The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 by Jeffrey Toobin & Otto Penzler & Thomas H. Cook

Author:Jeffrey Toobin & Otto Penzler & Thomas H. Cook
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Non-Fiction, Murder, Social Science, Crime and the press - United States, True Crime, Anthologies, Journalism, Crime in mass media, General, United States, Criminals, American, Case studies, Literary Collections, Crime and the press, Crime - United States, Criminals - United States, Crime, Writing, Criminology
ISBN: 9780061490842
Publisher: Ecco Press
Published: 2009-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

MARDIROS HAD ALWAYS BEEN a student of maps, but what he found when he came to America was something else. “Rita,” he shouted from a backroom. “These Thomas brothers. What geniuses!” They had taken a city that made no sense to itself and given it a structure, a syntax, that even foreigners like him could fathom. Here was a whole bound guide of maps that divided up the sprawl of Southern California into perfect little squares with numbers that corresponded to pages inside. Turn to any page, and you had the landscape of L.A. in bird’s-eye: parks in green, malls in yellow, cemeteries in olive, and freeways, the lifeblood, in red. He pored over the maps at night, reviewed them again in the morning, and then took off to find his new city. By car and foot, he logged hundreds of miles that first week, close to a thousand the next. He was looking for the right business in the right location and wasn’t in any particular hurry. They had come with plenty of cash.

One thing was certain. His parents, looking for something easier, wanted no part of the food business. There would be no Zankous in America. They settled instead on a dry cleaning shop, only to find out that the chemicals made Mardiros sick. Father and son traveled to Hong Kong to explore the trade of men’s suits, then decided the business wasn’t practical. The deeper Mardiros journeyed into Los Angeles, the more he bumped up against growing pockets of immigrants fresh from the Middle East. No restaurant, though, seemed to be dedicated to their cuisine, at least none that served it fast and delicious and at a price that would bring customers back. So in 1983, he went to his parents and pitched the idea. His father resisted. His mother cried. They threatened to return to Beirut. In the end, sensing their son’s resolve, they consented.

He picked a tiny place next to a Laundromat on the corner of Sunset and Normandie—could there have been an uglier minimall in all of Hollywood?—and erected a sign with block letters in blue and red. ZANKOU CHICKEN. Before long, the Arabs and Persian Jews and Armenians found it. So did Mexican gang-bangers and nurses from Kaiser Permanente and the flock from L. Ron Hubbard’s church, who methodically polished off their plates of chicken shawarma, hummus, and pickled turnips and returned to their e-meters with a clearness that only Margrit’s paste could bring.

This wasn’t Beirut. Mardiros put in long hours. He tweaked the menu; his mother tinkered with the spices. It took a full year to find a groove. The first crowd of regulars brought in a second crowd, and a buzz began to grow among the network of foodies. How did they make the chicken so tender and juicy? The answer was a simple rub of salt and not trusting the rotisserie to do all the work but raising and lowering the heat and shifting each bird as it cooked. What

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