After rocky path to citizenship, store’s opening a dream fulfilled

By Erin Dostal

Monday, May 3, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Suresh “Sam” Goel isn’t letting the recession keep him from realizing his American dream.

But that’s no surprise to those who know the 55-year-old’s history. This is a man who refused to let his deportation to India 12 years ago end his pursuit of that dream.

He became a U.S. citizen in January 2005, and on Friday, wearing his favorite Stars and Stripes tie, he’ll open his convenience store in Henderson. He named the store American Mini Mart.

Not many Americans are opening businesses in the recession. In Henderson, as in many places, the number of new licensed businesses has declined steadily the past few years.

Goel’s shop is at 720 Center St., in a low-income neighborhood that’s part of a redevelopment district. He figures his location and his type of store will work to his advantage. People without a lot of money can’t afford much, so they’ll shop within walking distance, and where prices aren’t inflated by high overhead costs.

As for the economy: “It’s down. No problem. Poor people need cheap food.”

He’s betting his life savings on it.

He estimates it cost him about $150,000 to start the business. By his wife’s count it will ultimately cost much more, closer to $250,000.

Banks and more than 30 friends and family members who believed in him loaned him the remainder of the money he needed, and he’ll be paying it back for years, she says.

It was years in the making, too. “I’ve been planning this since I came to the United States in 1989,” he says.

That was when he paid an international smuggling organization to get him into the U.S. He came across the Mexican border and then worked at convenience stores and gas stations in Arizona, Southern Nevada and Southern California.

When the Immigration and Naturalization Service caught up to him, he told them he had fled northern India to escape religious persecution, but his request for asylum was rejected at a series of hearings that started in San Francisco in 1992. The U.S. ordered Goel deported in 1995.

Goel, however, did not turn himself in. He says he did not understand the INS’ order because his translator in court did not speak his dialect of Hindi.

He moved on to another convenience store, in Anaheim, Calif., where he met Genie Collins. She lived near the store, so she was a frequent customer and enjoyed talking to him despite his broken English. One day, he “finally” asked her out on their first date, she says.

She didn’t care that he was an Indian immigrant. What counted was that he treated her and her two children well.

She was impressed by how much compassion he showed for others even though he had so many of his own hardships — sleeping in the back of the store because he didn’t have anywhere else to go and “just trying to survive, just like so many other people who come here from other countries.”

When he got a job at a convenience store in Las Vegas, she moved with him, and they married in their new hometown on July 6, 1997. The groom still carries that wedding photo with him. It’s yellowed and the edges are bent, but the couple’s smiles are resilient.

Genie Goel, 57, remembers the day well. She was wearing a cerulean blue, sequined dress. And she remembers how happy they were.

But that happiness was short-lived. As the Goels resumed the effort to make Suresh a legal resident of the U.S., INS officials told the couple that the marriage was a ploy to gain citizenship and sent him back to India on Nov. 30, 1998. He was taken away from his new wife in handcuffs. It only made her more resolved “to fight for him.”

She figured the public would see the injustice of the situation, so she told her story in the Las Vegas Sun in 1998. Several television stations followed the newspaper’s lead, and with the case in the public spotlight, she was able to persuade INS officials to allow her husband to return to the U.S. in November 1999. Without the publicity, she said it could have taken five or 10 years to get him back, if at all.

Immigration officials at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi said Goel had never officially divorced his first wife in India — so his marriage to Genie was invalidated.

They worked through it and married again, at A Little White Wedding Chapel in November 2000.

Since then he has worked, and saved every penny he could toward this week’s grand opening. They’ll have Indian cuisine and pasta made by Genie, and store-bought cakes.

If the business is a success, Genie Goel, who has been unable to work as a result of having polio as a child, hopes to open her own restaurant, serving up homemade specialties such as fried chicken and roasts.

The odds are against the Goels, though, says Beth Clementi, who has worked part time at a laundry in the same business complex as the minimart since March.

“There are no jobs. It’s still a recession,” she says.

She says on some days she sees only three customers during her four-hour shift.

Keith Elliot, 26, who lives in an apartment nearby, applauds Goel opening the store. It’s a good addition to the neighborhood, Elliot says, especially if it stays open late.

“I hope they make it,” he says.