by Dan Barry
But that delicate compact snapped last month when the creamery’s longtime chief executive left one day and never came back, though he passed on word of possible irregularities in the books. Now the 80-year-old creamery is in jeopardy, as are the livelihoods of people like Mr. Vevoda. He joins the ranks of so many others who feel betrayed—by the Bernard Madoffs, the American International Groups and the predatory lenders who have come to define this distrusting time.
Mr. Vevoda’s dairy-farm view of the world makes it hard for him to accept what has happened in Humboldt County. The way he sees it, you can’t just skip a milking, or stay in bed when a cow is calving. These animals count on you, and you count on these animals. The same with people.
One Thursday about a month ago, while Mr. Vevoda worked his farm, his herding dogs galumphing about him, the creamery’s chief executive, Rich Ghilarducci, left for some business in San Francisco. He and John grew up in nearby Rio Dell, and Rich was in the same class as one of John’s sisters. Everyone here knows Rich.
Late the next day, a San Francisco law firm whose specialties include white-collar criminal defense called the creamery’s lawyer with cryptic news. Expect to receive Mr. Ghilarducci’s resignation letter any minute now. Also, you could have problems with the creamery’s financial statement, so you might want to stop selling those preferred stocks.
The chief operating officer, Len Mayer, frantically kept calling Mr. Ghilarducci. Finally, he just left a message: “Rich. Give me a clue.”
He has not received an answer. Mr. Ghilarducci and his wife, it seems, have left their Rio Dell home, a silver teapot on the stove, a classic car in the garage. A local newspaper, The Ferndale Enterprise, later found him at his second residence, in Arizona, and published a photograph of his right arm closing the door to questions.
The central question—what happened?—essentially remains unanswered. Mr. Mayer would not provide a figure for the creamery’s financial hole, although he acknowledged that the $400,000 raised through the sale of the preferred stock could not yet be returned to investors; it’s been spent. He also said the creamery had been in touch with three federal investigative agencies in San Francisco.
The damage, Mr. Mayer said, “is big enough to threaten the future of the creamery.”
Mr. Ghilarducci’s lawyer, Elliot R. Peters, declined to say why his client abruptly left his job, home, colleagues and friends. But he said that Mr. Ghilarducci had “never done anything he thought was contrary to the interests of the Humboldt Creamery.”
In fact, he said, Mr. Ghilarducci had worked hard for the creamery, and had used $200,000 of his own money—taken from a home equity line of credit—to cover the creamery’s payroll last year.
Mr. Mayer, though, said he was unaware of any financial rescue by Mr. Ghilarducci, beyond investments he had made along with other creamery executives. As for whether Mr. Ghilarducci has ever done anything contrary to the creamery’s interests, Mr. Mayer answered in this way:
“He ups and resigns without any warning? And he’s not reachable?”
On the Saturday after the resignation, while Mr. Vevoda tended to his Holsteins, unawares, creamery executives holed up at a bed-and-breakfast and pored over financial records. On the Sunday, while the Vevoda family attended church, the executives told the creamery’s nine board members, all dairy farmers, what little they knew: holes in the financial records, an inability to re-create the balance sheet, and Rich in the wind.
Around 7 that Monday morning, a board member came to the Vevoda farm with a statement about to be issued by the creamery. It included phrases like independent inquiry and sudden resignation and inaccurate financial statements.
Mr. Vevoda exploded. He ordered the man to the family kitchen, because Kris, his wife, needed to be in on this. He then called his son and partner, Robert, and said, Get your butt up here. The three Vevodas stood around the dark granite counter while the board member, who was not offered coffee, stammered that he didn’t know any more.
John yelled, Kris cried and Robert kept asking, “Are we getting paid?” But after a while, what can you say?
John Vevoda, 56, body aching, stared out the kitchen windows, past the hummingbird feeders, past the welcome flag waving over the herb garden, to the acres of Vevoda pasture. He thought of his 35 years as a dairyman and the many trials he had endured, none greater than this:
In 1987, his first wife, Margaret, and their 5-year-old son, John, drowned while swimming in the Eel River. Another son, the son now standing beside him in the kitchen, saw it happen; he was 9.
Things went haywire after that. But through all the drinking that never rinsed away the grief, Robert Vevoda, 31, recalls that his father made him breakfast every morning, packed his lunch for school and kept the dairy going.
Finally, John Vevoda’s mother, Lotta, intervened by tracking down a high school girlfriend of John’s from the Bay Area. Kris was the mother of three children, divorced and working as an assistant bank manager. When her secretary said someone was asking for her by her maiden name, she hesitated about taking a call from that deep in the past.
She took the call.
As he stared into the green beyond the kitchen, Mr. Vevoda did some math. The creamery owed them $120,000 for the milk they produced in January, money needed to pay bills. And they had another $380,000 invested in the dairy cooperative. All of it now at risk or gone.
That night, John Vevoda got out of bed and threw up.
For the next several days, forensic accountants hired by the creamery worked in Mr. Ghilarducci’s office. There, under the gaze of dozens of his stuffed toy cows, they tried to make sense of the books.
The creamery’s executives then met with the cooperative’s 50 farmers in the turf building at the county fairgrounds. After a somber discussion, and with one executive near tears, the farmers voted unanimously to defer $2 million in payments for their January milk so the creamery could keep the doors open, pay employees, calm antsy vendors—and buy time while trying to figure out how to survive.
Matters had become that precarious. “If, say, the guy who sells us lids for our milk cartons wants to get paid immediately, everything grinds to a halt,” Mr. Mayer said.
When the fragile compact is broken—when that responsibility to one another is betrayed—the repercussions are felt by people far removed from, say, an office filled with stuffed toy cows. There are the dairy farmers, some of whose families helped establish the Humboldt Creamery cooperative in 1929. The local Easter Seals telethon, which no longer has the creamery’s financial support. The creamery employees, truckers, suppliers of lids. Their families.
The Vevodas. John’s mother, who lent them $10,000. Their employees. Their employees’ families, including Edgar’s two children, one 5 years old, the other 4 months old. The cows.
With their January payment short about $100,000, the Vevodas asked for time from their vendors and lenders. But the bank went ahead and processed a $20,000 mortgage payment. And one of their feed suppliers said that from now on, it’s cash on delivery.
The Vevodas faced some hard choices; after all, Kris Vevoda said, “You can’t just open the gates and tell the girls to have a nice life.” So they held a staff meeting in the milk barn, while 24 Holsteins in the stalls waited to be milked.
We’ll be using cheaper feed, John Vevoda explained. No layoffs, for now, but you’ll be working five days a week, not six. No more overtime. Oh, and please don’t cash your checks until after 3 on Monday.
The men listened. A silent exchange of glances told Robert the men wouldn’t leave them in the lurch. Then the morning’s five hours of milking began.
The other day, those employees were back in the barn, milking the cows, while John and Kris Vevoda worked in the office and tried to keep it together. At one point the phone rang, and they decided not to pick it up.
Soon there came the disembodied voice of a former employee, now retired, offering to help with the milking of the cows. “You don’t have to pay me,
” he said. “We’re praying for ya.”
Click.
The words seemed to confirm what John Vevoda had been trying to say all along about our obligation to one another, and he almost smiled.
In Prison, Playing Just to Kill Time and Just Maybe to Help Solve a Murder
COLUMBIA, S.C.—NOVEMBER 16, 2009
In the down time before another head count, two prisoners play cards. One inmate shuffles and the other flicks his hand, a mystical cutting of the deck. The dealt cards land on the lid of a garbage can used as a table, falling on top of one another, face down.
A form of gin rummy breaks out in the courtyard of the Campbell Pre-Release Center as the inmates, Mark and Mario, toss their unwanted cards into the discard pile. But from deuce to ace, nearly every card is a face card, looking up in silent appeal.
The cards ask: Do you know who killed me? And they ask: Do you know where I am? And they ask: Do you know something? Anything?
The South Carolina Department of Corrections started selling these decks in its prison canteens for $1.72 about a year ago; since then, inmates have bought more than 10,000 packs. Each card asks that you please call 888-CRIME-SC if you have any information about a case; each card also whispers, “Call *49,” an anonymous prison hot line.
The seven of hearts spins to a stop, and gazing up is Victoria Duncan, last seen driving off with two men in 1998, later found beaten to death in York County. She disappears under the king of spades, Christi Hanks, a prostitute from the Anderson area, found dead in a field in 2006.
Here comes the 10 of spades, Tracy Ann Johnson, beaten to death in her home in Greer in 2000, only to be covered by the four of hearts, Richard Martin. He left Nancy’s Lounge in Anderson one night in 1995 and was found an hour later, dying from blunt trauma to the head in the middle of Welcome Road.
Hands are won and lost as the inmates shuffle and toss the cards on top of one another. Their discards form kaleidoscopic arrangements in which the dead and the missing peer up together, as though from a deep, shared hole.
“You going down, mister,” crows Mario to Mark, looking at the cards looking at him. The inmates sit six feet from a bank of public telephones.
Another discard spins into view: Brian Lucas, 29, forever smiling on the ace of spades. He was one of four people shot to death in an isolated motorsports shop outside Spartanburg on Nov. 6, 2003. My case is unsolved, his card says. Please call.
Brian Lucas’s father, Tom Lucas, is the one who decided that his son would be the ace of spades, and that the three killed with him would also be aces. While he grieves for the other 48 murdered or missing people in the deck, he wanted to emphasize that this was our son, the son of Tom and Lorraine Lucas.
Aces, he says. “I had blood in it.”
Their son, their motorbike-loving, fix-anything, father-of-two Brian, was killed at the Superbike Motorsports store where he worked as service manager. Also murdered were Scott Ponder, the owner and now the ace of diamonds; Beverly Guy, Mr. Ponder’s mother and the ace of hearts; and Chris Sherbert, the shop mechanic and the ace of clubs.
After receiving the call, the Lucases drove six hours to South Carolina from their home in Kentucky, through fog and tears. “He cried all the way down,” Ms. Lucas says.
While closure is a fiction, their wait for justice continues. The why of what happened that afternoon, amid the motorcycles and helmets and Suzuki paraphernalia, is still an open question: a quadruple homicide that, six years later, remains in a swirl of maybes: maybe drug-related, maybe business-related, maybe family-related.
The Lucases moved back to Spartanburg and began working to keep the spotlight on their son’s case. They joined the Crime Stoppers Council, persisted with investigators and even talked to psychics. “We would have talked to Santa Claus if we could,” Tom Lucas says.
In the midst of their frustration, Mr. Lucas learned of a company called Effective Playing Cards and Publications, which had produced “unsolved” playing cards that were being circulated in the state prisons of Florida, as well as in county jails in several other states. And he thought: Why not cards for unsolved South Carolina cases—like my son’s?
Backed by the Crime Stoppers, Mr. Lucas met with Gov. Mark Sanford, collaborated with law enforcement officials, designed the cards and raised the money. He also worked closely with corrections officials to have the cards sold in the state’s 28 prisons, as well as in many county jails. “There’s a lot of information inside a prison,” Mr. Lucas says.
He pressed police officials to choose the cases they wanted to include, and accommodated families whenever possible. For example, the family of Donnie Bell, killed in a hit-and-run in 2003, asked for the three of hearts because “that was his card,” Mr. Lucas recalls. “I said, ‘Certainly.’” But he always made clear that the four aces were taken.
The thought of a family member’s image fluttering through prison card games is both jarring and reassuring, Mr. Lucas says. Many of the cases are cold, and families find hope in knowing that their loved ones have not slipped from memory—that they are, in a way, working their own cases.
Ann Hollingsworth, 54, of Anderson, agrees. Her sister is in the deck: Tina Milford, 23, kidnapped from a Li’l Cricket convenience store and shot to death in 1983. Ms. Hollingsworth says she endorses the program because a prisoner’s memory, or conscience, or self-interest, might be jogged by a young woman’s high school portrait on the 10 of hearts.
Twenty-six years have passed, Ms. Hollingsworth says. Her younger sister would be 50 in January—“if she’d lived.”
Mr. Lucas acknowledges that the cards have yet to solve a murder in South Carolina, but he emphasizes that they have prompted dozens of tips, including one promising lead in a case more than a dozen years old. “It gives you something to look forward to,” he says, studying the 52 cards arranged face-up on his kitchen table, including the ace of spades, his son.
Brian Lucas now appears and disappears in prisons throughout South Carolina. Here at the Campbell Pre-Release Center, he smiles from atop that garbage-can lid of a table, then vanishes until the next rat-a-tat-tat shuffle.
The cards are stored between the air fresheners and decks of Uno cards in the prison’s canteen. When they first appeared a year ago to replace another brand of playing cards, they prompted several altercations. Inmates kept interrupting games by picking up a card in play to take a closer look.
The dead and the missing are known here. “I remember she was quiet,” one inmate says of the three of diamonds. Says another of the five of diamonds: “People say he got what he had coming.”
The “unsolved” decks, long since stripped of any reverence, are now part of the everyday prison culture here. Inmates say that the cards are too expensive, that the cards are not as sturdy as those they replaced, that sometimes a card is just a card.
“I’m tired of seeing James,” says a man hunched around a hand he’s just been dealt. James is James Oneal Boulware, shot to death in Rock Hill a couple of years ago. The two of spades.
James and 51 others are soon shuffled and spun across tables to form new combinations of faint possibility. Read ’em and weep.
The Holdup: A Mobster, a Family and the Crime That Won’t Let Them Go
WORCESTER, MASS.—MAY 31, 2017
The aged gangster welcomed me at the door.
Hunched by hard time lived and served, his lean body scarred by several bullets and one ice-pick stabbing, he led a brief tour of the modest rental house he shared in a Massachusetts shore town. He paused to point out his three shelves in the communal refrigerator, a measure of his diminished domain.
This was Ralph DeMasi, once a feared member of the New England underworld whose long résumé included truck hijackings and home invasions, robberies and violence. Days shy of 80, he half-joked that at the moment he’d rather be holding up an armored truck.
He led the way to his small, well-ordered bedroom, where dozens of photographs formed a wall-to-wall collage of contradicti
on, a blur of toddlers and mobsters. Here, his ex-wife with their baby at an amusement park, and here, a friend at a picnic, shortly before his gangland murder.
“Rudy Sciarra,” Mr. DeMasi said, motioning to a photo of a vicious Mafioso from Rhode Island, long dead. “And the one on the right, he’s a wiseguy out of New York….”
But he struggled to summon this mobster’s name from his mind’s darker recesses. “You forget people, like, as you go along,” he said. “So the pictures kind of keep me up to—you know.”
He kept more memories in boxes of correspondence arranged lengthwise on his bed, the dates of every receipt and reply recorded in his shaky scrawl. These letters, which he slept beside, were the coded missives of criminals, swapping family updates, sharing gun-rap loopholes. They often closed with “A friend always” and “With love,” and were signed by public enemies named Bobo, and Gerard, and even Jim, as in James Bulger, the murderous former fugitive better known as Whitey.
Funny story: More than 40 years ago, Mr. Bulger and an accomplice shot Mr. DeMasi several times in the drive-by killing of another target.
Years later, after Mr. Bulger was captured, convicted and sentenced to prison forever, Mr. DeMasi sent him a letter—a message, really—that he summarized as: “Whatever transpired between us, it didn’t kowtow me or make me any less of a man.”
From this a pen-pal friendship grew. In one letter, written in slanted, nearly inscrutable script, Mr. Bulger suggested that Mr. DeMasi sell these notes; they might be worth something. In another, he evoked his time in Alcatraz:
“Thanks for writing and I really enjoyed your letter. Felt like I was hearing from friends way back in the Az years. Fellow Bank Robbers, not ‘Organized Crime’ guys. Life was simple back then.”
The two men also exchanged yearly Christmas cards. But on this August afternoon last year, Mr. DeMasi sat on his bed, trying to remember something. Finally he said, “Whitey owes me a letter.”