Trump controversy strikes Mexican restaurant

BY ERIKA NORTON
SUGAR LOAF — The latest Trump tornado touched down in Sugar Loaf this week.
Community members rallied outside the Cancun Inn in Sugar Loaf Wednesday to show solidarity with the Campos family, the longtime owners, who have been inundated with hate-filled phone calls and Facebook posts from Donald Trump supporters.
The calls and posts began after a friend of Esther Levy contacted The New York Post, claiming the Warwick resident and her friend, Alvin Goldstein, were thrown out of the restaurant Sunday for supporting the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Cancun owner Israel Campos was not at the restaurant at the time of the incident. He said the customers were asked to leave for being rude to the wait staff, according to his brother and the bartender on duty, Julio Campos, and the two waitresses who interacted with the couple.
Attorney Michael Sussman of Chester called the rally to stand by the Campos family, who legally immigrated to the states from Mexico and have owned and operated the restaurant for more than 25 years.
“This is one of those events about which we have no choice, and we need to be here as a community, and we need to make it very clear that whatever the crazy rhetoric of a presidential campaign, that it's not going to run out a business of a decent, hard-working family in Orange County,” Sussman said at the rally. “This is not about a restaurateur who saw people who had certain political views as opposed to his or hers and decided not to serve them. When people come in with their own agenda and are bent to create a disturbance, the restaurateur actually has an obligation to everyone else to deal with those people, and that’s precisely what happened here.”
But Levy has a different story. She said that she and her friend went to the restaurant, one of her longtime favorites, at around 5 p.m. for an early lunch after attending the Great American Weekend festival in Goshen. She was wearing a hat embroidered with Trump's slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and wearing Trump buttons.
Levy said her friend went to the bathroom while she was seated by the hostess inside, where they were the only patrons. Other diners were eating outside on the deck. After her friend returned, a cocktail waitress took their drink order: two glasses of water and two of sangria. Soon after, Levy said, the waitress came back and asked them to leave.
“We went to walk out, and I was accosted by Julio the bartender,” Levy said. “He started screaming at me. He said ‘We do not serve Trump supporters,’ and ‘Get the hell out of my restaurant right now and don’t ever come back.’
“I said to Julio, what are you gonna do when Trump wins?’ And Julio said, ‘Well Hillary is gonna win. And I did not talk about illegal immigrants or any of Trump’s positions or anything of the kind, and we left. We left where we weren’t wanted.”

Complaints from the wait staff

The wait staff and the bartender insist this is not what happened. The hostess at the time, Kaitlyn Slicker, agrees that she seated Levy while Goldstein went to the bathroom. As he came back out, he directed a sarcastic comment at her, Slicker said.
“I said ‘Oh sir, I can sit you where I sat the woman,’" said Slicker, recalling the incident. "And he said, ‘I don’t need your help. I can take it from here thank you very much.’ And he walked away.”
Waitress Holly Huttle said that when she approached the couple to take their drink orders, Goldstein interrupted her as she was introducing herself, but she didn’t hear what he said. After taking their orders, Huttle told Julio about the exchange. Julio saw that encounter as well as the one with Slicker, which led him to his decision to ask the couple to leave, Israel said.
Slicker said the couple continued to make provocative comments. According to Slicker, Goldstein said, “We’ll come back as soon as Donald Trump wins the election,” and Levy said, “My family came here legally ,unlike all of you who are here illegally.”
Israel said the couple might have been “tipsy” at the time. A post on the restaurant’s Facebook page says the couple was “rowdy due to intoxication.”
“You all know us, that we do not have anything to do with prejudice,” said Israel at the rally. "We are the least prejudiced coming from where we come from. Unfortunately this couple wanted to make this political, and it had nothing to do with politics. We came to this wonderful, beautiful country that we love so much. That’s why little by little our whole family has come here and we’ve been here for 45 years.”
Levy said she contacted the police the night of the incident because she was distraught over being thrown out. She said she was contacted about the many threatening phone calls the restaurant has received, but that she was not behind them.
Levy said she has talked to lawyers because online posts by the restaurant staff defame her character by saying she was intoxicated.
Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg, a member of the “Rabbis for Trump” group, helped Levy contact The New York Post. She has appeared on numerous TV news shows since the incident.
Sussman said he plans to take tapes of the "hours" of threatening phone messages the restaurant has received to the police because they represent “aggravated harassment in the third degree.”
Israel also said he has contacted the police because he is scared for his family, who live above the restaurant. Some of the phone messages said “Hopefully your whole family dies” and “Go back to where you belong," he said.