I’m standing by my own research.” The arrest, says Bros, put the investment operation on hold.Ĭertainly, equaling Jose’s successes would have proved a challenge for the most driven of sons. “For someone to commit a crime like this, I saw no psychological leads,” says Bros. He found nothing to suggest that Lyle was involved in the murders. Determined to find out more about his new employer, Bros began investigating him. Although Lyle met Bros only six weeks ago, he became a $125-a-week consultant to Menendez Investment Enterprises, a corporate shell awaiting an infusion of cash that Bros understood would come from Lyle’s inheritance. Lyle began traveling frequently-he flew to California early this month in an unsuccessful attempt to be named promoter of a Soul II Soul rock concert-and hired 20-year-old David Bros, a Princeton sophomore, as an adviser. But he wanted to do much more than serve chicken wings he planned to make his fortune in, among other things, show business and real estate. Buffalo’s and was planning to redecorate in a Western motif then open other locations in New Jersey and California. Shortly after the purchase, Lyle changed the name of the restaurant to Mr. “If I had stayed at Hertz, he would have become president of the company.” “I never knew anyone who worked harder, worked toward more goals,” says former Hertz Chairman Bob Stone. Passed over for an executive vice presidency in 1986, Menendez jumped to International Video Entertainment, a California video distributor that eventually became Live Entertainment. Not long after he persuaded RCA to open a Miami office, he was responsible for signing Menudo and Jose Feliciano. After Hertz in turn was bought out by RCA, Menendez switched to the parent company’s record division and was soon involved in signing pop groups, including Duran Duran and the Eurythmies. His next stop was Hertz, where he was put in charge of commercial leasing. Although the firm flourished during Jose’s years there, he was forced out when the company was taken over. At 23, he was hired away by one of his clients, a Chicago-based shipping company, as its comptroller. When his father wrote to object, telling him he was too young to be married, Jose replied firmly, “If I was old enough to be on my own at 16, I’m old enough to be married at 19.”Īfter earning a degree in accounting at Queens College in Flushing, N.Y., he took a job with the Manhattan firm of Coopers & Lybrand. Before graduating, he left Illinois for New York, taking with him Kitty Andersen, a strong-minded young woman who had first attracted his attention in debating class. Living with friends of the family in Pennsylvania, Jose won a swimming scholarship to Southern Illinois University at Carbon-dale-his mother, Maria, had been a champion swimmer in her youth-but gave it up because of the exhausting training schedule. by his father, Jose, a onetime soccer star who stayed behind in Cuba until his last investment property was seized by Fidel Castro. Jose Menendez’s immigrant odyssey had begun in 1960, when at the age of 16 he was sent to the U.S. Worse, the charges seemed an incomprehensible insult to the memory of Jose and Kitty Menendez and the dream they had worked so hard to fulfill. The boys, they said, were bright and ambitious the family close and loving. Now, almost at the same age, we don’t have a father.”īoth family and friends were stunned by the arrests. I’ve never seen my dad helpless, and it’s sad to think he would ever be.” Then Erik noted an irony. “I’ve never seen anything like it, never will see anything like it,” Erik told a reporter two months after the murders. The bodies were found by the couple’s sons, Lyle, 22, and Erik, 19, who told police they had returned from a night on the town to find the front door of the family’s Italianate mansion open and their parents’ lifeless bodies within. In what had the look of a gangland-style coup de grace, the barrel of a gun had been thrust into his mouth, and the explosion had blown off the back of his head. Jose, 45, chief executive of Live Entertainment, a prominent music-and-video distribution company, had been struck by eight shotgun blasts. 20, when the blood-spattered corpses of Jose Menendez and his wife, Mary Louise (“Kitty”), were found in the den of their $5 million Beverly Hills mansion, the evidence pointed to a mob hit. Yet the script’s existence, intriguing though it was, seemed for a time merely coincidence.
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