Livaditis--a Risk Taker, Failure at Jobs

Steven Livaditis was a Brooklyn-born Las Vegas kid who couldn’t hold a steady job and was turning with increasing frequency to what his older brother dourly called “hustling” and police called crime.

It had barely gone on long enough for a pattern to emerge, but the tendency seemed clear: He took progressive risks, often colored with immaturity.

In a word, Livaditis, the 22-year-old man that police arrested as Monday’s Rodeo Drive hostage crisis came to a tragic conclusion, seemed kind of “flaky.”

That was the recollection of a military official who dealt frequently with him after the suspect left New York in late 1982 and, at age 18, settled in Nevada.

“It didn’t seem that he had it all together.”

First there was the string of traffic arrests two summers ago. Then, a few months later, there was the burglary of a computer store. Las Vegas police arrested Livaditis for that one and he spent a couple of months in jail before being placed on probation.

Within six months he had violated his probation, failing to check in with authorities, and then, according to police, he raised the stakes dramatically.

One day in February, Livaditis allegedly confronted two clerks in a Las Vegas jewelry store with a large-caliber revolver. The clerks, who later identified Livaditis from a photograph, said he bound one of them with tape and forced the other to empty $250,000 worth of merchandise from display cases.

All the while, police said, Livaditis--sporting a neat mustache and full beard and nattily dressed in a polyester gray suit, dark shirt and reptile-skin shoes--cooly strolled the store as though he were a manager.

Hunted by Authorities

The FBI issued an arrest warrant and joined a list of agencies--including the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police and Nevada probation authorities--that were looking for Livaditis.

They found him Monday when he suddenly appeared on center stage in Beverly Hills and, apparently for the first time, his activities led to bloodshed.

“I never thought he had something like this in him,” the older brother, George Livaditis, 28, said Tuesday from his Las Vegas home. “Never. He had me fooled completely. . . . I never even knew he knew how to use” a gun.

To the elder Livaditis, Steven was “a good kid growing up,” who “got involved with the wrong kids in Vegas.”

But to law enforcement authorities, he was just another small-time criminal upping the ante each time out until a bigger robbery in a glitzier neighborhood got out of control.

According to George Livaditis, he, Steven and two other siblings were raised in Brooklyn by their mother.

Joins the Reserve

At 18, Livaditis joined the Army Reserve, a step that many young people take to acquire Army training or to supplement their incomes. After finishing his basic and advanced training, Livaditis moved to Nevada and was transferred to a combat support hospital in Las Vegas.

However, within a year he had been terminated from active status for “very poor” attendance, according to an Army official who spoke on the condition he not be identified.

The source said that while most young Army reservists are well-motivated, Livaditis exhibited an unusually irresponsible attitude about fulfilling his commitment.

The official described Livaditis as a thin, quiet, brown-haired, 6-foot-tall man, who “seemed to get along pretty well with his peers” and exhibited no unusual aggressiveness, but appeared to have “significant financial problems.”

On one occasion, the Army official said, “He came in to see me about a late paycheck. The check was probably less than $100, but he was so upset he was about to burst into tears.”

Last March, when he moved into an apartment on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, Livaditis was still having money troubles. The manager said Tuesday that the suspect had fallen behind in his rent and was about to be evicted. When Livaditis voluntarily moved out last month, he had assured the manager, ‘ “You’ll be surprised one day. You’ll get an envelope with the money in it.’ ”

Worked as Waiter

During the last year, Livaditis had been living in an apartment in a low-income area on East Fremont Street, which cuts through Las Vegas’ downtown casino district. According to his brother and police and court records, he had worked as a room-service waiter and other jobs at several Las Vegas Strip hotels between 1981 and 1984, and also worked as a cab driver.

But none of the jobs lasted.

“He’d jump around,” his brother said.

George Livaditis, who said he had not been close to Steven since they were children, said he nevertheless tried to counsel his younger brother countless times to live a straighter life, but to no avail.

“He’d say, ‘There’s no big deal,’ he’d change. You’d see him working, everything would be kosher. Then after a few months, you’d see him hustling.”

On Tuesday, the older brother tried to telephone Steven in jail, but could not get through.

He asked a reporter for help in obtaining the addresses of the survivors and family members of the three people who died, “so I can send letters of condolence.”

Concern for Business

He wondered if he would have to change his last name to protect his import business.

And he wondered, in anguish, whether police who negotiated with Steven had known his identity.

(In fact, police said, Livaditis had identified himself only as John.)

If police knew to whom they were talking, the brother said, they should have telephoned him.

“I probably could have talked him out” of the jewelry store, he said.