By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 9, 1999; Page B01

Jimmy A. Bell only wanted a pizza.

Now he wants $15 million. Maybe more.

One night last July, as his family did just about every week, the District lawyer called Domino's on South Capitol Street and ordered a pizza. As usual, he was told to wait in the street, the pizza was on its way.

Bell thought the pizza should be delivered to the door of his family's town house, just as is done in other neighborhoods. But Bell wanted his pizza, and rules were rules, so he agreed to wait.

He waited on Q Street SW for 45 minutes, according to a lawsuit filed this week in D.C. Superior Court, but the pizza didn't come. Bell called to complain, which angered the Domino's deliveryman so much that he came to Bell's house with the pizza -- and pulled a six-inch knife on the customer as witnesses watched, the suit alleges.

Enough was enough, Bell decided. He had waited in the street for a pizza for the last time.

After his attorney, Aisha Murray, said she had heard nothing after a complaint to the management of the store where Bell had placed his order, Bell filed suit.

He charged that the delivery policy of Domino's Pizza is discriminatory under D.C. human rights laws. He wants $5 million in damages on each of three counts, including assault. He also wants $10 million in punitive damages.

"It significantly bothers me," said Bell, 29, who attended American University law school and lives in the unit block of Q Street SW. "No matter how much education I have, they're still treating me that way. And that hurts. Every time they did that to me, they took a little bit of my dignity away."

Bell's lawsuit was the second filed this week against the local Domino's franchisee, Team Washington Inc. The other suit was filed by Christine Pollard, who lives in the 700 block of 12th Street SE.

Pollard's discrimination claim asserts that she was told to wait in a parking lot outside her apartment complex when she ordered a medium pepperoni and mushroom pizza last February from the Domino's on Pennsylvania Avenue SE. When the pizza did not arrive, she said, she called the store twice.

A Domino's employee used racial epithets in talking to Pollard on the phone and referred to her neighborhood's residents as "trash," she alleged. Pollard called back and tried to order another pizza but was refused.

"It's an offensive practice," Pollard's attorney, Everald F. Thompson, said of the allegation. "What we wanted to do was just resolve it amicably, have Domino's cease the practice of having the residents come out and get the pizzas, and get some monetary settlement."

An attorney for Team Washington, which operates more than 50 Domino's stores in the Washington area, said the company's "highest priority" is to make sure that employees "don't get into situations where they might be victims of crime."

"If an area has been identified as a high-crime area," lawyer Stewart Manela said, "then Team Washington may have a policy that keeps its delivery personnel from putting themselves into situations where they might more easily be victimized."

Manela said he knew no specifics of the two allegations, but said that Team Washington will investigate. "Team Washington absolutely and positively intends to treat all its customers fairly and without discrimination," Manela said.

Each of the lawsuits focuses both on the delivery policy and on the behavior of a Domino's employee.

In Pollard's case, the offending employee was a white manager who allegedly used derogatory racial terms to refer to his African American customer, Thompson said.

In the case of Bell, an African American then working as a federal civil rights investigator, it was a black deliveryman. The man warned that he could find Bell through the Domino's store's computer, Bell said.

"I wasn't thinking about any D.C. human rights law. All I was thinking about was getting me a pizza," Bell said. "On my block, there's all town houses. All you have to do is open the gate. No one sells drugs on my block. People go to work in the morning."