The Billionaire's Vinegar (26 page)

Molyneux-Berry examined hundreds of Koch’s bottles, taking one at a time and comparing it with others. Because Koch’s collection was so encompassing, Molyneux-Berry often had the luxury of comparing the same wine in the same vintage in multiple bottlings, even fifteen or twenty bottles of the same kind. All might look right except, say, three, which would look wrong in exactly the same way. It could take up to an hour to examine each bottle, but Koch insisted that Molyneux-Berry take the time necessary to assess the cellar.

“One, he’s very rich,” Molyneux-Berry said during a break from his work. “Two, he’s absolutely pissed off at being defrauded.”

Molyneux-Berry had worked up a list of thirty-two indicators of authenticity. They ranged from the shape of the bottle to the color of the glass, to the label material, to the label’s coloration, to the importer’s “slip” label, to the pontil scars and mold marks and ullage and capsule and cork and color of the wine and sediment. He would tick them off one by one.

Among the fakes he found was a magnum of Lafite 1945 that was in a bottle of a sort only created in 1964. A batch of 1950s La Tâche just purchased by Koch at auction had suspiciously high fills. Other bottles bore labels that had clearly been copied. Those were the easy ones. More difficult were instances where the bottle was correct, the label was good, the slip label seemed right, but Molyneux-Berry just had a feeling at first, and on closer scrutiny found some more definitive clue.

Molyneux-Berry made a point of not wanting to know the source of any bottle before he had made an assessment of its authenticity. He didn’t want to have an unconscious bias. “I don’t want to know the provenance,” he said. “That could color my own opinion. I’m just picking up each bottle, writing down what I think: fake…real…I don’t want to be like a jury told of a prior criminal record.”

In July, Molyneux-Berry took a break from cataloging, flying to Moscow to judge a sommelier competition before returning to the United States to resume his work in the Koch cellars. Molyneux-Berry had left the paper trail to others in Koch’s organization, and as they narrowed down the channels—not easy, given the compartmentalized information structure of the rare-wine market—news filtered back to him that several of the bottles he had deemed fake had come from Rodenstock.

Regarding Michael Broadbent, his old rival, Molyneux-Berry was split. He respected Broadbent’s success and his talent. He thought less of the lengths to which Broadbent was willing to go in order to win. “He told me,” Molyneux-Berry recalled, “‘My major weakness is I’m a salesman. I have to cut the deal.’”

Looking back now on the original Christie’s catalog featuring the bottle bought by the Forbes family, Molyneux-Berry noted that Broadbent hadn’t even mentioned Monticello (Molyneux-Berry had consulted with them first thing upon being offered the Frericks consignment in 1989): “There’s a fear in the way it’s cataloged. I suspect he was sick as a parrot about the authenticity, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity. It was the juiciest carrot he’d ever got.”

Molyneux-Berry wasn’t losing sleep over Rodenstock’s fate, which he thought might be worse than losing a lawsuit. “One or two of these guys are ferocious,” he said, referring to Rodenstock’s Hong Kong customers. “They will chop his head off, not ask for their money back. If we find a torso that looks like Hardy Rodenstock’s, we’ll know they’ve gotten their revenge.”

F
OR NOW, AN
intact Rodenstock was still making the society scene. In early 2006 he appeared with Prince Albert of Monaco at an event where Rodenstock made a donation to one of the prince’s charities. In May, Rodenstock attended Riedel’s 250th-anniversary celebration in Kufstein. But there were indications that he was getting nervous. In August he reached out to Walter Eigensatz, Mr. Cheval Blanc, who hadn’t spoken to him in years. Rodenstock called him and asked after his health, speaking of the good wines they had shared and suggesting they get together sometime. Eigensatz was measured in his response, leaving Rodenstock with the stark warning that he should “be careful.” It was clear to Eigensatz that Rodenstock was trying to make nice with his enemies. “A year ago he was telling people he hoped I’d die,” Eigensatz said a month later.

Michael Broadbent, pedaling blithely into the gloaming, seemed only mildly concerned by what was happening. “He was reluctant to tell me where he got them,” Broadbent told a guest in late 2005, speaking in Room Number 7 of the London headquarters of Christie’s. The room, its walls lined with red fabric, was one of a suite of tiny, windowless compartments on the ground floor that were reserved for specialists to meet with clients. Broadbent and the visitor were seated at a small square table. The former head of the wine department wore a dark pin-striped suit. Gold cuff links peeked out from the sleeves.

Broadbent’s tasting notes now exceeded 85,000, and he had only two blank red notebooks left. The manufacturer had changed the color to black, but Broadbent didn’t expect to have to make the change. “I’ll be dead by then,” he said. For a seventy-eight-year-old man who had devoted his life to alcohol, Broadbent looked fantastic. His face bore none of the exploded capillaries of the vodka-dependent; his liver functioned properly; his waistline remained in check; his mind was still acute.

“He was reluctant to tell me where he got them,” Broadbent was recalling. “That’s the only big question. And I said to Hardy, I said, ‘Look, if you tell me where you got these, and I’m happy, my Christie’s clients will be happy that I’m satisfied.’” Two decades on, to Broadbent’s unceasing irritation, Rodenstock had still not obliged him.

Broadbent had recently been fielding all kinds of inquiries about the bottles, including one from a woman who ran the New York charity to which Bill Sokolin had donated his broken Jefferson bottle. She had contacted Broadbent in an effort to ascertain its provenance. Broadbent, in turn, had put the question to Rodenstock. On August 21, Broadbent had received a fax from Rodenstock, who had just attended the Salzburg music festival, where he reported that he had had “a lovely time.”

Broadbent had begun to get nervous, as the possible repercussions of a full-fledged investigation began to dawn on him. In a handwritten fax to Rodenstock on October 4, he wrote:

Dear Hardy,

Jefferson bottles. You and I are bored stiff with this subject. Unhappily, more pressure from the USA. I had a
huge
file, including Frericks, but neither I nor my secretary can find it.
I seriously need all the filing you have on the Bonani/Hall analyses, and anything else relevant.
It is important that I produce the evidence,
again
, for your reputation, Christie’s, and mine is at stake.

Warm regards as always,
Michael

Rodenstock faxed a reply six days later, saying that he had been contacted by Koch’s investigator. Rodenstock promised to send copies of the before-and-after photos he had presented as evidence in the Frericks case, which he falsely claimed “clearly show that the bottle has been tampered with after it has left my cellar. Frericks certainly had fiddled about with the wine himself. The sealing wax is without any doubt no longer identical with the sealing wax the bottle had when Frericks had bought it from me.”

Now Broadbent’s nervousness seemed to have receded and been replaced by weariness. Talk turned to Sotheby’s, toward which Broadbent’s hostility had hardly abated. “Of course, I hate her,” Broadbent said now of Serena Sutcliffe. “I find her totally pretentious.” He continued, “But the great joy was, Serena is incredibly proud of her lingual abilities. Philippine de Rothschild was having a lunch party in London, and Serena was being over-the-top about something: her father was in the war, and I never had any relations in the war or killed in the war, things like that. She was just being absolutely obnoxious. And Philippine de Rothschild leaned over and said, ‘Serena, I cannot abide the way you speak French.’ And Serena was knocked back.” Broadbent did his best impression of Sutcliffe looking astonished. “And I said, ‘Tell me, what is it about her speech?’ Philippine said, ‘First of all, it’s very pretentious. She’s trying to speak in what she thinks is the French upper-class accent, and she’s using words that went out of favor years ago, and she just misses it.’” Broadbent grinned, clearly enjoying himself.

“I can tell you endless stories about her pretentiousness, silly mistakes she makes,” he said. “But I won’t. But she is very bright. She’s known as Pushy Galore in America. Some American told me that. She is pushy. I mean, she’s a hand-presser, particularly in Bordeaux, and she charms them all, but some people there can’t stand her, either.” He paused. “But she’s done a great deal and put Sotheby’s on the map. Whereas they were lagging hopelessly before.”

The conversation grazed other topics, then Broadbent said, “It’s terribly hot in here. Let’s go and have a drink.” King Street was still slick from the morning rain. The world headquarters of Christie’s was situated in the heart of St. James, a neighborhood of bespoke shirtmakers, old-line wine merchants, and private men’s clubs dating to the time of Britain’s seventeenth-century glory.

Broadbent’s club was Brooks’s, one of the oldest. At the bar upstairs, he ordered a glass of Tio Pepe sherry, one of his preferred tipples. That morning, as on many others, he had begun the day with a buck’s fizz, as the British call a cocktail of Champagne and orange juice. Even in his old age, he exuded a winsome boyishness, and his varied enthusiasms could distract him from the topic at hand. He might be mid-conversation at his ninth-floor riverside flat when suddenly he’d leap toward the window to point out some passing boat on the Thames that he’d never seen before. Or he’d be having lunch in a restaurant when he’d stop, mid-sentence, his attention caught by an attractive young woman, and murmur, “Dishy little Indian.”

Broadbent and his guest repaired to Brooks’s dining room for lunch. Broadbent ordered potted shrimp to start, followed by roasted grouse. “Pink,” he told the waiter, “but not bloody.” He ordered a small carafe of Macon-Lugny, a pleasant white Burgundy, followed by a half-bottle of a delicious blended red from Lebanon called Château Musar. He didn’t need to look at the wine list; he had previously sat on the club’s wine committee.

“Like me,” Broadbent said, returning to the Jefferson bottles, “Hardy is sick of the subject.” He sipped at his Musar. “Very drinkable, don’t you think?” His note on it would have to wait until later; Brooks’s discouraged the mixing of business and pleasure by forbidding papers in the club. Broadbent was fed up with Richard Marston, Koch’s British investigator, who had called him several times. “If they want anything further from me,” Broadbent said, “Mr. Koch himself can call me.” He pronounced
Koch
like
Bach,
with a throaty scrape on the final consonants. Broadbent dismissed the inquiries as “malicious.” Jim Elroy was an “FBI bore.”

B
ILL
K
OCH 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.”

C
HAPTER
20

T
HE
F
INISH

F
OR 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 wouldn’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.”

T
HOUGH 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.”