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For my daughters, Charlotte and Juliet
MAJOR CHARACTERS
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Mark Anderson—A Sausalito photographer and owner of Sausalito Cellars, a boutique wine storage company. Anderson was a civic leader and bon vivant, known for his knowledge of wine and patronage of the town’s best Japanese restaurant.
Delia Viader—An Argentina-born winemaker whose 1997 Viader Napa Valley was named the number two wine in the world by the Wine Spectator magazine. Viader was one of the first in the Napa Valley to plant vertical rows on steep hillsides.
Dick Ward—A cofounder of Saintsbury, one of the first wineries to make wine from Pinot Noir grapes grown in the Carneros district in southern Napa County.
Ted Hall—A former management consultant who started Long Meadow Ranch in the Mayacamas Mountains with his wife, Laddie, and son, Chris.
Miranda Heller—A fifth-generation Californian who inherited numerous bottles of wine made in 1875 by her great-great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman.
R. Steven Lapham—An assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of California. Lapham specializes in arson, terrorism, and wine fraud.
Debbie Polverino—A longtime Napa Valley resident and the manager of Wines Central in 2005 at the time of the fire.
Brian O. Parker—Special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Parker was the lead agent on the Mark Anderson investigation, a case that would consume seven years of his life.
Yoshi Tome—The owner of Sushi Ran in Sausalito, regarded as one of the top restaurants in the Bay Area.
Ron Lussier—A web designer whose first taste of Sine Qua Non, a California cult wine, changed his attitude about wine forever. Lussier stored his wine at Sausalito Cellars.
Michael Bales—A Latin teacher from Toronto who had built up a small but superb collection of California cult wine, including multiple bottles of the hard-to-buy Screaming Eagle. Bales rented a storage space at Sausalito Cellars so he could get direct delivery.
Samuel Maslak—Maslak’s south San Francisco restaurant, Bacchanal, was known for its wine list. After the restaurant went bankrupt in 2001, Maslak entrusted 756 cases into Mark Anderson’s care.
Michael Liccardi—A prominent wine broker from Stockton who masterminded a scheme to pass off cheap wine grapes as more expensive Zinfandel grapes.
Fred Franzia—The owner of Bronco Wines, one of the largest wine companies in the world and the producer of “Two-Buck Chuck,” sold at Trader Joe’s. Franzia pleaded guilty to fraud in 1999 for substituting cheap grapes for Zinfandel grapes. He paid a $500,000 fine and was barred from the wine business for five years.
Rudy Kurniawan—An Indonesian who came to the United States to go to college, but overstayed his visa. After tasting a bottle of Opus One, Kurniawan became interested in wine and used his family’s considerable wealth to acquire—and then sell—a cellar full of rare French wines. Much of it was fake. Kurniawan was convicted of fraud in 2014 and sentenced to ten years in prison.
William I. Koch—Koch, an energy magnate worth $4 billion and the brother of David and Charles Koch, who contribute widely to conservative causes, has one of the world’s great wine collections. He bought numerous bottles of rare wine from Kurniawan, only to discover they were fake. His lawsuits have played a large role in revealing the scope of wine fraud around the world.
Mark Reichel—Mark Anderson’s Sacramento-based defense attorney.
Fred Dame—A wine expert whose palate is so advanced that he passed the test for Master Sommelier on the first try—an accomplishment only fourteen other people in the world have achieved.
NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Tiburcio Tapia—The original grantee of the 13,000-acre Rancho Cucamonga in southern California. A descendant of some of the area’s earliest Spanish settlers, Tapia was given the rancho by the Mexican government in 1839. He was the first to plant grapes there.
Jean-Louis Vignes—A French immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles around 1831, when California was part of Mexico. Vignes was widely considered the most important winemaker of his time and a spur to French emigration to southern California. His 104-acre vineyard along the banks of the Los Angeles river was a showplace and a center of Los Angeles society.
Jean Louis Sainsevain—Along with his younger brother, Pierre, Sainsevain bought his uncle Vignes’s vineyard in 1855. Sainsevain became one of the most important wine merchants of the 1860s, opening stores in San Francisco and New York. After going bankrupt, he took over management of Cucamonga Vineyard. He was the winemaker for the 1875 Port and Angelica that was destroyed in the 2005 wine warehouse fire.
John Rains—A southern sympathizer who gained control of thousands of acres of land when he married Maria Merced de Williams. Rains purchased the 13,000-acre Rancho Cucamonga in 1858 using his wife’s money, but did not put her name on the deed. His murder set off a chain of violence throughout the region.
Maria Merced Williams de Rains—The daughter of one of southern California’s richest cattle barons, Merced grew up in luxury on Rancho Chino during the height of the rancho era. Raised to be wife and mother, Merced married John Rains when she was sixteen and was ill equipped to deal with the world after his death.
Robert Carlisle—When his brother-in-law John Rains was murdered, Carlisle led the hunt for his killers, often going outside the law. He took over Maria Merced Williams de Rains’s business affairs after her husband’s death and used the position to his advantage.
Benjamin Hayes—As the judge for the First Judicial District of Southern California, which included Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and San Diego counties in the 1860s, Hayes was intimately involved in the hunt for Rains’s killer. He became obsessed with the case—and with Rains’s widow—and documented it thoroughly in his diaries and scrapbooks, which are a major source of information about southern California in the mid-nineteenth century.
Andrew J. King—King came from a notoriously violent family in El Monte, a secessionist stronghold east of Los Angeles. As undersheriff for Los Angeles, King hunted for Rains’s killer. He eventually took over management of Rancho Cucamonga, with deadly results.
Ramón Carrillo—A descendant of an old Californio family who fought for Mexico in the war against the United States, Carrillo became John Rains’s majordomo in 1861. As tensions between Americans and Californios heightened after Rains’s death, Carrillo was vilified in the press and named a prime suspect in the murder.
Isaias W. Hellman—A German-Jewish immigrant who acquired Rancho Cucamonga in a sheriff’s sale in 1870. Hellman, who became one of California’s most prominent financiers, eventually overseeing Wells Fargo Bank, owned the Cucamonga Vineyard for more than forty years. One hundred seventy-five bottles of his Port and Angelica from 1875 were destroy
ed in the Wines Central warehouse fire. He is the author’s great-great-grandfather.
Benjamin Dreyfus—From a single vineyard in Anaheim, Dreyfus built one of the country’s largest wholesale wine firms, B. Dreyfus & Co., which had sales around the world. Dreyfus became a partner in the Cucamonga Vineyard and took over management in 1878. He is credited with selling the first kosher wine in California.
Leland Stanford—A railroad baron, California governor, and U.S. senator, Stanford built Vina Ranch in northern California, which became the largest wine operation in the world in the 1880s.
Percy Morgan—An English accountant who brought together seven of San Francisco’s biggest wine houses in 1894 to create the California Wine Association. By 1911, the time Morgan stepped down from the presidency of the CWA, the company had crushed its competitors and controlled more than 80 percent of the winemaking in California.
Pietro Rossi—An Italian chemist who came to San Francisco and assumed the helm of the Italian Swiss Colony, a large wine operation based in Asti in northern Sonoma County. Rossi fought hard against the avarice of the California Wine Association, but capitulated to its power in the end.
PROLOGUE: A FIRE IS SET
The three-hundred-pound man walked slowly up the steps to the mezzanine area of the cavernous wine warehouse, pausing to rest on a cane when his breath grew short. It was a warm fall afternoon in October 2005, right in the middle of the grape harvest, and the black sweatpants and t-shirt that were the man’s signature look clung damply to his heavy frame.
As he hobbled down the hallway leading to his storage locker, the man could look down onto the main floor of Wines Central, which was packed with millions of bottles of California’s finest wines. Pallets stacked forty feet high stretched the length of two football fields, with wine as varied as that from Beaulieu Vineyards, one of state’s oldest wineries, to cases from boutique wineries like the one owned by the Italian race car driver Mario Andretti.
The man, however, did not pause to consider the vast array of wine below him. He was in a hurry. And he was angry. He regarded this enormous warehouse in Vallejo, fifteen miles south of Napa, to be his domain. But he was soon to be an outcast.
The man stopped in front of Bay 14, a 2,500-square foot area he had been renting for the previous thirteen months. The space had once been filled with wines from the great châteaux of Burgundy and Bordeaux, as well as from the cult wineries of California like Sine Qua Non and Harlan Estate. But now it was almost empty. Wooden pallets perched haphazardly on the floor. Cardboard boxes and Styrofoam inserts leaned against a chain-link fence. Just 4,700 bottles, seven pallets of shrink-wrapped wine, remained, a bitter reminder of how the man’s business had fallen apart during the previous year. While he had once been sought out for his knowledge of wine, asked to join boards and commissions, and invited to Bacchanalian feasts around the world featuring gourmet food and rare vintages, the man was now a pariah, ignored by his longtime friends and under investigation by police.
The mezzanine was quiet, the sound dampened by the three-foot-thick concrete walls that had been constructed to hold Navy torpedoes. The man wiped his sweaty brow and took a final look around. The area was empty. He unlocked the gate into his storage area and went inside. There was no one to see him reach into his canvas bag and bring out a plastic bucket filled with gasoline-soaked rags. He removed a propane torch and pulled its trigger, which sent a small flame surging from the brass tip. The man held the torch against a piece of cloth until a flame took hold.
As the man clamored down the stairs toward the warehouse’s exit, the flame flickered, and then flickered some more, before it leaped up and caught on a nearby pile of cardboard. The tongues of fire grew as they gobbled up the wooden crates and Styrofoam nearby. Within a few minutes, the fire had spread up to the ceiling.
At 3:34 p.m., about nineteen minutes after the man had rushed out of the warehouse, walking faster than any of those inside had ever seen, fire alarms started to blare. The lights flashed. A piercing alarm went off. The warehouse manager and three workers ran to the front door and struggled to get out. Then an enormous explosion rocketed through the building, shattering thousands of windows. A railway portal toppled. The sudden rush of oxygen created a fireball that consumed everything it touched, scorching shrink-wrapped pallets of wine that fell upon one another like rows of dominos. Glass bottles shattered everywhere.
The firefighters from Vallejo who rushed to the scene would later comment that there was so much black smoke it looked as if a 747 airliner had crashed. For eight hours they fought the blaze, bringing in companies from around the San Francisco Bay Area as the fire grew larger. By the time the flames were out, the warehouse was a smoky, soggy mess. More than four and a half million bottles of premium wine stored inside, worth more than a quarter billion dollars on the retail market, were now worthless. It was the greatest crime involving wine in history.
Mark Anderson—the man in black—was nowhere to be found.
INTRODUCTION
Mark Anderson was wearing prison orange, not black, when I looked at him through the glass of the jail’s visiting room window. Under the glare of a harsh fluorescent light, his skin was sallow and his once luxurious blond ponytail had turned an undistinguished gray. Anderson was sitting down so I couldn’t see his enormous girth, but the jowls around his face hinted at his size. Anderson’s manner was mild, and his face almost cherubic, but, as I would soon learn, that openness was deceptive: he didn’t care anything for others. He was the kind of man who thought and talked only about himself.
Anderson had asked me to the Sacramento County Jail to prove his innocence. He had been accused of a heinous crime, one that cost the California economy hundreds of millions of dollars. There was plenty of evidence to suggest he was guilty, but Anderson had been spinning tales about his life for so long he never knew when to stop. Maybe this reporter would believe his version of events, would take the clues he hinted at and go out and uncover the government conspiracy he was sure was after him.
We only had twenty minutes to talk. I didn’t have either pen or paper, as I had been ordered to leave my purse in a locker after I had shown my driver’s license to a sheriff’s deputy ensconced behind bulletproof glass. I then joined a long line of women and their children, mostly Mexican or Black, who were waiting to see loved ones too poor to make bail.
How do you cram months’ worth of questions into a few minutes? How do you steer a man you have never met into a conversation about what might have motivated his crime when he has no intention of admitting anything? Even though I had spent years writing about gruesome murders, cheating husbands, and shady politicians, when I sat across from Mark Anderson I found I couldn’t pounce with the hard questions when I needed to. I didn’t have any true killer instinct, it turned out.
Instead, Mark and I had a conversation that wouldn’t have been out of place around a nice dinner and a glass of wine. Of course, it being Mark, who fancied himself a wine connoisseur, the wine would have to be an old Bordeaux or a hard-to-find Burgundy. I inquired about his living conditions. He described them in detail. I asked about his health. He went on to explain his various physical ailments. He had a back so contorted he spent many hours of each day lying on the ground. He was recovering from prostate cancer. He had sleep apnea. According to him, the jail was a pit, “akin to a prison ship in the 1600s” (a reference, it seemed, designed to impress me with his erudition). From there our conversation meandered to his travels in France, the incompetence of his lawyer, and how I really should track down this particular lead. His role in the crime barely came up.
* * *
Mark Anderson wasn’t the only person lying. I had gone to him under the pretense of objectivity, a reporter interested in better understanding why he had set such a destructive fire. That was cover enough for me to write an article.
But I obscured my personal motivations, the real reason I wanted him to confess. Yes, I was after a story, like most reporters. Bu
t I was also there for myself, to understand a chapter from my family’s past, rather than for any scoop I might have scored.
The fire in the Wines Central warehouse in October 2005 had destroyed 175 bottles of Port and Angelica wine my great-great grandfather had made in 1875. The wine had come from a vineyard forty miles east of Los Angeles, in Rancho Cucamonga, from grapes that had been planted as early as 1839. California was part of Mexico then and the area around Los Angeles, not Napa and Sonoma, produced the bulk of the state’s wine. The Cucamonga Vineyard was widely lauded for producing some of the best wine in California.
Numerous wooden boxes of the wine had been handed down through the generations. I hadn’t owned the particular bottles that were destroyed in the fire, although I had a few at my home in Berkeley. Another branch of the family had inherited most of the wine and a cousin had sent the bottles to a winemaker friend in St. Helena for assessment. He had kept the boxes of wine in his caves tunneled into the Mayacamas Mountains for months, but got worried that the humidity would ruin the labels. So when he moved his own wine cases to the Wines Central warehouse, he moved her historic wine as well. He had been convinced that there was no safer place for the wine than the old Navy bunker with its thick, earthquake-proof walls.
That must have been one agonizing phone call to make, the one to my cousin, telling her that all her wine had been destroyed.
To me, the loss of the wine felt like the severing of my past, something I had been trying to grab onto for as long as I could remember. I came from a pioneer California family, but had been ripped from its embrace after my parents’ divorce when I was two. In hindsight, I spent much of my life chasing after the security I imagined an intact home would have provided; when the wine burned I felt like one more link to my father, who had died when I was sixteen, and his side of the family had disappeared.
Tangled Vines Page 1
