In June of 2000, state Department of Revenue officials placed the restaurant on its first of 15 payment plans for back taxes. Within three years, Hankerson and his business partners steered their company into financial trouble. His mother gave him her name - a precious gift in a hometown that has adored Knight since she was a schoolgirl singing in talent shows. His record producer father Barry Hankerson loaned him money for the 1997 launch. Hankerson’s show business kin have a penchant for turning business into family affairs, and Gladys Knight’s Chicken and Waffles was no different. Gladys Knight did not respond to requests for comment placed through a representative. Hankerson declined comment through Steve Sadow, one of his attorneys. “I think he was just in it for the money in the end,” said Charles Preston, 63, who worked as a manager at the downtown location for eight years until he quit in April. Funds were so scarce that managers rushed to cash employees’ bounced paychecks with money from the downtown restaurant’s safe before Hankerson’s representatives arrived to retrieve it, they said. On paper, the company was making $8 million in annual sales, but years of chaos at the Atlanta institution had pushed it to the brink of collapse. In one case, a general manager - one of Hankerson’s childhood friends - put some $12,000 on his credit card to keep the company’s employee health insurance coverage from lapsing, former employees said.īy the time Hankerson, 38, was booked into Clayton County Jail June 22 on felony theft charges, he had pocketed some $52,000 in state taxes during March and April alone, according to his arrest warrant. Managers dug into their own pockets just to keep the restaurant’s doors open for the day, public records and interviews with a dozen former employees and business associates confirmed. The spending exacted a heavy toll on employees who were shorted on their pay after working under grueling and sometimes unsafe conditions. Hankerson siphoned money from his business’s three locations to finance a voracious marijuana habit and sex parties, witnesses have told investigators. Now, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned damaging new details about how Hankerson spent the company’s money and treated his employees.

Ajc news gladys knight restaurant