The Billionaire's Vinegar

by Benjamin Wallace

  BILL KOCH WAITED for months to see whether Kip Forbes would join him as a coplaintiff. In the end, although Forbes wanted to, his brothers argued against it, and Koch and Russell Frye decided to go ahead without him. Then the FBI approached Koch, saying they had their own investigation under way and asking him to delay his suit against Rodenstock until they could, in Brad Goldstein’s words, “lure him into the U.S.” Koch demurred. Waiting for the FBI would be “like watching a glacier melt,” Goldstein recalled.

  On the last day of August 2006, a Thursday, Koch sued “Hardy Rodenstock, aka Meinhard Goerke,” in federal court in Manhattan. Koch had decided not to sue Christie’s or Farr, in the hope that they would become cooperating witnesses instead. Simultaneously, in federal court in San Francisco, Russell Frye filed suit against a California merchant, the Wine Library, and its owners, brothers Edward and Carl Gelsman. Koch’s complaint laid out his evidence regarding the Jefferson bottles, and also singled out the magnum of 1921 Pétrus that had come from Rodenstock. The complaint noted that 1921 Pétrus had been given a perfect score by Robert Parker, and that the critic had first tasted the wine at the 1995 Rodenstock tasting he attended.

  Koch’s complaint mentioned that Russell Frye had been told by the Wine Library that Rodenstock was the source of many of the bottles he believed to be fake (Frye’s complaint likewise cited two fake magnums of 1921 Pétrus). Describing Koch as “one of Rodenstock’s many victims,” the complaint stated: “[Rodenstock] is charming and debonair. He is also a con artist.”

  CHAPTER 20

  THE FINISH

  FOR A MAN SEEKING TO LEAVE HIS PAST BEHIND, Germany is a hospitable place. Although it has less than a third as many people as the United States and is smaller than Montana, privacy laws there make it almost impossible to trace a person who is set on reinventing himself.

  Nonetheless, with Koch’s fat bankroll and well-connected team of law-enforcement veterans, the investigation yielded tantalizing glimpses of Rodenstock’s past. Besides learning of Rodenstock’s name change, which occurred in the mid-1970s, they gleaned other facts: he was born not in Essen but in Marienwerder, a village in northern Poland that was now named Kwidzyn. His father, Alfred Görke, had been stationed there with the German army and it was there that he met twenty-year-old Lydia Ristau, whom he married in 1940. Meinhard was born the next year.

  Alfred, working on the railroad supply chain for the eastern front, had to stay in Marienwerder, while Lydia fled west, by horse and handcart, with her infant son. They settled first in a refugee camp in Hanover, then traveled by bicycle to Gelsenkirchen, a small town in northwestern Germany.

  In 1945, Alfred rejoined the family and went to work for the civilian railroad in Essen. Though his son would later boast that Alfred “ran” the regional railway, he spent his career as a general clerk. Meinhard attended the Alma high school, where he was an unexceptional student, and then a technical school, where he studied surveying. He married young, to a hairdresser named Gisela, who gave him two sons, Törsten and Oliver. Meinhard never rose higher than “apprentice land surveyor” for the regional railway, and, contrary to his later assertions, never held teaching positions or published academic papers. He also had a younger brother named Gisbert, who lived near Essen, and whom the investigator, with cutting thoroughness, reported to be “a very small-sized man.”

  Curiously, though none of Rodenstock’s wine friends knew of the brother, Gisbert appeared to share a passion for the grape. In 2000, without mentioning their relationship, “Gisbert Görke” had written to Welt am Sonntag to applaud a pair of articles penned by Hardy Rodenstock. Around the same time, the Hamburg-based food magazine Der Feinschmecker received several letters from Gisbert Görke, all praising Rodenstock and his friends and attacking the magazine’s independent-minded editor, Madeleine Jakits. And in 2004, Gisbert Görke had written a letter to the magazine Vinum in response to an item about how to tell whether a 1928 Latour was real or fake.

  Koch’s investigators interviewed the Görke brothers’ mother, as well as Rodenstock’s old girlfriend Tina York. York, whose relationship with Rodenstock had lasted for close to a decade, revealed that Rodenstock had told her he was a member of the well-known Rodenstock clan, that he had kept the fact that he had two sons hidden from her, and that once when she had put a bowl of potato salad in his wine cellar to chill it Rodenstock “just flipped out.” And the investigators, led by Secret Squirrel, as Brad Goldstein had taken to calling the stealthy and ubiquitous Elroy, were still sleuthing at full speed.

  “You know that movie Catch Me If You Can?” Goldstein said. “That’s what I want. I want the lab where he makes the bottles. I want the printing press.”

  Goldstein soon came close to getting what he wanted. In October, two months after Koch filed suit, his office received an e-mail from a German financial planner named Andreas Klein. Klein’s wife’s family had been Helga Lehner’s landlords since 1968 and Hardy Rodenstock’s since he married and moved in with Lehner in 1991. The house, on Ostpreussenstrasse in Munich, was a small, conspicuously modern twin with bright orange siding; the Rodenstocks lived in one half and, starting in 1997, Klein and his wife lived in the other, sharing a thin wall with their neighbors.

  The Rodenstocks weren’t home much—they moved freely among their apartments in Monte Carlo, Bordeaux, Kitzbühel, and Marbella—and over the years the Kleins’ contact with them was polite but limited. Andreas Klein found Rodenstock bizarre. When they spoke, Rodenstock would invariably mention, apropos of nothing, “my friend” Franz Beckenbauer or Gerhard Schröder or Wolfgang Porsche or Mick Flick (the Mercedes-Benz heir). The name-dropping was so insistent that Klein was left with the strong impression that Rodenstock lacked self-confidence.

  Occasionally, Rodenstock would give the Kleins a bottle of wine—always accompanied by a request of some sort. Once, Rodenstock asked the Kleins to stop barbecuing out back because the smell was seeping into his first floor. Another time, Rodenstock requested that the Kleins walk more softly going up and down stairs because he could hear the sound through their shared wall. At one point, he gave Klein a pair of slippers he had bought in southern Spain, to encourage softer walking.

  The Kleins were more tolerant of the noise Rodenstock made. When he was home, they often heard a banging sound coming from the direction of his basement. It sounded distinctly like wood being hammered against wood, and at first Andreas Klein assumed Rodenstock was doing carpentry or making furniture. But Rodenstock was not a visibly handy person—he always hired people to mow his grass and do other housework—and something about the sound suggested to Klein that Rodenstock was assembling wooden wine cases. The Kleins knew that Rodenstock bought and sold wine, but couldn’t understand why he would personally be hammering the cases together.

  The shared attic had a mold problem, and in 2001, the Kleins decided to have their leaky roof replaced and a new attic flat constructed. Under German law, the Kleins needed permission from their tenants, but Rodenstock, after initially saying he would go along with it, started demanding increasing amounts of money and lease concessions.

  The Kleins and the Rodenstocks ended up in court. Because of the mold, the Rodenstocks temporarily moved out of the house and into an expensive penthouse apartment in a posh nearby neighborhood, but they left much of their furniture and possessions behind and at the same time stopped paying rent on the Klein house. Rodenstock now told the Kleins it would cost them 150,000 euros for him to give up his tenant rights, and in the court case, according to Klein, Rodenstock fabricated evidence, at one point presenting the court with a copy of a letter to Klein’s mother-in-law, the technical landlord, which he had patently, but carelessly, backdated: the address on the letter contained a postal code which had not existed at the time of the date on the letter.

  The case dragged on. The Kleins had two young children, were living in a house without a proper roof and with mold on the walls, and couldn’t afford protracted litigation, but in the meantime the court woul
dn’t permit them to evict Rodenstock or proceed with their renovation.

  At a loss for how to get rid of their nightmare tenant, the Kleins began to devise more creative methods. They thought maybe Rodenstock had been using their house as an office, which would be a lease violation, but that year, 2002, Rodenstock moved all his files to another apartment nearby. Klein went to look at the apartment and saw that the buzzer said Rodenstock/Görke. He assumed Görke must be the name of Rodenstock’s business.

  Then Klein hit on another idea. As part of their case, the Kleins had argued that the planned renovation shouldn’t pose any problem for the Rodenstocks, since they were hardly there anyway. Rodenstock had countered, in testimony to the court, that his other homes were just vacation apartments and that Munich was his primary residence. It occurred to Andreas Klein that Rodenstock probably didn’t pay German taxes and that the German tax authorities would be very interested to learn that Rodenstock was now claiming Munich as his place of residence. Klein gave a copy of Rodenstock’s court testimony to the tax authorities.

  In December 2004, nearly three years after the Kleins had submitted their tip, they received a visit from the tax police, who just wanted to confirm that Rodenstock was no longer living there. They apologized for the delay in following up on the tip, citing delays in foreign countries; they were interested in his apartments elsewhere in Europe. They now had a list of addresses associated with Rodenstock and were apparently conducting coordinated raids on them. The Rodenstock/Görke office flat was around the corner, and Klein watched as the tax authorities drove away from it with three carloads of documents. Three days after the tax raid—and a full three years after the court case had begun—Rodenstock finally agreed to move out of the Kleins’ house in exchange for a relatively small payoff of about 15,000 euros.

  After Rodenstock at last moved his belongings out of the house, in 2005, Klein went into the vacated basement. In one corner of a small room, he found a stack of what appeared to be unused wine labels, with no type on them, as well as a pile of old-looking corks. In the cellar’s bigger room, Klein found a few dozen empty wine bottles, and something stranger: Rodenstock had laid a carpet down on the concrete floor, and on top of the carpet was a large mound of dirt (with a dead frog in it); the carpet and the dirt were covered in mold. The room stank, making Klein wonder how the scent of an occasional barbecue could possibly have bothered Rodenstock. The Kleins thought back to all those times they had heard the sound of hammering. Though they couldn’t prove anything, Andreas Klein would later learn about Bill Koch’s suit from a German tabloid and write that upon seeing the cellar, “we were absolutely sure that he prepared the bottles in the smaller room and made them older in the bigger room. It was too obvious.”

  THOUGH THE LAWSUITS would take time to play out, it was likely that Hardy Rodenstock, as an entity in the wine world, was finished. Hans-Peter Frericks had posed his challenge to the bottles in pre-Internet days. The news about Bill Koch’s investigation spread much faster and farther. Now it would be impossible for Rodenstock to count on most customers being unaware of the accusations against him. And the accusations were, this time, far more conclusive.

  Rodenstock’s options were limited. Koch was in this for justice and for sport. He wasn’t going to settle with the German on terms any less humiliating than the Treaty of Versailles had been to an earlier generation of his countrymen. If Rodenstock confessed to having faked the bottles, or to having knowingly sold fakes, he would open himself up to countless other civil suits and criminal prosecution. He could fight Koch head-on, of course, but Koch had demonstrated an ability to maintain a fight for decades, and to all appearances Koch had a lot more money. (He had already spent more than $1 million on this investigation, and three weeks after the lawsuit was filed, the new edition of the annual Forbes 400 list pegged Koch’s personal wealth at $1.4 billion.) It would be an ugly war of attrition. In any case, fighting Koch would require that Rodenstock offer a persuasive counternarrative, something he had never been able to muster in two decades of accusations.

  When a major German collector faxed a Wall Street Journal article about the Koch and Frye suits to some friends, one of them reported back to Rodenstock, who sent the collector an angry fax from his apartment near Bordeaux. The collector hadn’t spoken to Rodenstock in ten years, and wrote back, “If you think this isn’t of interest to wine collectors, you are mistaken. And if you think the issue of fakes is overrated, you are mistaken.”

  Rodenstock, nonetheless, was already cranking up his fog machine. He threatened journalists. He made unverifiable statements and legalistic arguments. He attacked the characters of his accusers. He blustered. In an assertion that hardly smacked of an innocent man unjustly accused, Rodenstock said that even if the bottles were fake, the statute of limitations for a fraud lawsuit had expired. He said he had bought the bottles without actually seeing the cellar, contradicting what he had written to VWGA Journal editor Treville Lawrence in 1986. He even claimed that he still had some Jefferson bottles in his possession, and that he had received new orders for them since the filing of the Koch suit. After some obviously fake Jefferson bottles went on sale on eBay in late September, Rodenstock bought one and said the bottles were evidence of just how many fakers were out there.

  Surrogates, meanwhile, posited far-fetched arguments. Perhaps, they said, Koch himself had traced over the “original” engravings with a drill. Why? Because Koch was “a neurotic maniac.” Rodenstock suggested that Koch was upset because, at the 2000 Latour tasting where the men had had their only meeting, Rodenstock had made a comment to the effect that Koch was a prestige collector, rather than a true connoisseur. Specifically, Rodenstock recalled uttering the expression “the last shirt has no pockets,” the German equivalent of “you can’t take it with you.” Now, he theorized, Koch was avenging that remark. To the glossy society tabloid Bunte, Rodenstock dismissed Koch with a pearl of Bavarian trash talk: “The oak tree is not concerned with the pig that is scratching its back against the roots.”

  THOSE WHO HAD vouched for the bottles over the last two decades varied in their responses. Jancis Robinson was quick to put news of the suits on her website, writing that “I should perhaps have smelled a rat,” but pointing out that she had mentioned the questions about the authenticity of Rodenstock’s bottles in a late-1990s newspaper column. Alexandre de Lur Saluces, who in 1986 had called Rodenstock “my friend” and said he saw “no reason to doubt the authenticity” of the Jefferson bottles, now stated that he had always been skeptical of the bottle he tasted in 1985. Winespectator.com, in the awkward position of belonging to someone who owned one of the bottles, stayed silent. Decanter.com published a story that dealt with the role of Broadbent, despite his being one of its star columnists. Robert Parker’s opinion of the non-Jefferson Rodenstock bottles he drank in 1995 hadn’t changed: “[T]he wines I tasted were great wines—real or fake.” Robinson handled the delicate matter of her old friend Broadbent’s role by not mentioning it in her write-up of the scandal, instead leaving that work to a reader’s post she published on her site. “I knew he’d had a tough time in the [newspaper],” Robinson later explained. “I suppose I was being a bit protective of him.”

  Those who had sold the bottles began pointing fingers, all in the same direction. Farr Vintners, which had sold more of the bottles on Rodenstock’s behalf than anyone else, emphasized that it had been a mere conduit. “Our position,” Farr’s Stephen Browett wrote in an e-mail, “is that we made it clear to our buyers at that time that we were not guaranteeing the quality of the bottles and made it absolutely clear that Mr. Rodenstock was the source of them. We just took a commission. At that time the wines had been authenticated by Michael Broadbent of Christie’s who was regarded as the world’s leading expert.” In another e-mail, Browett added, “I don’t think that anyone would have bought or sold these bottles without his expert opinion.”

  “Looking back, more questions could have been asked” was the gentle bur
eaucratese used by Christie’s North America wine head Richard Brierley as he threw his department’s venerable, seventy-nine-year-old chairman emeritus under the bus. The auction house told the Wall Street Journal that Broadbent wasn’t available to comment.

  Privately, Broadbent was shaken by the news of the lawsuits, if not enlightened. A few days after they were filed, he said Rodenstock was “an absolute fool for not revealing where he got the bottles,” as if there were still possibly a legitimate answer to that question. In Koch’s lawsuit and the subsequent news coverage, Broadbent saw “an obsessive witch-hunt.”

  There was a general sadness among Broadbent’s many admirers, who could not deny that the affair had left him, as one collector put it, “very damaged.” His old-vintage bible, which continued to be quoted from liberally in every new Christie’s auction catalog, was riddled with tasting notes from Rodenstock bottles. Nearly all of the rarest wines, in a book premised on its comprehensiveness and inclusion of wines almost no other living person had tasted, Broadbent had drunk courtesy of the German. Any number of others had been drunk courtesy of friends of Rodenstock, and had likely come from him.

  With his 2002 edition of his big book, far from quietly cutting back on the number of notes derived from Rodenstock tastings, Broadbent strewed them throughout. No one collector appeared as often as he, and Broadbent wrote of Rodenstock’s “close friends, among whose number I am lucky to count myself…Hardy is a remarkably modest man, but jealous of his sources, though many of his rare wines have been bought at Christie’s. Through his immense generosity I have not only had the opportunity to taste an enormous range of great and very rare wines, but have met a very wide circle of enthusiasts and collectors, becoming one of the privileged fixtures at Hardy’s events.” Unlike the previous edition, in this one Broadbent included no special appendix delving into the provenance of the Jefferson bottles.