The theft from Esquin’s storage lockers, with its cloak-and-dagger techniques, was dramatic, but in no way unique. Wine theft is fairly common. Wine may not be as valuable as diamonds or gold nuggets, but some bottles are worth thousands of dollars, even tens of thousands of dollars. Wine is hard to trace, too, since producers make many bottles of each vintage. The rise of the Internet and the proliferation of websites selling or buying wine make purloined wine fairly easy to get rid of.
Wine storage facilities are natural targets. Many collectors park their wine in their temperature-controlled lockers and don’t check their collections regularly. Often a collector doesn’t notice a theft until long after a thief has sold his wine to an unsuspecting buyer.
That’s what happened in a wine storage warehouse in the Orange County city of Irvine. Legend Cellars was located in an innocuous business park in the southern California city, but had a reputation for good service. Scott Osumi owned the business, and his father, George, managed it. Wine collectors could rent lockers that held as few as eight cases of wine or as many as 250 cases. One of the business’s selling points was that the 15,000-square-foot facility was monitored by video cameras twenty-four hours a day.66
Since George Osumi managed Legend Cellars, he often helped new clients move into their lockers or assisted them when they brought in more cases. That gave him the chance to scope out who had rare and expensive wines and who only visited the place irregularly. That knowledge proved too valuable for Osumi to resist.
George Osumi had two ways of stealing wine: by stealth, or out in the open. Sometimes at night he entered the warehouse wearing latex gloves. He had hired a locksmith to make keys that fit the private padlocks on some of the locker doors. Osumi would enter and break open wooden wine storage boxes. He would remove expensive bottles of French and California wine and replace them with cheap bottles. Then he would nail up the boxes and place them back exactly as he found them. On other occasions, Osumi would order subordinates to enter the lockers and remove wine.
Over a five-year period from 2008 to 2012, Osumi stole about $2.7 million in wine, including bottles from a friend who had recently died. He stole 1,200 bottles from another collector. Osumi then asked his girlfriend to approach the Belmont Wine Exchange near the San Francisco airport and consign wines through them. She sold about $280,000 of wine during a one-month period in 2008. Osumi gave her a portion of the sales. Osumi also sold wine over the Internet. He pocketed a total of $311,000. Police later determined that neither Osumi’s girlfriend nor the store knew the wine had been stolen. Osumi’s son, Scott, was also ignorant of his father’s theft.
Osumi was caught after a client of Legend Cellars noticed that the contents of his wooden box that was supposed to contain six bottles of white wine from Domaine Leflaive, worth about $370 each, had been replaced with bottles of Chardonnay worth six dollars each. He went to the police. A jury found George Osumi, sixty-four, guilty of theft in 2013. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
There’s a pattern to many wine thefts. In May 2011, six thieves broke into an east London wine storage facility in Bethnal Green, disabled the alarm and CCTV cameras, and then used a forklift to place about 400 cases of wine on a pallet. They then carted the wine, worth an estimated $1.63 million, away in two white vans and a brown truck. They have never been caught.
Private collections are also at risk. On Christmas Day, 2014, thieves broke into the French Laundry, chef Thomas Keller’s storied restaurant in Yountville. It had just closed for a six-month renovation. The thief or thieves knew what they were after. They jimmied the door of the unmarked wine cellar and nabbed seventy-six bottles of top French wine, including vertical collections of Burgundies from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Dom Perignon Champagne worth an approximate $300,000. Most of the bottles were recovered a few weeks later at the home of a collector in Greensboro, North Carolina.
There are no firm numbers on how much wine has been stolen in recent years, but the numbers certainly reach into the millions of dollars. It’s a tough crime to track, as criminals often sell the stolen goods online case by case or bottle by bottle. Unlike art or antiquities, there is no centralized registry for stolen wine, making it difficult to connect any specific bottle to one that is missing.
A thief has numerous ways to get rid of stolen wine. He or she can put it up for sale on websites like eBay, Craigslist, or Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce site. He can approach a wine broker who buys old cellars or collections and sells them to wine stores. Or he can approach any one of a number of wine retailers who sell their products over the Internet. And some restaurants have been known to buy wine sold to them for much less than the wholesale price, which suggests they may realize they are buying stolen goods.
In turn, there often is little scrutiny of the wines offered for sale or consignment. Few retail stores or brokers expect sellers to have receipts for their wine, particularly older vintages. They assume that the wine was purchased long ago, has sat for a decade or more in a cellar, and the receipts are lost. This courteous attitude may reflect the gentlemanly origins of wine collecting, when it was an avocation of just an elite few. There is a camaraderie between those who revere wine, a brotherhood, and a sense that too much crass commercialism and scrutiny of a wine buyer taints the process. When I called numerous merchants around the country to ask about this dark side of wine, few were willing to talk about the underbelly of the wine world. None wanted their names attached to their remarks. “We don’t want any bad publicity,” one said.
Wine merchants do try to check to see if a seller is legitimate, but they rarely delve deeply into someone’s background. One retailer told me he puts the name of any potential seller into Google, and if there is any whiff of wrongdoing he immediately aborts the transaction. But if nothing turns up, he makes the sale. Another online retailer who deals in expensive French, Italian, and California wines asks potential sellers for photos of their cellars or refrigerated spaces. On occasion, he will visit. To cut down on the possibility of buying stolen wine (which has happened, he confessed), he won’t pay cash for wine. He will only pay by check to establish a paper trail.
When Mark Anderson approached various wine houses around the Bay Area to see if they would be interested in purchasing wine, none of them asked for proof that he owned the bottles. All Anderson did—and all that was required—was offer verbal assurance that he had the legal right to sell the wine. It was not until years later, after newspaper articles appeared detailing Anderson’s crimes, that the wine merchants cut off relations with him. Even then, Anderson managed to circumvent the obstacles and sell wine under a fake name.
Given this lack of scrutiny and how difficult it is to track down stolen wine over the Internet, happenstance can often play a large role in catching criminals.
It was sheer luck that authorities uncovered a wine theft ring in Sonoma County in 2008. A group of men, led by a customer sales representative working inside a distribution center for Jackson Family wines, the umbrella organization for the dozens of wineries owned by the late Jess Jackson, the lawyer-turned-wine magnate, managed to steal about $200,000 of wine by falsifying internal records. The sales rep set up shipments of wine to phony customers and then reported the wine as lost so it wouldn’t be traced. He and two accomplices then sold the bottles of red Bordeaux-like wine, valued at $150 to $175 a bottle, on eBay. They also sold some to online wine retailers. They got caught when they sold some wine that hadn’t yet been released to the public. A company official noticed, realized that the theft must be an inside job, and contacted authorities.
In fact, stupidity may be the police’s best friend. The two men who stole 200 cases from the Seattle wine store never got the chance to dispose of the wine. They made several mistakes during their cloak-and-dagger burglary that ultimately led to their arrest. When they spray-painted the lenses of the security cameras, they neglected to cover them completely. An employee of the wine store reviewed the security tapes and was able to id
entify one of the thieves as a customer who had rented a basement storage locker just a few weeks earlier. When police went to his apartment, they found a black gym bag with lists of wine and descriptions of wine in it, along with emails to a San Francisco wine broker offering to sell about $100,000 worth of wine. Inside the glove compartment of the SUV, police found a notebook that had “The Plan” written on the title page. It included a step-by-step to-do list for the wine theft, including what tools to buy, how to destroy evidence, and how to escape to another country.
Within days, the Seattle police department had arrested two men in connection with the crime. The stolen wine was also recovered, in a temperature-controlled facility less than a mile from where it was taken. When the two men pleaded guilty in July 2014, the prosecutor called it “the poorest execution of the greatest heist of wine.”67 The man who tried to set the fire was sentenced to nine years in prison; his accomplice got six years.
* * *
The problem of wine theft is small, however, compared to that of wine fraud, which has been going on for millennia. Pliny the Elder, who lived from about 23 BCE to 79 ACE, complained that much of the wine passed off as fine Roman wine during his time was actually fake.68
The most coveted wine was Falernum, a sweet white wine that turned deep amber as it aged. The wine was praised by nobles, coveted by everyone, available to just a few. But amphorae supposedly containing Falernum were ubiquitous, according to Pliny, even though the grapes for Falernum wine only came from three vineyards high on the slopes Mount Falernus, north of Naples, Italy. There was hardly enough to be as abundant as claimed.
One of the largest cases of wine fraud in the United States happened in 1987, and Steven Lapham, who would prosecute Mark Anderson twenty years later, was the assistant U.S. attorney spearheading the case. Interest in California wine had exploded in the late 1970s when a young winemaker named Bob Trinchero accidentally created a sweet, light pink wine he called white Zinfandel. Trinchero had been pushing his father Mario, the owner of Sutter Home winery in St. Helena, to plant more Zinfandel grapes. Zinfandel had once been one of California’s most popular varieties, but had fallen out of favor after Prohibition. Trinchero was one of a new group of young winemakers who saw potential in the grape. He loved its dense, fruity flavor. But Mario was skeptical, and only grudgingly allowed his son to proceed.
Ridge Vineyards and Mayacamas Vineyards had also gone into Zinfandel in a big way and Trinchero wanted to make a wine that was better than theirs. In an attempt to enhance his Zinfandel, in 1972 Trinchero crushed the grapes and drew off some of the juice before the wine started to ferment. The French call this process saignée. It intensifies the color, body, and flavor of wine by decreasing the amount of juice relative to the amount of skins. The process worked: the Sutter Home 1972 Zinfandel was a rich, flavorful wine with a deep red color.
Trinchero was left with 550 gallons of light blush liquid. He fermented it into wine and sold it, with mild success, in the Sutter Home tasting room along Highway 29 in St. Helena.
But in 1975, the saignée juice pulled off the Zinfandel got “stuck.” During fermentation, the sugar in grapes turns to alcohol, but conversion stalled that year. No matter what he tried, Trinchero could not get his wine to complete fermentation. The resulting wine was sweeter than usual, with a 2 percent sugar level. Trinchero bottled it anyway.69
The slightly pink wine was a hit. Consumers loved its sweetness. People who rarely drank wine were soon regular buyers of white Zinfandel. In 1980, Sutter Home produced more than 25,000 cases of the wine. By 1987, the winery was selling two million cases of white Zin, as it was affectionately called.70
Soon, around 125 wineries around the state were selling their own versions of white Zinfandel, including some of the larger winemakers like E. & J. Gallo, Beringer, and Robert Mondavi.
The new popularity of the blush wine meant there was a rush to buy Zinfandel grapes. Demand soon outstripped supply. Prices soared. Zinfandel grapes, which had been selling for $100 a ton in the early 1980s, sold for $900 a ton a few years later.71 That was about $750 more a ton than other varietals like Carignane or Barbera.
To a number of grape growers in the Central Valley, the shortage of Zinfandel presented an opportunity—but not a legal one. Why not, some reasoned, pass off cheaper varietals as Zinfandel? After all, to the casual observer Barbera grapes looked much like Zinfandel grapes—big, red, and fat. How about going a step further, too, and selling French Colombard grapes as Sauvignon Blanc grapes or Thompson seedless as Chardonnay?
Why not give it a try?
* * *
In the predawn darkness of the San Joaquin Valley, the men began to arrive slowly. Some came by car, others by truck. Engines rumbled, doors slammed, and soon the sounds of Spanish rang out across the hundreds of acres of grapevines that stretched far into the horizon. The men, most from Mexico and Central America, donned their heavy work gloves, picked up their shears and got to work.
Harvesting grapes is an art form of sorts, a balance of speed and delicacy. Temperatures in California’s vast Central Valley in late summer can easily reach 100 degrees by noon, so a worker has to pick quickly before the heat affects the fruit, but handle the grapes gently enough not to split their skins. The laborers that day worked at a rapid pace, clipping off the red, fat clusters and dropping the grapes into plastic crates at their feet. They moved from vine to vine and when the crates were full, they dumped the grapes into the back of a tractor-trailer narrow enough to navigate between the rows.
The pickers were probably too busy to notice the two men parked a few hundred feet down the road. The men had gotten to the vineyard even earlier than the workers and grabbed a spot under a large shade tree. It takes a long time to fill up a truck with twenty tons of grapes. The men in the American sedan had to blink off sleep and keep up a constant banter to stay alert over the course of the morning. They tried to be innocuous, too, by parking their car facing away from the vineyard. That let them monitor the harvest through the rearview mirror. But the men had gotten good at spying, their instincts honed after staking out a dozen vineyards over a six-week period. They had been working for almost a year to uncover one of the biggest wine frauds in California history, and the season of proof had finally arrived.
As the sun inched up higher into the sky, a truck loaded with glistening grapes pulled away from the vineyard. The two men watched it drive off, then did a U-turn, hoping the managers and workers in the vineyard didn’t notice them. The men followed the truck over back roads and watched it pull into a large winemaking facility. They noted the truck’s license plate, the time it left the vineyard, the time it arrived at the winery, and where the grapes came from.
They had snared their prey.72
* * *
The trucks laden with grapes had pulled into Delicato Vineyards in Manteca, about seventy miles east of San Francisco. In the late 1980s, Delicato was the largest maker of bulk white Zinfandel wine in California, producing it for Sutter Home and other wineries that sold it under their own labels. Delicato got many of its grapes from Michael Liccardi, a prominent wine broker from Stockton. Liccardi provided so many grapes that Delicato had given him unprecedented—and unsupervised—twenty-four-hour access to their wine production facility. Liccardi even had his own office in the Delicato complex where he could schedule and oversee the grape deliveries.
With a seemingly bottomless market for Zinfandel grapes, Liccardi needed to figure out a way to increase his supply. So he recruited two grape growers, the brothers Frank and Nick Bavaro, to help with a scheme he concocted. The Bavaro brothers would harvest Carignane and Valdepena grapes and pass the thick, red-skinned grapes off as white Zinfandel grapes.
To make sure the falsification was not detected, the Bavaro brothers had their farmworkers pick grapes in the cool of the night and deliver them to Delicato anywhere from two a.m. to four a.m.—when no one but Liccardi was around. Over a few years, Liccardi managed to broker the sale of 4,900 tons
of grapes valued at $3.1 million that weren’t what they purported to be. Those grapes produced 900,000 gallons of wine worth $18 million. The Bavaro brothers not only provided grapes to Delicato, but to unsuspecting wineries like Sebastiani Vineyards, Charles Krug Winery, and the Robert Mondavi winery.73
Another grape grower who sought a shortcut was Fred Franzia, the nephew of Ernest Gallo and the founder of Bronco Wines (which would eventually launch the world’s best-selling brand, Charles Shaw, better known as Two-Buck Chuck). Franzia, a brash, loud man, thought most Napa Valley winemakers were snobs. Franzia disdained those “highfalutin” vintners because he believed good wine could be made inexpensively. He became particularly creative with the grapes he passed off as Zinfandel. His crew scattered leaves from Zinfandel vines on the top of other grape varieties to obscure their true origins. Franzia called this the “blessing of the loads,” a reference to the practice of blessing the harvest. Franzia also passed off Carigne and Grenache grapes, which brought in about $196 a ton in 1992, as Cabernet grapes, which commanded about $387 a ton.
The growers and winemakers obscured the varietals by falsifying the tags accompanying the loads of grapes to the winemaking facilities. When grapes are harvested, the grower is supposed to fill out a field tag with the name and address of the grape grower, the grape variety, the date and time they were picked, the name of the trucking company delivering the grapes, and the license number of the trucks. The truck driver takes the field tag to the winery, which then uses the information to prepare a certificate for the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The winery also uses the information from the tag to file reports to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Often, a state inspector is on site to examine the grapes. The men taking shortcuts began falsifying the field tags to read “Zinfandel” rather than the true names of the grapes.
The money came rolling in. Some brazen grape growers bragged about the scam openly in coffee shops and diners. Word of their exploits spread around the San Joaquin Valley’s tight-knit wine community. It angered a lot of grape growers who struggled to make an honest living. Some called up the California Department of Food and Agriculture to report the rumors. Others telephoned the ATF. Soon, the two agencies had agreed to work together to break open the counterfeit ring.
Tangled Vines Page 14
