All that eating and drinking took a toll: Anderson was in his late thirties and slim and strong from playing tennis and other sports when he first visited the restaurant; over the years he ballooned to more than three hundred pounds.
It’s funny what having your photo on the wall of a popular restaurant can do. That’s what people would remember Mark Anderson for years later, after news broke that he was charged with wine theft and arson. Anderson may have been lauded by the Sausalito mayor for his civic involvement and the column he started to write for the region’s big weekly, the Marin Scope, in 1999, but it was his Sushi Ran meals that won him the most attention.
Despite his high profile, Anderson remained a mystery to many people. How, for example, did he earn a living? Martin Brown assumed he was an “estate baby” who lived off inherited income. There were lots of those in Sausalito.
Anderson was deliberately vague about his income. But he constantly dropped hints about how famous and accomplished he was, hints that at the time no one had reason to disbelieve. He told people that he had invented voice mail. He said he had managed the rock and roll band Iron Butterfly. He claimed to have been a spokesman for SRI, the Stanford Research Institute. He would later tell me that he crossed the Sahara desert with a tribe of Toureg nomads he met in Timbuktu. They sold him a wife, Fatima, for eight dollars. The camel for the trip cost seventy-five dollars. Then there was the time he had lunch with Chairman Mao. It’s not clear if that was before or after Anderson became an Israeli spy.
It was only after Anderson’s arrest that people started to dissect the tales that characterized him as a dashing, successful businessman and traveler. One of the members of Iron Butterfly said he had never heard of Anderson. The human resources department at SRI told me it had no record of Anderson’s employment.
But the most damning exposé came from Anderson’s younger brother, Steven. He grew so frustrated by his sibling’s tales that he created an entire website devoted to debunking his brother’s various assertions. He named it Corpulent Raider. “Among his many incredible claims is that along the line somewhere he helped to ‘Invent and Develop Voice Mail,’” posted Steven Anderson. “eeee … yah. Right. He worked as a salesman for one of the first voicemail companies that was forming back in the 70’s. For about 6 months. They … brought out the 7-League boot.” (Translation: they kicked him out of the company.)
It takes a certain kind of personality to tell so many lies with a straight face. I didn’t meet Mark until 2010, decades after he regaled his friends in Sausalito with his stories, but for about two years we spoke regularly on the phone and exchanged letters. Even as he sat in a jail cell, even as he faced the prospect of years in prison, he still twisted the truth. As Debbie Polverino, the manager of Wines Central, noted, Mark’s stories were rarely linear. Nor did they always make sense. He would launch into an explanation, for instance, of why he could not have set fire to the warehouse and within minutes his explanation was so tortured and complex that I couldn’t follow along. His stories would always contain something that seemed to be a kernel of truth so you couldn’t dismiss them outright. One of his attorneys even had a psychiatrist evaluate Anderson for narcissism.
Why did Anderson spin so many tales about his supposed accomplishments? He clearly loved to hear himself talk. Many other people enjoyed his stories and his corny jokes. Perhaps it covered up a deep insecurity, for Anderson was smart, but thwarted professionally. He had attended school through his forties, but never ended up with a permanent paying profession. Anderson enrolled at more than nine institutions, earning an AA degree, two bachelor’s degrees, including one from the University of California at Berkeley, a master’s in economics, and two law degrees.13 But he never passed the bar. “I have more degrees than a thermometer,” Anderson would joke.
The one professional constant in Anderson’s life was photography. He started snapping photos of houses for his father’s mortgage company when he was a teenager. In the early 1970s, Anderson traveled to the Sahara Desert and Ethiopia to take pictures, and in the late 1970s he shot film in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq—or so he says. When he eventually settled permanently in Sausalito, Anderson did portraits of family and friends and shot large-format photos of flowers and landscapes. Anderson sometimes hand-colored sepia-toned prints and rephotographed them. His work was respected; his clients included a mayor of Sausalito, a number of influential local businessmen, and Tome, the owner of Sushi Ran. He said his work had been shown in Parisian and Japanese galleries. Anderson may have been exaggerating. Eric Johnson, a successful artist who served with Anderson on the arts commission and considered him a friend, said his photographs were never particularly memorable. I looked in vain for proof that Anderson had risen to the top of his profession, as he claimed, but never found any examples of his work online or in the archives of stock photo agencies.
Then one hot August day I was browsing in an antique store in Healdsburg, California, a town in northern Sonoma County wine country. A framed photograph caught my eye. It was of three red tomatoes. They sat on a ledge, in front of a window covered by a slatted blind. Dappled specks of sun shone on the tomatoes. I looked more closely at the photo and saw it was signed “Mark Christian Anderson.” An inscription on the back said the photo was taken in 1992 but printed in 1994. I couldn’t believe it. Here at last was a photo of Mark’s!
The price tag said forty dollars. I thought that was too much for the photo, which was pleasing, but nothing special. But how could I pass up buying a photo made by Anderson? It offered concrete proof that he was a photographer, that he actually did something he said he did. I bought the picture. It now sits on a counter in my office.
* * *
The day Rosie the arson dog nodded her head up and down while sitting in Mark Anderson’s storage bay at Wines Central, ATF forensic chemists brought the propane torch, bits of cardboard, cloth, and charred wood from the scene to the forensics science lab in Walnut Creek, about twenty-five miles east of San Francisco. The lab, tucked innocuously in a business park, is one of only three ATF labs in the country to specialize in examining evidence from fires and explosions. It handles cases on the West Coast from California, Oregon, and Washington stretching east to Montana and south toward Texas. The ATF technician used an analytic technique called gas chromatography mass spectroscopy (GC/MS) to determine if any of the material from the wine warehouse had accelerants. The technician dissolved some of the cloth into a solvent and then injected a tiny bit into the gas chromatography machine. The machine separated the sample’s components and sorted them by volatility and mass, allowing the technician to see the chemical’s identity. During the next step, the mass spectroscopy machine blasted the sample with electrons, and then produced a computer analysis of what was on the cloth.
By October 17, five days after the Wines Central fire, the technicians had finished their tests. They had found traces of gasoline in the evidence, proof that the fire had been deliberately set. And by that point the police only had one suspect: Anderson.
No one investigating the fire had yet talked to him. He had been ignoring their calls requesting an interview. It was time to go get him.
* * *
On October 18, 2005, two days after Anderson returned home from visiting his father, he sat down at his computer. Anderson was a bit of a computer geek, an early adopter. In high school in the mid-1960s, he was a member of the electronics club and stayed after school to build radios and primitive computers. Business associates remember him as an early advocate of Google, back in the time most people were using Altavista or Yahoo as their search engines Anderson would surf the web to find funny jokes and websites, and send the links to friends.
Anderson typed in www.federalcrimes.com. It was a website that detailed possible prison times for various federal crimes. What Anderson saw could not have been reassuring.
* * *
The next morning, as Anderson lay in bed next to Cynthia, he heard a loud banging on the door. It was a
contingent of cops from Vallejo and the ATF, many of whom were dressed in white t-shirts with their logo in large letters on the back. A few carried large guns. Within seconds, police were swarming through the apartment. “The ATF came crashing in my back door with assault rifles locked and loaded in S.W.A.T. gear, with bomb-sniffing dogs—waking me up at 6 a.m. with guns pressed against my head,” Anderson later recalled.14
ATF agent Brian Parker handed Anderson a search warrant authorizing the police to take Anderson’s computers, BlackBerry, passport, and electronic records and search his Cadillac and Audi. Just the day before, the ATF had named Parker head investigator on the case, the biggest he had led in his five years as an agent. Parker had an unusually strong grounding in the forensics aspect of his job, as he had worked as a chemist in the ATF lab in Walnut Creek for a few years before deciding his true calling was in fieldwork. He had always loved architecture and engineering while growing up in Livermore on the eastern edge of the Bay Area, figuring out how something fit together and came apart. He brought that same attitude to his job as special agent. “I love digging through fire scenes. It’s like opening up a new puzzle every time you go out to the scene.” Parker would soon be consumed with tracking down a connection between Anderson and the plumber’s blowtorch recovered from his storage bay.
Anderson stood there trying not to let his face reveal any emotion as the agents tore through his apartment, picked apart his life, and carried the pieces to the fleet of waiting police cars parked outside, in full view of his neighbors and commuters driving by on Sausalito’s busiest street. It would have been hard to miss the sight of Rosie, the yellow Labrador arson dog, sniffing the seats and trunk of Anderson’s cars.
PART TWO
INVENTION
CHAPTER SIX
THE BEGINNING OF RANCHO CUCAMONGA
The grapevines were scraggly. They pushed their way out of the ground with barely enough enthusiasm to crawl up the metal stakes meant to hold them. Some had a few bright green leaves and twisting tendrils emerging from a winter sleep, but a significant number were gray and barren.
As I stood under the warm April sky and looked at the vines, I found it hard to believe that this spot was once home to one of the most admired vineyards in California, lauded for its wine, Port and sweet Angelica. Weary travelers on their way to the gold mines had exulted in the liquid made from its grapes, and judges at nineteenth-century state fairs had given the wines top awards.
But Rancho Cucamonga, forty miles east of Los Angeles, was now a city of strip malls, chain restaurants, and hotels, indistinguishable from surrounding towns. Three highways cut through the once-verdant area. Lines of houses crawled all the way to the base of the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, which were often obscured by smog wafting east from Los Angeles.
I had come to Rancho Cucamonga to see if I could find any reminders of the 1875 wine that had been destroyed in the Wines Central warehouse fire. Ever since I had heard that my cousin, Miranda Heller, had stored our great-great-grandfather’s wine in the warehouse and it had boiled in its bottles, I wanted to know more about its creation. I couldn’t find any reference to that specific vintage in the forty boxes of my great-great-grandfather’s papers stored at the California Historical Society. No family letters about the wine remained. The only clue I had to the origin of the wine was the label on one of the green oversized bottles that had not burned up. “Private Stock, Isaias W. Hellman” was printed at the top, under what looked like a cattle brand with the initials “IWH.” “Port wine, Cucamonga Vineyard, San Bernardino County, California” was spelled out below in ornate script. “Vintage 1875. Bottled from wood 1921” was under that.
So I traveled to where the wine had its beginnings. I knew that Hellman was only one of a long string of stewards of the vineyard that yielded the grapes for the 1875 bottle of wine. I had traveled 400 miles from Berkeley to see if I could reconstruct that lineage and chain of ownership, a task that would take months of searching through county deeds, court cases, and history books. Who had planted the grapes, I wondered. Who had made the wine? I eventually would follow the path the wine took from its inception in 1839 to its creation in 1875 to its destruction in 2005. The story was, in many ways, a reflection of the history of wine in California. The bottles were connected to the early days of the wine business in Los Angeles, when it couldn’t even be characterized as an industry, to winemakers’ attempts to capture the attention of East Coast drinkers, to battles for market domination that raged until Prohibition.
That’s how I found myself standing near one of the few remaining vineyards—if it could be called that—in the area. It was just a small patch of grapevines in front of a historic home that belonged to one of the early owners of Rancho Cucamonga. Clearly it was not well tended. Right after World War II, there had been 32,000 acres of grapes15 around Rancho Cucamonga, making western San Bernardino County the largest grape-growing region in America—larger than Napa and Sonoma combined. Urban development wiped that away. Now, there was little to remind me of what the land had been like during that era, let alone in 1839 when the first cultivated grapes went in the ground.
The first man to plant grapes on Rancho Cucamonga was Tiburcio Tapia, a Mexican soldier and descendant of one of the earliest Spanish settlers in California. When he was fifty, Tapia lived in Los Angeles, a tiny pueblo of fewer than 1,000 residents who lived in adobe houses centered around a central plaza. The biggest building in town was a white chapel constructed in 1784. Tapia lived in a large home nearby. He was a prosperous merchant and served as alcalde, a type of mayor, who was noted for his “strict integrity.” But his financial success came, in part, because he broke the law. California, then part of Mexico, required all ships coming to trade to anchor first at Monterey and pay taxes on the goods they wanted to sell. Tapia bypassed those extra costs by convincing the captains to bring their cloth, furniture, and tools directly into caves he owned along the coast near present-day Malibu. Tapia was then able to sell the smuggled goods at a reduced price, and undercut his competitors. He became very successful. “We stopped by the house of Don Tiburcio Tapia, the ‘alcalde Constitucional,’ of the town, once a soldier in very moderate circumstances, but who by honest and industrious labor had amassed so much of this world’s goods, as to make him one of the wealthiest inhabitants of this place,” wrote the Yankee adventurer Alfred Robinson. “He was the principal merchant and the only native one in El Pueblo de los Angeles.”
California was in transition in 1839, and Tapia, ever the shrewd businessman, aspired for more than a store on the plaza.
When Spain colonized Alta California in 1769, it created a rigid, three-pronged system of control. At the top were the presidios, which were garrisons stocked with soldiers, horses, and guns. Then came the missions, where Franciscan fathers built a chain of churches from San Diego to Sonoma and forcibly converted thousands of Indians to Christianity. The neophytes, as the Native Americans were called, grew the wheat, corn, grapes, and vegetables that fed themselves, their religious overlords, and the soldiers in the presidios. Then there were the pueblos, small towns of inhabitants who relied on the presidios and missions, but lived independently.
The Spanish exerted tight control over California, even prohibiting most ships from other countries to trade with those living in the state. Very few people possessed property; the missions controlled huge swaths of land where the fathers pastured their sheep and cattle. Spain only awarded twenty large land grants during its fifty-three-year rule.
When Mexico took over California from Spain in 1821, it abolished the restrictions on land ownership and, eventually, the mission system. Suddenly, California’s pastureland, rolling hills, and oceanfront property were up for grabs. In the next twenty-seven years, the various governors of California would give out seven hundred land grants of more than eight million acres, ushering in the ranchero era of vaqueros, cattle, haciendas, and legendary Californio hospitality.
Tapia wanted to make sure he got a
piece of the land rush sweeping California. In late January 1839, he mounted his horse, left his adobe home in Los Angeles, and rode ninety-five miles up the coast through wind and rain to Santa Barbara to petition Governor Juan B. Alvarado for more land. There was nothing extraordinary about Tapia’s application. He could have bragged about his military exploits or how he was a descendant of Felipe Santiago Tapia, who rode with the De Anza mission on its 1775 exploration of California, six years before Los Angeles was founded. Instead Tapia simply mentioned that he was constrained by having to share grazing land with his brothers. Cattle stock “suffer untold prejudice by reason of being kept on lands of inheritance,” he told Alvarado.
If there was one thing Governor Alvarado understood, it was cattle ranching, California’s main source of revenue. There was no official paper money or coin, although a few paid with Spanish reales or piastres. Commerce was done by barter. The main “currency” of the state came from the cattle that roamed the hills: bags of tallow that were used to make soap and candles and cattle hides that were used to make shoes and machine belts. Clipper ships from around the world, free from the restrictions placed on them by Spain, pulled into the harbors of San Diego or Santa Barbara to pick up the stiff hides, often referred to as “California dollars.” The captains would trade calico or furniture for the skins. Alvarado knew it took a lot of land to raise cattle, particularly in arid southern California. The conventional measurement was one cow per acre.
It’s hard to imagine a California like this, so sparsely settled that one could ride for days on horseback and only see cattle grazing on the hills. The state was, relatively speaking, a wilderness, miles away geographically and culturally from the growing cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. While waltzes and balls were common on the East Coast, fandangos and bullfights were popular in the West. There were only around 10,000 non-native settlers in California in the 1830s and about 100,000 Native Americans.
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