
Rocky Aoki, founder of the Benihana restaurant chain, has died in New York at 69. He's perhaps better known to today's celebrity watchers as the father of model and actress Devon Aoki. The man had a complicated life. This Bloomberg article on his death describes how he got started in America, built his empire and was found guilty by a court of insider trading after picking up a stock tip from former Apple CEO John Scully. A better profile of the man is this 2006 piece by NY Mag which writes about his business and gives the background to the family feud over money. Here's a taste as well as a quick family tree:
“I was like Trump,” brags Rocky, whose hair is still as distinctive as the Donald’s: a tightly permed Jheri curl he says he adopted in the sixties so that white people could tell him apart from other Asians. “Anything to promote my company, I did it. Richard Branson? He copy me”...Night after night, Rocky stayed up till dawn, snorting cocaine, picking up girls, and betting $100 per point on backgammon. For years, he’d been hiding his mistress, Pamela, from his wife, Chizuru, while hiding his other girlfriends (including a Miss Iceland) from both of them. Before his accident, Rocky boasts, he had “three kids from three different women at exactly the same time”―though he only found out about the third via a paternity suit.

One piece of trivia mentioned in the article: Aoki claimed to have invented green tea ice cream. Below is a 1985 commercial which features him and also a short interview from 2007:
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