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Mama mia! A saucy Papa John’s deliveryman sliced up a Brooklyn Heights elevator like it was a piping hot pie, but little did he know that a security camera recorded every last scratch.
And now the owner of the Livingston Street building is biting back, suing the franchise for $3,200 — the cost, he says, of removing the “Dizzy CFM” tag that the ditzy doughboy scratched into the car’s wood paneling.
“We were shocked,” said Michael Cantor, the landlord of 59 Livingston St., the defaced rental building between Court and Clinton streets.
“I spoke to the [franchise] owner and he said, ‘It couldn’t have been one of my drivers,’ ” recounted Cantor. “I asked him to watch the video and he refused.
“Since he didn’t want to take responsibility for it, we reported it to the police.”
The owner of the Downtown Brooklyn Papa John’s, which is on Livingston Street between Bond and Nevins streets, told The Brooklyn Paper that he had fired the rogue deliveryman — and that Cantor should take the former employee to court, not him.
“It was something the delivery guy did on his own,” said the Papa John’s owner, Nadim Mohammed, who expressed sympathy for the vandalism victims, adding, “I know the feeling. My own home was vandalized.”
Mohammed added that he offered to pay Cantor “a couple of hundred dollars” to keep the incident out of the courts, but he felt that Cantor’s demand for $3,200 was excessive.
“I did apologize to him,” Mohammed said.
That wasn’t enough for Cantor, who brought the Oct. 17 incident to the attention of the Papa John’s corporation, sending letters that caused as much agita as a pizza with extra toppings.
“It’s astonishing they haven’t even given us a phone call back,” Cantor said, adding that he has told his tenants not to allow Papa John’s deliverymen into the building.
Cantor and Mohammed are due in court next month, but at least one legal expert told The Brooklyn Paper that Cantor is unlikely to taste victory.
“It’s a tough case unless Papa John’s knew [the deliveryman] had a history of vandalism,” said Kenneth Montgomery, a criminal and civil lawyer in DUMBO. – with Zeke Faux
©2008 Community Newspaper Group
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