2
BEN AND NICK
Ben Markowitz was a handful from an early age. He was headstrong and willful; trouble seemed to be his constant companion. His father, Jeff, tried almost everything he could to get Ben back on the right path, but nothing seemed to work. Jeff related, “The first (bad) thing Ben ever did, he slashed some tires, and from there it escalated into an assault with a deadly weapon, which was brass knuckles. He thought he was protecting a girl. Little things like that. ‘Little’ big things that just kept going on and on. Ben was living with his mother, at twelve years old, and he started getting into trouble. So he moved in with myself and my new wife, Susan, and basically, we kind of got him on track for a while. He got involved in karate, baseball and a lot of different sports. He was doing okay for a while.
“Ben was a good athlete. Exceptional. He was a national champion in karate, he was in all-star baseball, he was an unbelievable little athlete. And a real joy to watch, to be honest. The other stuff—we kept hoping it was going to get better, but at fourteen he brought a weapon into the house and my wife, Susan, found it. She actually found a clip to a weapon, a nine-millimeter pistol. We traced it down, found out whose it was, and what it was all about.
“From that point on, Benjamin was in karate, and we actually had him move in with his sensei (karate teacher). His sensei said, ‘Let me have him for a while. I’ll take him to school.’ So we tried that route. And after about eight months, Ben came back home and I took the three-car garage and we turned it into his bedroom. But he and I got into an argument over painting it. He wanted to go out and not help paint, and it was a knock-down, drag-out fight with my son. I had to hold him down and tell him that we were going to finish the project. He actually attacked me.
“We painted that night, and I got him to stay. I told him that if he finished painting, he could go out. The next day we went to counseling. Ben had been in counseling since he was four years old. At counseling I kind of blew up with Ben, and the counselor said that there was no way I could get into physical confrontations with my son. So I said to Ben, ‘You can either do it my way, or the highway.’
“I got home from the counselor, and we were going to finish a few things in his room, and he disappeared. I didn’t hear from him for six months after that. Well, actually I heard from him, but I couldn’t get ahold of him. He would call and say, ‘I’m fine. I’m fine.’ And I was thinking that sooner or later he’s got to come back, and he did. But he came back tattooed from his shoulder blades down to his ankles. He had moved in with a tattoo artist. And he had a real hard-core attitude, including an SFV tattoo.”
SFV stood for a gang from the San Fernando Valley. It was, in part, a white supremacist gang, which Jeff and Susan Markowitz, being Jewish, found incredibly offensive. In fact, one of Ben’s tattoos was a swastika. Ben was fifteen years old.
“He came home with two pit bulls and said, ‘Well, I want these dogs.’ And we had a giant argument over those two dogs. We already had two dogs, and I said, ‘No, we can’t have any more dogs!’ And he disappeared again.
“Maybe a month later I got in touch with him at a friend’s house. This family had always been interested in helping out. Always been there for him. They took him to school and he went to continuation school next to his old high school, and he was doing okay at his continuation school.
“But some kind of confrontation happened in the school between him and another student. I was at work and I got a phone call from the principal of the continuation school to get down there. They had black gang members from one end and they had white supremacist gang members at the other, and Ben was the one who instigated the whole thing. All turned out fine and well, everybody ran away, and it all dissipated, but again, Ben . . .” Jeff left the rest of the sentence remain unspoken. “This thing escalated into something of unbelievable consequence.
“Through all of this period, Ben was working for me. I was picking him up, bringing him to work, and he was taking the bus. I was trying to do whatever I could do to try to bring him back. The assault with a deadly weapon was when he was fifteen. He was at the beach and he ran into a guy that had raped a friend of his, and Ben thought he had to be her protector. He walked over to this guy, had his hand in his pocket, and he also had brass knuckles. The guy came at him when Ben confronted him, and Ben took a swipe at the guy. Actually cut the guy on the top of the head.
“The police happened to be right there, because these boys had sneaked onto the beach, and the police had been called to go after them. So the police happened to be right there when Ben confronted this boy. Ben was arrested, and he was in for about eight months.
“When Ben got to be eighteen, I got him into an apartment, and he and a group of guys, well, it turned into a fiasco. Actually, before that, I moved out with him, and personally moved into his apartment. Just he and I. I took him to work every day, back and forth, and I visited with my wife on the weekends. Just to try something. Just to make him regroup and understand the ethics of work. It was the only thing I thought might work.
“In the meantime Ben, well, he’s probably the most lovable guy you’d meet. And he’s very caring and very considerate. I can’t tell you how many friends and how many enemies he has. It’s probably fifty-fifty. Anybody would do anything for him, and at the same time, he has people that really dislike him. Ben was an urban legend in our town, because he would defend himself. He would fight for what . . . well, a lot of times it wasn’t for what he believed, a lot of times it was because he had been drinking. Which is probably, like, a lot of people’s downfall. But if backed into a corner, he’d come out on top. It’s just the way he is. In juvenile hall there was a guy after him that was two times his size. The guy finally cornered him in the shower, but Ben came out smelling like a rose. That’s just the way he is.
“He knew karate, but beyond that, even before that, you could throw him up in the air and he’d land on his feet. He’s a cat with nine lives. The problem is what he left in his wake behind him.”
Ben Markowitz had a friendship with another young man from the area—Jesse James Hollywood—and Ben had played in the same baseball league with Jesse. Although years older than Jesse, Ben and Hollywood hit it off, and in time Ben moved into Jesse’s residence, and was part of his party scene. Because of Ben’s tough image, some people even came to view Ben as Hollywood’s “enforcer.”
As one reporter put it later, “Jesse James Hollywood was a wannabe bad boy. Ben Markowitz was a real bad boy.” Ben recalled later, “I’d known Jesse for years. He was younger than me, but we played the same sports. Later I sold marijuana for Jesse Hollywood. He would just front me so much at a time and I would pay him back when I got the money. He was supplying me with about two pounds a week. It cost about four thousand two hundred fifty a pound. I’d sell that and I’d get, like, fifty-two hundred. I was turning two pounds a week. Jesse was getting it from his dad. I knew from the beginning that his dad was in the drug-dealing business. We would not really talk about it, but Jesse let it be known.
“There were about four or five other people dealing for Jesse Hollywood. There was a guy named Brian, John, Ryan, Jake and a guy named Josh. As for Ryan Hoyt, I used to go out with his sister when I was young, like, twelve years old. I met Ryan then. Jesse, he had a way of picking on everybody, but I guess he picked on Ryan more than anyone. Just making fun of him.”
A Los Angeles magazine writer named Jesse Katz, who later studied this world of Jesse Hollywood and his buddies, wrote: Jesse Hollywood was a businessman. The people around him were basically lost souls. Jesse James was kind of the center of their universe. None of these kids would stand up to him, but Ben Markowitz just didn’t seem to care, and he was probably the only member of that crew that didn’t kowtow to Jesse James Hollywood.
Hollywood might have made fun of the others, but Ben would not take very much of a ribbing from him or anyone else. He had a volatile temper, was extremely strong, proficient in karate, and most people knew not to mess with him. Ben had one more thing—a younger half brother named Nick, whom he liked very much, and whom Ben took steps to keep from following down the path he had taken.
Jeff and Susan Markowitz were recent divorcees when they met in San Fernando Valley in 1982. They hit it off, and about a year later they were married. Susan’s only son, Nicholas, was born to them in 1984. Susan recalled that Nick was a happy baby and a very quick learner. By the age of two and a half, he could identify Snow White and all of the seven dwarfs.
The family eventually moved to a housing tract in the West Hills section of Los Angeles, which was on the edge of the San Fernando Valley. Originally the area had been the site within the domain of the Spanish San Fernando Mission. The valley remained mostly agricultural, with picturesque orange groves, until the early part of the twentieth century, when Los Angeles obtained water from the Owens Valley, which allowed new housing in the San Fernando Valley. After that occurred, the days of agriculture were over, and the Valley became a vast suburb of Los Angeles. The mid part of the Valley over time became somewhat run-down, but by the year 2000, West Hills was still one of the “tonier” areas of the San Fernando Valley.
Growing up in one of those suburban homes, Nick took piano lessons, enjoyed drama, read Shakespeare and studied martial arts. He and his mother were very close and even wrote in a journal together. It contained notes on the day’s events, funny stories and depictions of how they were feeling at the time. Susan later told a reporter, “He was the funniest person on earth. He just had so much energy. I don’t know what was going on in his head, but he would do anything to make us laugh.”
Nick wasn’t just a “mama’s boy.” He studied Tae Kwon Do and was very proficient at it. Jeff Markowitz later said of his son Nick, “He had a lot of friends. He had a funny personality. He was full of life. He was a jokester. He was in drama, and he just loved to use that on everybody, and he could play it up. He had awards for drama, and did it three years running, from junior high into high school.”
Longtime friend Laura Milner knew Nick from the time they went to elementary school together, and she was interested in the theater as well. She said, “We were both theater geeks. Nick had a way of lighting up a room. He was silly and you could talk to him. He liked to mess around with the guys, but could hang out with the girls. That’s why girls liked him.”
As tough as he could be, Nick was also very sensitive. Alireza Hojati, his teacher at the Academy of Karate, in West Hills, said of Nick, “In the first ten minutes, you could see that he was sensitive. He sparred, but you knew that he was a very gentle soul. He had a very hard time bringing himself to hitting anyone.”
At his Bar Mitzvah, Nick chose to speak about Moses, near the end of his days, and his admonition to the people of Israel to follow a path of justice. It was a speech about fair play and doing what was right. In many respects the things Nick talked about covered the area of witnesses and trials, ironic in light of what was to happen later to him and those around him.
Yet, despite all his good qualities, by the time he was fourteen, Nick was starting to drift. His dad noted, “He was very articulate, a quick learner and intelligent kid, but he didn’t push too hard. If he would have studied, he would have been unbelievable, but he didn’t. His grades became average, nothing great. Instead of staying home, he would go out with his friends and started doing that more and more. And after karate he’d say, ‘I’m going to so-and-so’s house.’ We knew the parents, we knew the families, but we never collaborated with them. Never found out what they were doing.”
In fact, by the end of the 1990s, the West Valley was no longer a haven of peace and tranquility, untouched by drugs and violence. A friend of Nick’s named Brandie Rosa told a reporter that it didn’t matter where you lived in the Valley, you could get booze, drugs and sex there at an early age. She said, “I found it just as easy to get drugs in Agoura Hills or West Hills, as anywhere else. Kids there are rich and bored and it was always easy to get pot and blow (cocaine).”
Brandie hung out with Nick and his friends, smoked cigarettes with them and sometimes smoked dope as well. She said that Nick in some ways was unique—in that he fit easily into groups of people who had nothing to do with each other, the slackers and dopers, as well as the straight-A students who never got into trouble. By the time he turned fourteen, it was hard to tell exactly how Nick was going to turn out, or who he was going to be.
Even Jeff and Susan realized this. Jeff later said, “He was just picking everything apart. He was deciding which way he’d go.”
One thing not helping matters was that Nick idolized his older half brother, Ben. He admired Ben’s tough-guy ways and seeming fearlessness. Jeff recalled, “Ben’s relationship with Nick—the urban-legend idea—we knew the ‘older brother/younger brother’ thing filtered into Nick. There was no stopping it. There was no way. They loved each other, and it was genuine. And to try to stifle him would have been even worse. In fact, I did. I tried to put a stop to the relationship, because I knew where it could lead, the possibilities. And I hoped that Nick, my younger one, would see the damage Ben had caused to himself and to others. But he didn’t see that. All he saw was some slight amount of glory—something that you read about, you see on TV, you see it in the news. The tough guy that the movies are all about. You feel for the tough guy—Captain Hero.
“Nick was falling into that same kind of category. I found out that Ben was getting involved in drugs, and it just so happened that Nick started to do the same on a small scale, but it could have escalated into something. The first thing we found out about Nick, he had a very small amount of marijuana on him and he was caught at school with it. It was just a bag with some remnants, but it was still known that it was there. Then one day he had some Ritalin on him. (Ben had taken Ritalin as a child, and Nick was curious what effect this had on Ben.) Nick had it for recreation. He said, ‘Well, I always wanted to try it.’
“Anyway, we had a New Year’s party in the year 2000, and Nick was on something. We didn’t know what it was. For some reason Ben felt it was his place to find out what it was. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but Ben confronted Nick to find out what it was, and I think it was that Ritalin again. It was funny how Ben was trying to protect Nick from all of this. And Ben actually confronted him, physically shook him and shook the information out of him, trying to protect Nick and keep him from that possible life—the life he was leading. But it was almost too late. At that time Nick had a real taste for it.
“Nick ran away more than once. The first time he went to Ben’s place and stayed with Ben and Ben’s girlfriend without telling us. But they called right away, so we knew Nick was safe. Ben told me, ‘Just leave it alone. I’ll take care of it.’ Which meant he kept him overnight and brought him home.
“Another time Nick disappeared for a day. There had been an argument. I think it was related to Ben. Nick went to visit Ben in Malibu and Ben was living there at the time with a cousin. So Nick came home again after one night.”
In the summer of 2000, Nick Markowitz was at a real crossroads of who he was going to become. Jeff recalled, “Nick was getting bored and I asked if he wanted to come to work, and he jumped at the chance. We just started having some good talks. The life he was deciding to choose or not to choose—his brother, his and my relationship. We were talking about a lot of little things. Little/big things.”
One of the places Nick liked to hang out with his friends was on a hill near Pomelo School, in West Hills. In this secluded spot they would smoke dope, talk and watch the sunsets. They brought an old table up there, along with bits of carpet and a bench, and it became a regular hangout. The site was nothing to look at, but at least it was private, and it was theirs. One person who visited the hillside spot was a girl named Jeanne, and Nick began to have a crush on her. It was his first real romance.
Perhaps if there had been more time, Ben, Jeff and Susan could have swayed Nick away from the lifestyle he was dabbling in. But things were on a collision course, because of who Ben Markowitz was, and who Jesse James Hollywood was. Had the Markowitz family never had any contact with the Hollywood family, chances are good that Nick would not have found himself being shoved into a white van on the corner of Platt and Ingomar Streets, on August 6, 2000. Chances are good he would have had his fling with marijuana and drugs and moved on to a very different life. In that neighborhood, in the year 2000, however, Jesse James Hollywood was a very real factor, and as much an urban legend as Ben was.