by Stacy Perman
It was around this time that Lynsi’s religious life was said to overlap with her business affairs. The chain, previously closed only on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, was now closed on Easter Sunday as well, reportedly on Lynsi’s instructions (she was also said to have asked for the antique bar to be removed from the Liberty Room in Baldwin Park). According to the filings, Lynsi held weekly prayer meetings for associates in her home that featured prerecorded sermons by Steven A. Radich, the Successful Christian Living church’s Apostle. Her husband, Richard Martinez, asked In-N-Out associates to pray with him during the workday. Boyd took issue with what he considered the couple’s “attempt to foist [their] religious beliefs on [their] employees.” Boyd contended that Lynsi “did not believe [him] to be a man of God and worked to have him removed from the company.”
By early 2004, the discord between Lynsi and Boyd seemed to have reached its apex. Boyd charged that she used Taylor to convey her wishes, instructing her brother-in-law to “fire, demote, or transfer to other departments those she believed to have slighted her.” Boyd was apparently one of these. According to court documents, Mark Taylor and Roger Kotch, the chain’s chief executive officer and vice president for administration and finance, approached Boyd and asked him to resign from his position as cotrustee of the Snyder family trusts. Although the two men indicated that Boyd could remain as vice president for real estate and development, they claimed to be acting on behalf of Lynsi, who wanted to remove Boyd and install Shawn Prince (the husband of her half-sister Terri) as cotrustee. Angered by the request, Boyd refused to consider the suggestion until Lynsi explained to him personally why she wanted him to resign.
On April 8, 2004, Boyd asked to meet with Lynsi, Taylor, and a complement of lawyers to discuss matters surrounding taxes owed on Guy Snyder’s estate. After Guy died, his estate posed a huge tax burden that had the potential to financially wipe out the company. In order to reduce about $47 million in taxes from his estate and pay off the outstanding federal and state taxes owed, Boyd and Taylor, as cotrustees of the family trusts and co-executors of Guy’s estate, along with their lawyers worked out a plan for the trusts to borrow about $60 million from the company to pay it off; the result was an agreement whereby the trust would be required to pay back about $147 million to the company, including interest, in 2015. However, Boyd claimed that Lynsi refused to attend the meeting. Taylor and Kotch explained to Boyd, according to the filings, that Lynsi had told them that if Boyd intended to be present, she would not “be in the same room with that son of a bitch.”
According to the suit, a week later, on April 14, Taylor informed Boyd that Lynsi was asking whether he had reconsidered resigning as cotrustee. He was asked to take an early retirement and pressed again to resign from the trust in order to allow Shawn Prince to be installed in his place. Boyd remained defiant. Adding Prince, he countered, directly violated the terms of the trust, which did not permit the naming of successor trustees. Furthermore, Boyd asserted that Prince was “unqualified to administer a multimillion dollar trust.” After Boyd flatly refused, he was told that Lynsi exclaimed, “Doesn’t that green-eyed monster know what the Snyder family wants?”
From that point on, Boyd contended that he was left out of vice presidents’ meetings and not consulted on a spectrum of management issues. Boyd asserted that he found out the reason from other vice presidents, who were performing a delicate balancing act; Lynsi now refused to be in the same room with him. Beginning in June, Boyd was no longer asked to take documents to Esther’s home for her to approve and sign. Since Esther had been largely homebound after breaking her hip, Boyd had regularly brought corporate papers and snapshots of new store openings for Esther to review. During this time, Boyd contended, he was routinely denied information and documents that he needed to perform his duties as cotrustee. Eventually, he claimed, Taylor replaced the long-standing counsel of the Snyder family trusts without notifying Boyd.
Increasingly, Taylor was exercising his ambitions within the highest ranks of the company. During this time, Boyd asserted that Taylor was transparent in his desire to become chief executive of In-N-Out. He seemed bent on making his mark on the chain to which in reality he had only a tenuous claim, given the trusts’ mandate to ensure that the company be passed on to direct blood heirs. Taylor, Boyd charged, was aggressively pushing to transform In-N-Out into a national and later international company, “without regard to In-N-Out’s ability to service those markets” or “ensure In-N-Out’s traditional superior quality and service.”
In a company that had long made decisions by consensus, Boyd asserted that Taylor took to launching his own initiatives without consulting other vice presidents. At one point, Boyd claimed that Taylor had tried to differentiate the egalitarian uniforms of managers from associates—a move, he contended, which would have “substantially changed In-N-Out’s corporate culture.”
Sometime during 2004, Taylor reportedly attempted to have Esther put in a home. The effort was thwarted only after her nephew Joe Stannard (who had power of attorney over Esther’s medical care) interceded. The episode did not exactly endear Mark to Esther, who Boyd alleged had become “extremely angry and hostile to Taylor.”
A campaign of isolating Esther, Boyd charged, began in earnest. Taylor and other executives neglected to inform or consult her concerning business decisions and developments at the chain including price increases and company growth, while at the same time conducting management meetings without her knowledge or presence. During this time, Boyd insisted that he continued to consult and advise Esther regularly about business developments, visiting her at her home or discussing matters over the telephone.
Although she lived less than two miles from Esther, several intimates said that Lynsi saw little of her grandmother. During a meeting concerning Esther’s health care, Joe Stannard urged Lynsi to visit. “She said, ‘I don’t know how to talk to an old lady,’” he recalled. “‘And she bugs me about college and working at In-N-Out all the time.’”
By the fall of 2005, the atmosphere within the company’s executive ranks had grown perceptively tense. The company initiated an internal investigation—as a result of the inquiry, In-N-Out claimed that Boyd, with twenty years of company service under his belt, had allowed construction costs for new stores to escalate. It also maintained that he favored one contractor, Michael Anthony Companies, with uncompetitive bids. On September 16, 2005, Boyd was given a notice of non-renewal of his employment, signed by Esther Snyder. When Boyd showed Esther the notice, according to court filings, she said that she didn’t recognize it. She did, however, recall that Taylor had brought a document to her house for her to sign a day earlier without explaining what it was. The incident seemed to upset Esther, who Boyd insisted said that she didn’t want him to leave the company. Shortly after he left her house, Boyd claimed that Taylor telephoned him, angrily shouting, “How dare [you] upset an old lady?”
Following this episode, Boyd contended that his contact with Esther became less frequent and his ability to get in touch with her was increasingly limited.
After being marginalized for some time, Boyd asserted that by September 2005, Esther was essentially a prisoner in her own home. Guards supplied by In-N-Out were posted on the property, and only pre-approved visitors were allowed inside. Her phone calls and correspondence were screened, and at one point, Boyd alleged, Esther’s telephone line was disconnected and Boyd’s own telephone numbers were blocked, preventing any incoming calls to Esther from going through. (Others contended that her number was changed to prevent solicitation calls.) A grainy, blurry picture that Boyd said showed guards in position outside of Esther’s Oak Tree Terrace home was submitted to the growing volume of court filings.
About six months later, in February 2006, after Esther’s old friend Wolf Kahles read an article about the ongoing legal battle between Boyd and In-N-Out Burger in the Los Angeles Times, he became concerned and telephoned Esther from his home in Germany. The pair had talked frequen
tly; however, when he attempted to call her private home line, he found that the number had been changed and was un-listed. “I was upset,” he recalled. “They changed her telephone number and didn’t tell anybody.” Kahles called In-N-Out’s headquarters only to be rebuffed. “I asked for her number and they said no. Then I left her a message with them and told her to call me. They never gave her any of my messages.”
On November 5, 2005, In-N-Out Burger retained Grant Thornton, a large tax firm, to perform a forensic accounting analysis on Boyd; specifically, the firm was tasked with looking into allegations of inappropriate transactions. The firm was given access to Boyd’s department offices and files. They interviewed Boyd’s staffers and a number of the contractors and subcontractors, including Michael Madrid, owner of Michael Anthony Companies. The contents of Boyd’s desk and those of the associates from his department were examined and copied. In addition, they reviewed the information stored in his computer and retrieved the laptops of Boyd’s staff. The accounting firm also undertook a public record search of Boyd, his wife, son, daughter, and sister. Five days later, In-N-Out notified Boyd that it would hold a hearing on December 13 to determine whether he would be terminated as a result of “misconduct.”
A month later, Lawrence A. Rosipajla, Grant Thornton’s director, delivered a thick seventy-eight-page report to In-N-Out complete with copies of invoices and photographs of Boyd’s second home in Arizona dated December 5, 2005. Among the findings, the report alleged that Boyd used his favored contractor, Michael Anthony Companies, to perform construction work on his personal residence but charged the cost of the work to In-N-Out. The investigation also turned up what it claimed was evidence that Boyd had allegedly embezzled company funds to build a wall costing more than $5,000 on his property in Arizona and a patio and cabana at his home in California. To cover his tracks, the report claimed that Boyd shredded documents. Boyd’s attorney Philip Heller described the investigation as a charade, tantamount to character assassination. It was, he said, “nothing more than a witch hunt”; and Boyd’s team soon delivered a counter investigation by Discovery Economics, refuting Grant Thornton’s findings.
As the fall turned to winter and 2005 turned into 2006, the situation between Boyd and In-N-Out Burger grew nastier still. In January, the board of directors called a special meeting, the purpose of which was to discuss Boyd’s termination. At the time, In-N-Out’s board was composed of Boyd, Taylor, and Esther. (Boyd and Taylor were named to the board following Guy’s death.) It was an odd situation to say the least. Boyd countered that he should be present and Esther included and attempted to hold the confab on January 27, later failing to get a temporary restraining order enjoining the board meeting scheduled by In-N-Out for January 30, 2006, at Esther’s home. Boyd claimed he was prevented from entering the house by guards. He was not allowed to speak with Esther and was told that she didn’t wish to see him.
The battle moved to the chambers of the Superior Court in downtown Los Angeles. In March, Boyd’s complaints grew to include a defamation suit against the accounting firm Grant Thornton, allegedly for making “intimidating and misleading statements to In-N-Out employees.” During the course of the Thornton investigation into Boyd, the firm (his attorneys charged) branded Boyd a “thief” and labeled him “unethical” during interviews with In-N-Out employees. Further, Thornton’s director Rosipajla “intimidated and terrorized employees by threatening them with criminal prosecution, civil penalties, and adverse employment action if they refused to state that Boyd had engaged in criminal acts.” It was hard to reconcile the behavior listed in the court documents with In-N-Out’s squeaky-clean reputation.
In-N-Out extended its lawsuit to include Michael Anthony Madrid, the contractor accused of receiving preferential bids and doing work on Boyd’s personal property (work that the chain’s attorneys claimed was invoiced to In-N-Out). In a lengthy declaration signed and dated on October 31, 2005, Madrid explained that he had worked on over one hundred construction projects for the chain since submitting his first proposal to build the Thousand Palms store about twenty years earlier. In-N-Out, he explained, made up roughly 25 to 30 percent of his firm’s business. “In-N-Out is a very important customer,” he stated. “I would not do anything to jeopardize that relationship.”
According to the declaration, in late 2003, Boyd told Madrid that he wanted to build a wall on his Arizona property, which happened to be twenty minutes from Laughlin, Nevada, where In-N-Out was building a store. Boyd, Madrid said, had asked whether it might be possible for Madrid’s crew to work on the wall while it was working on the nearby store. According to Madrid his firm didn’t create a job number for the wall because it was such a small project. Furthermore, he said, he never sent Boyd an invoice for the job, nor did he ask him to pay for it.
Then, sometime between August and September of 2005, two men appeared at the Michael Anthony Companies headquarters in Bloomington, California. The gentlemen said they were from In-N-Out and were conducting an audit. They questioned the firm’s employees about its pricing process and explained that they were looking into the burger chain’s projects in four cities. They probed at length about the Laughlin store, asking “pointed questions” about Boyd’s wall project. After being questioned for nearly an hour, Madrid asked the men to produce their business cards and explain who they were. One identified himself as an attorney. The other man said that he was In-N-Out’s controller. After another thirty minutes, Madrid became concerned about the line of questioning. “It appeared to me that this was not just about an audit, as I had been led to believe,” he stated. “It really is none of their business how we use funds paid to us.” Then Madrid escorted the men to the door, telling them, “I am not sure what it is you’re digging for, and maybe I should have counsel to help me determine that.”
A trial date was set for October 17, 2006. Before that time, a series of hearings were held to settle the score regarding Boyd’s dismissal and his continued role as cotrustee. The bitter fight went on for several rounds. On March 30, Judge Mitchell Beckloff suspended Boyd as cotrustee of the family trusts, given the conflict between Boyd and Lynsi, and appointed Northern Trust Bank of California to serve as cotrustee with Taylor pending a hearing to settle the matter on a permanent basis. Round one went to In-N-Out. Then, on April 5, the burger chain suffered a setback when Judge Aurelio Munoz threw out two of its lawsuits against Boyd—breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty—saying that they violated Boyd’s free speech rights. (In-N-Out had contended that Boyd’s suits revealed trade secrets and breached his confidentiality agreement.) For Boyd, the court’s decision was like a moral vindication.
It was only a partial victory, however; on April 28, Boyd lost his fight to remain employed with In-N-Out. Judge Munoz ruled that Boyd could not force the company to reinstate him. “This is an action for a wrongful discharge,” the judge stated, “not an action to restore a prince or a king to a throne.” This time, the legal round went to In-N-Out.
As the fall trial date loomed, the ugly and recalcitrant claims spurred on for several months and filled thousands of pages of legal filings. Lynsi, Taylor, and In-N-Out filed a motion in February to have several descriptions that they called “irrelevant, sensationalized, and unfounded allegations” removed from the lawsuits. On April 28, Judge Munoz ruled to strike several of them from the legal record.
However, his decision came after what the company deemed “dirty laundry” had already aired publicly. What emerged was a family drama filled with jealousy, scheming, splintering loyalties, money, and tragedy. Boyd claimed that Lynsi did very little work at the company but expected In-N-Out employees to perform errands for her such as cleaning up after her dogs on the company’s dime. Lynsi’s personal life came under particular scrutiny; she was called “reckless, impetuous, irresponsible,” among other personal shortcomings.
Boyd’s assessment of Lynsi’s business acumen and work ethic was no less damning. He complained that the girl who had all the wo
rld laid out before her if only she would lift her fingers to grab it did not take her work seriously. “She is often late for work and meetings or does not show up at all.” Calling her the “Hamburger Princess,” a sobriquet that most likely needled the young woman, he claimed that “despite her financial resources, Lynsi chose not to pursue a college education.” Boyd also asserted that Lynsi “lacks sufficient personal maturity, experience, and skill necessary to successfully run In-N-Out.” Her main qualification for running the company, he charged, was simply that she was the granddaughter of its founders.
Like a man expelling air after holding his breath for years, Boyd’s descriptions spared few. Lynsi’s mother, Lynda Snyder Kelbaugh (now married for the third time), was portrayed as a combination of Lady Macbeth and Cruella de Ville who had long sought to control the company, first through her son-in-law Taylor and now, as she was coming into her inheritance, through Lynsi. He charged, among other things, that “Lynda exerted her influence to push Guy Snyder to name Mark Taylor as cotrustee of the family trusts.”
Boyd himself reportedly became ensnared in Lynda’s wrath when he insisted several years earlier that Esther, recovering from her hip surgeries, should be removed from the hospital in Redding where she had been for nearly a year. Fearing that she would languish up north, or worse, he pushed to bring her home to Glendora, where he said she would receive better individual care and be more comfortable. A combative Lynda phoned him, he claimed, arguing that Esther should be left to mend where she was, not far from Lynda’s ranch in Shingletown.