When I get out of my car, she is already beside me. I didn’t see her walk up; she’s just there all of a sudden in weathered work boots and a cable knit sweater. Her hair is slung into a ponytail. She looks like Helen of Troy, I think, and wonder why that image comes to mind. Then I notice she’s wearing a thin headband of braided, gold-colored elastic that looks vaguely Grecian. Maybe that’s it. Her age is tough to guess. I would believe any number she would tell me. Later, she says she’s 38. For four days, Aimee has been overseeing the family’s move from a rental house to the farm, unpacking while keeping an eye on her three sons, ages 3, 7 and 9. It’s been hectic, she says, but even so, the place looks put together. The throw pillows are already arranged on the sofas. We walk up to the greenhouse, which perches on a hill behind the small residence. Aimee slowly pushes dirt from a trowel with her fingernails while we talk. “What I think is most fascinating about Hector is that everybody has their ideas about him,” she says. “It used to be frustrating, but I don’t find it frustrating anymore.” Aimee met Hector 16 years ago through a mutual friend. They connected at LEAF in 1997, dancing to Latin music. “The Latin community here, at that time, was really small,” Aimee says — her father is Latino, her mother is British. “There weren’t a lot of people who knew how to dance.” But the dancing didn’t lead to romance. At least, not right away. Aimee worked for Hector when he owned Zambra. After she took a job at Tryon Distributing, he
The turbulent story of Asheville’s most prolific restaurant owner
“I hear a lot of people say, ‘Oh, I met this guy, he’s perfect for me,’” Aimee says. “Hector’s not perfect for me, and I’m not perfect for Hector. All the perfect people in our community, they should probably just stop reading this article, because this is not a perfect article or a perfect life.”
hours and outdoor seating at Bomba, while creating an organic farm in Leicester to provide produce for the restaurants and a home for his family of five. It’s not just business, though, that gets heated. “Me myself, I start a lot of fires,” he admits.
HUSBAND One morning, I drive to the Diaz’s Leicester farm. I have been there before with Diaz: He’s given me the grand tour. He’s pointed out the fields of lettuce, beets, squash and garlic that separate the newly built farmhouse from the road. He has shown me his dozens of chickens, running about on a grassy hillside — Rhode Island Reds and Comets, all except for one, anyway. A yellow hen has moved over from a neighbor’s house. But today, Diaz doesn’t know I’m coming. I’m there to see his wife, Aimee Diaz, about whom I know very little.
became her client. In 2000, they bonded over a wine encyclopedia; Aimee considers that their first date. They started a family together in 2004. “But you didn’t come here for a love story,” she says. And she’s right. Since 2010, Hector has been arrested three times for assault: Aimee in 2010, his adult son (Aimee’s stepson), Phoenix Wolf, in 2011, and the parking attendant in 2012, according to the Asheville Police Department. “I have five children,” Aimee says (counting her three sons and two step-children). “We’re working really hard to address his temper, and I don’t want us to take three steps back right now. I have to focus on a solution.” It’s not just her family’s happiness she’s thinking about, she explains. The Diaz’s businesses employ about 100 people. “They count on us to keep it together and work hard and to provide a place for their success,” she says. “You know that analogy with the sticks? If you have one stick, it breaks if you put pressure on it. But when you put all the sticks together, you can’t even bend them. That’s where our focus has to be as a community.” For the charges listed above, Hector has been sentenced in the most recent case. The other ones were dropped eventually. In April, Aimee did not accompany him to court for sentencing — “That was his thing,” she says — but she did iron a shirt for him that morning, and she admires the judge who sentenced him. Hector is nervous about his upcoming trip to the psychologist and his anger management course; Aimee thinks it will be good for him. “The only reason you see a man and a woman sitting on a park bench when they’re 80 is because that woman and that man dealt with the nastiest parts of each other,” she says. “That’s a choice, and it’s a strong choice, and it’s a hard choice.”
ISLANDER, DRUG DEALER, BEACH BUM, AID WORKER When I ask Aimee about Hector’s past, she mentions his “lives” as a way of describing it. “He has done it all,” she says. The chronology is challenging. It would take pages to lay it all out. This fact hasn’t been lost on Hector; he wants to write a book. Hector was born in a field near the mountain town of Cayey, Puerto Rico. His 14-year-old mother delivered him in hiding; she was worried her brothers would kill the baby because his father had come up the mountain from the city and seduced her. “My uncles were like, ‘If that guy comes up here, we’ll chop his head,’ Diaz says. “These guys were in the United States Army. They went to Korea. They went to Vietnam. Pretty tough.” His aging grandparents raised him; his mother fled to New York shortly after his birth. He spent most of his time playing sports — boxing, baseball or basketball —
mountainx.com • JUNE 26 - JULY 2, 2013 51