It’s impossible to know if Anderson had concocted a strategy early on to delay his sentence based on inadequate counsel. But he laid the groundwork for that claim with his first complaint to Karlton in 2008. Many other letters chastising Reichel’s representation had followed. On August 16, 2010, Judge Karlton felt compelled to appoint an independent attorney to assess whether Anderson’s claims of inadequate representation were true. Anderson’s sentencing was postponed once again.
It became Reichel’s word against Anderson’s. The complaint meant that Reichel was no longer bound by attorney-client privilege. Out poured a torrent of stories showing how working with Anderson was extremely strange.
“It was a bizarre experience,” wrote Reichel in his declaration to the court. “It was not an easy task. From the beginning of that representation he was not candid with me, changed his story often, and did not ever want to admit hard truths. He is extremely difficult to work with, and that is an understatement.”
Reichel said talking to Anderson was like going into the carnival fun house where everything is distorted. He had “bizarre defense theories.” He constantly lied and changed his story. Reichel would ask Anderson a simple question, like “Who is Joe Throckmorton,” and Anderson would repeat the question back verbatim. He would tell Reichel about “important” defense witnesses who did not exist. When one of Reichel’s investigators interviewed Anderson, he was castigated for not knowing enough about certain types of French red wine. Anderson seemed to prefer “to discuss anything other than his case; he desired that my time … be spent listening to him spin yarns with stories of all the great things he had done in his life.”
Reichel eventually had a psychiatrist examine Anderson. The report “confirmed all my concerns about his characteristics of narcissism and a complete unwillingness to deal with difficult matters and preferring to simply lie about things.”
Despite the difficulty, Reichel denied he pushed any plea bargain on Anderson. He had been prepared to go to trial. Anderson even admitted to Reichel he had set the fire, Reichel wrote in his court statement. When Anderson saw the government’s overwhelming evidence against him and the jail sentence it could bring, Anderson had willingly taken the fifteen years, eight months, said Reichel.191
Anderson submitted a point-by-point rebuttal to Reichel’s affidavit. His version was diametrically different. He claimed Reichel rarely showed up to talk to him, had no handle on the case, and had done the barest of preparation. “If one were going to ask someone to attempt to castigate, humiliate, and pontificate, about something he does not understand or comprehend, with all the pomposity and subtlety of a Victorian costermonger, Mr. Reichel would certainly win a penny at the circus,” Anderson wrote. “There are no metes or bounds to his lack of vacuous creativity.”
In August 2011, almost two years after Anderson pleaded guilty, Judge Karlton removed Reichel as Anderson’s counsel. There was evidence, he said, that Reichel had performed poorly. Then he gave time to Anderson’s new attorney, Jan Karowsky, to prepare to argue why Anderson should be able to withdraw his guilty pleas.
That meant more delays for Anderson’s victims.
* * *
I had been following Anderson’s case closely for almost two years at that point, driving from Berkeley to Sacramento whenever there was a hearing. Mark and I were communicating by letter and telephone, but I did not visit him in jail after my initial visit in 2010. Instead, I only saw him in the courtroom. It got to be a cozy crowd at the courthouse. The group included Steven Lapham, the prosecutor, Brian Parker, the lead ATF agent, and Jan Karowsky, Anderson’s newest attorney. Anderson’s girlfriend, Cynthia Witten, was frequently in attendance, although she never talked to the press. She was always dressed demurely in a long-sleeved dress, skirt, or powder blue suit. One time when I was sitting in an aisle seat and she needed to get by, I smiled and said hello. “No comment,” she murmured.
Of course, the central actor in this drama was Mark. Even his entrance into court resembled theater. Accompanied by a sheriff’s deputy, he would enter by a side door into the wood-paneled courtroom and make his way to the defendant’s table. He had gained even more weight in jail—his attorney said he weighed 330 pounds—and his stomach bulged against his bright orange uniform. Sometimes he arrived in a wheelchair. Sometimes he walked in leaning on the wheelchair for support. One time he even asked the judge’s permission to lie down on a wooden bench while the proceedings continued because his back hurt too much to stay seated. Apparently, Anderson had to lie down when he met his attorney in jail, too. Karowsky told the court how strange it was to hear “this disembodied voice” coming from the floor during their strategy sessions.
There were numerous hearings on Anderson’s case. As Judge Karlton said from the bench, how could this man take up so much of the court’s time? Anderson seemed disconnected from reality. Despite the evidence, he kept arguing that he was innocent—even after he pleaded guilty. He even started to insist he was not at Wines Central the day of the fire. “He almost seems like he likes the attention,” Lapham, the prosecutor, said outside the courtroom. “As soon as he gets packed off to federal detention he becomes a number. At least here he gets attention.”
* * *
While Anderson dallied, Ted Hall stewed. He thought it was unconscionable that so much time had lapsed from crime to judgment to justice. While Lapham didn’t seem to mind the delay—Anderson was sitting in a jail cell, after all—Hall and others wanted closure. They wanted justice. They felt jerked around. There had been eleven hearings set for Anderson’s sentencing, eleven delays. Six years had passed since the fire and four since Anderson’s arrest. To Hall, the delays were “not in the public interest.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DELAY
On February 7, 2012, six years and four months after the fire at Wines Central, Mark Anderson was rolled into federal court to finally be sentenced for the crime. Anderson’s new attorney could not convince Judge Karlton to let Anderson withdraw his guilty plea. Karowsky, a white-haired former district attorney turned criminal defense attorney, had fought hard for his client, however. He had hired his own wine appraiser to look at the value of the four and a half million to six million bottles destroyed that day. The appraiser, who had been recommended by the well-regarded Sotheby’s auction house, put the loss at $54 million—significantly lower than the government’s estimate of $250 million for the wine alone. (Lapham thought the loss was actually more than $400 million but had agreed to the lower number for sentencing purposes.) Karowsky had hoped the lower figure would reduce the severity of the crime and Anderson’s time in jail.
“The day has actually arrived,” Judge Karlton said as he settled in the chair behind the high desk on the dais.
The judge then began to think aloud, casting around scenarios for Anderson. The plea bargain worked out in November 2009 that would have sentenced Anderson to fifteen years, eight months—and given him a chance to spend his later years out of jail—was no longer in effect, the judge noted. Anderson had breeched it when he made a motion to withdraw his guilty plea.
Karowsky asked for a sentence of ten years. “Here we have a gentleman who never had a traffic ticket, a respected member of his community, finding himself in a financially precarious position, who took an extreme action.”
Lapham asked for thirty years. He pointed out that the losses were huge. Insurance companies had paid out about $65 million in claims. And he revealed for the first time that Sterling Vineyards, a unit of the gigantic British beverage firm Diageo, suffered the largest uninsured loss—$37 million.
Judge Karlton couldn’t seem to decide what to do. He started throwing around different scenarios. If Anderson had been twenty or thirty years old, a sentence of thirty years would be a deterrent, he said, but now that he was sixty-three, that jail term would almost certainly mean he would die in jail. Thirty years was “an outrageously heavy sentence.”
“Ultimately the question in the court’s mind is
what is sufficient? I’m not certain thirty years, given Mr. Anderson’s age, is appropriate … Mr. Karowsky, you suggest ten years. I’m going to tell you, that’s not going to happen. Everything else is a life sentence, probably.” Judge Karlton looked to be hovering at a sentence of about fifteen years.
Then Ted Hall stood up. Lapham had invited some of Anderson’s victims to talk about what impact the fire had on them. It was a strategy that Lapham often used to show a judge the human side of a tragedy. Hall, dressed in a gray suit and looking more like the management consultant he used to be than the winery owner he was currently, slowly made his way from the audience gallery to a podium before the judge. He held a white piece of paper with his statement typed on it. Almost as soon as Hall started to speak, he began to cry. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He choked up, and was barely able to get out his words for a minute. The fire may have happened years earlier, but it still carried an emotional impact.
The fire had ruined many people’s lives, Hall told the court. Wineries lost millions. Some went out of business. Hundreds of people lost their jobs. But while the court focused on the financial implications of the crime, Hall asked the judge to think about the personal implications.
“This was a crime against families: those that owned the businesses and many everyday working men and women who helped us produce these irreplaceable wines,” said Hall. “Our farm workers, our winemaker, and our entire team dedicated themselves to producing these wines for which there is no replacement. We can’t simply call up a factory and ask them to make us another vintage of 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon. It is gone forever. The fruit of our hands and of our hearts is irretrievably gone, like a piece of fine art trashed by a barbarian sacking a city … May his sentence reflect the havoc he wreaked and may it be long to reflect the lasting damage to our lives.”
Delia Viader was not in the courtroom. She had planned on giving a statement, but so many of Anderson’s hearings had been postponed or changed that she hadn’t been sure if it was worth the effort to drive the hour from Napa. Dick Ward also decided to skip the hearing. The only other person who testified was Catherine Williams, the daughter of Julie Johnson, who had lost thousands of cases of her Tres Sabores wine. My mother “has not taken a day off since that fire,” said Williams. “She cannot stop working because the devastation that it caused brought her to the brink of financial insolvency. It not only ruined her business, it ruined her spirit. He stole her wine and he stole her spirit.”
The testimony of the two victims changed the atmosphere in the courtroom. Judge Karlton reacted visibly to Hall’s statement, lifting his eyebrows as if he suddenly understood the stakes of Anderson’s crime.192 While before there had been banter about Anderson’s sentence, with a few jabs made by the judge about how wine lovers think every bottle of wine is worth $10,000, there seemed to be a new awareness of the devastation and pain Anderson had wrought.
The judge asked Anderson if he had anything to say. Anderson did not.
“This was a grievous crime,” said Judge Karlton. “It’s important the court recognize that. Whatever I do is a life sentence anyway.”
He then sentenced Anderson to twenty-seven years in prison and ordered him to pay $70.3 million in restitution, even though Anderson was broke. That meant Anderson would be jailed until 2034, when he was eighty-six years old.
As Anderson heard the sentence, all he did was shake his head in disbelief.
* * *
Anderson has never publicly expressed remorse for setting the fire. He never apologized in court for his actions, something his victims have long wanted. Apparently, he told a probation officer in 2009 that “he was very sorry for his conduct and remorseful for the impact of his actions on others,” but that document has never been made public and its contents have only turned up in court filings. “My position regarding the event was that it was indeed a catastrophe and obviously a devastating loss to the owners of the contents and the owner of the business,” Anderson wrote me after he was sentenced. “Notwithstanding the event, I had nothing to do with it; was not a party or directed the theft of any wines and certainly did not have any part in anything of which I was accused.”193
Over time, I stopped expecting a confession from Mark, or even any acknowledgment that he had hurt people. If his own brother felt compelled to create a website attacking him as a way to get his attention, as a way to say he thought his brother was guilty, how could anyone else expect to penetrate the web of self-denial he had spun around himself?
Our last conversation was in the spring of 2012, right before he was about to be sent to Terminal Island, a low-security federal penitentiary in San Pedro, right near the entrance to the Los Angeles Harbor. Al Capone, Charles Manson, and Timothy Leary were all once inmates there. Anderson had hoped to be sentenced to Lompoc, probably because it was closer to where Witten lived, but he didn’t get his wish. She eventually moved back to her home state of Oregon. But Terminal Island, with 975 inmates, is one of the better federal prisons. It sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and most of the year the weather is sunny. Anderson had appealed his case, he told me, arguing to the Court of Appeals that he had had insufficient representation, which led him to accept the guilty plea. He wrote me one more letter. Then our correspondence stopped.
PART SIX
REDEMPTION
CHAPTER TWENTY
LEGACY
The bottle of Port had been lying on its side in a storage room beneath my home’s staircase for almost fifteen years. A present from my stepmother, I had taken it from its cool, dark resting place only twice: once, after my cousin told me that 175 bottles of Hellman’s wine had been destroyed in the Vallejo warehouse fire and again, after I visited Mark Anderson in the Sacramento County jail in 2010. On both of these occasions I held the green bottle in my hands and wondered about the discolored label and sediment stuck to the sides. I also pondered: what would it taste like? It seemed too precious to open for even a special birthday or anniversary. But what kind of occasion would justify drinking a wine made in 1875?
I had begun researching the Port’s provenance in 2010, and by the summer of 2014 I had scoured history books, assessors’ records, court cases, archives, and museum exhibits. I knew when the grapes were first planted in Cucamonga Vineyard (1839) and when the last grapes were pulled out (1917). I knew that the vineyard had passed through the hands of at least five men and a smattering of companies. I knew five people with a connection to the vineyard had been killed. But all those facts didn’t tell me a crucial thing: how good was Hellman’s Port? What exactly was lost in the fire?
My mother and stepfather had also been curious about the value and quality of the wine, and in the 1970s had sent a bottle of Hellman’s Port to Julio Gallo, the proprietor of E. & J. Gallo, now the biggest wine company in the world. At that time Gallo was mostly focused on making bulk wine from grapes in the Central Valley; it would only be later that the firm also moved into high-end wine.
The Port impressed Gallo. He recounted his reactions in a typed letter to my mother. For two paragraphs he talked about the amber color of the wine, its viscosity, and its strong, but pleasant, perfume. It was only in the last paragraph that he admitted that he had dropped the bottle on the floor, where it shattered and spilled. He had to crouch down on his knees, sniff the juice, and dip a finger into the puddle to evaluate the Port.
Long Meadow Farms proprietor Ted Hall and Fritz Hatton, a wine appraiser and a regular auctioneer at Auction Napa Valley, also turned their expert attention to Hellman’s Port. They tasted samples from the bottles my cousin Miranda Heller had sent Hall in 2003 for evaluation. “We were dazzled by it,” Hall told me. There was “a surprising amount of fruitiness, and it was more sophisticated than Fritz or I expected given the state of the wine industry at the time.”
Through the years, Hellman’s wine has occasionally been put up for sale at auction, and buyers have posted their tasting notes on the Internet. Eric Ifune, a surgeon, bought some of Hellma
n’s Port and Angelica, the slightly fizzy fortified white wine, in 2102 at an auction at Zachy’s Wine House in New York. He paid $800 for two bottles. He drank the Port with his family in Las Vegas on Christmas Day. He had the Angelica a few months later with friends in Seattle. He considered both bottles extraordinary and posted his tasting notes on Wineberserkers.com. He wrote that the Port’s aroma was rich with hints of sweet, dark fruit, maple syrup, and tangerines. The taste was nutty and sweet, almost like pecans and pralines.
I decided I needed someone with an expert palate to help me determine the quality of Hellman’s wine. So I contacted Fred Dame, who is a Master Sommelier, a title held by only 147 people in North America. Getting the title is famously difficult, as it requires memorizing thousands of facts about different wines and regions around the world, as well as being able to recite unimaginable minutiae about hospitality. The test on wine involves blind tasting six wines and accurately identifying the grape, where the wine comes from, and the year it was made. Most people don’t pass the first time, despite thousands of hours of study. Many people don’t pass the second or third times, either.
Dame took the exam in 1984 and became the first American to pass all three parts on the first try. Only thirteen other people in the world have accomplished that. For their achievement, they were awarded the “Krug Cup,” an honor bestowed by the historic Champagne company.
Dame was recently featured in the documentary Somm, which traces four men as they study to take the Master Sommelier test. He was busy enough before the film, traveling around the world to consult with companies about wine, but the movie’s release has put even more demands on his time. Food festivals from El Paso to Boca Raton routinely ask Dame to make an appearance.
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