Meanwhile, it was a Sisyphean task for Kardashian to convince Priscilla to marry him, which he desperately wanted. But he was up against the King, who still loomed large in Priscilla and Lisa Marie’s lives. At one point, Kardashian complained to a friend that while he was making love to Priscilla, she would get incoherent phone calls from Elvis “and she would put the receiver on the pillow between them and let him listen.”
Larry Kraines recalls Kardashian telling him that Priscilla was “terrific and nice, ‘but this guy Elvis doesn’t stop controlling her,’ didn’t want her going with anybody because they had Lisa Marie, and Elvis was very involved in that. Robert was very bothered by all of that. So one thing led to another and I guess Robert just felt that he couldn’t take the pressure that Elvis was putting on Priscilla, and he basically broke it off and said, ‘This isn’t going to work,’ and that was that.”
But Kardashian’s friends were hearing only one side of the story.
In fact, it was Priscilla who would eventually end it with Kardashian, and one of the reasons was that Robert had begun trying to control her just as Elvis had done, and that infuriated her.
One example was when he pushed her into preparing a dinner for him—and then complained to her that she was a lousy cook. With Elvis, the best she could put together was a simple breakfast. Robert was now hoping to turn Priscilla into his version of a domesticated “Armenian housewife,” Migdal said.
“Priscilla once tried to make dinner for Robert because he kept asking her,” said Migdal. “He wanted her to be more of a housewife. So Priscilla said that one night she cooked asparagus, and she made this, and she made that, and we both laughed about it because he was very picky about what he ate, and she went out of her way to make it perfect for him, and he hated it. He did not like it. She said that after that meal he never suggested that she make dinner for him again.”
Priscilla was hurt and insulted.
But there was little time left in their relationship for any more Kardashian domesticity tests, because Priscilla was honest with him and made it clear that marriage wasn’t in the cards.
She told him, “Look, I’m not going to marry anyone until Elvis dies.”
And that was the end for Robert Kardashian with Priscilla Presley.
* * *
IN 1976, AMERICA’S BICENTENNIAL YEAR, a few odd coincidences occurred involving some of the principals in the Kardashian drama.
Kris Houghton, based in New York for American Airlines, heard from Robert that he and Priscilla had broken up. She was joyous. And Kardashian’s pal O. J. Simpson had gotten hired by ABC Sports to be one of the Summer Olympics commentators in Montreal, where a young athlete by the name of Bruce Jenner was on the U.S. team, competing in the decathlon.
Kardashian and O.J. made plans to go to Montreal for the games with a stopover in New York, and Robert asked Kris to meet them and pick up where they had left off before Priscilla had come into his life. The threesome—Kris, Kardashian, and O.J.—checked into a suite at the Plaza Hotel, shopped, dined, and partied at Studio 54. As Kris stated when she saw Kardashian again, “I could feel everything around me changing so fast.”
And when Jenner won the gold medal, all of America, including Kardashian and O.J., was excited, except for Kris.
“Who’s Bruce Jenner?” she asked.
Meanwhile, back at Graceland, Elvis and his live-in girlfriend Linda Thompson, a former Miss Tennessee, snuggling together in the King’s bed, were also watching the Summer Olympics and “were pretty closely following” Jenner’s progress, she recalled.
As Thompson has never forgotten, “Bruce was on the final lap of his last race, the tenth event, and as he crossed the finish line to win the Olympic gold medal, distinguishing himself as the ‘world’s greatest athlete,’ Elvis and I were exuberant.… We were also commenting on what an amazing specimen of a man Bruce Jenner was.
“Elvis remarked, ‘Damn, if that guy is not handsome! I’m not gay, but damn, he’s good-looking.’
“I quite agreed and teasingly said, ‘Wow! He is gorgeous. I’m going to marry that guy someday!’
“Elvis replied, ‘Yeah, sure, honey, over my dead body.’”
When Elvis died of an apparent heart attack on the toilet in his bathroom at Graceland in August 1977 at just forty-two—addicted to drugs, his body bloated from junk food and generally in horrifically poor health—it was Linda Thompson who discovered him. Joan Esposito, then engaged to Tom Kardashian, would be at Priscilla’s side through her mourning (and Linda Thompson’s), and Joan’s ex, Joe Esposito, would be one of the King’s pallbearers.
Kardashian had started seeing Kris again, with her hopes high that they would be married.
They were having dinner with Robert’s friends the Kraineses when they heard the news that the King had died, a death that shocked the entire world. But Kris, who knew that Priscilla wasn’t going to commit to marry until after Elvis’s passing, was again concerned that she’d lose Robert to the Presley widow. That concern was magnified ten times when Kardashian immediately got up from the table and placed a private call to Priscilla. In her memoir, Kris said she worried for some months whether Robert and Priscilla Presley would get back together.
But virtually to the day of the first anniversary of Presley’s death her worries ended. She and Robert would be married.
Linda Thompson’s prediction to Elvis that she would marry Jenner one day came true, too—they would be wed in January 1981.
And Kris Houghton Kardashian, a decade later, in 1991, would marry Jenner, even before her and Robert Kardashian’s signatures were dry on their divorce papers.
PART II
The “Mouthpiece”
NINE
A Corrupt Family Business
It was just less than eight miles from the Kardashian family homestead in the upper-middle-class development of View Park–Windsor Hills, in Los Angeles, to the city of Vernon. But the two locations were a world apart.
One was where Arthur Thomas Kardashian and his wife, the former Helen Jean Arakelian, comfortably resided and where their children, Robert, Tommy, and Barbara grew up. The other was a foul-smelling, industrial hellhole, four miles south of downtown L.A., where the Kardashians made their money.
It was in Vernon—California’s tiniest city, a 5.2-square-mile quagmire of grimy warehouses, factories that specialized in mixing toxic paint, a rendering plant that boiled dead pets into animal feed and grease—where the Kardashian family’s successful meatpacking business, Great Western Packing, was located, at 3377 East Vernon Avenue.
As Tom Kardashian recalls, “Most all of my friends hated to go down there, and they still talk about what the city of Vernon smelled like. If you didn’t grow up around cattle with the smell, you wouldn’t understand, but if you did grow up around cattle on a daily basis like I did, it’s like being a doctor and doing surgery.”
While tens of thousands of people labored in Vernon by day, the city was deserted by nightfall, except for less than a hundred who actually resided there in a few dozen low-rent, city-owned apartments and houses—a “dreary municipal oddity” where there were no parks, stores, schools, or any other form of civilization, except for four restaurants that were shuttered by late afternoon.
Members of certain families had corruptly run the city since the early years of the twentieth century, causing Forbes to once call Vernon a “benign dictatorship,” creating “spoils for a few and a toxic stench for everyone else.”
One of Vernon’s major business enterprises for years had been meatpacking, and by the mid-seventies about a dozen permeated the hellish little city, run mostly by Jews and Armenians like the Kardashians, who fought one another for business.
Great Western Packing had been founded by Robert Kardashian’s grandfather, Tatos Saghatel Kardashian—better known as Tom—and his brothers. They were together in many other businesses—hog ranches and rubbish and garbage collection. One of Tatos Kardashian’s first jobs when he came to Southern
California from the old country was driving a truck for Angela’s Furniture Company for ten dollars a week. After a time, he talked a banker into trusting him enough to loan him some money so he could buy his own truck, and he started a trash-hauling business, “and that’s how a lot of Armenian guys ended up in the rubbish business,” said Tatos’s grandson and his namesake, Tom Kardashian.
The sprawling Kardashian family had arrived in America from their village in Armenia in the early 1900s. It was in California where Tatos Kardashian met his future wife, Hamas Shakarian, the matriarch and the great-grandmother of the famous Kardashian siblings. Hamas’s brother, Issak Shakarian, had made a fortune in the dairy business in Downey, California. His son, Demos Shakarian, took over the business, but would earn his greatest fame as a Pentecostal evangelist who believed in miracles and healings, and in the early sixties would found a global organization for Pentecostal Christian businessmen called the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International. And curiously, his granddaughter, Denice Shakarian Halicki, a glamorous blonde, became Robert Kardashian’s fiancée after his divorce from Kris. She was Robert’s third cousin.
* * *
DESPITE THE VERY CLOSE family ties and successful family businesses, the entire Kardashian family was in for a devastating, scandalous blow.
In the early 1970s federal prosecutors began a top secret, wide-ranging probe of corruption in the city of Vernon’s meatpacking industry. And dead center in the government’s net was none other than Great Western Packing, the Kardashians’ long-successful family business, then run by the new patriarch, Arthur, his brother Bob, and the junior member, Arthur’s son, Tom Kardashian.
And it was Robert’s brother, Tom, who would take the fall for his father and uncle. Unlike Robert, Tom grew up in the meatpacking business. When he was a kid, he’d travel with his father, Arthur, on cattle-buying trips, and he quickly learned the ins and outs of buying livestock. After graduating from Dorsey High School, in Los Angeles, he went to USC, lived at home, and majored in accounting, utilizing what he learned for the family business, which he described as “volatile. Some years we could make good money and some years we’d lose money. You couldn’t do anything to prevent the losses.”
Tom rose to general manager of Great Western, which advertised in Los Angeles–area newspapers in the 1970s as selling “Selected beef by professional livestock men,” and he was living the high life with his kid brother, Robert, in their Beverly Hills bachelor pad, with their buddy O. J. Simpson as their regular guest, and it was always party time.
But on Tuesday, March 19, 1974, thirty-three-year-old Thomas Arthur “Tommy” Kardashian—future uncle of Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob—was arrested by the FBI on charges of either bribing or offering to bribe U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors.
The USDA inspectors and meat graders regularly came around with their hands outstretched seeking cash in exchange for giving Kardashian meats a better grade. If a housewife thought she was buying a prime sirloin steak for the family dinner, she might have actually been taking home one of lesser quality. It was a sleazy way of doing business, but a way of life for the Kardashians’ operation, and for some other meatpacking houses in the gritty little city of Vernon.
As Tom Kardashian asserted, “Believe it or not, it all started with the federal meat inspectors and the federal meat graders, and they were the ones that could coerce and hold us hostage if we didn’t do certain things like give gratuities and pay those guys to just do their job.”
Nevertheless, Tommy’s shocking and surprise arrest has quietly and scandalously lived in Kardashian family history, a long-held family secret and a major embarrassment known only to a few.
From the time Kris married Robert Kardashian and even after he divorced her, and from the time she married and divorced Bruce Jenner, she religiously abided by the Kardashian family’s omertà—its code of silence about criminal activity—and kept the dirty little secret that her brother-in-law Tom Kardashian was a convicted felon.
But in a series of confessional interviews for this book in 2015, seventy-five-year-old Tom Kardashian, then billing himself as a “business and professional coach,” broke his long silence about his arrest, indictment, and conviction and the decades he had lived under a dark cloud as a convicted felon until a Republican president gave him a rare pardon.
Curiously, in his 2015 online résumé advertising his services in hopes of generating new clients as a business consultant, Kardashian boasted, “As President of Great Western Meatpacking Company, he grew the organization into an industry leader.”
But on that horrific day back in mid-March 1974, Tom Kardashian was no family business hero, as he’s never forgotten.
“The FBI took me in handcuffs out of my plant in front of all the people because I was the general manager running things. It was totally unexpected,” he said, looking back to that horrific time. “I was taken to the federal building in Los Angeles and booked. And so I was held until the attorneys got me released, which was the same day.
“Then I had to go to federal court and go in front of a judge, and I ended up pleading guilty to a felony in a plea bargain, so I didn’t have any jail time. I was a young man and I felt terrible. There were two other employees who were involved in the day-to-day operations, so the three of us were indicted by the federal government.”
Kardashian was one of thirteen men from five meatpacking firms, including the Kardashians’ family firm, indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on March 20, 1974, on charges of bribing U.S. Department of Agriculture meat graders. Eleven of the indicted were arrested the next day when Tom Kardashian was taken into custody. Five of the indicted were owners of meatpacking plants.
The charges stemmed from offers of bribes ranging from sixty dollars to three hundred dollars per day to federal meat graders to upgrade beef quality, allowing the meatpackers to charge more money and make more money. The Department of Agriculture graders had the responsibility to make the determination whether meat was classified as USDA Prime, Choice, Select, or lower quality.
In one case, according to the assistant United States Attorney for the central district of California at the time, Robert C. Bonner, and the FBI, a meat grader was offered a payoff of one hundred dollars a week if she would overlook tapeworm-infested beef—at a firm other than Kardashian’s. Bonner stated at the time that to the best of his knowledge no contaminated meat had been shipped to any supermarkets, and that none of the meatpacking plants caught up in the raid would be shut down.
Tom Kardashian and others were charged with paying bribes ranging from sixty to one hundred dollars a day to USDA meat grader Charles Gledhill.
William A. Sullivan, then the assistant FBI director in charge of the Los Angeles office, said that those indicted could, if convicted, face maximum prison sentences of fifteen years and fines up to twenty thousand dollars for each count of bribery or offering of a bribe to a federal official.
Looking back in 2015, Tom Kardashian acknowledged, “Our company was indicted for some improprieties, but it was an industry situation, at a time when our industry was kind of corrupt. Our meat was distributed interstate, so we were a part of the federal thing, and our plant was federally inspected.”
He said his lawyers had advised him to make a plea bargain deal and avoid a trial and possible imprisonment. He was placed on three years probations and fined ten-thousand dollars on November 25, 1974.
“I couldn’t use the defense that this [bribing USDA graders] was an industry practice,” he maintained. “A conspiracy is the same as actually doing it. It made no difference whether it was my idea, or somebody else’s idea, or an industry practice. The government went after each company separately, so I couldn’t use the defense that this is what was going on. Also, I was a young man, so I had to go through the advice of the attorneys on what would be the net effect on my family, and on myself personally.”
Kardashian says he decided to take the fall—think Al Pacino as Michae
l Corleone, the Corleone family protector in The Godfather—even though he had no direct ownership in his family’s business but had been a part of it since his childhood.
“They would have arrested my uncle, or my dad, who were shareholders, in place of me,” he explained. “But I was young and figured I could take it. I knew my uncle had a bad heart and it would have been difficult on him. But I didn’t realize what kind of effect the conviction really would have on me.
“It restricted me as a young business guy,” he continued. “I had the stigma, meaning that I could not be on the board of any companies because I was now a felon. Once you’re a felon, you’re a felon. Whenever I’d go somewhere, even voting, or to be on a jury, one of the questions is—have you ever been convicted of a felony?”
He eventually got a position with a company called Public Storage and became president of one of its divisions. “But when we had to do public filings, the attorneys for Public Storage had to put a whole disclaimer that I was a felon. It was not an enjoyable thing.” He also was installed as a member of the Young Presidents’ organization in 1978–79. “They knew I was a felon,” he noted, “and they accepted me anyway.” His membership coincided with his marriage to Joan Esposito, a month after his brother, Robert, married Kris Houghton, in July 1978.
Under federal rules, Kardashian wasn’t permitted to apply for a pardon for a period of ten years following his conviction. He did apply in 1984 and was rejected.
“I was told it was too soon,” he said.
“But here’s the deal,” Kardashian continued. “Twenty years after my conviction I got a federal pardon from the president of the United States, the senior Bush, because I did a lot of community service, and I was involved in my church. After all those years, the government saw my background, and I hadn’t given a bunch of money politically to make that happen. Very few people get a pardon from the president.”
The Kardashians Page 9