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That's a hell of a story.
La Shish owner's charm, success hide unsavory past and dealings
But some fault U.S. in chain's fall
BY DAVID ASHENFELTER and NIRAJ WARIKOO • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS • March 9, 2008
At one point, fugitive Dearborn restaurant chain owner Talal Chahine seemed to have it all: a successful business, a loving family and stature within the community.
Many people pointed to Chahine, 53, founder of the now-defunct La Shish restaurant chain, as the epitome of the American dream, a Lebanese immigrant who struck it rich by popularizing Middle Eastern cuisine in metro Detroit.
But behind the charming public façade, there was another Talal Chahine, authorities say.
A man who skimmed $20 million off his business. A man who fathered eight children with five women, several of whom took him to court for child support payments. A man who married a twentysomething Lebanese immigrant under state law in 2004 while still married to a 37-year-old woman he wed under Islamic law. A man said to have engaged in witness tampering after his son was charged with killing a man in a drive-by shooting in a dispute over a woman.
After federal agents raided his office and two metro Detroit homes in April 2005, looking for evidence of income tax evasion, they hung another label on Chahine: terrorist sympathizer.
Eight days ago, the acclaimed restaurant chain that Chahine built into an empire and hoped one day to take nationwide, collapsed under the weight of that single accusation: that he had ties to a deadly Lebanese terrorist group.
Chahine, believed to be living in Lebanon, has denied the accusation.
"I unconditionally disavow, condemn and despise acts of terrorism," he said in September 2006.
The closing of his business has left 305 employees without jobs in a difficult economy, state and federal tax collectors out more than $16 million in unpaid taxes, penalties and interest, and many in metro Detroit's Arab-American community feeling as though the U.S. government -- through an overzealous prosecution -- ruined one of the most successful Arab-American businesses in the country.
"What they did was wrong," said Nasser Beydoun, head of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce. "It was unethical. They had nothing on terrorism, and they knew that. They just wanted to put more pressure on him, which I think was dirty and underhanded."
Chasing the American dream
Talal Khalil Chahine was born in Yaroun, Lebanon, in 1955, one of 13 children of a wealthy Beirut architect. His mother was a homemaker.
Though offered a full scholarship to attend medical school in the former Soviet Union, Chahine said he decided to come to the United States in 1971 because he believed in the American dream.
"I loved America before I even went there," he told the Free Press in a 2006 phone interview after he had been indicted and fled to Lebanon.
Though he arrived in New York to attend college, he wound up working as a street vendor selling umbrellas in Manhattan.
He eventually moved in with an uncle in Dearborn and enrolled at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where he obtained bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering.
He became a U.S. citizen and spent the next seven years working at an engineering company in Ann Arbor.
In 1988, he had a life-changing experience.
During a trip back home, fighting broke out in Beirut, shutting down the airport, delaying his return to Detroit and preventing him from calling his employer.
When he got back to Ann Arbor, he told Crain's Detroit Business newspaper in 1999, his office had been cleared out.
Although his bosses took him back after he told them what had happened, he said the incident made a huge impression.
"One week without a paycheck, and I would've really been wrecked," he told Crain's. "I thought, 'I can't be in this position again. I have to have independent means.' "
Chahine decided to open a Middle Eastern restaurant. But not just any restaurant.
He told the Free Press in 2006 that he wanted to "elevate the whole Middle Eastern food industry to a much higher level."
In January 1989, after getting a new engineering job at Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, Chahine opened his first La Shish at Michigan Avenue and Oakman Boulevard.
The restaurant became a hit, and three years later, Chahine went into the business full-time.
Restaurant critics raved about his food.
"Some of the best Middle Eastern food in an area inundated with it," Metro Times, an alternative Detroit newspaper, gushed in 1998. It praised La Shish's "generously portioned fare, including shish kebab, shish tawook, lamb chops, lentil dishes and beautifully fresh salads as well as fresh fruit and vegetable drinks. Outstanding."
Customers also liked the reasonable prices.
During the next two decades, Chahine's operation expanded to 14 locations in metro Detroit, including two franchises and a headquarters and food-preparation facility in Dearborn.
Chahine talked about taking the chain national.
In the Free Press interview, he said La Shish grossed about $30 million a year and employed 600 to 700 workers.
But success didn't come without problems.
After the terrorist attacks in September 2001, someone started a rumor that La Shish employees cheered the attacks.
Chahine said he was just as horrified by the attacks as everyone else and wanted to help.
"No matter where we were born, we are -- first and foremost -- Americans," Chahine said at a news conference. "And we must all do what we can to relieve the suffering of our fellow Americans at the hands of terrorists."
He donated a full day's restaurant proceeds -- $60,196 -- to a charity for the families of New York firefighters and police officers killed in the World Trade Center attack.
Later, Chahine would confront problems he couldn't fix.
Trouble and shady dealings
In May 2004, Chahine's son, Khalil Talal Chahine, 23, of Plymouth Township was charged with murder in the predawn, drive-by shooting of a 20-year-old Westland man on Warren Avenue in east Dearborn. Police said they got into a fight over a woman at a Detroit nightclub and took it to the street.
In the hours after the shooting, federal and state authorities say, Talal Chahine tape-recorded interviews with family members to try to shift blame onto his son-in-law, Ali Abbas El-Ozeir, 22, the alleged driver, who fled to Lebanon after the shooting. Although authorities said Chahine's efforts amounted to witness tampering, he was never charged.
In April 2005, on the sixth-day of his son's criminal trial, federal agents raided Talal Chahine's homes in Dearborn Heights and Plymouth Township and his headquarters on Rotunda Drive in Dearborn, looking for evidence that he had evaded federal income taxes. Lawyers said a disgruntled family member tipped off authorities.
Agents found $1 million in cash at the headquarters and a dual set of computerized books -- one real and one altered -- at the Plymouth Township home. Investigators would ultimately conclude that Chahine and his wife, Elfat El Aouar, 38, had used the system to skim $20 million off his chain in 2000-05 and smuggle most of it to Lebanon.
Chahine didn't stick around to find out how the criminal investigation would turn out.
In September 2005, four months after his son was sentenced to 22 to 32 years in prison for second-degree murder, Talal Chahine crossed the border into Canada, drove to Toronto, then flew to Lebanon.
He took along Abir Bahjat Nasser El-Harake, the younger wife who had lived in Chahine's Dearborn Heights home, even though the two had recently divorced. Authorities said Chahine had married her in 2004 while married to El Aouar, La Shish's vice president of finance and the mother of three of his children.
The couple haven't returned to Michigan.
Back in Detroit, Chahine and El Aouar were indicted in May 2006 on charges of evading $8 million in federal taxes. She eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced in May 2007 to 18 months in prison. El Aouar is serving time at a federal prison in Danbury, Conn.; Chahine remains free because there is no extradition treaty with Lebanon.
Had he been tried and convicted, Chahine would have faced a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, plus restitution approaching some $20 million with penalties and interest, prosecutors have said.
The indictment wasn't the end of Chahine's legal problems.
Last October, he was indicted again, this time for allegedly conspiring with a Detroit immigration official to extort $250,000 from a La Shish restaurant manager in Troy in July 2003. The manager had embezzled the money from the store, according to lawyers familiar with the incident, and the immigration official threatened the manager with deportation if he didn't repay the money. Later that month, the indictment said, Chahine went to Lebanon to collect cash and real estate valued at more than $250,000 from the man's family.
Then, last December, Chahine was indicted for his role in an alleged conspiracy involving three Lebanese women, including El Aouar. The women hired men to marry them in the early 1990s so they could remain in the United States after overstaying their visas and become U.S. citizens. El Aouar married Chahine in 2000.
Chahine was accused of vouching for the fraudulent marriage of El Aouar's sister, Nada Nadim Prouty, and concealing the incident from the FBI in 1998 after she applied to become an agent. The indictment said Prouty, 37, of suburban Washington, D.C., illegally accessed FBI investigative files, several involving investigations of Hizballah, which the U.S. government has designated as a foreign terrorist group. Authorities suspect she shared some of the information with Chahine after he married El Aouar.
