When Parker had finished, Anderson looked up at him. “I don’t think you’ve got that quite right,” he said. Parker was stunned by that response. Anderson didn’t look sad, he didn’t look shocked or mad that he was under arrest. He acted like he could have been anywhere, not in handcuffs in the trailer that was the Sausalito police headquarters. But he was still the kind of know-it-all who corrected a federal agent reading out his Miranda rights. Parker handed Anderson the card with the Miranda warning printed on it. “You read it then,” he said.184
* * *
Three days later at a press conference in Sacramento, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, McGregor Scott, stood at the front of the room flanked by agents and investigators from the ATF, IRS, and U.S. Postal Service. He announced that a grand jury that had been meeting for more than a year had handed down a nineteen-count indictment. Anderson was charged with arson, interstate transportation of fraudulently obtained property, mail fraud, use of a fictitious name in connection with a scheme to defraud, and tax evasion. He faced 240 years in prison. “Mark Anderson put lives at risk to cover his tracks,” Scott explained.
Anderson had been hauled to jail first in San Francisco, then in Sacramento. He spent the next five days in a small cell with a narrow bed, sink, and metal toilet. He was released from federal custody on $500,000 bail. (Witten’s father may have put up the funds.) When Anderson returned to his apartment he must have been happy to see his harbor view—and desperate not to go back to that claustrophobic jail cell.
Anderson looked for ways to cast suspicion on others. On April 4 he logged onto Wine Expressions, a website for wine lovers, using the screen name “carlmwood.” Anderson wrote two comments saying that he had heard Wines Central was a “leaky” warehouse and its manager had been involved in the disappearance of some wine years earlier. “Hasn’t anyone ever looked into the other people at Wines Central? It wasn’t a wine warehouse, it was a front for all kinds of other business scams. Anderson had moved out long before.”185 In another comment he wrote: “Jack Krystal (owner of Wines Central) … was bankrupt and needed the insurance to get out of town.”
Two days later, a federal court judge determined Anderson was a flight risk and cancelled his bail. Anderson had no known family ties in the area, no steady employment, no substantial financial resources, used aliases, and traveled overseas frequently, the court determined. He also owned books on how to flee and hide. He was thrown back in jail.
* * *
The court appointed Mark Reichel to represent Anderson. He was the tenth attorney in the previous few years to represent Anderson in various civil and criminal proceedings, and the second federal defender. (The original federal defender excused himself because of a conflict of interest.) Reichel was a Sacramento attorney who had spent thirteen years as a federal public defender handling both white-collar crimes and major felonies, including arson. He had argued one case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and would soon appear in the pages of People magazine for defending a twelve-year-old boy accused of fatally stabbing his eight-year-old sister. Reichel, whom journalists could always rely on for a pithy quote, had set himself up in private practice in 2006 and took on government cases to augment his work. Both defense attorneys and prosecutors regarded him highly, although they acknowledged he was a bit disorganized—until he got in court. Then he was a bulldog.
Reichel would be facing off against R. Steven Lapham, who had been intimately involved in the pursuit of Anderson since he was identified as a suspect in late 2005. Reichel and Lapham were old adversaries who had argued against each other numerous times. But the legal community that spent its time in the wood-paneled courtrooms of the glossy Robert T. Matsui United States Courthouse in Sacramento was small and congenial. Reichel and Lapham had a good personal working relationship that transcended individual cases.
At the start, Reichel crafted a strategy that would limit the amount of time Anderson spent in jail. Reichel didn’t think he could get his client off completely—there was too much evidence against him for that—but he believed he could minimize his jail time. The key was to split off the fraud charges from the arson charges.186
Reichel thought it would be easy for Lapham to prove that Anderson had sent stolen wine to the Chicago Wine Company. The paper trail was clear: clients had entrusted their wine to Sausalito Cellars. Anderson or Kansai Partners had sold similar wine, and money from that sale was deposited into bank accounts controlled by Anderson. The scheme was amateurish and greedy, and Reichel thought jurors would be insulted by Anderson’s conduct.187
But if Anderson pleaded guilty to the four counts of interstate transportation of fraudulently obtained property, Reichel could try to block details of that fraud in the trial about arson. The jail sentence for the fraud would not be severe, and Anderson might get time served.
Then Reichel would be able to focus on the arson charges during the trial.
The arson evidence was mostly circumstantial. Reichel thought he could also poke holes in what the government said was the motive for the fire: that Anderson set the fire to the warehouse to “cover his tracks,” to make it harder to prove he had illegally sold his clients’ wine. Anderson had moved most of his clients’ wine out of Wines Central to another warehouse before the fire. There were no computers or paper records. Reichel planned to argue that there was nothing left to cover up, no evidence to destroy, so there was no motive for Anderson to light the fire.
But when Reichel told Anderson about his strategy, he found an uncooperative client. Anderson insisted he had not stolen the wine and he wanted Reichel to present his convoluted explanations for why it went missing.
Sitting alone in a jail cell with a bad back and constant pain is one way to focus the mind. Anderson never got a license to practice law in California. He graduated from law school, but failed the bar exam twice. Maybe that partial knowledge led him to try to outsmart the judicial system from the isolation of his jail cell. He showered the court with letters and claims. And to a large extent, his manipulations worked.
Letters in his large block print handwriting poured into the court. Anderson complained constantly about his health. He wasn’t getting his pain medicine. The sheriff’s deputies had taken his egg carton mattress topper, which meant he couldn’t sleep. They had broken his CPAP machine when they searched his cell. They had stolen dozens of boxes of important defense documents. Because of his complaints, he had been tossed into solitary confinement for twenty-eight days, he told the judge.
That’s not all Anderson complained about. He was dissatisfied with Reichel. In January 2008, he wrote to the judge in the case, Judge Lawrence Karlton, and said he hadn’t seen or heard from Reichel for months, even though he had written and called the attorney four dozen times. Anderson accused Reichel of not interviewing key witnesses, not hiring a computer expert to examine his hard drive, and being disorganized. “Where is my court appointed attorney?” Anderson wrote on June 18, 2008—his five hundredth day of incarceration. “Why has virtually nothing been done on my case, in my defense, since my arrest?”
* * *
Inmates have a lot of time on their hands, and they often use it to reach out to whomever they think can help—reporters, women sympathetic to the incarcerated, prison rights organizations. But Anderson’s tendency to cry wolf at any opportunity would come back to haunt him.
He sat in the Sacramento jail and stewed. A date was set for his trial, and then postponed. A new date was proposed, and put aside. Finally, two years and nine months after he had been arrested, the courts set November 17, 2009, as the date for the start of Anderson’s trial.
Lapham was ready. He had been working on the case for four years and had spent weeks preparing, interviewing witnesses, poring over wine inventories, examining the forensic arson evidence. He likened trial prep to planning a military campaign where moves and contingencies are plotted out in advance. Lapham intended to put fifty-six witnesses on the stand—people whose
wine Anderson had embezzled, former employees, winemakers, detectives, and Wines Central employees. One of them would be flying in from Japan. Others were coming from out of state. He had interviewed every one of them at least once, and intended to talk to them a second time before they walked up to the witness stand.
As Lapham sat in his office on the eleventh floor of the federal building, reminders of other arson cases surrounded him. There was a photo of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl pinned above the bookcase. She had died in 1997 when her father threw a Molotov cocktail into the house where his estranged wife was living with her child and new boyfriend. There was a drawing made during a trial of a Sacramento developer who torched a warehouse to collect insurance. A plaque with grape leaves was a reminder of his successful prosecution of Fred Franzia, who had substituted cheap grapes for expensive Zinfandel ones.
In the days before Anderson’s trial was set to begin, Lapham’s attention was focused on an easel at the center of his office. He had diagrammed the case day-by-day, with notations of which witnesses and which evidence would be presented. Lapham thought the prosecution part of the trial would last at least three weeks since it was a complex case with many moving parts. The stakes were high: Anderson faced up to 240 years in prison.
Lapham is always open to resolving a case before trial. He has had a lot of experience, having argued around sixty cases before juries, so his reputation is secure. He is not one of those young Turk attorneys who are afraid to show weakness. He doesn’t feel that settling a case is a capitulation.
The U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California has a policy that if there is going to be a plea bargain, it must be negotiated two weeks before a trial is set to start. That ensures that the attorneys get to focus on trial preparation in the days leading up to court, rather than hammering out a plea bargain. But Lapham knew he would have to make an exception for Reichel, whom he considered a good attorney but one who took things down to the wire. Reichel always juggled up until the last moment.
A few days before the trial was set to begin, way past the office’s official deadline, Reichel called Lapham. He wanted to deal. Reichel had talked to his client and Anderson, the man who had shouted his innocence to anyone who would listen, had agreed to plead guilty to all nineteen counts. Laphman listened. He said that in exchange for a guilty plea he would ask that Anderson be sentenced to fifteen years, eight months in prison. The suggested sentence meant Anderson, then sixty-one, might not die in jail.
Anderson’s day of reckoning came on Monday, November 16. He was rousted early from his hard jail bed, which he had tried to make more comfortable by piling on two mattresses and three mattress pads. He dressed in his orange jail jumpsuit and then joined the line of prisoners who had court dates that day. But Anderson couldn’t walk next door to the courtroom. His back, with its ruptured discs, hurt too much. A sheriff’s deputy had to push Anderson into the hearing in a wheelchair.
Anderson managed to hobble from the defense table to a spot in front of Judge Karlton. His attorney stood by his side. Lapham was just a few feet away. When the judge asked Anderson if he wanted to plead guilty, if he understood what he was doing, Anderson replied, “Yes.” He said he agreed to give up his constitutional rights, his right to remain silent, and his right to appeal the sentence. Anderson said “yes” more than twenty times to the judge’s questions. When asked how he would plead, he said, “Guilty.” He later signed a document admitting that “he used gasoline soaked rags to intentionally start a fire in Bay 14 of Wines Central warehouse,” and that he “embezzled his clients’ wine through the use of Kansai Partners.”
The judge set the date for sentencing six weeks in the future.
If only it had ended there.
* * *
I was sitting at my desk in mid-November 2009 when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver. There was a recorded message on the line, asking if I would accept a collect call from the Sacramento County jail by an inmate named Mark Anderson. Would I accept the charges?
Would I? Of course I would. I pressed the phone key that would patch through the call. Nothing. I pushed it again. At that point the line died.
I was puzzled. I had started to report on Anderson and the fire, but had not reached out to him directly. How had he heard I was interested in talking to him? Was it because the story about wine was for the New York Times? I hurriedly wrote him a letter asking if we could talk, and received one back just a few days later. “Yes! I heard through the grapevine you were making inquiries and yes, I would very much like to speak with you or even meet with you,” Anderson wrote. I would soon come to know his big, blocky print handwriting well. The letters came regularly, six, seven, sometimes ten pages on white-lined binder paper. He usually wrote front to back, in pencil. In the first year, Mark wrote me more than twenty times.
In his letters, Mark was charming and expansive, writing chatty tomes with references to wine, history, and countries he had visited around the world. I would send him a list of questions. He would answer them in detail. He always asked me to make a copy of our correspondence and send it back to him. Every letter contained a jab against the jail system.
He said it was too bad we weren’t communicating face-to-face. “A personal conversation … like at Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel, with a bottle of old Cabernet in front of a snowy landscape, recounting this entire story would be much more interesting.”188
In later letters Mark played the aggrieved victim. There was no truth to anything the prosecution said, he insisted, even though he had pleaded guilty to the federal charges of arson, mail fraud, and tax evasion. He never embezzled any wine; missing bottles were due to flooding in the cellars or an errant employee who helped himself. The prosecutors had blown up what should merely have been a civil case into something criminal. He had nothing to do with the Wines Central fire—and by the way, most of the burned wine was plonk, not Napa Valley’s best as claimed by the U.S. attorney’s office. “I’m just as much of a victim,” he wrote, “if not more—I’m being charged for something I didn’t do.”189
The letters evolved into occasional calls. Mark would telephone collect from the Sacramento County jail. We would have a few frantic minutes to talk before a robo-voice announced that the time was up.
Two things marked my communications with Mark: incredible detail and an amazing lack of specificity. He could write for pages about his childhood in Berkeley or the wine adventures he took with his friends around the world. He went into depth about the time he drank wine in a thatched hut in Bora-Bora and the time by the pyramids in Egypt. Mark created such vivid portraits that his stories would leap off the page.
But when I pushed Mark for verification of his history, people I could interview who could confirm those events actually happened, he suddenly became unable—or unwilling—to provide me with names. All his old friends from the Kansai Wine Club in Japan were dead, he insisted, so I couldn’t verify the tales of his amazing international travels. As for other friends, etiquette required he contact them first. But unfortunately, he had fallen out of touch with most of them.
Mark’s inability to connect me with anyone who could corroborate his stories increased my suspicions. It’s one of the first things you learn as a reporter: when a story is complicated, it is frequently false. All the warning signs were there: Mark was evasive. He constructed elaborate explanations about what happened to him and where the wine had gone. He usually cast the blame on someone else.
At first I didn’t understand why Mark wouldn’t be frank and admit he had set the fire. After all, he had pleaded guilty to arson and assorted other crimes. Why wouldn’t he try to grab a different kind of glory? The brass ring of crime? He could be known as the man who destroyed the largest collection of wine in history, a caper so outrageous that it ruined a quarter of a billion dollars of property. I imagined there would be a kind of relief in admitting what he had done, of coming clean. I was wrong.
“Involving yourself in the life of a g
reat liar, once you understand that he’s a liar but go on seeking the truth from him, is a swan dive through a mirror into a whirlpool,” Walter Kirn wrote in his memoir about dealing with a man who claimed to be a Rockefeller descendant. I dove into that whirlpool with Mark Anderson. I learned there was no coming up for air.
* * *
It didn’t take long for Anderson to decide he made a terrible mistake. In April 2010, five months after pleading guilty and before he had been sentenced, Anderson wrote Judge Karlton and said he wanted to vacate his guilty plea. He insisted he had been tricked into accepting a deal because his attorney told him it meant he would only spend eighteen more months in jail. Anderson said he didn’t realize his guilty plea would be final. He figured it was just his attorney’s maneuver to get more time for a trial for which he was not prepared. Plus, Anderson said, Reichel rushed the process, only giving Anderson a few hours to decide. “I can’t remember a time I was under more pressure,” Anderson wrote.
It’s hard to believe that Anderson didn’t know the stakes when he accepted the plea bargain. This was a law school graduate who had worked as a legal researcher for the twenty-six judges at San Francisco Superior Court. He had “negotiated hundreds of civil agreements, in several languages.” Yet he felt “like a deer in the headlight with Mr. Reichel urging him to take the plea.”190
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees the federal court in California, has ruled that defendants can withdraw their guilty pleas before sentencing under certain circumstances. And one of those is a defendant’s belief that their attorney’s deficient performance and bad legal advice motivated their decision to plead guilty. In fact, one ruling seemed to speak to Anderson’s case. In United States vs. Davis, the Ninth Circuit ruled in 2005 that the defendant has the right to withdraw his guilty plea if “the defense counsel’s gross mischaracterization of the likely sentencing range could have motivated defendant to plead guilty.” That was precisely Anderson’s claim.
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