Levon Termendzhyan

We are back with Michele McPhee.

Now I have to ask the question, because this comes up so early in the podcast, the Lion.

The Lion teams up, and everything starts happening here, and Jacob's life begins to turn, twist, spin, go upside down, but yet it still looks pretty cool.

Now, i- it's like, you know, I, I, I...

This is gonna age me.

Like, from y'all lips to God's ears on Matt Damon and Ben Affleck being a part of this, 'cause it's unnatural to them.

The problem is, I have had pitch meetings, even my management company, they're like, "Well, what is the story? How do you get into the story? It's so big and sprawling.

You have to really just kinda hone in on what's, what's the part of the story that you could tell in a movie." And Errol, think about it, which, what is the story? Is it the, the unlikely love story that happened between Jacob Kingston's third wife and Lev "The Lion" Dermen? Is it, you know, the women who ratted out Jacob Kingston from The Order? Uh, what...

But he got a tip from someone who might be able to help, the perfect savior, a man who owned a series of rundown truck fueling points via a company called Noil, which is lion spelled backwards.

He meets this wildly charismatic, reputed Armenian mob boss, Levon Termendzhyan, known as The Lion, and this partnership was formed.

Levon Termendzhyan's is a classic American success story.

He arrived in Los Angeles as a kid as part of the waves of Armenian immigrants that settled in places like Glendale, North Hollywood, and Burbank.

He got a job at his family's gas station, and then he bought a gas station, and then he bought another gas station, and then he bought another gas station.

I wasn't there, but I do know that this party was extraordinary, and it brought the who's who out to Universal Studios for this guy's party.

That's who he was.

But the successful, fun-loving businessman was only one side of Levon Termendzhyan.