Now, prosecutors say profit and family are behind the attempted murder of Mr. Sgourdos.
His nephew, a manager at the diner, is charged with hiring a man to kill Mr. Sgourdos, with instructions to torture him first until he surrendered the combination to the diner’s safe — and the money his nephew believed Mr. Sgourdos was hoarding.
“Not enough to satisfy yourself, to let everyone be happy, too,” the nephew, Georgios Spyropoulos, complained to a man he believed was a hired killer — actually an undercover state trooper — as they sat at the diner in March, according to the official arrest affidavit. “Out of nine families, the other eight suffer because of him.”
On Route 3, a six-lane highway along the shopping strips just west of the Meadowlands, the Tick Tock is all things New Jersey: big and brash (“Eat Heavy” beckons the sign on its shiny facade) with a melting-pot menu — Tuna Tommy salad, matzo ball soup and disco fries smothered in brown gravy and mozzarella.
The plot that now surrounds the diner, too, is so Soprano State that, as the state’s attorney general, Jeffrey S. Chiesa, said, “if you were to tell the facts to somebody, it’s so stereotypical that it wouldn’t be credible.”
In the parking lot of a Home Depot not far from the diner, prosecutors said, Mr. Spyropoulos handed $3,000 and a revolver to the trooper he believed was a hit man. They said he gave another man, who was to pose as an exterminator to get into the Tick Tock and help open the safe, a disguise and some roach spray — which officials said he had packed in the kind of pastry box the diner uses for cakes and cookies it bakes on site.
In conversations captured on secret recordings and recounted in the affidavit, Mr. Spyropoulos hinted ominously that he had more people he wanted dead. “We’ll have a lot more to do,” he is quoted as saying.
Neighbors had long whispered that Mr. Sgourdos, who owned the diner and two Manhattan restaurants with his two brothers-in-law, was stingy in paying even his relatives. But lawyers for Mr. Spyropoulos and Mr. Sgourdos alike say that while there were disagreements one might expect among relatives who work together in a 24-hour business, no one expected such an escalation.
“The leap is from a passionate argument over ‘Who burnt the toast?’ to ‘I’m going to kill someone,’ ” said Matthew J. Cavaliere, a lawyer for Mr. Spyropoulos, 45, who is in the Passaic County Jail on $1 million bond after the police arrested him at the diner last month. “That’s a huge leap.”
Legend holds that New Jersey has more diners than any other state. But even here, the Tick Tock stood out.
It was more location than food. While the coffee wins applause on travel blogs, a local newspaper reviewer called the Tick Tock’s desserts “worrisome,” the service “eccentric.”
Television and radio news crews from New York love the Tick Tock because it offers a place to pick up voices of New Jersey with just a quick dash out the Lincoln Tunnel.
Politicians, too, gravitated to its crowds — Gov. Jon S. Corzine came to the Tick Tock to sell his austerity budget in 2008; Chelsea Clinton came to campaign for her mother that same year. Carousers from the city or the nearby MetLife Stadium like it for a post-party milkshake or burger. And Guy Fieri made it his first stop on the New Jersey tour during Season 2 of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”
The Tick Tock was opened in 1948 by a Greek American who had previously operated a lunch cart for local office buildings. Mr. Sgourdos and his two partners all married into a family that owned a restaurant in Brooklyn in the 1970s. They bought and sold other restaurants before making a bid in 1987 for the Tick Tock.
The three men’s wives, children and in-laws worked in the business; Mr. Sgourdos told Northern New Jersey Business in 1995 that someone from the family was always on duty.
They did enough business — 1,000 eggs each breakfast — that they expanded with a Tick Tock in Manhattan, across Eighth Avenue from Pennsylvania Station, and spent $2 million to rebuild and expand the diner here. They recently bought and refurbished an elaborate catering hall in Cedar Grove, N.J., owned by sons and daughters of the three Tick Tock owners.
But that venture includes only blood relatives, which Mr. Spyropoulos is not; he had married the daughter of one of Mr. Sgourdos’s partners. His relationship with Mr. Sgourdos was “mainly a business relationship,” a lawyer for the uncle, Joseph Pojanowski, said. To regulars, he was the guy with the smile and thick accent greeting customers at the door.
Still, those close to the family, which declined to comment, said Mr. Sgourdos was among family members at a recent Sweet 16 for Mr. Spyropoulos’s daughter.
Mr. Spyropoulos appeared successful — he drove a Mercedes and, like Mr. Sgourdos, lived in a large, new suburban home. Neighbors said his wife did not work.
In late February, according to the affidavit, he reached out to someone he knew from the diner — who was working as a confidential informer for the State Police — and asked for his help in finding a man to kill Mr. Sgourdos. According to the affidavit, he wanted the body disposed of to make it look like a missing-persons case, which he believed would attract less police attention. Officials said he promised to split whatever was found in the safe with the confidential informer.
In late March, the informer introduced him to the hit man, who asked how big Mr. Sgourdos was.
“Five-foot-five, 160 pounds,” Mr. Spyropoulos replied. Mr. Sgourdos lived in a 6,000-square-foot house with his wife, Mr. Spyropoulos said. He told the hit man that he did not mind if she was killed if she “gets in the way.”
Mr. Spyropoulos insisted that Mr. Sgourdos be tortured to get the combination to the safe. The man reassured him: “You can get anything out of anybody with a pair of linesman’s pliers.”
Mr. Spyropoulos said the killing should happen on a Sunday, when the take from the diner would be $20,000, and “everything is dead” overnight, allowing the “exterminator” to enter without much notice.
He told the hired murderer how Mr. Sgourdos parked his car and how to disable the security system in his house. And he described his routine: “like clockwork,” he left at 5:30 every morning, when the neighbors were still asleep. “He’s boring,” he said.
On April 9, the State Police went to the diner to arrest the nephew. He was seated at the entrance of the Tick Tock as usual, greeting customers arriving for lunch.
As the allegations spread within the family, branches broke off. A judge ordered that if Mr. Spyropoulos made bail, he would not be allowed to have contact with Mr. Sgourdos’s family. But that does not include Mr. Sgourdos’s niece — Mr. Spyropoulos’s wife — who does not believe that her husband would have plotted this.
“She’s standing by her man for now,” said Mr. Pojanowski, the lawyer for Mr. Sgourdos. “It’s going to be very, very tense.”