A flyer appeared in Roseland last September announcing a rally to support Chicago’s only black-run mall. A collection of low-priced clothing, shoe, jewelry, and nail shops, plus a shrimp-and-catfish carryout, the Halsted Indoor Mall at 115th and Halsted was operated by a Haitian named Pierre Romeus far behind on his rent. His landlord, the Jewel-Osco chain, seemed determined to evict him. “Let Us Stand Black to Black Against a Common Economic Enemy,” the flyer proclaimed. “Today it’s Pierre Romeus. Tomorrow It’s Us!”
“Every day is a struggle,” says Romeus’s attorney, Chester Blair.
A vegetarian and teetotaler, Brinson owned a house in Oak Brook, an East Randolph pied-a-terre, and a retreat in Wisconsin. He and Price owned Lincoln Town Cars and custom-made Baroque Royale limousines. In 1990 Brinson met Marvin Guccione, a small businessman. The two of them formed a partnership and made plans to turn the empty building into a mall. “Clarence wanted a black-owned mall on the south side where black people could go and shop,” says Dwight Samuels, a Brinson associate. “He saw the mall as a feather in the cap of the black community. That was his dream.”
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Romeus grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where his father ran a clothing store. He graduated with a degree in business from the College Notre Dame in Cap-Haitian (the alma mater of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s president) and studied at the Sorbonne. In 1972 he immigrated to New York, where a sister was living; two years later he moved on to Chicago. He says he directed construction projects for the Gary and Merrill-ville sanitary districts as well as back in Haiti before signing on with the mall.
It’s difficult to say exactly what business, in a legal sense, Romeus had been running. The Illinois secretary of state’s office had dissolved 115th Mini-Mart Inc. in July 1996 for failure to pay its franchise taxes and file an annual report. Brinson filed the neglected paperwork and paid the fees, and by June 1998 115th Mini-Mart Inc. was again a legal entity. Brinson named a lot of his friends to the board of directors, and in July 1998 the board met at the mall and installed Dwight Samuels, a bank manager, as its president.
In the aftermath, Samuels told the tenants he’d now be collecting their rent. No, said Romeus, you’ll go on paying me. When Samuels came by to collect the rent on August 1, a security guard from Lillard’s agency told him to leave. Samuels refused, the police were called again, and Samuels wound up spending eight hours in jail.
