A Deadly Case of Cold Storage Hardly Chills Lunch Crowd

In a city that has a flair for murder with an ironic twist comes the strange case of Jack’s Placita:

Jack’s is a cavernous beer hall on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, where polyester-clad crooners sing in Spanish and the decor consists primarily of posters of bikini-clad beach bunnies hoisting Coronas to their sun-kissed lips. It is a place not likely to be found in the newest Guide Michelin.

A little less than a year ago, Jack’s was shut down for a couple of days after county health inspectors spotted seven live rats glued to sticky boards in a storage room in the back. “Eliminate massive rat infestation,” the report ordered, noting the “10 fresh rat droppings observed on bag of potatoes.”

This year’s health inspection at Jack’s Placita, conducted two weeks ago, yielded a far more dramatic find: two bodies, wrapped in cloth and frozen solid, lying in a 10-foot-by-10-foot walk-in freezer in the basement, amid boxes of meat that were waiting to be turned into burritos.

But unlike vermin infestations, the issue of bodies in freezers is not addressed in the California Uniform Retail Food Facilities Law, which governs restaurant closures. And so there was no shutdown order, and Jack’s continued dishing up tacos and beer and frozen fruit slushies while the police tried to sort out who did what to whom.

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The inspector who made--or rather, prompted--this grisly find is Quang Ly, 22 years old, three months on the job and still nervous about it.

Ly did not actually discover the bodies; what he discovered was that the freezer was filled with trash. “All kinds of stuff,” he said when asked what he had seen. “Old food debris from the restaurant, and fruit. I couldn’t walk in because it was piled up with boxes of meat.”

He told the manager to clean it up, and vowed to return in two days. But before he made it back to Jack’s, Ly read in the newspaper that a restaurant employee had found what he had missed: a woman, 39 years old, 58 inches long and 106 pounds in a moderate state of decomposition, and a man, 30 years old, 67 inches long and 159 pounds, also in a state of moderate decomposition.

So frozen was this couple, coroner’s spokesman Scott Carrier said, that identifying them required a special process in which the fingertips, shriveled from the cold, were raised to take fingerprints. Finally, authorities determined that they were Lydia Katash, who owned the restaurant with her ex-husband, Jack, and Eli Massalton, who was Jack’s cousin and Lydia’s lover.

The pair, who were strangled, had been missing since February. At the time of their disappearance, Jack Katash speculated that his ex-wife and her lover--who had $15,000 with them then--may have skipped town. “I have no idea what happened,” he said.

As it turns out, court records on file in the San Fernando Valley show that Lydia and Jack Katash were involved in a bitter legal battle over control of the restaurant. At the time of her disappearance, Lydia Katash had been running Jack’s Placita and her boyfriend, Massalton, was managing it.

The court fight, it should be noted, was part of a nasty divorce. Lydia accused Jack of stealing large sums of money from the business; an accountant she hired alleged that Jack pocketed $1.6 million from the restaurant over a five-year period and that he had seriously underreported his earnings to the IRS. Jack, who last week declined to be interviewed, denied the charge in court papers.

In the summer of 1991, a judge put an independent receiver-- accountant Jack Zukerman--in charge of the business. Zukerman says he decided to let Lydia, who had taken control of the restaurant while Jack was in Israel on a brief trip, continue running the operation while he sorted out the finances.

“She had been in for about a week and a half, and the business was profitable, and it seemed like things were being managed well,” he said. “Secondly, I felt that I would have less difficulty handling the case with Lydia as opposed to Jack. I felt that Jack was probably more sophisticated in ways of avoiding disclosure.”

The matter was set for trial when Lydia and Eli made their mysterious disappearance in February. Not long afterward, records show, Jack went to court and told the judge he ought to be given control of the eatery in light of the fact that his former wife was nowhere to be found.

He was, and still is.

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Police, meanwhile, are saying little about the case except that they have not yet interviewed Jack Katash. “We’re still investigating,” Detective Richard Haro said. “I can’t really say if he is (a suspect) or is not right now.”

Meanwhile, it is business as usual at Jack’s. On a recent weekday, the lunchtime crowd consisted mostly of beer-gulping young men gathered around a long horseshoe-shaped bar and a few unsuspecting diners. The plat du jour, it seemed, was the fried shrimp and french fry special, served in red-and-white checkered paper boats.

Among the patrons were two bookkeepers who work for Unocal, on the other side of downtown, where tall glass buildings reflect clean sidewalk scenes. It is safer over there, say Maggie Morales and Debbie Garcia--not so many homeless people asking for money. This was their first trip to Jack’s Placita.

They were not particularly amused to learn of the bodies in the freezer, although the news did not put the skids on lunch. Morales pushed back her plate, said “Bye!” and stopped eating for a moment. But the shrimp tasted good, and soon she was nibbling once again.

On Thursday, the health inspectors returned to Jack’s Placita.

Ly was there, this time with his supervisor, the chief inspector. They found the restaurant, which they had earlier cited for a cockroach infestation, to be clean, including the now-infamous freezer.

“There’s nothing wrong with that freezer,” the chief said. “They cleaned it out. It’s fine.”