Maurice Driz, in a photo he posted to his own Instagram the day after the April 2015 attack.
Maurice Driz is one of the twin brothers at the center of this case, the father of co-defendant Shawn Driz, and, with his twin Alberto, a former owner of a chain of Blaze Pizza franchises. The family's money runs back a generation: their father, Mario Driz, founded a Los Angeles knitwear company, Driz Knitting Mills, and in the late 1980s Maurice and Alberto ran a British hosiery venture called Cosy Legs as its overseas arm.
The 2015 attack outside The Nice Guy was prosecuted as a crime. In the Los Angeles criminal case (No. BA436130, at the downtown criminal courthouse), Maurice Driz was convicted of felony assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury (Penal Code 245(a)(4)) and sentenced. For his defense he retained a heavyweight team of private lawyers, led by Robert Shapiro, the attorney best known for defending O.J. Simpson, along with Mark Werksman and Tarek Shawky. The case was prosecuted by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office.
The twins operated their Blaze Pizza franchises through a holding company and a stack of per-location LLCs. In a separate lawsuit, Vilma Aguilar v. Blaze Pizza, LLC (Los Angeles Superior Court, 2018), a former employee who was hired at 16 accused her bosses of inappropriate comments and touching, and said she was transferred more than 20 miles away after she complained. A jury sided with her and awarded close to $500,000. Both Maurice and his twin Alberto were named as individual defendants, and Maurice was named among her supervisors. It is one more record of how this family ran its business.
Cosy Legs, the twins' hosiery company, boomed in the late 1980s, winning a reported £3 million contract to supply the Soviet Union with three million pairs of woolly tights, and later ran a factory in England supplying major British retailers. Both arms of the business were wound up in 1993 and 1994, according to notices in the official government gazettes. It is background, but it fits a pattern of ventures that end in collapse.
In July 2021 an L.A. jury ordered Maurice and his co-defendants to pay $72,645,492 to the three people they attacked. Roughly $12.8 million of the punitive damages was assessed against Maurice, and he is jointly liable for the whole judgment. Under California's 10% statutory interest, the debt has grown toward $122 million, and the plaintiffs have not collected a penny of it. He represented himself at the civil trial.
Sources: LA Superior Court criminal docket No. BA436130 (People v. Maurice Driz) and civil docket No. BC643270; · L.A. Patch · Beverly Press · MyNewsLA (harassment verdict) · The Gazette (Cosy Legs windings-up).
