Onion Volcanoes, Speedboats, Insider Trading, And A $50 Million Family Feud. The Wild Legacy of Benihana Founder Rocky Aoki

In the late 1970s, Rocky Aoki's life looked like a movie he was directing himself. The Japanese-born wrestler turned restaurateur had built Benihana into one of the hottest dining experiences in America, where chefs juggled knives and turned onions into steaming volcanoes for celebrities like Muhammad Ali and Sean Connery. Off the clock, he lived even louder: racing speedboats at 80 miles an hour, setting ballooning records across the Pacific, playing backgammon for thousands a point, and partying until dawn with drugs and women who weren't always his wife.

Then came the crash — literally. In 1979, his boat disintegrated in San Francisco Bay, nearly killing him. When he woke up in a hospital bed, his wife was on one side, his mistress on the other, and the empire he had built was about to fracture into the kind of family feud that would last long after his death.

What followed was decades of lawsuits, betrayals, and courtroom battles that left his children, including future superstar DJ Steve Aoki and model/actress Devon Aoki, fighting their stepmother for control of a $50 million fortune and a hibachi restaurant empire.

Early Life and Wrestling Roots

Hiroaki "Rocky" Aoki was born in Tokyo in 1938 to Yunosuke and Katsu Aoki. His father was a vaudevillian performer and restaurateur who founded a small café named Benihana after spotting a single red safflower in the wreckage of postwar Tokyo.

Rocky tried music first, starting a band called Rowdy Sounds, but athletics proved his true path. He excelled in karate, track and field, and especially wrestling. Expelled from Keio University for fighting, he still qualified for Japan's 1960 Olympic wrestling team, though he ultimately did not compete.

A scholarship brought him to the United States, where he wrestled at Springfield College and later CW Post on Long Island. From 1962 to 1964, he won three straight U.S. national AAU flyweight championships. To support himself, he drove an ice cream truck in Harlem, taping newspaper clippings of his wrestling victories to the side to discourage thieves. The $10,000 he earned in one summer became the seed money for his first restaurant.

The Birth of Benihana

In 1964, at just 25 years old, Aoki opened the first Benihana on West 56th Street in Manhattan. The tiny four-table restaurant introduced teppanyaki dining to America, but with a twist: the chefs didn't just cook, they performed. They juggled knives, cracked jokes, and sent shrimp flying into their hats.

At first, the place struggled. Then a rave review in the New York Herald Tribune turned it into a sensation. Soon, everyone from celebrities to curious New Yorkers wanted in. By 1972, Benihana had nearly 20 locations and was bringing in $12 million a year — the equivalent of around $93 million today.

Rocky leaned into the theater of it all. His father had urged him to emphasize showmanship, and it worked. Diners came not just for steak and shrimp, but for onion volcanoes and a spectacle that felt half dinner, half Broadway.

Playboy Entrepreneur

Success in the kitchen gave Rocky license to play everywhere else. He raced powerboats, created the Benihana Grand Prix, and even set a world record in 1981 as part of the first hot-air balloon flight across the Pacific. He opened a flashy Manhattan nightclub called Genesis, launched a men's magazine of the same name, and partied like a rock star.

He also became a master of cheap publicity stunts. He posed in hot tubs inside stretch limousines, cameoed on "Hawaii Five-O," and once drove a stretch Volkswagen Beetle across the country. He played high-stakes backgammon, hung out with celebrities, and cultivated a flamboyant image that kept his name — and the Benihana brand — in the headlines.

But the lifestyle had consequences. His 1979 boating accident nearly killed him and left him with lasting health problems, including Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion. His personal life was no less turbulent: seven children with three different women, multiple marriages and affairs, and constant tension between wives, mistresses, and offspring.

Insider Trading and the Benihana Trust

By the late 1990s, Rocky's appetite for risk spilled from speedboats into the stock market. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to insider trading after paying $10,000 for a tip about Spectrum Information Technologies. Acting on the information, he bought 200,000 shares and made nearly $600,000 in profit when Spectrum's stock spiked.

The conviction forced him to step down as chairman of Benihana Inc. and created new complications. To protect his holdings and keep the company's liquor licenses from being revoked, Rocky placed his shares of Benihana of Tokyo (BOT) into a new trust in 1998. BOT was the family's most valuable holding: it controlled all of Benihana's international franchises and the flagship Honolulu restaurant, which by itself accounted for nearly 40% of BOT's sales and more than 60% of its profits.

The trust, valued between $35 and $50 million, was managed by three of his children — Kevin, Kyle, and Kana Grace — along with family friend Kenneth Podziba. While the U.S. arm of the business, Benihana Inc., would later be sold to outside investors, BOT and the trust remained the family's golden ticket. Instead of protecting the Aokis' fortune, the arrangement planted the seeds of one of the messiest inheritance battles in modern business history.

Rocky and Keiko Aoki in 2005 (Photo by Neil Rasmus/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

Family Feud

In 2002, Rocky secretly married his third wife, Keiko Ono, a former model and business consultant. His children were blindsided. Two of them, Kevin and Grace, even handed her a postnuptial agreement at the wedding party, demanding she renounce any claim to the BOT trust and its assets. She refused.

Soon after, the family war erupted. Rocky accused four of his children — Kevin, Grace, Kyle, and Echo — of trying to "wrest control" of the companies and sued them in 2005. He disinherited them in retaliation, revising his will repeatedly to favor Keiko. He left only two of his seven children, Steve and Devon, as potential heirs.

By then, both were carving out their own fame. Steve was becoming one of the most recognizable DJs in the world, known for his marathon sets and cake-throwing stage antics. Devon had established herself as an international model and actress, the face of Versace and Chanel, and a star of films like Sin City and 2 Fast 2 Furious.

The children were furious that their father had handed Keiko increasing influence over assets that had originally been placed in their control. The board of Benihana Inc. further complicated matters by diluting the family's stake from 50.9% to 36.5%, explicitly to prevent Keiko from consolidating power. By the time Rocky died in 2008 at age 69, the lawsuits were unresolved, and his fortune — especially the BOT trust — was already mired in legal knots.

The Widow vs. The Children

When Rocky passed away, Keiko assumed control of his estate and appointed herself CEO of Benihana of Tokyo, the company housed inside the trust. That trust, worth around $50 million, now held the international franchise rights and the Hawaii Benihana location — the single most profitable unit in the entire empire.

Almost immediately, Rocky's six surviving children challenged her authority. Under the trust's rules, only Steve and Devon were eventual heirs, but neither could access the money until they turned 45. In the meantime, Keiko was trustee, controlling every dollar.

As trustee and CEO, Keiko pursued a string of flashy but ill-fated ideas. She launched the "Beni Girls," a hip-hop dance duo in hibachi costumes, and introduced the "Beni Burger" at the Honolulu location. Both gimmicks sparked lawsuits from Benihana Inc., the U.S. chain already outside the family's control. She also spent millions fighting legal battles in multiple states, losing more than once.

The heirs accused her of squandering the fortune their father had intended for them. In court filings, they argued that she was draining the trust with reckless litigation and bizarre marketing ploys. Keiko countered that she was preserving Rocky's legacy. The feud turned the $50 million BOT trust into a weapon — one side claiming mismanagement, the other claiming betrayal.

The Court Decides

After years of litigation, New York's Court of Appeals delivered a decisive ruling in 2016: the Benihana Protective Trust belonged to Steve and Devon Aoki. Keiko had no right to inherit it.

The decision was a major victory for the two celebrity heirs, but with a catch. The trust would remain sealed until they turned 45, leaving Keiko in charge of the assets in the meantime. Steve, born in 1977, gained access in 2022, while Devon, born in 1982, must wait until 2028.

The Brand Moves On

While Rocky's heirs and widow fought over the Benihana of Tokyo trust, the U.S. arm of the company was moving in a different direction. In 2012, private equity firm Angelo Gordon bought Benihana Inc. — the American chain of hibachi restaurants, along with the Haru and RA Sushi brands — for about $296 million, taking it private and out of the Aoki family's hands.

That meant that by the time the inheritance battle was raging, the family was no longer connected to the U.S. restaurants most diners associate with the Benihana name. What they were fighting over was BOT, which controlled the overseas franchises and the single most profitable restaurant in the system: the Honolulu location.

In 2024, Benihana Inc. changed hands again when The ONE Group Hospitality — parent of the STK steakhouse chain — acquired it for $365 million. Today, the Benihana brand most Americans know is run by a corporate hospitality group, while the Aokis' connection survives only through BOT and the trust Rocky left behind.

Legacy

Rocky Aoki built a restaurant empire with the flair of a showman and lived a life that blurred the line between business and spectacle. Benihana went on to become a global brand, but his fortune ignited one of the most protracted and bitter inheritance battles in modern American business.

Today, the restaurants continue under corporate ownership, while his family's story remains a cautionary tale about wealth, power, and legacy. Rocky once joked, "Money not everything, just 99%." In the end, the empire he created proved him right — because decades later, it's the money, not the meals, that people are still fighting over.