The Restaurant Owner Who Offered a Job to the Man Who Robbed Him
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, when Diablo’s Southwest Grill in Georgia was broken into, owner Carl Wallace could have responded the way most business owners would. Instead, he posted a public message offering the burglar something unexpected, a job. Here’s Carl sharing his story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.0 | And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:17.7 | And now we have one of the co-owners of Diablo Southwest Grill here to share his story. |
| 0:24.1 | Diablo's was started by Carl Wallace and brothers Brandon and Bradwall in Augusta, Georgia. |
| 0:30.6 | Here he is sharing his story of how this business got started and how they operate. |
| 0:36.9 | Luckily for me, you know, through life, all of my success has come from challenges and what |
| 0:43.9 | seems sometimes like really bad days actually set us up for the best days. |
| 0:50.2 | My wife had lost her job with Verizon when they had bought out another company, and I had never cooked a day in my life. |
| 0:58.0 | So when she went back to work, instead of working business hours, she started working retail hours. |
| 1:03.1 | And then that led me to having to cook for myself because she wouldn't get home to 9 o'10 o'clock at night. |
| 1:09.6 | And then I realized I had a passion for cooking. |
| 1:11.6 | And so actually Diablo's was born out of loss of a job for her. |
| 1:16.6 | And then I wanted to create a chain, not just do someone else's dreams. |
| 1:19.6 | I wanted to create my own dream. |
| 1:21.6 | So we created Diablos and grew from one store in Augusta to, we're fixing to open up our 15th store in about two months. |
| 1:33.5 | So the day before Easter Sunday, 3.30, 4 o'clock of the morning, we had a break in. The individual |
| 1:40.0 | smashed our front glass, gained entry into the restaurant, and then went to the register, |
| 1:45.8 | immediately grabbed the register, shook it around, snatched all the cords and wires. |
| 1:50.4 | It made an absolute mess of all the register and the change drawer. |
| 1:56.0 | Shook it around, realized there was no money in there, threw it to the ground, |
| 1:59.7 | looked around the restaurant for about 10 more seconds, realized there was no money in there, threw it to the ground, looked around the restaurant for about 10 more seconds, realized there was, you know, no safe. The safe was hidden and actually ran right back out of the restaurant as fast as he could get out. And the whole process was less than one minute. We were awakened by the security company calling us and letting us know. |
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