The 5 Star Grocery in South Ozone Park, Queens, is open 24 hours, but after a series of robberies nearby, the door is locked earlier than usual.Every night, before he shuts off the lights of his bodega in South Ozone Park, Queens, Reynaldo Rojas takes out some plastic bags and fills them with dozens of cigarette packs and phone cards from behind the counter. He empties the cigar box he uses as a cash register and tucks a wad of bills into his pants.
He has learned to leave little of value behind. In South Ozone Park these days, bodega owners assume the worst.
Mr. Rojas’s tiny shop at Rockaway Boulevard and 128th Street has been burglarized twice. The first time, about two years ago, thieves broke the wall in a back bathroom, climbed in and stole cigarettes, phone cards and cash. He lost $11,000: the money to pay his $1,600 monthly rent, bills and taxes. The second time, just a month and a half ago, burglars broke two locks on a gate, shattered the plexiglass on the front door and again grabbed phone cards and cash.
The store, Rojas Deli and Grocery, is, as Mr. Rojas puts it, “a penny business.” Seven days a week, some 13 hours a day, he deals in 60-cent Tic Tacs, 99-cent Doritos and $6.90 Newport Lights. He figures he makes the same amount of money as when he worked as a security guard on Long Island more than four years ago, when he earned $14 an hour.
“This is not the kind of business to make money and put in the pocket,” said Mr. Rojas, 44. “One hundred candies. How much is this? Five dollars.”
Burglaries and robberies are especially hard to stomach in this world of nickel sweets. It was here in South Ozone Park, less than a mile from Mr. Rojas’s shop, that a bodega owner was shot in the face during a robbery on Monday and later died. No one has been arrested, and the police said that the same three men who held up that bodega may have also robbed 16 others in the area since mid-March.
For Mr. Rojas and other convenience store merchants in this neighborhood north of Kennedy Airport, there is sadness for the victim’s children and worry over which store will be next. There is, as always, talk of dollars and cents, and outrage that Bolivar Cruz, the bodega owner, was apparently killed for the $300 in his cash register.
On Wednesday, the day Mr. Cruz died, another bodega in the neighborhood was held up. It does not reassure anyone that the police do not think it was related to the other robberies. But there is the matter of work and bills to pay, and so the bodegas of South Ozone Park have remained open for business.
Even late into the night, their bright lights shine along Rockaway Boulevard, a busy strip of auto shops, pizza joints and hair salons not far from Kennedy Mini Market, Mr. Cruz’s shuttered shop on 131st Street. Late Friday evening and early Saturday morning, life at the bodegas went on as normal. Customers, nearly all of them men, were eyed with a flash of suspicion and then treated with a kind of convenience-store courtesy: not too polite, but not too rude, either.
At 5 Star Grocery, the walk-up window was open 24 hours, but the front door was locked. Abdo Abashar, 45, a longtime worker at the bodega, said he had been leaving the door open until midnight, but started closing it about two hours early because of the robberies.
Mr. Abashar has seven children.
“Seven of them,” he repeated.
He was told Mr. Cruz had eight children.
“I know,” he replied. “Seven daughters and one boy.”
At the 24-hour Jassi Convenience store on Lefferts Boulevard near Rockaway Boulevard, middle-aged men bought lottery tickets at 2 a.m., and Mohammad Ullah, 47, working his usual 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift, made a fresh pot of coffee.
It was about 2 a.m. one Saturday nearly two months ago when three masked men burst into the store, pointed a gun at Mr. Ullah’s co-worker and took $2,000 from the register. The co-worker quit; Mr. Ullah stayed on.
There he was behind the counter of the brightly lighted store early Saturday, sipping coffee and buzzing customers inside after glancing at their reflection in a large mirror across the counter.
“Still we’re working,” Mr. Ullah said with a shrug. “What can we do?”
The workers and owners at South Ozone Park bodegas and convenience stores are nearly all immigrants. They come from the Dominican Republic, from Yemen, from Bangladesh. They work alongside family members, who often pitch in, providing extra help or extra security.
During one 12-month stretch in the mid-1990s, more than 50 people — one a week — were killed in bodega robberies in the city. Homicides and overall crime in the city have fallen significantly since then, but bodegas remain dangerous places. Besides the Queens holdups, bodegas in Brooklyn and the Bronx have also seen robbery streaks in the last year.
The bodega provides a livelihood, but brings long hours, low pay (some workers said they made $450 to $500 a week) and often little respect from customers. The recent robberies and shooting, owners and workers said, made a hard life that much harder.
“It’s not easy,” said Javier Tejada, 33, the owner of Antillana Deli Grocery, several blocks from the scene of the attack on Mr. Cruz. “You work 14 hours, and then in five minutes you lose your life.”
Yet the bodegas in this part of Queens shatter the stereotype of the late-night New York City convenience store. None of the shops visited on Friday night had bulletproof cages inside separating the customer from the cashier. The bodegas here remain friendly establishments, decorated with American flags and pictures of grandchildren mixed in with liquor licenses. Customers stepping into Al-Prince Deli and Grocery on Rockaway Boulevard near midnight Friday found not a gruff worker behind the counter but two playful little boys, the sons of the owner, Amir Abozaid.
Mr. Cruz was shot about 9:30 p.m. on Monday. At the same time on Friday evening, Mr. Rojas stood at his cramped plexiglass counter as customers came and went.
Although Mr. Cruz was shot while reaching for his pistol, Mr. Rojas does not question the benefit of a firearm. He pulled from his wallet a membership card from a Long Island gun club where he goes for firing practice. “You never know,” he said, referring to the shooting of Mr. Cruz. “I can be next.”
He has owned the shop for four years and is its sole employee. His nephew made deliveries and helped him around the store on Friday. To Mr. Rojas, who came to New York from Santiago, in the Dominican Republic, it felt natural to have his nephew assisting him in the store. He wants his bodega to feel like home.
He keeps pictures of his two children, his grandson and another young nephew underneath a plastic covering he uses as a countertop. Next to the pictures he has displayed money from around the world, a tradition started by his customers. He has lira from Turkey, taka from Bangladesh, pesos from Colombia. “Believe it or not,” he said with a grin, “I’m a millionaire.”
His mother in Washington Heights is worried for his safety. His customers are, too. “Don’t close too late,” they tell him. “Be careful.”
Mr. Rojas, a round, unshaven man who has not taken a vacation in four years, watched the first game in the Subway Series on Friday evening. The television sat on a refrigerator that keeps the sodas cool, next to a monitor that showed live video of the inside of the store.
He has one security camera, but two crosses. Both are made of palm fronds. One hangs above the door, beneath promotional Budweiser posters. The other one dangles by a piece of tape from the top shelf of his counter, below the stacks of cigarettes, eye level with the customers.
“I believe in God,” Mr. Rojas said. “When you believe in God, you feel the protection.”
Mr. Rojas does not stay open late. On Friday, he turned off the television about 10:30 p.m. It was slow for a Friday, he said. He quickly locked the gates, leaving on the twinkling green and blue bulbs lining the awning. He drove off with his nephew, taking the phone cards, cigarettes and cash home with him.
