It was difficult to determine exactly how many bottles the fire ruined or damaged, and it was a figure that investigators would change over time. For many years Lapham thought that 6 million bottles of wine had been affected; he later revised that figure to 4.5 million bottles. In the days after the fire broke out, officials told reporters that the fire had destroyed $100 million worth of wine. As Lapham refined his calculations, later putting the average retail price of each bottle at sixty dollars, his estimate of the dollar value of the wine soared to $277 million or even more. At one point he thought $400 million of wine had been destroyed, making it the most destructive crime involving wine in history.
The fire scene was so big and the fire so extensive that the Vallejo Fire Department quickly realized it did not have sufficient resources to investigate. The fire chief had requested the assistance of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. By the time Lapham arrived, the warehouse was buzzing with activity. Electrical engineers, fire protection engineers, forensic chemists, evidence technicians, and others from the ATF’s National Response team were picking through the charred debris and talking to witnesses. A dog sniffed around for the presence of accelerants.
The damage to the building was not uniform. Some edges of the warehouse looked almost untouched, with cartons of shrink-wrapped wine still piled high on pallets. The worst damage appeared to be on the west side of the structure where the Navy had built a three-tiered, heavy timber-and-wood plank mezzanine to store torpedoes and other weapons during World War II. Private collections and library wines were kept on that level. Wineries would set aside a few cases from every vintage to make a historical record of their wines and to watch how they aged over time.
The first firefighters on the scene had noticed an orange glow coming from the mezzanine area and the pattern of damage suggested that the fire had started there. The pallets of wine stored nearby were the most singed. Many of the tall stacks had fallen upon one another, blocking that entire section. Moreover, the flames had eaten away a large portion of the floor, sending huge support beams crashing to the level below.
If the mezzanine was the place the fire had started, Lapham thought as he made his way through the warehouse, who had been up there?
* * *
Debbie Polverino, the forty-two-year old dark-haired manager of Wines Central, had been in charge of the warehouse’s operation the day of the fire. Less than twenty-four hours after her workplace burned down around her, ATF Special Agent Brian O. Parker brought Polverino back to the building to walk her through the scene. Polverino knew the space intimately. She was a Napa County native, a descendant of a long line of Portuguese grape growers, and had worked in many facets of the industry. Feisty and talkative, Polverino had been hired at Wines Central in 2003 to overhaul the computer system controlling the logistics and tracking mechanisms of the company. With ninety-five wineries, forty private wine collectors, sugar from C & H sugar, loads of raw sugar from Nicaragua, pasta and sauce from Francis Ford Coppola’s company, and barrels of olive oil, there were lots of moving parts at the warehouse.
The day of the fire had started like any other, Polverino told Parker, a slender man in his early forties with light brown hair, a boyish face partially covered by a Vandyke beard, and gold-rimmed glasses. He would soon be made the ATF’s chief investigator of the fire. It had been a mild summer and harvest had been delayed past its usual early-September start time, which meant that grapes were still sitting on the vines. Twenty to thirty trucks usually delivered wine to the warehouse each day, but the truck traffic was relatively quiet on October 12. So quiet, in fact, that Polverino decided to shut down earlier than the normal four p.m. closing.
In the late afternoon, there was just one truck left at Wines Central. The driver had left the warehouse earlier, but returned when he discovered his load of sugar was too heavy. He parked in a loading dock as a Wines Central workman used a forklift to remove extra bags.
The only other customer in the warehouse was a man Polverino disliked: Mark Anderson. She had long had her suspicions about Anderson—she prided herself on her bullshit detector—and told Parker to take a close look at the man who had vexed her constantly.
Anderson had been difficult from the moment he had become a Wines Central customer in 2004. He had sublet a large space on the mezzanine area for Sausalito Cellars, a boutique wine storage company he had started in 1999 to store collectors’ wine. Anderson had brought in around one hundred pallets of wine, about 67,200 bottles, and sequestered them behind a chain-link fence he had erected around his space.
Polverino thought Anderson was a know-it-all, and an annoying one at that. He had a longstanding relationship with Jack Krystal, one of the owners of Wines Central, and that made Anderson feel he had the right to offer his unsolicited opinion about the warehouse’s operations. It also made him feel immune to Polverino’s request for a detailed inventory of the wine in his storage bay. Every other client was forthright about his or her inventory. Not Anderson.
More annoyingly, Polverino thought Anderson was a braggart, particularly about wine. He would come and sit in her office in his black sweatpants and t-shirt and talk on and on about the oldest vintage he had tasted and how much it cost. He seemed to consider himself a storyteller and, unprompted, would describe marathon tasting sessions he had enjoyed with his wealthy Hong Kong buddies or his many trips to France. Polverino thought he was lying. Anderson didn’t seem particularly knowledgeable about wine, nor did he seem like he could afford to pay for the good stuff. He couldn’t answer a direct question about wine, either. Instead of a simple yes or no, Anderson would meander and take twenty-five minutes to get to the point. Polverino felt she could never get a clear answer out of him.
Anderson was constantly late on his $1,400 a month rent and recently his Sausalito Cellars clients had started calling Wines Central directly to try to find him. It seemed that Anderson had stopped returning their emails and calls.
Relations between Anderson and Wines Central had gotten so bad that the owners had asked him to move out by September, but Anderson had missed the deadline. Then Polverino noticed that strange things were going on in his storage bay. Anderson started to remove bottles of wine from their wooden boxes. He would place the wine bottles in the middle of the floor and stack the wooden boxes along one edge of the storage bay, creating a visual barrier of sorts. After a few weeks of this, there was a wall of boxes and cardboard twenty feet high running the length of the cage. Polverino told Anderson to remove it. He ignored her admonitions.
Anderson had finally started to move his wine out of Wines Central a few weeks earlier, renting a truck to haul his clients’ wine to a warehouse in nearby American Canyon. On the day of the fire, there were only a few pallets left. Anderson came into the building before noon carrying a canvas bag. When Polverino decided to close up early, she sent one of the office workers to the mezzanine to inform Anderson.
A short while later, Anderson rushed through the office, “faster than I have ever seen him,” said Polverino. “He was soaking wet and sweating. His eyes were as wide as could be. He didn’t want to look at me. I said ‘so you are all done?’ He didn’t say anything to me.”
Stranger yet, five to ten minutes later, Anderson telephoned Polverino. He had never called her before. Polverino heard the surprise in Anderson’s voice when she picked up the telephone. “You are still there?” he said. Then he launched into a soliloquy about his schedule, telling Polverino he was on his way to Yountville to visit his ailing father and that he wouldn’t be back at Wines Central the next day. He would return the following week. Polverino was puzzled and slightly disturbed by the interaction. Why was he telling her this? Anderson had never shared any details about his schedule with her before. She had a feeling Anderson was deliberately trying to keep her on the phone.
Polverino hung up and walked out of her office into the main area of the warehouse to collect the mail. She was standing near the carved w
ooden door when it suddenly blew open. Polverino went to shut it, but found it hard to close. She yelled to a colleague, who came over. Together they tugged at the door, using all of their strength to shut and lock it.
Polverino returned to her office. Shortly after she sat down at her desk, the fire alarm went off, sending out a high-pitched noise. The lights flickered. Polverino, confused by what was happening, dashed back onto the warehouse floor. She heard a large rushing sound, like all the air was being sucked out of the warehouse. A moaning and then a zapping noise followed. Then one of the Wines Central workmen yelled out, “There’s a fire!” Polverino turned around to see a huge ball of orange flame coming toward her from the mezzanine area. She ran to the front door, but it wouldn’t open. She pushed it again. It didn’t budge. She threw her weight against it, this time looking over her shoulder at the advancing wall of flames. Another Wines Central worker rushed to help. Together they pushed open the door, and the air rushing out of the warehouse lifted Polverino off her feet. She grabbed onto the door handle so she would not be thrown out of the building. Her white tennis shoes flew off. When the air equalized and Polverino crashed to the ground, she ran away from the building. When she turned around, the warehouse was in flames.
* * *
The yellow Labrador retriever was racing through the Wines Central warehouse, her snout bounding up and down as she leaped over mounds of glass or swerved to avoid felled timbers. She had started her sniffing at the outer edges of the massive building, where the damage was minimal, but had been slowly led toward the mezzanine where officials thought the fire had started. The dog’s nose was incredibly sensitive (dogs have an average of two hundred million cells in their noses compared to a human’s five million) and she was working quickly. She was officially known as an accelerant detection canine, or arson dog, but her name was Rosie. She was four years old.
As Rosie made her way with her ATF handler toward the center of the building, she didn’t sense gasoline or lighter fluid or lamp oil—any of the accelerants she was trained to detect. But when she was led upstairs to Mark Anderson’s storage bay, she sat down and lifted her snout up and down, as if she was nodding a silent yes. That was a sign for the ATF investigators to look more closely through the debris. As they pushed aside burned boxes and shifted beams, they spotted the charred shell of a BernzOmatic brand propane torch, the kind plumbers use to solder copper pipes. That was not something that was usually found in a wine storage facility. The brass nozzle on the torch was slightly melted but still attached, and in a closed position. More digging uncovered some unburned rags and saturated cardboard. Rosie nodded her head vigorously at the items, and was then rewarded with a small treat.
It looked like investigators had found strong evidence that the fire had been deliberately set.
CHAPTER FOUR
A SOGGY, CHARRED MESS
Delia Viader’s wine wasn’t even supposed to be in the Wines Central storehouse. Normally, she kept her wine at her winery in Deer Park, high up on Howell Mountain, until it was ready to be shipped. Then it went to a wine storage warehouse in American Canyon, just a short jog south of Napa, and then it was sent to stores and restaurants around the world. But in 2005, Viader had shipped out wine that normally would have stayed onsite because she was expanding her wine caves. Viader aged her wine in barrels longer than many winemakers. V, her top wine made from Petit Verdot grapes, stayed in new French oak barrels for thirty months. Her main product, Viader, a blend of Cabernet and Cabernet Franc grapes, spent twenty-four months in barrel. As Viader’s operations expanded, she needed more room to age her wine in barrels.
The contractor had promised Viader that he could enlarge the length of the tunnels from 10,000 to 15,000 feet by September, well before the 2005 harvest. But construction fell behind schedule. Viader had to move out her 2003 vintage—all 7,400 cases—or there wouldn’t be room for the upcoming harvest. Since her normal wine storage warehouse in American Canyon was full, Viader turned to Wines Central.
As Viader stood outside the scorched and damaged warehouse a few days after the fire, thoughts about her wine ran through her mind. Yellow police tape cordoned off the warehouse. Ever since the fire erupted, anxious winemakers had clustered outside, eager to find out if any of their wine had survived the fire. They waited for days for news because Vallejo police and ATF investigators had shunned their repeated pleas to be let inside. The longer the winemakers waited, the more frustrated—and fearful—they became.
The morning Viader arrived at the warehouse, the only official on site was Polverino, whose job had gone from managing a wine warehouse to managing its cleanup. There were no cops or firefighters around. Polverino was so busy answering phones in the makeshift office in a trailer that she didn’t object when Viader said she was going to enter the damaged building.
Viader put a hard hat over her blond hair and picked up a flashlight to navigate her way through the pitch-black warehouse. As she entered, the smell of soot and char and wine overwhelmed her. She could see that towering pallets of wine had toppled over and others were so unstable they were likely to collapse without warning. Her thick, sturdy boots crunched on broken glass. What would she find? she wondered. Broken bottles of Viader? Intact cardboard boxes still surrounded by shrink-wrap?
Viader was certain of one thing. She needed to maintain close control of her bottles to ensure her winery’s reputation. She remembered the fire in the Rombauer-Frank Family winery in Calistoga in 2000 in which twenty wineries lost about $40 million of wine. Instead of destroying the ruined wine, an insurance company sold it to a salvage company, which was supposed to remove the labels. But the salvage company sold 9,000 bottles, labels intact, to an import company in San Francisco’s North Beach, passing off the wine off as new. Wine lovers bought the damaged wine, expecting it to taste good, only to find that it had a burned flavor. Lawsuits followed and winemakers like Viader made mental notes never to be cavalier about the disposition of fire-damaged wine.8
As Viader slogged through the darkness, it was nearly impossible for her to distinguish the names of any of the wine sitting near the center of the warehouse where the damage was greatest. Viader had a sense where some of her wine had been stored and walked up to a pile of bottles in that general vicinity. She started to pull bottle after bottle out of the pile, looking for some telltale mark that it was Viader. But the bottles were covered in a layer of charcoal gray ash. The labels were so burned or blackened that few winery names were visible. Viader scrutinized the lead capsules that covered the corks for clues. Many of those had melted. Other bottles had exploded in the heat and shattered into tiny shards of glass.
While the center of the warehouse was a mess, the outer edges looked almost normal. Viader headed to one side of the building where her portable labeling machine had been working a few days earlier. Her heart skipped a beat. There it was: a towering stack of Viader, seemingly untouched in its clear plastic wrap.
Viader sensed an opportunity. She turned around and quickly left the warehouse. She knew she needed to retrieve the wine that looked unscathed. It was only a matter of time before officials would exert greater control on who went in and out of the burned building. She had to act fast.
Viader got into her car, pulled out of the warehouse parking lot and hit the accelerator when she reached the highway. The trip back to her winery took about a half hour. Once there, she ordered her entire crew—grape pickers, wine blenders, cellar rats, interns, about fourteen workers—to return with trucks to Wines Central. Viader was determined to take out some of the wine before unscrupulous people carried it off to sell on the gray market. She felt her reputation depended on it.
By late afternoon, Viader was a dripping mess, her jeans soaked with wine, water, and foam and smelling of smoke. But she and her crew had rescued enough wine with the labels intact to fit inside the back of a small pickup truck and an SUV. They had to squat in the muck and pull bottles from the bottom of a mound of wine to do it, but they had su
cceeded.
The rest of her wine, Viader realized, must lie under the pile of charred and broken bottles.
* * *
Dick Ward was unlucky. Saintsbury’s library of wines had been on the wooden mezzanine level of the warehouse, just a few storage bays away from the space rented by Anderson and right near the ignition point where damage was greatest. The fire had eaten away at the wide plank floorboards and support beams, sending parts of the mezzanine cascading down onto the main floor. There was little that was recognizable in the rubble.
When Ward was finally allowed to go into the warehouse, he peered up in the mezzanine level. Nothing remained. The boxes holding Saintsbury’s library of wines had been burned completely. The only remains of 3,000 cases and 200 large-format bottles from vintages stretching back to 1984 were small pieces of glass. A wave of sadness poured over him. The library wines represented his life’s work, years of cultivating grapes in the vineyard, tinkering with wines in the barrel, and rejoicing when the flavors soared. He had wanted to taste those bottles as they aged to see how his wine evolved. Now that would not happen.
Ward took out his camera and took photos of the collapsed pallets and burned support beams, but felt so shell-shocked and emotionally drained that his gestures were almost automatic. In the days to come, as Ward replayed the scene at the warehouse over and over in his mind, he would remember how spooky and eerie the warehouse felt. The smoky smell lingered on his clothes long after.
Tangled Vines Page 5
