CLEANING UP

IDIDN’T WANT MY FATHER’S NAME TO BE tarnished,” says Yaakoub Hijazi, president of Paterson, New Jersey-based Star Laundry. When his father, Youssef, died in 2011, four months after being diagnosed with lung cancer, Hijazi was a 19-year-old student at Montclair State University. He soon learned that his dad’s $4 million (sales) commercial laundry and dry-cleaning business was on the brink of collapse. “When you go bankrupt, your name is destroyed,” he says.

So Hijazi,