PROVINCETOWN — With seven days remaining before the Aug. 31 deadline on their eviction notices, five former employees of Napi’s Restaurant still had nowhere to go as of Tuesday this week.
Delroy Brennan and Ellis Wilson said that in the preceding week the general manager at Napi’s, Dan Sabuda, has tried to get them to leave even before the 31st, telling them that their apartments were already supposed to be vacated. Wilson said that Sabuda had showed up one night after midnight “banging on the door,” and that his family is “afraid.”
One of the renters, former Napi’s dishwasher Kay Spence, told the Independent, “It’s not like we want to stay here — it’s just that we can’t find anywhere else.”
Spence and Dwight Sangster have looked for housing as far away as Brewster. Another renter, Eileen Spence, said she inquired at Nauset Green, which offers affordable units in Eastham, and was told to check back in the winter.
The renters, all Jamaican, received eviction letters at the end of July. Bernard McEneaney, executor of the Van Dereck estate, said the five are being evicted because they no longer work at the restaurant. McEneaney, Napi Van Dereck’s longtime financial adviser, stated that the housing, owned by the estate, has always been contingent on employment at Napi’s. The renters dispute McEneaney’s contention that their housing was conditional on working at Napi’s.
Marie Boni, a former office employee at Napi’s Restaurant who worked under both Van Dereck and McEneaney, also contradicts McEneaney’s assertion. “That was never conditional,” she said. “It was never implied you had to work there.” Boni was fired by McEneaney in 2020.
McEneaney said that the five former employees quit their jobs. But the Jamaicans all said they were fired, and two of them said it was done in an explicitly discriminatory way. Dwight Sangster and Craig Parks, another former employee, each said that Sabuda had told them he wanted no Black people working in the restaurant.
McEneaney and Sabuda did not respond to the Independent’s requests for comment this week on the charges made by the Jamaican tenants. Anthony Alva, the Hyannis attorney whose office delivered the eviction notices for McEneaney, was contacted by phone but declined to comment.
After Aug. 31, if the tenants are still occupying the apartments, McEneaney may file a complaint in Orleans District Court. A judge could then order the tenants to vacate by a certain date. In instances where there is a verbal lease agreement, or at least no evidence of a written lease, as in this case, there are “not a whole lot of defenses” for tenants, said Hyannis attorney Michael Pierce.
Pierce, who lists landlord-tenant disputes among his specialties, said that the federal eviction moratorium, renewed earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control, offers protection to most tenants, but that “there’s a lot of interpretation as to its scope.”
The Supreme Court will likely soon hear a case brought by a group of landlords in Alabama and Georgia asking to strike down the moratorium. On Aug. 20, a federal appeals court upheld it, but since that ruling the landlords have asked the Supreme Court to step in to block it.
Although the Supreme Court upheld the last moratorium in a 5-4 ruling in June, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted with the majority then, has recently said he believed the CDC overstepped its jurisdiction.
The current CDC moratorium replaced the earlier eviction ban, which lapsed in July. The current one covers areas of the country experiencing “substantial and high levels” of Covid transmission, including Barnstable County.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 3.5 million people say they face eviction in the next two months.
