Ron and Nancy Are Friends, but ‘Don’t Print That, Baby’ : ‘Caviar King’: High Living, Low Profile

From his office on the second floor of Ron’s Market, surrounded by photographs of movie stars and testimonials of his good work from Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Charles Asatryan directs an empire of imported goods--58,000 items in all, from Armenian cognac to frozen quail to 4-foot-long smoked eel.

the family is named Ron)--was founded by Asatryan and his father, Grigor, after the family emigrated from Soviet Armenia a decade ago. It sits in the largest Armenian emigre community in the world. More than half of the store’s customers are Armenian. If they are overwhelmed at first by an abundance never seen in Yerevan, the smells are the smells of home.

“We speak their language. We bring them food from the old country,” Asatryan said. “But we are more than a market. We cash their checks. We make out money orders and pay their bills. We go to the hospital with them. We go to the attorney with them. We are like their Red Cross.”

Example of Success

Asatryan is the most visible example of immigrant success--a kind of paladin for Soviet Armenian refugees who gather in restaurants and coffee houses and reverently speak his name.

He said that all of the caviar that enters the United States from the Soviet Union bears his imprint. He imports more than 500,000 pounds of red caviar and 10 tons of black caviar each year. He won’t say how it arrives from the Soviet Union.

“We are not buying one gram of caviar straight from Russia. We go through middlemen in Europe. Please sir, don’t mention that question. Every business has a secret. That is my secret.”

The exclusive arrangement has made him a very rich man and a friend of the White House and stars such as Linda Evans.

‘The King of Caviar’

“It’s true. I am the Godfather. I am the King of Caviar. . . . But I cannot talk about that too much.

“I’m involved in too many things. I’m a politician. I’m a businessman. I’m an importer-exporter. I do business with the White House, the best hotels. . . . But please don’t print that, baby. I want to be low profile. I mean, don’t understand me wrong. But the bigger you are, the more the government goes after you.”

Asatryan is the kind of guy who in one breath wants to be low profile and in another confides that he has just agreed to a segment on himself on “Good Morning America.” He won’t discuss the stars whose photos line his office. Yet he tells you that actor Wayne Rogers--”my buddy, my brother”-- comes into the store each week and buys $1,000 worth of beluga caviar.

His workers love him, planting kisses on both his cheeks after he returns from a weeklong trip to Europe and Israel. He said he averages fewer than four hours of sleep a night and wants to slow down.

You Can Do Same Thing

“I want to prove that in America, in 10 years, you can be anything you want,” he said. “If you sleep 20 hours a week, you can do the same thing. I don’t know what a discotheque is. I don’t know what Disneyland is. Isn’t that a shame?”

He is an excellent ice carver and a lover of chimps (25 stuffed monkeys stare at shoppers from various parts of the store). But his passion remains a cognac collection that dates back to the 15th Century. One bottle is worth $125,000.

“I open. I drink. Nobody better than me. I work for my money. I want to enjoy it.”