Copyright held by The John Cooke Fraud Report. Reprint rights are granted with attribution to The John Cooke Fraud Report with a link to this website.
By Barry Zalma
Aunt Susie had been in the restaurant business all her life. She worked for chains like Denny’s and Stuckey’s. She was a good cook. She knew everything there was to know about the restaurant business. She could manage people. She could train waitresses, waiters, bus boys, cooks and dishwashers. She had done it all, and she knew how to teach others to do it.
Aunt Susie’s dream was to own her own restaurant. She was sure she could do it better than any people she had ever worked for. She knew she could cook better than any person who ever cooked at any of the restaurants she worked in. She believed that good wholesome food served fast and inexpensively would always find a clientele; but she never made enough money to save up for her dream.
At age fifty Aunt Susie was still working for other people, managing a restaurant in the high desert around Lancaster, California. One of her regular breakfast customers was a handsome man of sixty. He would eat breakfast alone at the counter every day at 7:00 am sharp. Since her shift started at 7:00 am, they were together every morning. She would have his coffee ready in front of his favorite stool before he sat down. The cook would start frying his eggs, sunny-side-up, as soon as the man walked through the front door. When business was slow, as it was most mornings at 7:00 am, Aunt Susie would sit down with him and they would share conversation and their first coffee of the morning. They became friends.
The old man had operated several Ford dealerships in the high desert area. He was a recent widower and he was lonely. Aunt Susie was divorced; all her children had grown up and left home. These two lonely people became good friends. Aunt Susie learned that her friend had sold his last car dealership because he had a heart attack and could not take the stress of operating the dealership any longer. He was bored. He had lots of money that he didn’t know how to spend.
Aunt Susie told him about her dream of opening a restaurant called Aunt Susie’s Kitchen. She would sell only wholesome home-cooked type meals like pork chops and sweet yams, country-fried steak and mashed potatoes and steak and baked potatoes. The old man, with a car salesman’s confidence, could sell anything to anyone. He decided opening a restaurant was a wonderful idea. Aunt Susie would cook and train the staff and the old man would supervise. His cardiologist would approve.
A pizza parlor in a shopping center was advertised for sale. The location was good and most of the equipment could cook Aunt Susie’s wholesome food. They only needed to buy a few extra pieces of equipment. With his negotiating skills the old man wore down the owner of the pizza parlor and purchased his lease and equipment for less than its market value. Aunt Susie’s Kitchen was born. They advertised on local radio and in the local weekly newspaper. Customers began to come in and it looked like the business was going to make money.
Sit-down restaurants are rare in Lancaster; restaurants with tablecloths are even rarer. Business was good for six months. Aunt Susie was happier than she had ever been in her life – success was hers. Even better, she and the old man found that they liked each other so much they moved in together and began keeping house. Nothing could be better.
After six months, the novelty of a sit-down restaurant wore off. Business began to drop. In the second six months, gross sales went down ten percent each month. They were barely making enough to pay the help, the rent on the restaurant and the rent on the small apartment they lived in. Aunt Susie and the old man tried everything. They even leased a roach coach – a mobile catering truck – and started selling Aunt Susie’s special wholesome food at swap meets in the high desert. Aunt Susie’s mobile kitchen reduced the slow down in business but did not stop it.
A sign in the shopping center announcing the opening of a new Denny’s administered the final blow. The competition would destroy them. Aunt Susie didn’t know what to do; the old man did. He told her not to worry, he would take care of everything. Since her birthday was coming up, he decided they would go to Las Vegas. He intended to blow what was left of their funds and have a good time.
The restaurant was closed on Sundays, so they would leave Saturday night and return Monday, letting the waitress open up on Monday morning. Saturday morning they arrived at the restaurant to find one of the plate glass windows broken. They called two glass companies, but neither could come right away. The old man went to the local Builder’s Emporium and bought a single sheet of plywood. He wired the plywood to the metal frame of the window, using a coat hanger through a hole he drilled in the plywood. Believing the restaurant was secure, the two drove to Las Vegas that day. They registered in a $200-a-night suite at Caesar’s Palace and had a wonderful time. They even soaked in the indoor spa while drinking champagne on her birthday.
Monday morning, just before they were to leave Las Vegas, they called the restaurant to speak with the waitress. They wanted to confirm that the restaurant had opened properly. The waitress didn’t answer the phone at the restaurant so they called her at home. They thought the waitress had overslept. When the waitress answered she was hysterical, crying and incoherent. When she calmed down, she told them that the restaurant had burned. Someone had unhooked the plywood cover on the broken window, poured gasoline through the restaurant and set it afire. The only reason the entire mall did not burn was because the sprinkler system put the fire out. The restaurant was a mess.
They checked out of Caesar’s Palace. They drove back to Lancaster. Everything the waitress had said was true. The restaurant was a loss. Although the equipment had not burned, smoke, soil and stench were everywhere.
Aunt Susie’s first thought was about her son-in-law. Several years previously, her daughter had married what appeared to be a very wealthy man. Aunt Susie had not liked him. Having worked in the restaurant business all her life, she knew many police officers to whom she had fed half-priced or free meals. Before her daughter married this wealthy man, she’d had her police friends check him out. She had learned that his wealth came from his position as a major heroin dealer. She had tried to talk her daughter out of marrying this man, but her daughter had not listened. Aunt Susie had not spoken to her daughter for five years. She refused to speak to her son-in-law.
Only six months before the fire, her daughter had finally made contact and asked if Aunt Susie wanted to see her grandson. Aunt Susie hadn’t even been told the child was born. Aunt Susie, the daughter and the grandson had reconciled. When Aunt Susie learned that her son-in-law beat his wife and child, she got her daughter a lawyer and filed divorce papers. Much to Aunt Susie’s shock, after the bruises faded, her daughter had reconciled with her criminal husband. They had blamed Aunt Susie for breaking up their marriage. The wall of silence had been raised again.
Following this incident, the drug dealer had been upset with Aunt Susie and had threatened to harm her. He had even had an acquaintance – one who earned his living by killing people – call Aunt Susie to make threats.
Susie’s first suspect was her son-in-law and his friend, the hit man. When they arrived in Lancaster, she told the arson investigator of her suspicions. The investigator verified that her son-in-law was a known drug dealer, but he was unable to connect the son-in-law to the fire.
The claim made to the insurance company resulted in payment of the full limits of the policy, $150,000. Aunt Susie and her friend collected twice their original investment in the restaurant without doing any work. Because of the fire, Aunt Susie could break her five-year lease. She and the old man had a cushion to either live comfortably or open a new restaurant.
Her son-in-law was contacted by the police, but there was no prosecution. Everyone knew the fire was an arson. There was no doubt about it. Tablecloths were found stretched throughout the restaurant and soaked with gasoline to spread the fire. One hung from the T-bar ceiling to help the fire climb into the ceiling area. If the automatic sprinkler system had been disconnected, the entire shopping center would have gone up in flames. Instead, all the damage was done by the water. The fire department found its duties limited to removing water since the sprinklers had put out the fire before they arrived.
The odor of gasoline was so strong that the firefighters had to put fans in to blow the gasoline fumes out of the building.
The fire cause investigators knew that only one person had a motive to start this fire. Spite is a common motive for arson. The son-in-law remained the primary suspect. He was frank with the investigators and admitted hating his mother-in-law; but as long as she left him alone, he said, he would leave her alone. He admitted he had threatened her, but only during that time when his wife and child had moved out at her instigation. He was a happily married man again. He could prove he was in Miami Beach with his family from the week before until the week after the fire at Aunt Susie’s Kitchen. Her case was marked off as another unsolved arson.
If the arson investigators had more time to investigate – if the insurance company’s investigators were not overburdened – if anyone had even tried, they would have learned what the old man told Susie two years later. He had broken out the window himself. He bought a gallon of gas at the local Shell station, telling the attendant he needed fuel for his lawn mower. He then went down to the corner where the day laborers gathered every morning at 6:00 am. He selected the hungriest-looking laborer and offered him $500 to cause a fire at Aunt Susie’s Kitchen. He gave the laborer the gallon of gasoline. He explained in Spanglish (pidgin English/Spanish) how to take the tablecloths off of each table and soak them in gasoline so the fire would spread throughout the small restaurant structure. He gave the laborer a pair of wire cutters to cut the wire holding the plywood panel so he could enter the restaurant. He told the man to do so after all the stores in the mall were closed and locked up, when the mall was dark. He told the laborer he would make sure the broken window would be one on the side of the building away from the main thoroughfare. He gave the man a hundred-dollar bill and told him that after the fire, he would meet him at the corner and give him four more.
Since it would take the laborer three months of hard work to make the same $500, he readily accepted. The day after the fire, the old man met the laborer at the same corner. He gave the laborer four more hundred-dollar bills. He suggested that the laborer move to a corner in Los Angeles. The laborer agreed and they never saw each other again. Neither knew the other’s name. No one was hurt. Only the insurance company, and all the people who bought insurance from that company, lost.
Barry Zalma, of the Culver City, California, Law Firm of Barry Zalma, Inc., is also the president of ClaimSchool, Inc., and the publisher of How Your Friends and Neighbors are Screwing You, a compendium of similar columns
© Copyright 1996 Alikim Media