* * *
The year 2005 was annus horribilis for Anderson. Ron Lussier, who had been renting space from Anderson for almost four years, heard about the embezzlement charges in January. Lussier called Anderson, who downplayed the situation. Everything was a mix-up, Anderson said. The guy (Maslak) who was complaining hadn’t delivered the amount of wine he was now claiming. Lussier didn’t care. At that point he wanted out. He and his boyfriend were building a wine cellar in their Sausalito home that could accommodate their wine.
Anderson told Lussier that he could get his wine, but he would have to wait a week. It was only then that Anderson revealed that Lussier’s wine was in Vallejo, not Sausalito. Anderson gave a meandering explanation that he was forced to move the wine because of unexpected, and unresolvable, cooling problems in the Sausalito facility.
A week later, Lussier drove in a rented truck to Wines Central. He expected to spend a few hours with Anderson clearing out his collection, and was surprised when Anderson departed, leaving an employee to move Lussier’s thirty cases of wine.
Lussier had poured his heart and soul into that collection. In addition to tracking down Sine Qua Non bottle by bottle, Lussier had purchased great California Cabernet Sauvignon from top wineries like Silver Oak, in the Oakville portion of Napa, and Stag’s Leap. Every time he made a wine purchase, Lussier thought about the parties he would host for his friends, creating memorable evenings with good food, good wine, and good cheer.
When Lussier returned to his hillside home in Sausalito, he took inventory. It looked like Anderson had returned all his cases. He selected a wooden box that held wines made by Stag’s Leap Vineyards from 1992 to 1998. He tried to take off the top. It wouldn’t budge. It was glued shut. That was odd, Lussier thought to himself. Lussier got a lever and pried open the top. He was shocked by what lay inside. Instead of six beautiful bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon, made from some of Napa’s finest vineyards, worth about $650 each, there were six bottles of Two-Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s. The price for each bottle? Less than two dollars.
“It was painful,” said Lussier. “When we bought it we thought we would have a fantastic party one day. We were going to taste it to see how it changed every year.”
Lussier called Anderson on the phone and demanded an explanation. Anderson delivered his usual litany of excuses and suggested the wine must have been misplaced when Sausalito Cellars moved to Wines Central in Vallejo.
“The rest of the wine never showed up,” said Lussier. Mark “would always mumble excuses. Kind of like street people, he would mumble. He would just go on and on and on.” He seemed to put on an endless stream of ever changing excuses.
Lussier went to the police.
* * *
On Monday April 25, 2005, Anderson and his girlfriend, Cynthia Witten, were in their apartment along Sausalito’s waterfront when there was a loud knock on the door. When Anderson answered, he saw Sausalito Police Department Sergeant Fraass, an agent from the Internal Revenue Service, and a number of Sausalito police officers dressed in SWAT outfits. They had a search warrant for his apartment, his Audi and Cadillac, and his computer.
The officers rushed into the apartment and started opening drawers, filing cabinets, and closets. They looked under the bed, scoured the bookshelves, asked for the car keys to search the cars, and carted off the computer. Some of the material the police carried off shed a suspicious light on Anderson and suggested he was thinking of leaving town. Police found a stack of books on how to disappear, including some with titles like The Modern Identity Changer by Sheldon Charrelt; Bullet Proof Privacy: How to Live Hidden, Happy & Free by Boston T. Party; Swiss Bank Accounts and Investment Management by David Falkayn; and Hide Your Assets and Disappear: A Step by Step Guide to Vanishing Without a Trace by Edmund Pankan.173
The police also seized check registers, receipts, a printout of an email with the phrase “Missing Wine” at the top, a shipping box labeled Sausalito Cellars, various VHS tapes, including two in an envelope marked “Attorney-Client privilege,” and Anderson’s and Witten’s passports.
The raid indicated the seriousness of the police investigation, but the ratcheted-up pressure did not seem to faze Anderson. About two weeks later, he sent off four pallets of wine worth about $50,000 to Chicago Wine Company.
By this time, the managers at Wines Central were regularly receiving calls about Anderson. Clients who couldn’t reach him would call and ask Debbie Polverino to pass on a message or to try to find out when he would be there. Some of the winemakers who stored their wine in the warehouse also started to complain about Anderson to Polverino. They reported that some cases of their wine were missing. They suspected Anderson was the thief.
Anderson was becoming a distraction; his storage bay occupied only a tiny fraction of the 240,000-square-foot business, but he needed a lot of attention. Also, despite repeated requests, Wines Central had still not gotten a detailed inventory of Anderson’s collection. As a business practice, Wines Central needed to know what wines were in its possession, regardless of who owned them. The company had more than ninety-five winery clients at that point and forty private collectors. But Anderson gave excuse after excuse about why he hadn’t prepared an inventory.174 And he was also overdue on his $750 a month rent.
On June 5, Anderson met with Jack Krystal, the owner of Wines Central, and Linda Childs Hothem and Scott Hothem, the two owners of Pac-Am, a company that had taken over day-to-day management of Wines Central in February. They told Anderson he had to move out, and that he had ninety days to do so. However, to put a pretty face on the eviction, they wrote Anderson a letter referring to a “change in business model” at Wines Central, which would affect Sausalito Cellars.
“This letter will serve as official notice to you that no later than September 3 at 5:00 p.m., all products owned or controlled by Sausalito Cellars and/or Mark Anderson must be removed…”
Anderson behaved calmly in the meeting, but inwardly seethed. He was furious. He felt snubbed, cast out of a club he had helped create. Not only had Anderson been with Krystal in the warehouse before it became Wines Central, he had looked for people to invest with Krystal, who needed an infusion of cash after he became embroiled in costly litigation with his original partners. Anderson had gotten Orlando Lobo, the owner of the Marinship building where Sausalito Cellars used to be, to take a look at the investment. Lobo passed on the deal. Anderson had then introduced the Hothems to Krystal. They had struck a deal.
Anderson later told Linda Hothem that “he would make things difficult” if the eviction proceeded. He could sue, he told her, for financial hardship. He could claim he hurt his back at Wines Central. Anderson tried to make her feel guilty for his troubles. Then he announced he would never pay Wines Central another cent.175
It must have felt as if the world was spinning out of control. Anderson faced trouble on many fronts: he was fighting criminal charges in Marin (two more clients had stepped forward to talk to police), a number of his former clients were suing him, and he needed money to pay his lawyers.
Still, Anderson kept on selling his clients’ wine. The day he got a formal letter asking him to leave Wines Central, he sent off another pallet worth $22,700 to the Chicago Wine Company. By now, Bill Mazer, the owner of the auction house Golden West, which had been buying Anderson’s wine for a few years, was demanding proof that Anderson had the right to sell wine. While Premier Cru believed it had severed its relationship with Anderson in the middle of 2004, Golden West had continued to purchase his wine. Anderson wrote Mazer and told him that he had formed a relationship with a new entity not connected to Sausalito Cellars: Kansai Partners. Anderson then offered more wine to Mazer, who cut two checks for Kansai Partners on July 13, 2005—one for $5,000 and another for $6,385.
* * *
On September 26, 2005, Anderson sat down before his computer. The world looked bleak. He was now facing numerous embezzlement counts for stealing 8,000 bottles of wine worth $1.1 million. If convicted, h
e faced a lengthy prison sentence. His business had fallen apart. His friends were avoiding him. The mayor of Sausalito had suggested he resign from his commissions. His father, long a financial spigot, was running out of money. And his younger brother, Steven, declined to even talk to him.
Anderson had always been a good teller of yarns, a man who could smooth away awkwardness with a joke or funny story. But there was no humor in his current situation, no dexterous phrase that could make the trouble go away. Ten days earlier, the Marin County district attorney had filed more embezzlement charges against him. Anderson now faced eleven counts for stealing from his Sausalito Cellars clients. Anderson had been juggling the charges since February 2004, but the law was closing in.
As his mind raced, Anderson began to type. He was looking for a way out, for an end to all his troubles. He needed something that would take care of all his problems at once. A fire would do that. A fire at Wines Central would make it impossible for authorities to prove that the missing wine hadn’t burned up.
Anderson began surfing the Internet. He Googled cell phone triggers. Thousands of articles popped up. He scanned some and when he found one that seemed helpful, he saved it to a shortcut on his computer. It joined other articles on how to build time bombs and destruction by fire.176
Anderson had been thinking about burning down Wines Central for months. In May, right around the time the owners of Wines Central had told him he would have to vacate his storage bay, he told Jason Greer, one of his employees, that “It would suck for Jack (Krystal) if the whole place went up in flames.” The comment was so chilling that it lodged in Greer’s memory.177 Then, a short time later, Anderson said: “Wines Central is old; the wood is brittle, and it would go up in flames easily.”
After the fire, when Anderson’s name emerged as a suspect, a man—most likely his brother Steven—speculated on his motive. “After being charged with 10 counts of embezzlement, Anderson set the warehouse ablaze in an attempt to destroy the evidence,” “Steven” wrote on the website of Moonstone Cellars. “This is how Mark works … if he doesn’t get his way, he will wreck everything for everybody. Out of Spite. He lit that fire possibly to hide evidence, but knowing him (I am as close as you can get), he was getting back at Wines Central for not rolling over for him like the Sausalito crowd. Yeah, he is that mean. Not Crazy … Criminal Mean. And he has not a Scrap of Remorse.”
It’s remarkable how little it takes to ruin 4.5 million bottles of wine. In the end, it didn’t involve cell phone triggers or fancy incendiary devices. All it took was a bucket of gasoline-soaked rags, a plumber’s propane torch, and fuel—in this case the Styrofoam, cardboard, and wooden boxes used to protect wine bottles.
No one knows where Anderson bought that plumber’s torch, a standard propane torch available in almost any hardware store in the United States. ATF Agent Brian Parker became obsessed with that torch. He spent hours combing every hardware and automotive store near Sausalito he could think of, but didn’t turn up a receipt with Mark Anderson’s name on it. There was no evidence of the purchase on Anderson’s credit card receipts, either.
By October 12, the pressure on Anderson was unrelenting. He had been enduring the scorn of the outside world for close to two years by then. His vaunted position as a member of two city commissions had evaporated. His invitations to feasts that featured wine by the world’s great chefs and wine made in the world’s great vineyards had dwindled. Even his closest friends, like Yoshi Tome, owner of Sushi Ran, didn’t know what to think when they looked at Anderson. Was he a scoundrel, a thief, a con artist? Or was he a man falsely accused?
Something finally snapped. Anderson felt compelled to act, to lash out at all of those who wronged him.
Anderson backed his car out of his driveway on Bridgeway Avenue in Sausalito in the early afternoon and headed north on Highway 101. Hidden in his truck was a bucket inside a duffle bag. The gas-soaked rags were stuffed inside, along with the propane torch. The drive took him past the Marin County towns of Mill Valley, Corte Madera, and San Rafael. When he reached Highway 37, he headed east toward Vallejo, getting off on the Mare Island exit. The trip took less than an hour.
Anderson had been cleaning out his storage locker for a few weeks by then. He had rented more space in a warehouse in American Canyon, just a few miles north. A large truck had hauled away most of the wine Anderson still had from clients, but about seven pallets and a lot of garbage remained.
Wines Central had a peculiar physical layout. To reach the mezzanine, where Anderson’s wines and various library wines were stored, visitors had to walk through the office. Anderson arrived in the early afternoon of October 12, although Debbie Polverino, the warehouse manager, did not see him going up the stairs to the mezzanine. But a worker saw Anderson later, cleaning out his storage bay.
It was afternoon in the middle of the harvest, and no one else was on the mezzanine. From his second-floor vantage point, Anderson could have looked down onto the main floor of Wines Central and seen cases of wine stacked up into the distance. The wine that lay in bottles inside cardboard cases reflected hundreds of thousands of hours of work, maybe even millions of hours. Laborers had prepared the ground, planted and tended the vines, and carefully picked the grapes. Winemakers had sorted, crushed, and fermented the fruit, the first steps in the long process to turn the grape juice into an alcoholic liquid that could please, delight, and inebriate. The winemakers tasted and blended wine from different parts of different vineyards to create a signature product, one that expressed their taste and vision.
But Anderson probably didn’t give that a moment’s reflection.
When he was sure he was alone, Anderson reached into his bag and took out the bucket and gasoline-soaked rags. He pulled the ignition switch on the propane torch and touched the blue flame to cloth. The fire took hold.
The last time Polverino saw Anderson was around 3:15 in the afternoon. Anderson came rushing through the office, sweating profusely, almost galloping through while using his cane as a third leg. She had never seen him move so fast.
The warehouse exploded into flames about twenty minutes later.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DISMAY
The days after the fire were gloomy ones for Delia Viader. She tried to maintain a bright outlook, but the uncertainty was crushing. She had about 7,400 cases in the warehouse with a retail value of about $4.5 million. Viader had been counting on sales from that vintage to pay the bills that were piling up. But now no money was coming in.
Viader phoned her insurance company regularly, pushing for the time they would mail her a check for her loss. The insurance broker kept saying “soon,” but the mailbox remained empty.
Viader tried to focus on other business. The fire happened smack in the middle of the 2005 harvest, and there were still grapes hanging on her vines. She had three quarters of an acre of Petit Verdot grapes on her hillside vineyard and they were always slow to ripen. While Cabernet Sauvignon grapes might be ready to pick in September or early October, Petit Verdot weren’t fully ripe before the end of October or early November. So even though Viader felt distracted by the fire, as a winemaker she had to be engaged in the harvest.
Viader also needed to do damage control. She called all the restaurants that carried her wine and all the distributors who sold it. The loss of the 2003 vintage meant that there wouldn’t be Viader products on store shelves or on restaurant wine lists for at least a year, an eternity in the wine world. The business was extremely competitive. Placement was everything. Convincing a restaurant to carry your wine could take years. Once a wine was off a wine list, it might be off forever. There were always other winemakers, other wineries, waiting in line to talk to that sommelier, to pour him or her a glass and discuss the soils in which the grapes grew. Viader wanted to maintain the relationships she had built up over fifteen years. She needed to personally explain to her clients that although the 2003 vintage was a total loss, she hoped to release her 2004 vintage, now aging in oa
k barrels in her caves, early. Could they hold a spot for her?
As she waited for word from her insurance company, Viader got the idea that she could learn something from the fire. Heat had always been an issue with wine. It didn’t take much to cook a bottle and change a wine’s flavor. Viader had an extensive chemistry background and had always been fascinated by the chemical transformation that happened with wine. She decided to send samples of wine that she and her crew had pulled from different parts of the warehouse to a laboratory in St. Helena that specialized in wine analysis. Viader would ask them to test it and see how different levels of heat exposure had affected the bottles differently.178 It was a variation on the “if you’ve got lemons, make lemonade” theory.
As the days rolled by, Viader’s financial troubles began to mount. She owed money everywhere—to the people who had purchased wine futures, to members of the wine club, to restaurants that had made down payments—and she had negative cash flow. She had a lot of bills to pay and nothing to pay them with. “In this business, you live from one harvest to the next.”179
Viader had to take out an emergency loan from the bank.
A communication from the insurance company finally arrived. It was not what Viader had been expecting. The insurance company denied most of her claim. It would pay her $500,000 but not the $4.5 million she had lost when her wine was destroyed in the fire.
It all came down to fine print. The policy insured Viader’s wines at her winery on Howell Mountain and at the warehouse she had long used on Tower Road in southern Napa County. But the destroyed wine wasn’t in either place. It was at Wines Central. It was “in transit,” according to her insurer.
Viader was devastated. She sat in her office in the winery, a large room crowded with desks, computers, and various size bottles, and fumed. And cried. And cried some more. Then she vowed to contest the ruling.
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