organization dedicated to defending the civil and human rights of immigrants living and working in the Greater New Haven region. The protest was held outside of the now-shuttered Andy’s Restaurant (formerly the Greek Olive) at 402 Sargent Dr.

Former Andy’s restaurant employees Lina Segura and Alexander Hernandez have accused the suspect of owing more than $20,000 in unpaid minimum wage and overtime work at the Long Wharf eatery that was open for only a few months last year. The pair said they have filed complaints about that alleged wage theft with the state Department of Labor. 

On Wednesday, Segura and Hernandez joined tens of protesters outside their old workplace, holding signs and banners printed with slogans like ​“Caution: Workplace Declared Unhealthy For Employees.”

Others claiming to have loaned the individual money for his real estate and restaurant ventures have said he failed to ever pay them back. Specifically, an arrest warrant issued by the West Haven police charges the individual with three counts of issuing bad checks as well as larceny in the first degree, suggesting that he took a total of $32,000 from another New Haven ex-restaurant owner, Balmer Gonalez, after promising to repay him.

The accused individual did not respond to multiple requests for comment by the New Haven Independent before the publication time of this article. He has not yet entered a plea in his ongoing criminal case. He is scheduled to enter a plea in court on May 18 in Milford.

Intent To Defraud?

The arrest warrant and corresponding affidavit provide a clear timeline about one person’s ongoing financial disputes with the individual suspected of borrowing money from an array of lenders and failing to properly compensate his own employees.

In the application for the arrest warrant, a West Haven cop detailed interviews with the complainant, Balmer Gonzalez, and the defendant. 

Gonzalez told West Haven Police Det. Steven Viele that last July he agreed to loan the defendant, an acquaintance whom he’d known for about six years, $2,000 in return for $2,200. Gonzalez said he believed the defendant had the means to repay him because the defendant owned a contracting company.

The defendant reportedly wrote a $2,200 check drawn on a Bank of America account but asked the individual not to cash it for a couple of weeks. He then also asked Gonzalez for another $20,000 loan with the promise to repay him $21,000, and wrote up another check at that amount. He later asked for a third loan of $10,000 to invest in his business — the restaurant at 402 Sargent Dr.— with the promise of a $12,000 repayment. 

Gonzalez said the defendant told him to hang on before cashing the checks because he was waiting on the sale of an East Haven property that he had been using the loaned money to rehabilitate. 

Gonzalez finally turned over those three checks as evidence to the detective after more than six months had passed by without receiving repayment, after he’d made contact with at least two others to whom the individual had reportedly owed money and never repaid, and after he’d tried to cash the checks himself only to be told that the suspect’s bank accounts were all closed.

The detective was able to speak to the suspect over the phone, who said that he did borrow money from Gonzalez and issue those three checks. The suspect said that he and his lawyer had recently met with Gonzalez and that the pair had signed an agreement to extend the repayment of the money until December 2023. 

He sent the detective a copy of that agreement as well as a personal statement and Bank of America statements.

The detective said that the agreement, which proposed an extension of the repayment timeline and asked Gonzalez to loan up to $70,000, did not feature a signature from Gonzalez himself.

The bank statements, meanwhile, showed that the suspect had negative balances in his accounts at the time that he wrote the checks to Gonzalez. The detective said that information suggests the suspect ​“showed intent to defraud” Gonzalez.

Gonzalez later confirmed that he had met with the suspect and his lawyer to discuss the extension and expansion of the agreed upon loan, but that he did not sign the new agreement because at that point he did not believe he would get paid back.

The arrest warrant charges the suspect with one misdemeanor, issuing a bad check between $1,000 and $2,000, and three felonies, which include issuing two bad checks over $2,000 and larceny in the first degree. The state’s criminal court database states that the suspect was arrested on March 20 and released from custody on a $10,000 bond.

Like "Family," Or "Slaves?"

On Wednesday afternoon, around 20 people gathered outside of the now-vacant Andy’s Restaurant, a Colombian eatery, to call out the former owner for alleged theft — while drawing attention to broader labor abuse happening across the region.

“Que queremos?” construction worker and ULA organizer Bella called out to a crowd of workers standing in a unified line outside the restaurant along Sargent Drive.

“Justicia!” They responded.

“Cuando?”

“Ahora!”

ULA Director John Lugo translated as Alexander Hernandez, who washed dishes at Andy’s, spoke to his experiences with the suspect.

“He owes money to everybody and plays around this issue with everyone in the community,” Lugo quoted Hernandez as saying. ​“It’s not just me — his excuse is, ​‘I buy crap, I don’t have money to pay you.’”

“If we keep working together, we’re gonna get justice eventually,” Hernandez said in Spanish.

Lina Segura, who is Hernandez’s partner, told the Independent that the suspect owed her family $22,000 in total. 

Segura and Hernandez moved from Colombia to New Haven back in July 2022 with their three-year-old son, Samuel. 

She worked as a chef at Andy’s for around three months after arriving in New Haven, during which time she said she worked around 80 hours a week. Her boss, the suspect, was also a Colombian immigrant who had arrived in New Haven several years earlier. 

“He was always late to pay the workers,” she said. After payments halted all together, Segura said her boss invited her family to live in an apartment he was renting in North Branford to make up for his inability to compensate them monetarily. She said he told her he was working on another house in East Haven and that he’d be able to pay her and her partner back what he owed them once he sold the property. 

However, at the same time that he was promising but continuously postponing compensation, he was also failing to pay rent for the North Branford apartment.

After Andy’s shuttered due to financial woes, the suspect received an eviction notice — meaning Segura and her family had to relocate.

In a press release distributed by Lugo for the event, Segura is quoted as saying: ​“The owner told us we were like family and that he would pay us later. But after months of working hard and not receiving any money, we were more like [his] slaves.”

Segura’s family is now renting a room in Bridgeport. Her husband has found a job washing cars while she continues to look for work. 

Segura said a friend of hers connected her with ULA, who helped her file a complaint with the Department of Labor. Through ULA, she also met others who said they had lost money to the suspect, such as Daisy Vasquez, another individual who spoke at Wednesday’s protest, claiming the former restaurateur had failed to repay her and her husband up to $36,000.

Now, however, Segura is unsure what to do next. She said she is facing the possibility of deportation and that she doesn’t have enough money to take her boss to court.

ULA is attempting to cover the costs for people like Segura to hire lawyers, but the organization is currently working with around 20 people who have reportedly experienced wage theft and are in need of similar support.

While other workers took the microphone Wednesday to speak to their own ongoing fights with past employers — read more about some of those cases as previously written about here — Lugo also called on public officials to help expand protections against labor exploitation for immigrant workers.

In January, President Biden announced that the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has developed a new streamlined process for undocumented immigrants who are victims or witnesses of labor exploitation to apply for a so-called ​“deferred action request.” That’s a process which temporarily protects workers from deportation and provides them with temporary work authorizations.

Lugo said he wants local and federal officials to boost their advertisement efforts for that new channel to help make immigrants who might be fearful of engaging with the government aware that there are pathways by which they can contest unfair working conditions and practices. He said he also hopes the federal government will locate funding to provide legal support for workers like Segura aiming to hold their employers accountable.

“We need to encourage more workers to come out and say something about the exploitation they face,” he said.