Immigrant Who Has Operated Newsstand for 23 Years Fights City Bid to Fine Him over $90,000

For 23 years Sadik Topia, an immigrant from Gujarat, has offered newspapers, magazines and neighborliness from the newsstand on 79th Street and Broadway.

It hasn’t been a bad living, good enough to raise a family in the Bronx and send his kids off to success. One daughter is a nurse at Montefiore. A son is a certified public accountant.

But suddenly, as his sixtieth birthday approaches (on January 21st), Topia finds himself out on the street, quite literally, banned from the newsstand and forced to sell his newspapers from the steps of an adjoining church.

“They’re killing me,” Topia said, “for nothing.”

Topia’s nemesis is the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which has suspended the license to operate the newsstand.

While Mayor Adams has promised a “City of Yes,” where agencies help small businesses prosper, Topia has experienced a Dickensian spiral in which seemingly minor infractions produced a fine far greater than he could pay, $58,000.

In addition, he was liable for some earlier summonses for infractions like displaying wares on makeshift shelves that were not part of the structure of the newsstand, a city approved design, and for selling a phone charger for $30 when newsstand’s are limited by city ordinance from charging more than $10 a piece for their goods.

These fines added another $34,000, bringing his total debt to the city to $92,000.

When he could not pay, the license to operate was suspended. “Too much fine,” he explains.

Now his neighbors have risen in Topia’s defense.

“My email box is full of correspondence from residents who love him,” said the local council member, Gail Brewer, in a letter to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “He is a neighborhood institution.”

“The violations,” Brewer added, “seem very small, but the fines are huge.”

Topia’s tale is, ultimately, the story of a declining business, print newspapers and magazines, and how the pandemic accelerated that long, slow challenge and turned it into a crisis.

When he started as a news dealer, he was collecting as much as $2,000 a day from the sale of newspapers and magazines, he recalled. But the news business moved on-line and Topia had to move to other products to keep his business alive.

One of those products was e-cigarettes and their paraphernalia. The newsstand was licensed to sell these products, but it expired in 2021 amid the pandemic. The city, Topia says, told him he could renew it after the pandemic, but he never did.

Unfortunately for Topia, a city investigator on September 19, 2022 observed that his newsstand was offering vaporizers, Juul pods and smoke pens for sale despite his expired license.

The fine is $100 a day. But that is where things went really wrong for Topia.

The case ended up before an administrative hearing officer. Topia argued that he had only been selling the electronic smoking products since labor day of 2022, 13 days before the inspector caught him, and that he immediately stopped.

That would have been a $1,300 fine.

But the hearing officer was in no mood for leniency.

“With respect to penalties,” a summary of the case explains, “The hearing officer found that respondents claim of cessation was not convincing and imposed $100 a day for 584 days, from the date of license expiration through the date of the hearing.”

Topia, in other words, was presumed guilty of illegal sales unless he could prove his claim that he was innocent for most of the time.

Now, an administrative hearing is not a criminal court. The presumption of innocence, which we are all taught is a bed rock of our legal system, doesn’t apply in the same way.

Topia and his representatives “failed to successfully rebut the presumption of continued unlicensed activity,” an appeals tribunal wrote in upholding the ruling and the severe fine.

“Protecting the health and well being of our neighbors is paramount,” said a spokesman for the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, Michael Lanza, “and we take tobacco related community complaints seriously.”

Lanza points out that, technically, it is not Topia who is being fined, but the license holder of the newsstand, Marilyn Kaufman, who subcontracts running the newsstand to Topia.

The city holds her responsible, although Topia was running the newsstand. Topia says she expects him to deal with the fines and he accepts that responsibility, having run the stand for 23 years.

Despite the careful reasoning of the administrative hearings, Topia’s neighbors feel there has been a miscarriage of justice.

For one thing, Brewer observes, there are 61 smoke shops operating in her district in various degrees of illegality and peddling e-cigarettes. Why is Topia shut down while they continue to operate?

Lanza says his department does not regulate Cannibis, the state does. But the department does regulate tobacco and e-cigarette sales and “has enforced and issued penalties to more than 100 separate smoke shops and other businesses selling these products illegally” in Brewer’s west side district.

Lanza adds: “DCWP has prioritized enforcement of illegal smoke shops that have a history of violating NYC laws prohibiting the sale of tobacco and electronic cigarettes to minors and the sale of illegal flavored products. Since March 1 2023, DCWP has shut down more than 50 illegal smoke shops, collecting more than $1 million in penalties owed to us.”

Still, many of his neighbors just don’t think such a bad thing should happen to someone they know as such a good person.

“Sadik was there during the pandemic,” says one of his loyal customers, Peg Breen, who stops by almost every day on her way to her job as President of The New York Landmarks Conservancy. “One day I realized I didn’t have enough money for the papers I wanted. He didn’t know me, but just said to pay the rest the next time. Another time, when I stopped for the papers, he handed me the sunglasses I thought I had lost. He’s a lovely person and a real neighbor.”

Another regular customer, Ann MacDougall, who lives a block away, appealed to the city to help Topia, known in the neighborhood as Sammy.

“Close to half the existing news stands on the UWS have been shuttered,” she wrote to Brewer, “even though they have expanded their offerings to lottery tickets, more candy, etc. It is a hard living indeed and I for one (and many of my UWS friends) are very happy they are there...I would have thought the city would try to make it easier for these vital small businesses to survive–and maybe such a project is underway, but I am unaware of it.”

For his part, Topia says he is grateful for all the community support and hopes it will be enough to win a reprieve so he can keep operating the newsstand. “I worked very hard to make my life,” he says.