On a Friday in 2016, the employees of M Street Pizza on Marshall Street woke up expecting to work. Instead, they found two weeks’ pay missing and their place of employment on the brink of closing down.

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he employees of M Street Pizza always got paid on Fridays. Direct deposit would usually kick in. Checks would shortly follow. But on a Friday in May 2016, nearly two weeks after Syracuse University’s commencement, neither happened. The previous two weeks of pay were gone.

That was the first inclination something was up, said Lisa Ramirez, the general manager of the Marshall Street pizza restaurant at the time.

Ramirez panicked. She called Greg Allen, a former SU football player and one of M Street’s out-of-state owners. She called Jeff Smith, an intellectual property lawyer and the other M Street out-of-state owner. She wasn’t able to contact M Street’s primary owner and landlord, David Jacobs. She thought, then, that if something went wrong, he probably had something to do with it.

In the next few hours, Ramirez would learn that Jacobs, a former SU football player and long-time Marshall Street business owner, emailed Smith earlier that day to inform him he had removed himself as an owner of the pizzeria.

Without an explanation, employees said, Jacobs changed the building’s locks that night. When Ramirez tried to pick up her things the next morning, she couldn’t get in.

In the span of 24 hours, M Street employees had lost two weeks’ pay, their jobs and a line of communication with Jacobs, who, when confronted, told employees that M Street was no longer his responsibility and to call his lawyer, one employee said.

“It’s just not fair and it’s not right,” Ramirez said. “And it’s not right my people had to go through that. And for my full-time people, to lose your job just like that, it’s terrible.”

What Ramirez and the other M Street employees didn’t know is the pizzeria’s owners had been squabbling behind the scenes for months. The conflict between them culminated in Jacobs withdrawing funds from M Street’s bank account before he officially pulled out as owner and shuttered the restaurant.

M Street’s employees were not paid the day the restaurant closed because there wasn’t enough money in the account for payroll, Allen and Smith said.

Allen and Smith paid everyone out of their own pockets, but the process took about three weeks, employees said. The Daily Orange confirmed at least seven employees were not paid on time, but Allen and Smith declined to confirm a specific number of employees. Both also declined to say how much money was withdrawn by Jacobs from the business’ bank account.

In a statement emailed to The Daily Orange, Jacobs’ lawyer, Peter Hobaica, said Jacobs withdrew $800 from the account as reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses. The statement acknowledges the plight of M Street’s employees but avoids placing the blame on Jacobs for M Street’s demise.

“…If you are talking about employees who were treated unfairly, who were not paid or who lost their jobs with little or no notice; I would say perhaps they were unaware that Mr. Jacobs had nothing to do with those actions or decisions,” Hobaica said in the statement.

Since Jacobs was technically owed the money, Allen and Smith said he did not do anything illegal or steal any money. It was the timing of Jacobs’ withdrawal from the business’ bank account that left Allen and Smith without enough funds to pay employees, they said.

“They (employees) have bills. They have families to feed,” Ramirez said. “You just can’t not care.”

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y the time Jacobs shut down M Street on May 27, 2016, his relationships with M Street’s employees had started to deteriorate. Only one employee who was hired when M Street opened stayed until it closed. The rest were fired or had quit.

In interviews with The Daily Orange, 11 former M Street employees described their interactions with Jacobs, who some described as “erratic” and “difficult to work for.” The result was a chaotic and stressful workplace marred with infighting between Jacobs and the employees.

Jacobs declined to meet with reporters from The Daily Orange for an in-person interview regarding this story. In the emailed statement, Hobaica asked if The Daily Orange’s reporting on M Street’s closure was a “witch hunt.”

“I’m left wondering why The D.O. has any interest in Mr. Jacobs, his business ventures or any of his tenants,” Hobaica said in the email. “Does someone have a bone to pick? Is someone on some sort of witch hunt here?”

The relationship between Jacobs and Ramirez was particularly fraught. Former employees said Jacobs frequently changed work schedules Ramirez had made and canceled shifts for employees she’d scheduled — sometimes with as little as 15 minutes notice. Allen and Smith suggested Ramirez distribute promotional material at nearby hospitals, and recalled Jacobs saying Ramirez was “not a good representative of our brand.”

“All I did was put out fires and try to make people happy,” Ramirez said. “And it was just so hard. He’s a very difficult man to work for.”

Jacobs was not the day-to-day manager of M Street, but was still privy to its inner workings through a system of security cameras set up at M Street and Shirt World, a Jacobs-owned SU apparel shop two storefronts down from the restaurant. Former employees said Jacobs would monitor the cameras and, when he saw something he didn’t like, would call or come into the store.

“Literally he drove everybody in the building crazy because he was in there every 10, 15 minutes,” said Tom Dittrich, a former pizza maker at M Street. “And then the camera thing. Oh my god, the camera thing was insane. He would watch it and call and be like, ‘Why is this person just standing there?’”

Former employees said Jacobs fixated on what they thought were unnecessary grievances, such as not having enough pizza in the display case or not doing enough to shorten the line of customers, even though, employees said, everyone was busy working.

“He would call on the phone and be like, ‘Why isn’t there a fresh pizza up there?’ Well, they just bought it. Every other normal human would understand,” said Jeremy Miller, a former pizza maker and the only employee who said he worked at M Street from start to finish.

Former employees said Jacobs was preoccupied with what he called “the brand.” He would often tell employees to throw out entire pizzas or change the recipe because the pizzas didn’t look “on brand,” former employees said. They weren’t shiny enough, or didn’t have the right amount of sauce, or he didn’t like the color of the cheese. Jacobs was determined to make the pizzas glisten and would often use a spray bottle of olive oil to douse the pizzas in the display case, former employees said.

“So how can you have ‘the brand’ when you change it every day?” Dittrich said. “Every time he comes in he would change it. ‘I want it this way. No, I want it that way.’”

Some could deal with Jacobs’ interruptions, rants about “the brand” and what they viewed as undeserved criticism. They needed the money. For others, it drove them to quit.

“It was annoying. It was definitely hostile,” said David Dailey, a former pizza maker at M Street who quit about a month and a half before the pizzeria closed. “It got to the point where I didn’t even want to go into work anymore because it was, you know, that bad.”

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acobs has been a fixture on Marshall Street for decades. From 1975-79, he had what is today the third-most career field goals as a kicker on SU’s football team.

In the years since he retired from football, Jacobs has bought three additional buildings on Marshall Street near Shirt World, including the properties where Calios and M Kaiten Sushi are today, according to Onondaga County property tax records. He also owns the building where Moghul Indian Grill sits, an employee at the restaurant confirmed. M Kaiten Sushi, a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, now sits at 113 Marshall St., the former M Street address.

At the outset, Jacobs wanted to bring pizza with a “New York City, kind of smoked brick taste” to Marshall Street and the university area, he said in a fall 2016 interview. He approached Allen, a friend who never played football with Jacobs but is enshrined in SU history as one of the Syracuse 8 — a group of SU football players who boycotted the 1970 football season to demand better treatment for black players — to come on as an owner. Allen, who now lives in the Chicago area, agreed.

Jacobs then asked Smith, a lawyer based in Northern Virginia who worked for Jacobs on intellectual property and trademark issues, to join as an investor. Allen, Smith and Jacobs struck a deal in mid-2015. Allen and Smith both declined to say how much money they put into M Street at its start.

“Based on where it is with all the restaurants and bars, as far as an investment on paper, it wasn’t a high-risk exposure,” Smith said.

As M Street began operation, Allen and Smith said they soon found they had a different business philosophy than Jacobs. They said Jacobs, who had been running Shirt World for more than two decades, did not set up employee applications or exit interviews, adding that he rarely kept receipts or used the corporate credit card.

“He said that we were more corporate America, and he was more mom-and-pop,” Smith said.

When a business closes down there is usually a winding down period, Smith said, when the owners pay distributors and employees, settle debts and work out what to do with raw materials. That never happened with M Street. Even as little disagreements between the owners started mounting, Allen and Smith said they wanted time to resolve a number of issues facing the troubled business.

Then Jacobs sent the email removing himself as M Street’s owner, leaving Allen and Smith responsible for its bills, including back rent, back taxes and pay for employees who weren’t compensated when the restaurant closed.

While former employees said Jacobs did not contact them to explain why the business suddenly closed, documents reviewed by The Daily Orange show that on the day M Street shut down, Jacobs and his lawyer, Hobaica, were in contact with Allen and Smith, primarily discussing the issue of how much rent money Jacobs was owed.

In the emailed statement, Hobaica said “decisions and failures” related to business finances — including taxes and payroll — “were not made by Mr. Jacobs,” adding that Jacobs withdrew from the business partnership “quite some time” before M Street closed. Emails reviewed by The Daily Orange show Jacobs emailed Smith that Friday at 11 a.m. to pull out as an M Street owner. On that same day at 4:09 p.m., Allen and Smith also removed themselves as owners via email, formally ending the business partnership. Jacobs changed the locks later that night.

“Jacobs withdrew (unexpectedly) and Hobaica sent us a demand letter within 90 minutes or so. Greg and I did not live in (New York) or any of the surrounding states for that matter,” Allen and Smith said in a joint statement via email. “Furthermore, based on the tension and legal dispute, it was not in our best interest to have the Jacobs who owned the building, act as our landlord.”

It took more than a year after M Street closed for Allen, Smith, Jacobs and their lawyers to hammer out the slew of tax, regulatory and liability issues that arose from the sudden closure.

“The whole thing has been emotionally draining. It’s really drained the life force out of me,” Smith said. “The only good thing to come out of this is I have a new lifelong friendship with Greg.”

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mmediately after getting a phone call from an alarmed Ramirez, Allen and Smith said they transferred money into the company bank account out of their own pockets. Both declined to say how many employees did not get paid on time, how much money was taken out of the account in the first place and how much they had to transfer back into the account.

“The employees shouldn’t have to suffer because of our partnership. That’s the one thing we took care of,” Allen said. “We decided that we weren’t going to leave them hanging like that.”

The business’ sudden closure left those employees still at M Street scrambling to find another job to support themselves and their families. One employee said no one could use Jacobs as a reference when looking for other jobs because he wouldn’t answer any phone calls.

“I have kids. I’m not the only person with children on this planet, but you don’t do that to people,” said Miller, the only employee who worked at M Street from its opening to closing.

Ramirez said Jacobs was justified at times.

All 11 employees interviewed for this story described Jacobs’ “erratic” behavior, “passive-aggressive” interruptions and obsession with “the brand.” Three of those employees also acknowledged that the workplace was at times disorganized and that a few employees slacked off. One employee said they knew at least one other employee who did drugs.

The day before Jacobs relinquished his share of the business, four employees said Jacobs gave a few people a tour of the pizzeria. At the time, the employees suspected Jacobs was looking to sell 113 Marshall St. to another tenant. In an emailed statement, Hobaica disputed that Jacobs gave a prospective buyer a tour of the building that day. Hobaica did say, though, that on many occasions, “fans or family would come by and Mr. Jacobs would give them a tour of the place.”

Even though those employees had an inkling Jacobs was looking to sell the property, they never thought he’d lock the doors the next day. And despite Jacobs’ quirks, they never thought he would cut himself off from M Street so easily.

“The people that were harmed the most by this were the employees,” Smith said. “They’re the ones that lived this.”

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Published on December 7, 2017 at 1:11 am

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu