“The machine works something like a road-scraper, has a knife that sinks two feet underground and cuts the vines off there,” wrote Graves. “Mr. Stowe told me that he removed 25 acres a day with it, at a slight expense, whereas to grub them up by hand would cost $25.00 an acre. I don’t think the Stanford estate will ask us very much for the old machine.”167
The machine from Stanford’s old vineyard arrived by train to Rancho Cucamonga in early January 1917. It had rained heavily that month and the ground was so saturated that work couldn’t start immediately. The man in charge of uprooting the vineyard, Mr. Stowe, only got going on the job a few weeks later. He drove the machine through the old vines, ripping and tugging them from the ground. In the first three days, he took out forty acres. “Our vines are so big, much bigger, I guess, than this machine ever tackled, that there is some difficulty in getting rid of the vines after they are dug up,” Graves wrote Hellman. “So we had to put two Mexicans on the job to grab a vine as quick as it is cut off and pull it out of the way. This allows the machine to go ahead without stopping.”168
It took the foreman three months to remove all the grapevines from the vineyard.
* * *
I was sitting in the reading room of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, when I read Graves’s letters about the old machine rented from Stanford University. It was astonishing to learn specific details about the demise of the vineyard, one that had been planted during the rancho era of the Californios and ended seventy-eight years later in the middle of World War I. Just a few years later, Prohibition would put a different kind of end to the California wine industry.
When I read Graves’s description of the vines’ tenacity, I gave a silent cheer. Good for them to protest their destruction, I thought, and to cling with their roots to life as long as possible. I liked the idea that the grapevines that had been planted before California was part of the United States had resisted their death. I doodled on my notebook: “RIP: 1839–1917.”
PART FIVE
DECEPTION
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THEFT AND DECEPTION
In December 2003, Samuel Maslak’s tortuous court case over the bankruptcy of his South San Francisco restaurant was nearing resolution. It was time to sell his wine and distribute the funds. Maslak had hired the London-based Christie’s to auction off the restaurant’s collection. Christie’s had a good reputation in the wine world, and selling a wine collection through the company signaled its excellence. Maslak hired a trucking company to pick his wine up from Sausalito Cellars so the Christie’s wine experts could catalogue it.
But the driver who pulled his big truck up to the loading dock of Sausalito Cellars faced a surprise. Maslak had told him he would be picking up around 756 cases of wine. But when the driver arrived, Anderson said there was much less wine—a total of just 144 cases. Baffled, and not sure what to do, the driver left Sausalito. As soon as he arrived at the office he alerted his supervisor to the discrepancy.
When Maslak heard the news he was furious. How could Anderson claim he had not left 756 cases worth around $650,000 at Sausalito Cellars, especially since he had been spending $600 a month for the privilege? How could some of them “disappear”?
Maslak immediately called Anderson to demand an explanation. But the answers he received made him even angrier. Anderson spun wild tales about the missing cases, one so complicated and convoluted it was hard to follow. In Maslak’s mind, the transaction was simple: he had dropped off 756 cases of French Bordeaux, Burgundy, and many California varietals in May 2001. Now he wanted them back.
That would not be possible, Anderson insisted. When they had first communicated, he had gone to the restaurant to look at the wine cellar to estimate the scope of the contract. When he arrived, the wine cellar was in disarray with bottles out of boxes stacked on shelves, Anderson claimed. Anderson offered to box the wine, but Maslak decided to do it himself—meaning that the bottles were all jumbled together when they arrived at Sausalito Cellars.169 Moreover, Sausalito Cellars stored fewer boxes than Maslak contended, according to Anderson. The first driver dropping off cases in 2001 only left 200 cases of wine, not the 756 cases that Maslak remembered, said Anderson. There was no way the old location of Sausalito Cellars could have held so much wine, said Anderson. It was a tiny facility.
And didn’t Maslak remember that he had sent someone in December 2002 to pick up about forty cases for a party that he was throwing? He had nothing to do with the missing wine, Anderson insisted.
“I called Mark and said, ‘There should be roughly 7,000 bottles of wine,’” Maslak said. “Mark’s answer was, ‘I was wondering when you were going to deliver (the rest of) those wines for storage.’”170
The explanation Anderson provided was lengthy and complicated, full of long-ago actions that didn’t quite make sense. Even though he and Maslak had a signed contract stating how much wine Sausalito Cellars would store, Anderson just dismissed what was written on it. This would be his modus operandi during the next few years—offering convoluted explanations for why a client’s wine was missing. The wine was there, just not available. Or there had been a flood in the storage cellar and many saturated boxes fell apart, so wine got mixed up. Or it was a case of bad record keeping. Or one of Sausalito Cellars’s employees might have taken the wine. It was always someone else’s fault, never Anderson’s.
Maslak didn’t believe a word Anderson said. In the two and a half years Maslak’s wine had been at Sausalito Cellars, Anderson had never once mentioned that some of it had not been delivered. And Maslak, a successful businessman who lived in a spacious home in Woodside, a tony suburb south of San Francisco, was not the kind of guy who let himself get hoodwinked.
So one cool gray December day in 2003, Maslak drove to the headquarters of the Sausalito Police Department, then operating out of a trailer near the waterfront. It was a small police operation with fewer than twenty-five officers, a department that spent most of its time dealing with tourist theft, burglaries, and parking issues. When Maslak walked in and started talking to Sgt. William Fraass, a second-generation Sausalito police officer, he kicked off one of the biggest investigations ever launched by the department. Solving it would demand many years of Fraass’s attention.
* * *
Two months later, Fraass had enough information to file criminal embezzlement charges against Anderson. On February 25, 2004, the Marin County district attorney’s office filed one felony count of embezzlement against Anderson. No warrant was issued for his arrest; instead the court sent Anderson a letter informing him of the charges and ordering him to appear in court.
On March 17, 2004, Anderson drove north from his Sausalito apartment to the Marin County Civic Center, a landmark building with distinctive blue roof that had been Frank Lloyd Wright’s last commission. Anderson’s back was bothering him so he slowly made his way up to the “C” floor, where courtrooms lined the hallway. His attorney, Douglas Horngrad, was there to represent him. Dorothy Proudfoot was the deputy district attorney for the prosecution. Anderson entered a “not guilty” plea.
* * *
Three months later, Jack Rubyn, president of the Marin chapter of the International Food and Wine Society, went to Sausalito Cellars to pick up some bottles of Château Cheval Blanc for a vertical tasting of the prized Bordeaux varietal. The group had been started in 1996 and its 600 members met numerous times a year to drink and feast and revel in the sense of community that wine appreciation could bring. The members always gathered at top restaurants. In 1997, for example, the society had hosted two meals at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the restaurant credited with launching the nation’s push for fresh and local ingredients, as well as a luncheon at the French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s Michelin three-star restaurant in Yountville. The Society also hosted a party to celebrate Julia Child’s birthday at Roland Passant’s Left Bank in Larkspur.
Anderson was a longtime member of the club. There was nothing he liked bette
r than sitting around a table, eating delicious food, drinking excellent wine, and talking with friends. Over the years he and Rubyn had become close—so close that Rubyn agreed to move the society’s wines into Sausalito Cellars. Anderson had fenced off a section of the storage facility and told Rubyn that he would be the only one with a key.
Because Anderson was a trusted, longtime member of the group, the International Food and Wine Society had placed a number of its best wines in Styrofoam packaging on shelves in the rear portion of Sausalito Cellars. But when Rubyn entered the area that June day, he noticed that the containers, each marked with a unique identification number, were out of order.171 He opened a case that was supposed to contain a magnum of 1929 Cheval Blanc. It was empty. He then reached for the container that should have held a magnum of 1959 Cheval Blanc. It, too, was missing. An increasingly worried Rubyn also discovered that a 1961 Cheval Blanc was not in its container. Pale with shock—after all, he considered Anderson a close friend—Rubyn found wine in boxes that it should not have been in, and more wine missing from where it should be.
Rubyn returned to Sausalito Cellars the next day and discovered that a box that should have contained a jeroboam (equivalent to six bottles) of 1995 Musigny-Vogue worth about $2,600 “looked odd.” Instead of the fine French wine, Rubyn found a jeroboam of Estancia Chardonnay nestled inside. It was worth about $50. That wine did not belong to the Society. Other large-format bottles, including a 1959 jeroboam of Château Lafite Rothschild valued at $29,000, were also missing. All told, 482 bottles, worth $282,289, were not where they were supposed to be.
The next day Rubyn went down to the Sausalito police station and filed a report.
* * *
News of the embezzlement charges reached across San Francisco Bay in mid-June. John Fox, the owner of Premier Cru, a retail wine store and auction business in Emeryville, was disturbed. His company had been buying wine from Anderson for more than two years, and Fox had to consider the possibility that some of it might have been stolen. Fox was concerned his company’s reputation would be tainted if customers learned they had purchased stolen wine. Fox contacted Anderson and told him his business was no longer welcome. The last transaction between Premier Cru and Anderson was on June 7, 2004.
The news was a blow to Anderson. He was increasingly dependent on his illegal wine sales. While he had relied on his father’s largesse for decades, his father’s bank account had finally dried up. He couldn’t lend his son any more money. Sausalito Cellars wasn’t bringing in much cash, either. Anderson’s clients had started cancelling their contracts when they heard about the embezzlement charges. Anderson was now behind in his rent for the large space at 30 Libertyship Way.
But Anderson thought he might be able to get around Premier Cru’s banishment. It was simple, really. All he had to do was use a different name.
Anderson had long associated the word “Kansai” with wine. After all, he had learned so much about wine when he hung out with the group of Japanese businessmen in the 1980s. They had dubbed themselves the Kansai Wine Club, named after a region in the southern-central section of the main island of Japan. So Anderson created a new entity, “Kansai Partners,” with which to sell wine. Anderson sent off an email to Premier Cru offering the store twenty-four bottles of high-end French wine. On June 14—just a week after telling Anderson his business was no longer welcome—Premier Cru purchased those twenty-four bottles from Kansai Partners for $34,800.172
Anderson needed another place to sell the purloined wine, some place well out of town that had never heard about his embezzlement charges. Anderson settled on the Chicago Wine Company, a well-regarded auction house. But to be sure, he approached the auction house not as Mark Anderson, but as Kansai Partners. On September 29, 2004, the Chicago Wine Company purchased forty-five cases of wine from Kansai.
Despite all these sales, Anderson found himself $5,000 behind in rent at Sausalito Cellars. His relationship with the building’s owner and manager had let him postpone his debt, but he needed to find a less expensive alternative to storing his clients’ wine than in a Class A office building in Sausalito.
Another business acquaintance of Anderson’s, Jack Krystal, a commercial property developer born in Argentina, had opened a large wine storage warehouse on the old Navy base on Mare Island in Vallejo, about thirty-seven miles northwest of Sausalito. Anderson had known Krystal for more than a decade, mostly through Chamber of Commerce events and other business gatherings, and they were friendly. Anderson had been with Krystal the day he and his business partners took over the lease for the former Navy warehouse they planned to turn into a fine wine storage facility.
Mare Island was the first naval station on the West Coast, opening in 1851. It had once been a bustling naval hub teeming with service men and those who repaired Navy ships and submarines. But the Navy moved out in 1996 after a 143-year occupation, leaving behind a collection of concrete bunkers, huts, and miles of cracked pavement. Lennar Corporation had won the right to redevelop the land for the city of Vallejo.
Krystal and his three partners had been looking to start a boat storage company when they toured Building 627 on Mare Island. They were impressed with what they saw. The warehouse was huge, around 600 feet long and 300 feet wide, with large rolling doors and numerous loading docks. Rumor had it that the parts for Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, had been stored in that warehouse, but that may have only been an urban myth. What was provable was that the U.S.S. Indianapolis had stopped by Mare Island during World War II and had picked up a top-secret payload it then carted to Tinian in the Northern Marian Islands where the A-bomb was assembled. Four days after delivering the atomic bomb, a Japanese submarine torpedoed the U.S.S. Arizona, killing 200 and tossing 880 men into the ocean. The men had to tread water and fight off vicious shark attacks for five days before they were rescued. Only 317 sailors survived.
When Krystal and his partners saw the space, they jettisoned their plans for a boat storage business and decided to start a wine storage business instead. Vallejo was ideally situated: it sat at the intersection of a number of highways connected to San Francisco, Sacramento, Napa, and Sonoma. It was also close to the railroad. There was also an increasing demand for wine storage services. Land was so expensive in Napa and zoning restrictions so tight that there weren’t many storage facilities near the bulk of the wineries; instead they were clustered at the southern end of the valley and places like Vallejo.
The men’s vision was big: they not only wanted to offer storage of wine cases, but of barrels of wine. They wanted to purchase a wine trucking company so they could pick up and drop off deliveries. They wanted to offer wine tastings to lure in retail customers. They wanted Wines Central to cater to small and large wineries, from one-person operations to corporate giants that produced 100,000 cases a year. And since the warehouse’s walls were three feet thick, they marketed the building as particularly safe from earthquakes, little realizing how the concrete walls would later bake the wine.
Wines Central was successful from the start. Krystal and his partners attracted a number of large corporate clients, including Sterling Vineyards and Beaulieu Vineyards. There were small clients as well, such as Sinskey Vineyards, an organic and biodynamic vineyard on the Silverado Trail, and Saddleback Cellars, whose owner, Nils Venge, had earned the nickname “King of Cab.”
Sean Thackrey was attracted to Wines Central because he thought the three-foot-thick walls of the former naval bunker would be indestructible in an earthquake. Amazon Ranch liked the place because its rents were reasonable. None of the winemakers thought to inquire if Wines Central had fire sprinklers. It didn’t.
Since Anderson needed to leave his Sausalito cellar, he rented Bay 14, a 2,500-square-foot space on the second-floor mezzanine in an area reserved for individual collectors and special collections. Anderson got permission to erect a chain-link fence to segregate Sausalito Cellars’ wine from the rest of the wine on the mezzanine, allowing him co
mplete control over his space. No one else had that privilege. Anderson’s storage space was directly above the space used by Long Meadow Ranch.
Anderson started to transfer his clients’ wine from the Libertyship Way facility in Sausalito to Wines Central in the summer of 2004. He was in no hurry to inform his clients about the move; in fact he retained a small office space in his old building so he could keep the same address. By fall, Sausalito Cellars had relocated about 100 pallets of wine, which works out to 5,600 cases or 67,200 bottles.
* * *
Pressure on Anderson continued to build. Maslak filed a civil lawsuit against Sausalito Cellars and Anderson on July 23, 2004. Susan Guerguey, the secretary for the Society of Medical Friends of Wine, a group started in 1939 by doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals to explore the medicinal benefits of wine, heard about the embezzlement charges around then. Troubled, she called Anderson and demanded to see the group’s wine. To her astonishment, Anderson told her the wine was no longer in Sausalito, but at a warehouse in Vallejo. So Guerguey and the group’s president drove to Wines Central. When they arrived, Anderson pointed them to a collection of boxes. Guerguey checked each box off against her inventory and found that a lot of wine was missing. She told Anderson that the society was terminating its contract with Sausalito Cellars immediately. She marched down to the office of Wines Central and arranged to rent some space in the mezzanine—space to which Anderson had no access.
On December 17, 2004, the Marin County district attorney filed four additional embezzlement charges against Anderson, alleging he had stolen 6,600 bottles of wine worth more than $870,000 from his Sausalito Cellars clients. The new charges sparked the local newspaper, the Marin Independent Journal, to splash a story about Anderson on the front of its local section. Soon, other clients of Sausalito Cellars started to call wanting to know the whereabouts of their wine.
Tangled Vines Page 21
