Shoppers push buying groceries carts out of doors a Stew Leonard’s grocery store in Paramus, New Jersey, U.S., on Tuesday, Might 12, 2020. Stew Leonard Jr. stated that meat packing plant the corporate makes use of is working at about 70 p.c capability, and he expects it to rebound to complete capability in a couple of month, CT Publish reported.
Angus Mordant | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
A brand new federal lawsuit accuses the executive govt of the New York metropolitan area-based Stew Leonard’s grocery retailer chain of creating racist and sexist feedback about staff and shoppers.
Former longtime worker Robert Crosby Jr. additionally claims in his civil grievance that he was once terminated from his process in violation of the American citizens with Disabilities Act after his bout with Covid-19 left him disabled.
Crosby, a 58-year-old father of 4, accuses Stew Leonard’s and CEO Stew Leonard Jr. of constructing a adverse paintings atmosphere. The swimsuit cites “systemic racial, sexual, non secular and ageist discriminatory practices” performed through control.
Crosby is looking for a minimum of $500,000 in damages within the swimsuit filed this week within the U.S. District Court docket for the Southern District of New York.
The claims within the swimsuit distinction with the farm-folksy symbol of the grocery chain, which as soon as was once praised through President Ronald Reagan and industry guru Tom Peters. The primary Stew Leonard’s opened in 1969 as a small dairy store in Norwalk, Connecticut. The shop, which featured a small petting zoo, farm-themed meals presentations and animatronic making a song animals, skilled explosive expansion in measurement, reputation and exposure within the following many years.
The family-owned corporate now has virtually $400 million in annual income at seven places in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
Leonard Jr. declined to remark at the allegations in Crosby’s swimsuit.
“Robert Crosby, Jr. labored for Stew Leonard’s virtually twenty years, however sadly we needed to section tactics,” Leonard Jr. stated in a observation supplied to CNBC on Tuesday. “We perceive he introduced a lawsuit and we can assessment it with our lawyers, on the other hand we don’t touch upon pending litigation.”
Crosby, a former loss-prevention supervisor, “verbally hostile” the alleged slurs and practices right through his employment, the swimsuit says.
The lawsuit additionally alleges that Leonard Jr. joked concerning the discovery a number of years in the past of human stays and tombstones from an deserted Orthodox Jewish cemetery situated on and close to the grounds of a Yonkers, New York retailer. The swimsuit says staff have been ordered to bury the tombstones in order that “nobody may to find them” through the shop’s president — Leonard Jr.’s cousin — who later advised them to throw the human stays right into a dumpster.
Crosby’s swimsuit alleges that ever since he started running on the Yonkers location in 2001, he and his co-workers have been “subjected to a administrative center atmosphere that was once adverse and poisonous.”
The lawsuit alleges Leonard Jr. many times referred to girls as “b—–s,” referred to as two white Jewish workers his “resident Jews,” often referred to Black workers as “thugs” and the N-word, and made feedback about Black workers’ frame portions. Crosby’s swimsuit additionally says he witnessed Leonard Jr. many times say that Jews have been the “worst shoppers to handle.”
The swimsuit additionally describes an organization Christmas birthday celebration within the early 2000s at which Leonard Jr. “insisted that higher control put on sexually suggestive and beside the point apparel together with pretend breasts, underwear, intercourse toys and provide a sexually suggestive and offensive skit.”
Crosby claims he complained a number of occasions about Leonard Jr.’s alleged practices to the corporate’s head of human assets. He says within the swimsuit that she advised him that “Stew’s simply being Stew,” and that “he has no filter out.”
Covid struggle
In line with Crosby’s swimsuit, when the coronavirus started spreading broadly in the USA in March 2020, Crosby complained concerning the loss of non-public protecting apparatus on the retailer, the loss of social distancing and a ban on staff dressed in protecting mask on web page. The ones court cases fell on deaf ears, the swimsuit says.
Crosby’s swimsuit says that he shriveled Covid in April 2020, after 50 co-workers examined sure the prior month. He says he evolved signs that “have been excessive and life-threatening” and integrated “lack of scent and style, nausea, mind fog, Epstein Barr Syndrome, Continual Fatigue Syndrome” and reminiscence loss. This required hospitalization, the swimsuit provides.
Stew Leonard Jr.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
The swimsuit says he evolved “Lengthy Haul Covid,” and that he was once harassed to go back to paintings after having been reluctantly granted scientific depart. (Lengthy Covid sufferers enjoy signs for months after they’re inflamed.) Throughout a next six-day hospitalization in September 2020 for headaches from Covid, Crosby was once ordered through the vice chairman of the Yonkers retailer to “paintings from his medical institution mattress.”
Crosby says he was once fired later that month after Stew Leonard’s refused to grant him a brief depart from paintings so he may get better from Covid, consistent with his lawsuit.
Crosby filed the swimsuit after he gained a realize of possible reason issued through the New York State Department of Human Rights in keeping with a rate of discrimination he filed in opposition to Stew Leonard’s in 2021.
The attention stated the department made up our minds that possible reason exists to imagine that Stew Leonard’s and Leonard Jr. engaged in illegal discriminatory practices. It additionally indicated that Crosby had alleged Leonard would “use the ‘N’ notice freely a couple of occasions.” In March, the federal Equivalent Employment Alternative Fee issued Crosby a realize of a proper to sue Stew Leonard’s after he had filed an EEOC grievance in opposition to his former employer.
Graveyard controversy
Crosby additionally describes in his lawsuit the invention of tombstones from Might 2004 as much as 2009 at the leased land occupied through Stew Leonard’s in Yonkers.
Crosby alleges that an organization govt directed him and his coworkers to bury the tombstones “the place no you’ll find them.” He additionally claims they have been advised they might lose their jobs if any person came upon about it.
In 2009, consistent with the lawsuit, Crosby and different staff found out human bones whilst investigating a fireplace. They have been advised to “get espresso burlap luggage and discard the bones within the dumpster,” the swimsuit says.
“Defendant Leonard Jr. jokingly referred to the invention of human stays and tombstones, which have been made up our minds to be the stays of an Orthodox Jewish Cemetery, as ‘The Yonkers Holocaust,’” the swimsuit alleges.
Crosby’s swimsuit alleges he suffered from post-traumatic rigidity dysfunction and different diseases after his bosses threatened to fireplace him if he advised others concerning the bones.
Crosby’s allegations may shed new mild on a tale that broke in 2004, when the New York lawyer basic’s place of job alleged {that a} New Jersey developer could have did not conform to a 1989 court docket order to prepare for the relocation of all the stays from the cemetery after they evolved the Yonkers web page that got here to accommodate Stew Leonard’s and two different shops, Costco and House Depot. The stays have been meant to had been reinterred in Israel, consistent with media experiences on the time.
Two tombstones have been discovered discarded close to Stew Leonard’s in 2004 at the heels of the ones allegations, consistent with revealed experiences.
Then-New York Lawyer Common Eliot Spitzer claimed that the stays of as much as 135 kids could have been left at the back of right through the disinterment undertaking. The developer, Morris Commercial Developers, in 2005 agreed to settle the case with Spitzer through placing up a monument close to the web page of the previous cemetery and to offer any of the $100,000 agreement left after the monument was once erected to a non-profit group.
On the time, a attorney for Morris Commercial stated “there was once no admission of ‘beside the point habits or incorrect behavior’ and maintained that all of the our bodies within the cemetery have been reburied,” consistent with a 2005 Related Press article at the case.
The Stew Leonard’s chain’s symbol in the past took a success in 1993, when Stew Leonard Sr. pleaded responsible to federal fees in a $17.1 million tax fraud scheme that concerned the siphoning off of retailer coins receipts into his personal coffers. The elder Leonard was once sentenced to greater than 4 years in jail within the case, which additionally noticed responsible pleas through his spouse’s two brothers, either one of whom have been most sensible executives on the retailer on the time.
Court docket information from the case filed through federal prosecutors display that Leonard Jr. gained immunity as a part of the deal through his dad and uncles to plead responsible, and that Leonard Jr. allegedly participated in a cash-skimming conspiracy that ended in the tax fees.
