RABINOWITZ ON SHOOTINGS: IT JUST DOESN’T MAKE SENSE
Byline: Kristi Ellis
LOS ANGELES — “I have played this game with myself too long. I am at a point where I just don’t know what happened.”
Calm and reflective, Leonard Rabinowitz, co-chairman of California Fashion Industries Inc., was talking about his own pondering over the murders that rocked the company and the Los Angeles apparel community in the last year.
Kenneth Martin, director of worldwide sourcing for the company, which produces the Carole Little collections, was shot to death in December 1994. Rolando Ramirez, the company’s chief financial officer, was fatally shot last May as he sat in his car at a downtown stoplight. A third person, Carole Little contractor Hakop (Jack) Antonyan, was gunned down in front of his shop in 1993.
A multi-agency force, which includes several local police jurisdictions as well as the FBI and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department, has conducted an investigation for eight months but has been reluctant to speculate much about direct links between the three murders.
Industry speculation has focused on disgruntled and highly competitive contractors who were suffering from cutbacks at Carole Little in 1993 when the company eliminated a chunk of its contracting base in the wake of new federal and state labor regulations requiring manufacturers to make sure their contractors were operating legally.
Rabinowitz dismissed another publicized theory that organized crime might be behind the murders.
“I don’t see it; it’s just not there,” Rabinowitz declared. “At one time a large number of our contractors were Russian/Armenian and people said it was them [behind the murders], but put some bacon on the table,” he said, referring to the lack of evidence. He added that no one has approached him or hassled him for that matter.
“It actually could be a terrible case of two people [Martin and Ramirez] that got killed at random, but I can’t buy off on that,” Rabinowitz said. “A lot of bright people tell me that I am looking for something that doesn’t exist.”
Rabinowitz said that he is “big on logic” but just doesn’t see the reasoning behind murders over apparel.
“I have never heard through the 20th century of anyone getting killed over sewing. Liquor and drugs, maybe, but not sewing; it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Conceding that a contractor that made its livelihood off Carole Little might retaliate for lost business, Rabinowitz countered, however, “Before anyone would have taken the draconian step of killing Ken, they would have come to me and said something.”
Antonyan’s alleged hit man, Karapet Demirdzhyan, has been awaiting trial for a little over a year and a half. Deputy District Attorney Ellen Aragon has submitted a motion in Los Angeles Criminal Courts building to include evidence related to threats made against a former Carole Little employee, Karen Wong Holzinger, whose house was bombed a second time only hours after Antonyan was killed on Nov. 2, 1993. Holzinger was vice president of domestic manufacturing.
In jail at the time of the Martin and Ramirez killings, Demirdzhyan has been the only person arrested.
Asked if he thinks law enforcement officials have gotten their man, Rabinowitz replied: “I have no clue, and if they do have their man and if indeed this is who it is, I think that he is insignificant in the scope of everything.
“If it was him, then he was hired,” he added.
But he backed away from drawing any links between the three murders.
“I think that this has gotten a lot of attention, and I think that if there were something clear out there, somebody would have come up with something. But the FBI is still working on the case, and maybe they will.”
Rabinowitz also related that he spent more than $100,000 to have Deloitte & Touche conduct a forensic audit and search for irregularities in the books after chief financial officer Ramirez was killed. “This guy was with me 17 years, and we cared about him a lot. There is no way that I believe that he did anything wrong,” Rabinowitz said. “I spent the money because I wanted to clear his name, and there was nothing that they could find.”
Rabinowitz said that the only conclusion he has reached during the investigation is that Ramirez was “the honest person we thought he was.”