Frustrated and confused, the Dangs, led by Danielle, pressed Gyulai for profit-and-loss statements and a look at the books. Gyulai refused. Despite growing tensions among the owners, Thai and Danielle were married and held a party inside the restaurant on Valentine's Day 2014. A month after the wedding, Gyulai fired Danielle. He fired Thai a year later.

Embeya closed for two weeks after Thai's departure and reopened with a new kitchen staff led by Mike Sheerin, who had headed the kitchen at Cicchetti in Streeterville. But Embeya never recovered. Thai Dang filed a lawsuit in October 2015, alleging Gyulai didn't pay him some $90,000 in wages. After Thai and Kenny Dang received bank records and testimony in that case, they filed a separate complaint for breach of contract, initially alleging that Gyulai made unauthorized payments to himself and Patel "in excess of $200,000." The damages ballooned to nearly $1.5 million after subpoenas returned new records.

A judge ruled on the wage case on May 25, 2016, awarding Dang a judgment of $102,500, which he never received. On June 19, Embeya closed. "The lawsuit ruined us," Gyulai told the Tribune at the time. But bank records paint a different picture. So does Sheerin. "(Gyulai) said we weren't making enough money to sustain," he says. "I didn't believe that, and I still don't. Business was good. Business was steady." Sheerin says he knew things were awry in the final months because Gyulai, usually a consistent presence in the restaurant, was rarely around. Gyulai and Patel also walked away from their lease, owing thousands of dollars to the building owner, Penny Pritzker's PSP Capital Partners, the firm confirms.

Patel, meanwhile, was exploring how to unload their condominium, says Sarfaraz Niazi, a friend of Patel's who is a world-renowned scientist and the founder of Adello Biologics, a Chicago-based biopharmaceutical company. "The last time I saw her was maybe two months before she disappeared," Niazi says. "She cooked dinner for me, and she was talking about renting out her place or selling it. She asked if I could help her, but I didn't see any sense of emergency." A few months later, he called to invite her to dinner. Patel declined, saying she was in Hungary, Niazi says. He hasn't heard from her since.

'THEY PULLED A HOUDINI'

After trying to sell their home, Patel and Gyulai decided to rent it to a dentist who practices in Northlake, according to bank records and real estate listings. But despite pocketing monthly payments from the renter, the couple stopped paying the mortgage in June 2016 and their association dues around the same time, leading the association to take possession of the property pending foreclosure. The dentist was ordered to vacate by April 1, court records show.

The condominium association later sued for unpaid dues and won. But by that time, Gyulai and Patel were gone. The Dangs haven't been able to recover their losses, either. "The fact is, they're gone, and there's not much the courts can do," says the Dangs' attorney, Mike Leonard. "They pulled a Houdini on all of us."

The wreckage they left behind continues to smolder around the Dangs. Once Embeya was forced to vacate the property last year, all of the equipment inside, some of which was Thai Dang's prior to Embeya, was lost. Last August, he went to the city to apply for a liquor license for the Vietnamese restaurant in Pilsen called HaiSous that he and Danielle planned to open, only to be blocked by $19,143.25 worth of parking tickets, delinquent business license fees and state taxes racked up by Gyulai, who had attached the abandoned SUV to the business. Thai and Danielle had to petition the state to have Thai removed as a named owner of Embeya in order to obtain the license, Danielle Dang says.

Then came a lawsuit filed against the restaurant by its primary lender, Ridgestone Bank (now Byline Bank), to which Embeya owed more than $600,000. With Gyulai and Patel out of the country and the condominium headed into foreclosure, the bank went after Thai and Kenny Dang, the latter of whom had put up three properties in northern Virginia as collateral for the loan. Kenny, Thai's eldest brother and a father figure, sold one of the homes to pay down the debt. He and Thai negotiated with the bank to save the other two, one occupied by their parents. To pay off the rest of the debt, Thai and Kenny, who operates two nail salons in Virginia, now must make monthly payments of more than $8,000 for the next five years.