A Renegade Muscles In on Mister Softee’s
Turf
By ANDY NEWMAN and EMILY S. RUEB MAY 30, 2016
Summer in New York City means ice cream trucks: belljingling fleets of pleasure
craft festooned with pictures of perfectly swirled desserts and beaming children,
delivering frozen providence into grateful sweaty hands.
But behind those cheery facades simmer turf wars — longrunning, occasionally
bloody feuds between icecream vendors for control of the city’s prime selling spots.
And in a recent battle for a lucrative zone of tourist attractions and sunny
pedestrian plazas, a place filled with people willing to pay $4 for a plain vanilla cone,
no sprinkles, the king of ice cream land has lost to an upstart.
Mister Softee says he has been muscled out of Midtown.
New York Ice Cream, staffed by drivers who used to cover Midtown Manhattan
for Mister Softee, has had the area locked down for at least a year, Mister Softee said.
The renegade is enforcing its dominance with threats and intimidation that
sometimes get physical.
“If one of my drivers goes to Midtown, they’ll bring their trucks in and surround
them – a bunch of guys,” said Peter Bouziotis, who runs the Softee depot in the
Bronx, which covers Manhattan. “They’ll start banging on the windows.”
At the corner of 40th Street and Seventh Avenue in Times Square, a New York
Ice Cream man in the window of his purpletrimmed white truck was unapologetic.
“From 34th to 60th Street, river to river, that’s ours,” he said on a recent
afternoon, moments after handing a chocolate cone to a delightedlooking little boy.
The vendor would not allow his name to be published for fear of losing his job.
“You will never see a Mister Softee truck in Midtown,” he continued. “If you do,
there will be problems, and you won’t see him there very long.”
Boxing in a Softee truck so the driver can’t do business. Getting up in his face.
Grabbing his collar and delivering some unsolicited advice.
“Happens all the time,” the New York Ice Cream man said.
New York Ice Cream’s founder, Dimitrios Tsirkos, did not respond to repeated
requests for comment.
Mister Softee’s vice president, Jim Conway, said that the company had urged its
drivers to retake the heart of the city, to no avail.
“Corporately, we would love to see people go in there — we consider it wide
open territory and anyone would do great selling there,” Mr. Conway said. “The issue
is that people just fear for their safety.”
Mr. Conway said that Mister Softee had not sought legal remedy for the
bullying. “It’s just the way it is,” he said. “Life on the street.”
A city permit allows mobile vendors to sell anywhere within the city. At a
franchise operation like Mister Softee, routes are assigned by the depot manager so
that drivers for the same company do not trip over one another.
But, Mr. Bouziotis said, “I’m not going to push anyone” to sell ice cream where
they feel endangered.
Bad blood has run through the New York ice cream trade for decades. In 1969, a
Softee driver was kidnapped by rivals who blew up his truck. In 2004, a coneselling
couple in their 60s were ambushed by competitors who beat them into critical
condition with a wrench. In a 2010 brawl caught on video, two drivers near
Columbus Circle exchanged punches before one man pushed the other’s face into a
planter.
But drivers for Mister Softee, whose coneheaded, bowtied likeness adorns more
than 350 trucks across the five boroughs, can play hard, too.
In 2012, a frozen yogurt vendor said that a Softee duo snapped his brakes with a
crowbar, and the founder of the Van Leeuwen ice cream company said he had gotten
death threats from Softee drivers. (A lawyer for Mister Softee, Jeffrey Zucker, said
that while he had not heard about the 2012 allegations, “a franchisee could lose his
or her Mister Softee franchise for engaging in that type of criminal activity.”)
“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily
tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and
East Harlem, said on Wednesday. “Every truck has a bat inside.”
Mr. Vega, 41, said that if he comes across a rival on his route, “I jump out and
say, ‘Listen young man, this is my route, you gotta get out of there.’ ”
The rift between New York Ice Cream and Mister Softee goes back to around
2013. According to court documents, Mr. Tsirkos held at least a dozen Softee
franchises at the time, mostly in Midtown.
Several of his drivers said that he was upset at high franchise fees and inflated
prices for supplies. So he took his trucks (they are owned by individuals, not Mister
Softee), added sprinkles and a waffle cone to the logo, and struck out on his own
under the name Master Softee.
Mister Softee cried trademark infringement.
In court, at least, Mister Softee is winning. The upstarts have changed their
name, to New York Ice Cream, and the look of their trucks.
Mr. Tsirkos has been ordered to compensate Mister Softee for his misdeeds.
Last week, a federal judge ordered him to pay Softee $287,858.44 in lawyers’ fees,
bringing the total he owes to over $767,000. (So far, Mister Softee’s lawyers say, Mr.
Tsirkos has parted with only $2,426.)
On the streets, it’s been tougher.
At the Bronx Softee depot on Southern Boulevard on Wednesday, Mark
Rodridguez, a former Army infantryman in Afghanistan, said that he had managed
to sell ice cream on 33rd Street near Madison Square Garden for several hours one
recent afternoon.
“They didn’t chase you?” asked a colleague, Leon Frierson.
“No,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “Too many cops. Nobody’s gonna try anything.”
nytimes.com |
