The Kardashians Read online

  In fact, two days before he left office in January 1993, President George Herbert Walker Bush issued only a dozen pardons and commuted the sentences of two other men. Two of those pardoned had been contributors to Bush’s reelection campaign a year earlier.

  Kardashian was given a “full and unconditional pardon” for the offense of “offering gratuities to public officials.”

  The others pardoned by Bush included crimes ranging from bank fraud to tax evasion to drug dealing and smuggling.

  Kardashian’s name was buried deep in the list of Bush presidential pardons and commutations released to the media by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, on January 18, 1993. Of the twelve, Kardashian’s name was number eight, listed between a felon convicted in 1955 of larceny and a felon convicted in 1962 of a drug charge. Bush declined to give his reason for the Kardashian clemency.

  * * *

  YOU HAD TO BE A tough guy to be in the meatpacking business, and Tommy Kardashian could be a tough guy. The labor unions that Great Western Packing had to contend with—such as the then-corrupt Teamsters union—were a constant problem, like maggots infesting meat.

  “There was a lot of fear in dealing with the unions,” Kardashian asserted, pointing to the Teamsters, who were the truck drivers who hauled the meat, and the butchers’ union, and the operating engineers’ union, whose members took care of the refrigeration. Tommy’s uncle, his father, Arthur’s brother, Bob Kardashian, was in charge of Great Western Packing’s negotiations with the union reps. But when the talks broke down and there was a strike and labor trouble, Tommy Kardashian stepped in as the company’s muscle.

  “I was young enough to drive through the pickets,” he boasted years later. “I brought in protection—big guys who played football.” Some were from his and Robert’s and their friend O. J. Simpson’s alma mater, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. “I was in my early thirties. I was single. I’d get some of my ex–football player friends. That’s just the way it was.”

  Tom’s brother, Robert, patriarch of the contemporary Kardashian clan after his marriage to Kris Houghton, knew for years that his family’s meatpacking business was rife with corruption, and he didn’t want any part of it.

  As Tom noted, “Ours was just not a good business, and I couldn’t wait to get out of it. My brother saw that early on, and that’s why instead of working for the company and having to work for me he just said, ‘I gotta do something else.’ Robert knew being in the family business there was corruption. If you were to ask me, did I know I was doing wrong, did I know it was illegal to do that, I’d have to say yes. It’s not like somebody pulled something over on me. I can just imagine some of those guys who are the sons of Mafia people. They don’t have much of a choice.

  “But Robert didn’t care about our thing, and the number two part of that was he was going to have to be number two to me, and when your older brother is telling you, ‘you gotta do it this way and that way,’ you know it doesn’t work.”

  After Tom Kardashian’s conviction, continued government investigations, and tightening regulations, the Kardashian family’s meatpacking business became increasingly more difficult to operate and was far less profitable, so in the early 1980s Great Western Packing ended a many-decades-long and lucrative run, corrupt as it may have been at times.

  “We couldn’t really sell the company,” said Kardashian. “It didn’t bring a premium price because the whole industry was really being watched, and the government was putting extra pressure. It was hard to stay in business.

  “We didn’t even have a lot of land to sell off,” he continued. “We were in Vernon, which wasn’t a strong place where all of a sudden land values escalated. My dad decided to retire when he was, like, sixty-five, around 1982. [Arthur Kardashian, paternal grandfather of Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, and Rob, died at ninety-five, close to Christmas 2012, outliving his son, Robert, by a decade.] All I can say is the government virtually put our industry out of business.”

  * * *

  THE CRIMINAL PART OF THE Kardashian family’s meatpacking business, the one that got Tom Kardashian in serious trouble, was even evident at times in the Kardashian home.

  A close high school friend of Robert Kardashian’s, Phil Pennino, says he knew for certain that “Bob’s father and his uncles were very powerful in L.A. County. They were heavy-duty.” Having grown up in an Italian American home with Sicilian roots, Pennino could spot a goombah—an Italian who might have unsavory connections—a mile away. “One of the guys that used to come around to the Kardashian house was a gangster, an L.A. gangster, and I know Bob knew him,” stated Pennino. “He used to come around to the family business, too, and I said to Bob, ‘How the hell do you know this guy?’ and he said, ‘He and my dad blah, blah, blah.’ So I knew the Kardashians knew certain connected people.

  “Bob just said the family knew the [L.A. gangster] guy. He said he was a ‘close friend, a part of my family,’ and ‘Oh, yeah, we’d make a joke of it.’ We were about seventeen and we laughed at it because it was kind of cool, but we really didn’t understand the full ramifications of what was going on.”

  Some years later, after Robert was hanging with his best friend, the football hero O. J. Simpson, they were in their favorite Beverly Hills hangout, the Luau, and were hitting on a couple of women, and Kardashian was doing his best to impress them. And out of the blue, he boasted about how he was a made member of organized crime, that he was an enforcer in the Armenian Mafia, and that his expertise was breaking the knees of those who didn’t cooperate. The women seemed both impressed and frightened. While Kardashian’s story was probably little more than macho braggadocio, it said something about the family and business from where he was coming.

  He would later confide in his close friend Joni Migdal, whose Jewish family, the Linsks, were neighbors of the Kardashian family in View Park–Windsor Hills, that he knew of the corruption and criminality that existed in his family’s business, and that he didn’t want to be a part of it.

  “His whole family wanted him to join that hierarchy of Armenian business people, and Robert made a conscious decision to not have any part of that business,” Migdal stated. After graduating in 1966 with a degree in business administration and psychology from USC, Kardashian went straight to study law at the University of San Diego School of Law. “At that time,” said Migdal, “we were having lunch almost every day, and we had a long talk when Robert was about to get his law degree about whether he was going to join his family’s businesses and be the consigliere of that group of people, or go another route that was a more honest way of making money, and he decided to go that way.”

  Kardashian would join the Beverly Hills law firm of two entrepreneurial attorneys—the partnership of Richard Eamer and John Bedrosian, a first-generation Armenian-American whose parents emigrated to the United States when the Kardashians had in the early twentieth century.

  Migdal firmly believed that Robert made the right decision because it was just a few years later that his brother, Tom, would be arrested and forced to make a plea bargain deal to avoid imprisonment in the Great Western Packing bribery case.

  “Robert was devastated and really supportive of Tom,” she said. “But the family was secretive about it, and they were embarrassed because they had never had anything like that happen. Robert told me about his brother’s arrest even before it hit the headlines, and he was really broken up. But the whole culture of Arthur and Helen and Tommy and Robert and Barbara was just to go under the radar.”

  Robert Kardashian’s only actual experience working for Great Western Packing occurred as a teenager in the summers when his father was hoping he’d follow in his and his brother’s footsteps and one day join the family business. With that in mind, and just to give him a taste of what the business sometimes entailed, Robert was assigned the god-awful, bloody task of stunning Kardashian cattle before they went to slaughter.

  “That was his summer job for a while,
to use a big rubber thing like a sledgehammer, pounding the cows over the head,” recalled his friend and confidant Larry Kraines. “He stunned them enough for them to go to the next process. He told me he didn’t like doing it, and he didn’t like the family business. It wasn’t for him. But he’d go in and do it and pick up some cash.”

  TEN

  A Kardashian Childhood

  Robert G. Kardashian was born on February 22, 1944, the youngest of Arthur and Helen Kardashian’s three children—the one who would make the Kardashian name famous.

  Because he came into the world on George Washington’s birthday, his parents had honored the nation’s first president by giving their second son the middle name of George—Robert George Kardashian.

  He was four when the family moved into the home where he and his two siblings, Tom and Barbara, would grow up—a handsome three-bedroom, five-bath, almost four-thousand-square-foot house, built in 1942, at 4908 Valley Ridge Avenue in the hilly and airy View Park–Windsor Hills development of Los Angeles, known generally as Baldwin Hills. The Kardashians had moved “up the hill” from a far more modest home in a far less fancy area of L.A. as Great Western Packing’s wartime money, sometimes involving the black market sale of meat, was rolling in.

  While the Kardashian family was relatively affluent and fell into the upper-middle-class bracket, Arthur and Helen had something of an immigrant mentality when it came to living large.

  “My dad and mom never traveled,” said Tom Kardashian, looking back. “They never went to Europe, or on boat cruises, or any of that kind of stuff. We had enough money to live well, but we didn’t have an abundance of money to go out and say, ‘Oh, we’re going to buy an airplane,’ or ‘We’re going to buy a boat.’ We didn’t have a second home. My mom and sister and my brother and myself would get away to Balboa, and my dad would go back and forth from the city on weekends.” Balboa, where the Kardashians inexpensively vacationed, is a peninsula in the Pacific, part of the ritzy city of Newport Beach, south of Los Angeles.

  But Robert and Tom would live far differently, owning fancy Beverly Hills homes, driving Rolls-Royces, and courting women with expensive tastes, Kris Houghton as the best example.

  Because Mrs. Kardashian’s sons were rambunctious and Mr. Kardashian was rarely home, always on the road buying cattle, Helen Jean Kardashian had decided to send her boys to a neighborhood military school, the California Military Academy, founded in 1906, on Angeles Vista Boulevard, within walking distance of the Kardashian home.

  “It was all about discipline and respect,” ex-felon Tom Kardashian said.

  The Kardashian boys wore military uniforms and sported dog tags around their necks, had to report for formations, kept their shoes spit-shined, were required to respond “yes, sir” and “no, sir” when addressed, and had to salute their teachers, according to the rules established by the academy’s director, Colonel Albert E. Ebright, who stressed competition among the cadets, and whose office was decorated with trophies and weapons of war. “When a boy comes here, we assume he is a good lad,” was Ebright’s motto. “We stress that he will be good because he wants to be. Not because he is afraid of not being good.”

  * * *

  HELEN KARDASHIAN WAS UNLIKE most Armenian women, who have dark hair and olive skin like her granddaughters Kourtney and Kim. Instead, she had blond hair, a light complexion, and blue eyes that gave her an angelic look, but her sisters were all dark-skinned. It was similar to the situation with Robert and Kris’s third-born, Khloé, who was blond and looked nothing like her siblings or her father. But that situation would be more complicated.

  Mrs. Kardashian had a toughness about her and ruled the Kardashian household with an iron fist. Larry Kraines, who often slept over at the Kardashian home on weekends after he and Robert bonded in tenth grade, has never forgotten that Helen Kardashian was an obsessive housekeeper. “Oh my God, if Robert got up at five thirty, six o’clock in the morning to go to the bathroom, Helen would clean and have his bed made up before he had a chance to get back in it. She was unbelievable, a real character.”

  And some who knew her said she could also be a “bitch on wheels.”

  She had come from a poor Armenian family, was one of four children of Arut and Annie Arakelian, and grew up in the gritty, ethnically diverse working-class Los Angeles community of San Pedro, close by the Port of Los Angeles, which had long been the home port of the U.S. Navy’s battle fleet.

  Helen Kardashian once told Tommy that she was “very poor growing up, but she didn’t know she was poor,” he recalled. “She and her sisters used to take the streetcar to get around.” And before she married Arthur Kardashian, who came from a family with its hands in a lot of different businesses—such as hog farming, meatpacking, and waste management—she had worked for the StarKist company packing fish. She died at the age of ninety-one in 2008, and like her husband, Arthur, outlived their famous son, Robert.

  After finishing sixth grade at the California Military Academy, Robert was enrolled at Audubon Junior High School, down the hill in the nearby Leimert Park neighborhood.

  Unlike his first wife, Kris, Robert was an academic high achiever in school, popular with his classmates, and active in organizations.

  At Audubon, he was the student body president and was a member of the student council.

  As Linda Matsuno-Parmenter, an Asian-American Audubon classmate who also was on the student council with Kardashian and is pictured next to him in the class of 1961 Audubon yearbook, said, looking back to that time, “Robert was just a person who got along well with everybody. He just had a friendly personality and no matter what group you hung out with, he was able to kind of connect with people.”

  His popularity increased in high school. In his class at L.A.’s Susan Miller Dorsey High School—then a third black, a third white, a third Asian, and the only all-black high school in Los Angeles in 2016—he was on the honor roll, was a member of the service boards and the Triangles service club, was “best all-around” of the “significant seniors” along with a classmate by the name of Sylvia Duran, who are pictured with their arms locked together in the Circle 1961 class yearbook. He was a Yell King—a cheerleader with mostly girls—and he was elected student body president.

  Robert was inducted into the Bishops, a cliquish social club for the school’s elite “where we got our butts wacked as an initiation,” recalled Kardashian classmate Tony Byler, who played football and later, like Kardashian, became an attorney. Byler married another member of Robert’s class, Donna Tom, who has never forgotten how he crashed a little birthday party she was having at school with a chocolate cake she had baked. “And Bob Kardashian ate so much of it he claimed he got sick, but he might have been kidding me because he was very social.”

  For a time in high school he was going with an Armenian-American girl, Dee-Dee, a student at St. Mary’s Academy, whom he had met at the Armenian Pentecostal church that his family attended every Sunday, where a Kardashian family relative was the pastor, according to Tom Kardashian. “Robert dated a lot of girls, a lot of Armenian girls, and he was not afraid to bring girls home and around our parents, where I was pretty much the opposite. I kept to myself. As the second boy in the family, he was very outgoing and had the kind of personality that created a lot of friends.”

  One of Robert’s close high school pals, Phil Pennino, remembered Dee-Dee well. “It was a high school romance and Bob was pretty serious about her, and she was gorgeous. We double dated many times. Robert always kind of had a girlfriend.”

  Back then Kardashian was a big rock ’n’ roll fan who especially liked the surfer music of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. “Bob taught me how to do the ‘surfer stomp.’ I was all intimidated by learning that dance, and he’d just laugh,” said Pennino. When they were seniors, the two pals went stag to see the Kingston Trio, then a popular folk music group, at the Copacabana.

  When Robert graduated from Dorsey, his class yearbook noted the following about him: “As head of
the Student Council this past semester, Bob Kardashian has more than proved his leadership as displayed by excellent executive ability tempered with a wonderful sense of humor, good judgment, and fairness at all times. Bob leaves Dorsey held in the high esteem of all those who know him.”

  “He was,” as his brother said, “Mr. Personality. He was student body president and was all those things that came along with being a good person, a good guy, and so he had popularity from that, and that was strong for him.”

  Arthur and Helen Kardashian threw a big graduation party for Robert at the house, attended by many of his high school friends and members of the wider Kardashian family. And because he had done so well academically and in September was to begin his college career at the University of Southern California, his parents gave him a new black with a white interior Chevrolet Corvair, a rear-engine compact introduced by General Motors a few years earlier to compete with the new breed of inexpensive, fuel-economy foreign imports that were becoming popular with the American motorist in the early sixties.

  “When he had that Corvair, he had to keep a spare fan belt in the glove box because that would always break or come off and the car wouldn’t run,” remembered Larry Kraines. “I’d make fun of him—‘Your brother’s got a Corvette, and you’ve got a Corvair, what the hell’s with that?’” Phil Pennino recalled going on double dates with Robert in the Corvair, and there were always mechanical problems. “He told me the engine fell out a couple of years later. It was a piece of junk.”

  The year 1962, when Robert graduated from high school, was a dangerous time. That October the Soviet Union deployed ballistic missiles to the communist island of Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of south Florida, in what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russians threatened to escalate the Cold War into a possible nuclear war. And in Southeast Asia, the war in Vietnam was expanding and would end with the deaths of more than fifty thousand U.S. troops.