FRYING UNDER THE RADAR: Vendor Hamada Rashad Mohammed refers to most of his 177 outstanding violations as “a scam” by the city.
It’s Midtown’s million-dollar corner — for food-vendor scofflaws.
Just five vendors operating on 54th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan have racked up close to $1 million in outstanding fines in the past 12 months, court records show.
That’s nearly a tenth of the total $10.45 million in outstanding violations issued citywide in the past year.
“If you’re sending someone out to [find scofflaws], they’re not going to have to go all over town,” said Owen Stone, a spokesman for the Department of Finance, the agency in charge of collecting the fines.
Indeed, the top five scofflaws — who owe $891,796 in unpaid fines — all sell their hot dogs and lamb kebobs within throwing distance of one another on the busy block packed with tourists and workers, not to mention ticket-writing cops and sanitation and health inspectors.
“[The authorities] can’t even keep track of how many tickets they give out,” sniffed vendor Hamada Rashad Mohammed, who has been slapped with 177 violations totaling $176,689 in fines in the past year.
“If I get one [violation] after a period of tickets, then, OK, I will pay it. But 30 tickets in two days just for standing here doing my job? No way, that’s a scam,” he said.
Like many other vendors, Mohammed said he fights the tickets through the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings.
Fines for infractions such as setting up too close to the curb or improper food storage can cost as much as $1,000 a pop. Overall, the city is still owed $20.9 million in outstanding street-vendor fines that have been issued since 2003.
The high dollar amounts and sheer number of violations prompt some vendors to just blow them off.
“I get crosswalk violations, fire violations, fire-hydrant violations, noise violations — you name it, I got it,” said vendor Hussain Ishmayil, who operates on the same block but hasn’t yet been ticketed enough to land on the top-five list.
“I can get 10 tickets a day, and that’s about average,” he said.
“[But] the cops can give me all the tickets they want,’’ Ishmayil said. “Nobody ever comes to collect. It’s a big joke. We all know it.
“These four corners get nailed all the time, and we shrug it off . . . I pay a few tickets like the ones that involve my license, but a lot of the others I toss on sight.”
Of the 13,775 tickets shelled out in the past 12 months, the city has collected on only 394, for a paltry total of just $121,253. The city had collected $1 million from 2,980 violations paid between October 2010 and October 2011 — but the majority of those had actually been doled out earlier. The city can yank a vendor’s license if he fails to pay his fines. But it can get tricky: Scofflaws have been known to switch their identities if they rack up huge bills and lose their licenses, only to reapply for new licenses under different names.