Angry Suitor Claims Dating Service Didn’t Live Up to His Expectations

They met outside a dating service headquarters, two strangers who had only heard of each other; sure enough, passions flared and the next stop may be before a judge.

Not to perform a wedding but to sort out a tangled tale of a Diamond Bar auto dealer’s spare-no-effort quest for Ms. Right, featuring charges and countercharges of consumer rip-off, chicanery, dating service intrigue, poison personality and assault.

All this stems from Larry Hash’s attempt to picket the Encino headquarters of Great Expectations, a video dating service, and the brawl with the service’s owner, Jeffrey Ullman, that both men agree ensued.

They agree on little else.

Hash, 34, says he joined branches of the company’s dating service from San Diego to Encino, even paying $1,250 for a life membership, in his effort to locate the woman of his dreams. In return, he says, the service duped and mistreated him, with the climax coming when Ullman punched and throttled him as he picketed Ullman’s office Monday.

Ullman and his staff in turn describe Hash as “a hell of a troublemaker” who badgered them into giving him dating services he never paid for, and blamed him for the outbreak of violence at their friendly matchmaking emporium.

Ullman, 41 and Hash both talked of going to court over the fracas.

Ullman said he will no longer fix up female clients with Hash, declaring him lonely guy non grata in all five Great Expectations clubs he belonged to.

“He is too abusive. We don’t want women meeting him,” Ullman said.

Their brief encounter occurred Monday afternoon after Hash discovered that his name had been expunged from the list of male hopefuls at the Encino branch.

But according to Hash, his $1,250 “lifetime” membership, purchased in Newport Beach in 1986, was supposed to be good until he found his perfect mate and no longer required the company’s services. Eager to broaden the field, he had forked over additional fees to join branches in San Diego, Upland, Los Angeles and Encino, he said.

By all accounts he was successful, frequently selecting others and being selected himself, except in Encino, where the femme flow was cut to one.

“I couldn’t figure out why there was no action,” he said. “I got one date, and it was a good one. But then it suddenly dried up.”

Curious, he went to the Encino office in April and found his file had been deactivated.

Cathi Robbins, director of the Encino center, said the cancellation came after the expiration of his one-year membership--a membership which, moreover, had been granted him free when Hash insisted that he signed up with the Encino office and paid the start-up fee at the Los Angeles branch.

Robbins said she also terminated Hash’s Los Angeles membership when no record could be found there of any payment. The San Diego membership soon followed suit, and his original membership in Orange County appeared also to be in jeopardy when the office could find no documentation of it.

But Hash, who said he did indeed pay but conceded he lacks much of the paperwork, said Robbins and other employees refused to deal with him.

“What really irked me enough to picket them is that the director of their Encino office got a real bad attitude,” he said.

Hoisting a 3-by-4-foot sign that proclaimed, “I GOT RIPPED OFF BY GREAT EXPECTATIONS,” Hash protested outside the Los Angeles and Encino branches in an effort to have his membership reinstated.

When Ullman approached as Hash picketed Monday, Hash said he at first took him for an interested spectator.

But then he noticed that the man “had kind of a snarl on his face. He didn’t look happy at all. . . . He came at me like a raging bull, slugged me, choked me, and threw me into traffic. The guy clobbered me.”

Ullman denied the account by Hash, whom he described as “a very emotionally troubled individual.”

Hash said he would pursue the case through legal channels to win reinstatement to Great Expectations.

“I joined this club to find Ms. Right, and that’s still my intention, no matter what the owner may say.”

Times staff writer Jim Herron Zamora contributed to this story.