The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (18 page)

He maneuvered his black BMW down the steep canyon, looped along La Crescenta Avenue, and climbed the backside of the mountain until he reached the split-level brick and stucco house on Ayars Canyon Way. He parked out front, walked up to the tall entrance past two sago palms, and knocked on the door. He was now wearing a dark brown jacket with gray pants. Perhaps he had changed clothes on the way over. Or maybe his wife’s memory had played a trick, dressing him for the last time in white. A housekeeper led him into the dining room, where his 45-year-old sister, Dzovig Marjik, was standing. She was dressed in blue jeans and a long-sleeved brown sweater. Her hair was curly like his, as if she had just gotten out of the shower herself, and it was tinted an odd red. She asked him to take a seat at the dining table and poured him a glass of lemonade.

He chatted pleasantly with her for a half hour as he waited for their 76-year-old mother to come home from work. When Margrit Iskenderian walked in a little after 2 p.m., she was carrying a big box of food. She set it down on the kitchen table, put on her white slippers, and greeted his sister and then him. The housekeeper poured his mother a glass of lemonade and topped off his glass and the glass of his sister. Then she walked downstairs to her bedroom to let the three of them—mother, son, and daughter—talk.

His sister sat across from him, and his mother to his right. His
voice was calm. Their voices were calm. He waited about five minutes, for the conversation to go from nothing to something, and then he reached for the gun in his waistband. He grabbed the handle, put his finger on the trigger, and extended his arm across the table and over the pitcher of lemonade. He fired once into his sister’s brain. The bullet knocked her off the chair, and she fell facedown on the granite floor. He turned to his mother. She was screaming and running toward the door. He chased her down about 15 feet short of it and stood in front of her. He raised the gun and waited long enough to hear her plead for her life. “Don’t shoot. Please,” she said in Armenian. “Please don’t shoot.” He fired once into her chest, and she staggered backward, falling flat and faceup on the floor. He stood over her, straddling her body. She looked up at him and raised her right hand. He fired a second bullet, a third bullet, a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth. Each one he aimed straight into her heart. She was wearing a beautiful silk top, the color of eggplant, but he couldn’t tell. She had died with her apron on.

As he looked around the room, he could see his 23-year-old nephew, Hagop, trembling halfway up the stairs. He didn’t say a word to the young man he had once regarded as his fifth son. He turned away and walked a dozen paces to the leather couch in the living room. Then he sat down, pointed the gun at his right temple, and fired one time.

O
N AN EARLY WINTER AFTERNOON
not long ago, five years after that day, the widow of Zankou Chicken sat in her little office in the back of the Pasadena restaurant and stared into her computer screen. Live images from each Zankou, the four her husband had built and the two she had opened since, popped up with a mouse click. Every car in the parking lot, every customer standing in line, every worker taking an order or turning a spit of meat, from Burbank to Anaheim, came under her gaze.

She studied the movements the way she imagined her husband had scrutinized them from his perch inside each store, looking for signs that the service wasn’t fast enough, or the food good enough, or that an employee, God forbid, might be stealing. She had her cell phone at the ready in case her sons needed to reach her—to discuss business or some difficulty in their lives. This had become Rita Iskenderian’s vigil, watching her stores and bird-dogging her sons for any sign of trouble. A life-size photo of Mardiros, mustache drooping, middle-aged body thick in a suit, handsome still, kept watch on her. She looked up and shook her head.

“I didn’t have time to cry. I had to get out of bed. I buried him, and 15 days later I was running this business. I was not a working woman. I had no position. No ground. But I know how important this business is. That is what my husband built. I have to be on top of it. I am doing for him. Everything for him.” Her English was broken by the backward phrasing and accent of a woman who carried Syria and Lebanon in her past. Two packs of cigarettes a day had turned her voice husky, and her whole manner had the weight of weariness. When a smile did come, she caught herself and put it away before anyone noticed. And yet she kept a sense of humor, a kind of gallows giggle, that life, luck, had turned out the way it had. Only when you got to know her well did she betray a hint of the anger she felt toward Mardiros. Her disquiet was not only for what he had done to her and her children and the rest of the family but also for what he had done to himself, the stain across his name.

“It’s a shame that a man of this value has left behind this thing. Because he was a man who gave all his soul. He never said no to anybody. What his mother did to him, I cannot explain. What his sister did to him, I cannot explain. Can jealousy explain this? Can foolish pride? Five years later, it is still a mystery to me.”

She regretted not putting aside her own pride back then and
visiting his mother and sister Dzovig. Maybe she could have helped broker a peace and kept the whole thing from happening. What had taken place since was its own crime. She and Mardiros’s surviving sister, Haygan, had been best friends since childhood. After the deaths, they had met and consoled each other, and Rita continued to make gestures of reconciliation. But then the lawyers marched in, and a war between the two sides broke out.

If Mardiros’s intentions had been to erase family entanglements and leave the business and its future to the next generation, he had left behind an even bigger mess.

His registration of the Zankou trademark had lapsed in 2000. Rita believed the chain’s good name belonged to her as part of the 1991 split. But during probate, she received a letter from lawyers representing Dzovig’s two sons. They intended to challenge her claim. She filed suit, and the matter went to trial. In late 2006, to the displeasure of everyone involved, the appellate court ruled that the trademark belonged to both sides. Rita’s in-laws and one of her nephews then countered with a lawsuit of their own, alleging wrongful death and seeking tens of millions of dollars from Mardiros’s estate. But their lawyers had failed to file within the statute of limitations, and the suit was dismissed.

Rita didn’t discourage her sons when they talked about the love they still felt for their cousins and the desire to be one family again. But she was sure the other side was thinking up ways to take the Zankous from them. Indeed, her two nephews and sister-in-law, who would not speak publicly about the matter, were preparing a new lawsuit to not only take full control of the trademark but wrest away one of the two houses that Rita and her sons owned. “It never ends,” she said. “It never ends.”

She opened her office door and walked down a long hall to the front of the restaurant. A giant map of Los Angeles, lifted from the pages of a Thomas Guide, shouted a welcome to customers. Two Armenian cashiers, smiles from the old Soviet Union, took
orders. Rita poured herself a soda, parted the black plastic curtain, and entered the main kitchen for all six of her Zankous.

Mexican men in yellow T-shirts with
ZANKOU
written in red were cleaning chickens, slicing chickens, marinating chickens, skewering chickens. They sent to the ovens 48,000 pounds of Foster Farms roasters and fryers each week, 2.5 million pounds a year. Blood dripped off their knives, down a gutter, and into a drain. On a big black stove, 20 stainless steel pots filled with garbanzo beans—next week’s hummus—bubbled on the fire. Bins brimmed with tahini, the sesame seed paste, and
mutabbal,
the smooth, creamy roasted eggplant dip, and
tourshe,
the long, thin slices of pickled purple turnips. The skewers, both horizontal and vertical, were piled thick with beef and chicken. From the inside out, fat sizzled, dripped down, and coated the meat, turning the exterior into a delicate caramel. This was the dish that Mardiros had invented, the best-seller they called
tarna.

Against the far wall, a Formica table and chairs had been set up gin rummy style. Four ladies, two from Mexico and two from Armenia, sat all day performing a kind of circumcision. They took every clove of garlic that came whole and peeled from Gilroy and excised the tiny stem at the tip. Bud by bud, they cleaned 1,500 pounds of garlic each week. “You would think they stink of garlic,” Rita said, gesturing toward the women. “But get close and all you smell is soap.”

Of all the possibilities, no one had thought that the widow who had never worked a day at Zankou would be the one to step into her husband’s shadow. Her sons didn’t think she could do it. She wasn’t sure herself. Together, they had grown the chain by adding a store in West L.A. and one in Burbank, the fanciest of the bunch. For the most part, though, it was still a mom-and-pop. She took her workers into her extended family, for better and for worse. She paid them more than the minimum wage and provided free food for lunch. Many had stuck around for years; only a handful had left disgruntled.

She didn’t apologize for being a hard driver, a stickler for quality. Indeed, her insistence on using the best and freshest ingredients and cooking everything from scratch was cutting into profits. The cost of tahini alone had doubled in the past year. Back in Mardiros’s time, profits from one store had opened the next. In the case of Burbank and West L.A., Rita had to take out large loans on her house. She had no choice but to raise prices, so that a plate of chicken tarna now ran close to $10—the danger zone for fast food.

“Everybody thinks we are making millions,” she said. “Would you believe it if I told you that the one Zankou in Beirut was making more money back then than all of the Zankous put together today?”

At age 24, Zankou was a survivor. Fending off challengers, some shameless in their imitation, was nothing new. The Internet droned with foodies debating the chain’s “overrated” chicken or lamenting how the garlic paste had somehow lost its zest. “Zankou Chicken, I don’t get the hype,” one wrote. Another declared, “Arax is the best falafel stand in Hollywood. The only reason I go to Zankou now is when Arax is closed.” Zankou defenders shouted back: “What do you mean overrated? It’s better than ever.”

Rita tamped down talk by sons Dikran and Steve about bringing in outside investors to triple the chain, or about selling Zankou nationwide as a franchise. Look around, she told them. Koo Koo Roo, Boston Market, Kenny Rogers—the street was littered with small chains that grew into bigger chains and imploded because they forgot what good food tasted like.

Dikran, the marketer who handled everything from menus to charity, seemed to understand. Steve took it personally. He was 28 now and knew more about the food operations than any of them. He had Mardiros’s instinct for the business, Rita agreed, and his taste buds, too. He could take one bite of food and know immediately which spice was too much or too little. But he also had the curse of his father’s temper. Rita worried that he might
get into trouble again. And when it came to managing people, she did not trust his judgment.

Five months earlier, Steve had insisted on hiring a supervisor for Pasadena, a woman who had a long career managing fast-food franchises such as McDonald’s. After much discussion, Rita gave in. The new manager wasted no time making small changes (name tags) and big ones (hour-by-hour tracking of sales). Steve saw an operation evolving from unprofessional to professional. Rita saw it going from friendly to sterile. It was a classic battle, pitting the virtues of smallness against the efficiencies of bigness. It turned ugly. The manager was fired.

Steve became furious with his aunt, Rita’s sister, who worked at the Pasadena Zankou and had complained bitterly about the manager. He confronted her. She was ten years older than his mother and blind in one eye. His mother wouldn’t speak of the details, but it was clear that Steve had gotten physical with his aunt. Rita felt she had no choice but to fire him and kick him out of the house.

“What Steve did to his aunt, I am too ashamed to talk about,” she said. “He is a good boy, and he’s got a big heart. But he has given me no choice. He has to learn how to control his temper. His anger, we will not accept.”

S
TEVE KNEW THE BACK STREETS
of Los Angeles every bit as well as his father. Tooling from Glendale to Hollywood, cranking the wheel from freeway to road, he could tell his Global Positioning System a thing or two about the best way to get there. He had been blaring Bob Marley for two days, ever since his mother had given him the boot. Now it was time to continue his education of
The 48 Laws of Power.
He slipped the CD into his player, and a voice, eerily disembodied, began to intone:

“Power is more God-like than anything in the natural world…. Power’s crucial foundation is the ability to master your emotions…. If you are trying to destroy an enemy who has hurt
you, far better to keep him off guard by feigning friendliness than showing anger…. Make your face as malleable as an actor’s. Practice luring people into traps. Mastering arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of lying. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.”

Law 1 seemed easy enough: “Never Outshine the Master.” He was having more difficulty with Law 15: “Crush Your Enemy Totally.” It didn’t occur to him that the tape, like his favorite movie,
Scarface,
was so over-the-top that another listener might find it comical. He wanted to believe in the message. Whether that message came from Sun Tzu or Donald Trump or Tony Montana, he was willing to hand over his whole being to it. He saw himself as putty going in, a rich and beloved American tycoon coming out.

“My goal in life,” he said, “is to have as many people at my funeral, to have affected as many lives in a good way, as I can. I want to live a great life. I want to be a great person. I really enjoy hanging out with different people, intellectual people, important people. I know I really can’t do that unless I have power.”