Running With the Gap Gang

One Friday night in March, a suspicious though not unexpected group of three men and three women strutted into the Gap store at the Westlake Promenade, attitude crackling off them like static electricity. Some headed to the counter, where they commanded the clerks' attention, fussing and unloading clothes from fat shopping bags already brimming with trendy merchandise. Others disappeared into the racks of spring fashions.

Gap employees braced themselves. They knew these people. Their routine was always the same. Whenever they shopped, they were loud and disruptive. They always returned more than they bought. On a usual night, employees would have done what they always did when they suspected the group was ripping them off: smile and say -- though the irony nearly killed them -- "May I help you?"

The ringleaders were Darlene Burnett Delraye, 47, and Sherry West, 26, the mother of Delraye's grandchildren. Other family members took turns accompanying them. One former manager of a metro area store says they typically bilked her out of $1,000 to $2,000 a week.

But losing money didn't bother the manager as much as the torment of waiting on them. She says her staff endured behavior ranging from verbally abusive to physically threatening. The extended Burnett family addressed clerks by their first names and contested the store's return policies with senior managers. If a clerk questioned a receipt or refused to provide a return for any reason, family members would scream at her, threaten to file a discrimination suit, or get her fired for being racist.

Once, the former manager saw a woman from the crew swipe a pair of babyGap jeans. With none-too-subtle intimidation, the woman's companion pulled out a packaging knife and started cleaning her nails with it.

"While I'm talking to them, I'm shaking," recalls the former manager, who asked to remain anonymous because she still fears the family. "I'm going cold inside . . . Verbal assault is just as bad as physical assault, and having to go through an ordeal like that for 45 minutes makes you feel like you're being held hostage."

Most times the manager didn't dare call police. Gap markets its diversity policy along with its merchandise, and the supervisor worried about the appearance of a white woman accusing black people of theft. Unless she saw them steal with her own eyes -- which is Gap policy -- she let them go, because she didn't want to risk a discrimination complaint.

But Westlake managers weren't so reluctant. For over a year, they had been calling the police on the group. Westlake cops once removed Sherry West and Alphonso Burnett, the father of her children, from the store for creating a disturbance, but there wasn't enough evidence to charge them with theft. On other occasions, employees went home crying from the stress of it all. The parents of high-school-age workers often complained to managers, demanding they take action.

Just before 7 p.m. on Friday, March 10, Westlake employees finally had enough.

A few days earlier, one of the crew brazenly informed workers they would be back Friday. So that evening, when Westlake patrolman Mark Krumheuer stopped by the Gap at the beginning of his off-duty shift as a Promenade security guard, employees told him they were expecting some unwanted "customers." A half-hour later, the Burnetts arrived laden with shopping bags. Gap employee Brenda Wittman called the police.

Krumheuer stood outside and watched the scheme unfold: While some members of the family kept clerks busy with returns that totaled several hundred dollars, Roderic Burnett, Delraye's 25-year-old nephew, stole some shirts and hid them in his bag. Another officer arrived and witnessed Roderic place still more shirts in his bag.

That's when police entered the store. Chaos ensued.

When questioned, Roderic said the bag with the stolen merchandise wasn't his. Delraye's son, Leonard Burnett, 19, claimed it instead. Then Delraye entered the fray when Leonard tried to pass her a pouch full of receipts.

"They started with the 'You're only doing this because we're black,'" Westlake Detective Tim Tolero says. "Because of the commotion, they were all separated and taken outside the store and questioned . . . There was minor resisting, pulling away from the officers, and there were threats about how [Cleveland Mayor] Mike White was going to fire us all."

Throughout the parking lot interrogation, the group, which included Delraye's 27-year-old son Alphonso and her 23-year-old daughter Amber, admitted to nothing. All but West gave fictitious names. They told police they arrived by bus, but they didn't know which number. When car keys were found on Delraye, she refused to say which car was hers. Officers arrested the whole family.

Police found nearly $3,000 worth of Gap merchandise on the Burnetts, plus $1,521 in cash and hundreds of receipts from Gap stores in four states. After scouring the Promenade parking lot, Tolero found Delraye's dusky blue '93 Lincoln. Later in the evening, another officer found a '94 Pontiac that turned out to be West's. Both cars were in the process of being repossessed. But there was another reason the family didn't want the police to find them.