Local Resident Worked For Menendez

About 20 years ago Triune resident Jake Lamb was vice president of sales for a major Los Angeles video distribution company run by Jose Menendez who was murdered by his sons Lyle and Erick.

Now Lamb is selling for his own company, Sweet Heat Farms, which is based in Eagleville. He is also still involved in the audio and video field.

The Iowa native entered the video field after he graduated from the University of Georgia. He worked his way up to be vice president of sales for the video distribution company run by Menendez, which was owned by Carolco that got its start making the Rambo films.

Menendez was CEO of the video company and was Lamb’s boss’s boss. Lamb worked for the company about a year and left about a month before the brothers brutally shot not only Menendez but their mother too.

The murders occurred on Aug. 20, 1989, in the den of the family’s Beverly Hills home while the parents watched television. The brothers denied having anything to do with their parents’ death but in December 1992, after about three years of lavish spending, they were indicted in the murders.

The defense argued that the brothers were driven to murder by a lifetime of abuse from their parents, including sexual abuse from the father Jose Menendez. In part because of the brothers’ past criminal records, they were eventually convicted of two counts of first degree murder and were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

According to media reports, Jose was not well-liked by his coworkers and many of his fellow workers believed the initial reports that his death was a mob hit.

Lamb agreed with that assessment, saying Menendez was a "horrible guy" who was especially harsh on his employees.

He remembered that Menendez held business meetings once a month. At those "business reviews," he would keep the employees, who were scheduled to give their reports, sometimes waiting needlessly for hours at a time before it was their time for the "grilling."

"He had an accounting background, so if you weren’t exactly right to the penny, even though they were estimates, he would just destroy you," Lamb said. "And to keep you on the edge of your seat, he would lower the thermostat to 50 degrees, insult your family and education, and order in lunch for everyone except the individual giving the status report."

Lamb remembers Menendez’s wife, Louise, as "a sweet woman who was caught in the crossfire."

He met Lyle and Erick at company functions and at parties at Jose’s house. He described the brothers as "rich kids with an attitude."

The family had to keep moving into new homes about every three to four months because the brothers kept breaking into neighbors’ houses and stealing stuff, Lamb said.

One of the strangest and perhaps most troubling instances that he remembers occurred when he and his boss and others were at a staff meeting.

"Jose asked me a question which in order to answer it correctly I would have to had implicated my boss, so I said nothing," Lamb said. "So Jose looked at me and said, ‘Well, we have a dead man working for us now.’"

Two days later, Lamb got another job offer in Washington D.C., which he immediately took.

"Just one short month later, Jose Menendez was the dead man," he said.

Menendez’s murder came as no surprise to Lamb.

"It wasn’t like who could have done this," he said. "There was a long list of suspects."

He believes the brothers received the punishment they deserved, saying the slayings were a heinous crime, but he also believes there is some merit to their allegations of abuse.

"They always said the kids killed him for the money, but they wouldn’t have killed him the way they did if there weren’t more to the story," Lamb said.

"If you just want to kill somebody, you cut the brake lines, but to make it look like a gangland execution by blasting him eight times with a shotgun at point blank range and then going outside to reload…well that’s a lot of suppressed anger," he said. "The shotgun wasn’t just a weapon, but an erasure as well."

Sometime later, Lamb bought a copy of "People" magazine, which had a Menendez family portrait on the front page.

"I was reading it and someone asked, ‘Wasn’t that a horrible thing that happened to that guy?" he said. "I thought to myself, ‘Buddy. you don’t know the half of it.’"

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