Rochester Custom Leathers was opened on 29 July 1989 and was located at Village Gate Square, a retail mall at 274 N Goodman Street. At the same time Eusebio was my night manager, Ed Bremner was my day manager. We had nearly 50 employees over the ten years we operated as Rochester Custom Leathers, and sold the business in 1999 to Paul Pape, and then again in 2001 to Russ Shaner and Richard Schroedel.
On a positive side, the location they were looking at was stolen from underneath them by my friend Larry Warnow's roommate, who opened a restaurant in that location called "Edibles" -- they opened on South Ave in a rented house. Shortly after they opened, there was a legal challenge to their name "RSVP Video", as they didn't do a proper name search at the County Clerk's office. The had to rename and re-brand. Their new name was "The Pride Connection", it was about six months into their operation when they decided to stab me and my business once again and started selling leather products using the name "Pride Leathers". They failed to file a DBA for Pride Leathers, so I did instead and then issued them a cease and desist notice. They had to waste money on an attorney to show prior use and got to keep the name, but it cost them plenty to do so. Then, to make matters more interesting, just as I was involved with the Rochester Rams, a gay leather club, they became involved with someone in the leather community and created "Rochester Leather Folk" to create a customer base, as they perceived that the Rochester Rams were my customer base. Funny thing is, being involved with the Rochester Rams really made no major discernable difference with my sales.
Paul was doing great with the business until one day, on his way in to the store he was t-boned at the intersection of Alexander St and University Ave and subsequently died three days later. The store went into escrow until it could be all sorted out -- he was on an installation payment plan, plus a small percentage of sales with me; but having died, the assets needed to be sorted out by his brother John. The dust settled in 2001 and Rich and Russ re-opened Outlandish Video & Gifts. Rich bought out Russ around 2014 and it continued to operate until August 2016 when Rich died and his relatives did not want to operate it.
Now knowing that Eusebio is deceased, and God knows where Ed is -- I can come out and tell people what really happened to Rochester Custom Leathers. There is a lot more and other people were involved, but this is the main cast of characters. Eusebio and Ed really, really hurt me and I hated them for a very long time, but in hindsight, look at how well things turned out for me and how awful is was for them. I guess there really is karma.