For the past month, Donnell “Malik” Sims has been working to shut down the Union Mart convenience store and gas station in North City’s Mark Twain neighborhood. Now, the Organization for Black Struggle member is hoping to enlist a new, and perhaps somewhat unlikely ally in the effort: Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway.
Hanaway is a tough-on-crime prosecutor, who was appointed Attorney General last year after stints in the state legislature and as a federal prosecutor. She advocates for tougher sentencing rules for people found guilty of crimes as well as treating more juveniles in the criminal justice system as adults. Sims, on the other hand, is a community activist who has long advocated for criminal justice reform. He grew up in the Pruitt-Igoe and Peabody Darst Webbe housing projects in St. Louis, got addicted to freebasing cocaine, and racked up a slew of theft-related charges. However, those charges are no longer on his record, as he successfully completed treatment court, a program that allows people facing stiff criminal penalties to get charges off their record if they get sober and turn their lives around.
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“The system works if you work it,” he says. “Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.”
Sims’ fight against the Union Mart started on February 25 when a customer there posted to Facebook a video of two of the gas station clerks getting hostile with a man outside the store who seemed to be intoxicated. One of the clerks tried to kick the man in the stomach. Another pulled out a large metal pole. At this point, the woman filming pulls forward in her car, screaming, “Don’t hit him with no motherfucking pole!” She didn’t exactly de-escalate the situation, but she likely saved the man from a beating. “He’s going to leave,” she says in the video. “But you’re not going to hit him with no pole.”
Other than noting that his employees “did not retaliate,” the store’s owner Malik Rupani politely declined to comment on the incident.
The dynamic underlying all this, the reason the video touched Sims’ nerve as well as the nerves of many others, is ongoing tension between the Black community in North City and the gas stations that serve them, which are primarily owned and staffed by people of Middle Eastern descent. The post accompanying the video on Facebook reads, “On drugs or not, I’m gonna stand up for my people.” Last year, prominent attorney Jerryl Christmas filed a lawsuit trying to shut down the Crown Mart on North Kingshighway in the Academy neighborhood. His brother was killed there in 2024. Christmas has shown up in front of the station with a bullhorn, encouraging people to get their gas down the street at one of the few Black-owned gas stations in town.
Christmas believes there’s a difference between the gas station and quickie marts on North Kingshighway and the ones on South Kingshighway. He says to imagine you’re on Delmar, about to turn either north or south. “If you head south on Kingshighway, you will not reach a gas station until you get to Manchester. It’s at least a couple miles. If you decide to turn [north], you got a station on the corner as soon as you turn.” He notes there is more or less another gas station on every half mile thereafter, sometimes multiple ones at a given intersection. To his point, there is a convenience store right across the street from Union Mart that is owned by the same person who owns the gas station where his brother was killed. He adds that the gas stations south of Delmar are more likely to be places like QuickTrips, which also sell literary tickets, tobacco and alcohol. But they do it differently. With many North City gas stations, he says, “You can’t even see in the windows for all the cigarette advertisements, all the alcohol advertisements, then you wonder why we have all these issues in the community.”
The night after the Union Mart Facebook video went viral (it has almost 100,000 views), Sims and others showed up at the Union Mart and held an impromptu protest. Voice of the People News was there, so was Amir Brandy of the Real STL News. In the video, Brandy says, “When all is said and done, they’re going to drive to West County where it’s safe, after they sold all the paraphernalia, the cigarettes, the poison.” At one point, someone off camera shouts that the purported victim in the video was well-known to the employees and regularly harassed them. Brandy responds, “That man was walking away when that man kicked him. You haven’t seen the video?”
Sims stresses that this has nothing to do with the ethnicity of the people who own the gas station. He himself is a convert to Islam and has in the past tried to be something of a bridge between the owners and the community.
Still, he says that places like Union Mart operate as scourges to the areas where they’re located.
“When you walk in, it looks like you are in the casino,” Sims says. “You want us to gamble ourselves to death, drink ourselves to death, then beat us when we’re drunk?’
Sims is referring to slot machine-like devices, sometimes called “no-chance” games, long popular in convenience stores across Missouri. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled them to be functionally the same as slot machines and therefore illegal anywhere other than casinos.
And this is where Hanaway comes in.
Last week, Sims fled a formal complaint with the AG’s office over Union Mart and its roughly 12 gambling machines. “Just based on the fact that judges and the community members are saying this is illegal, we don’t want this—if you’re a good steward, you would just remove them,” says Sims.
For years, one of the most prominent manufacturers of the gaming machines, Wildwood-based Torch Electronics, gave significant sums of money to Missouri political leaders. Likely in part for that reason, the machines were able to exist in a legal gray area. But recently, Torch took a double loss in federal court. A federal judge ruled that the company owes compensation to the maker of non-gambling touch-screen games that the judge said were unfairly elbowed out of the market. A few months later, the same judge ruled the machines illegal gaming devices.
Hanaway has filed lawsuits against gas stations and convenience stores that continue to house the machines, asking judges to find them in violation of the law and to order them to cease offering the games and pay civil penalties. She also said her office is cooperating with the FBI, looking into matters of possible “money laundering and banking.”
Hanaway told SLM in a statement, “To Missouri business owners: unplug and remove these devices. You won’t be subject to criminal and civil penalties if you unplug and remove these devices now.”
Sims is hoping that Hanaway will be able to go even further with Union Mart—or, at the very least, that she’ll take them to court over their gaming machines, one step in a larger process.
Asked over text if he wants Union Mart closed down completely, or just in different hands, Sims is unambiguous: “CLOSED!!!”
In a recent conversation at the Carnahan Courthouse downtown, Christmas indicated that as part of his battle to close down the gas station where his brother was killed, he too had taken note of the recent federal ruling as well as Hanaway’s getting tough on gas stations that still permit gambling. He didn’t know if the North Kingshighway spot had the gambling machines or not. He said he was going to find out.
“I’ll have to go undercover,” he said.
