Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (25 page)

With his vast profits Leroy expanded his
négociant
cellars in Auxey-Duresses, buying up massive amounts of the best wines and best vintages. It was said that Leroy’s caves contained millions of bottles of the most valuable wines, and amounted to a wine library akin to the National Library. He also bought up vines in the best appellations of Burgundy: like Auxey, Meursault, Pommard, Vougeot, Chambolle, Gevry, and Vosne, smartly realizing that one day these capital investments, and the one he had made in the Domaine, would pay huge dividends.

Monsieur Leroy, who died in 1980, installed his eldest daughter, Lalou, as the head of his company in 1972, the year before she became co-
gérant
of the Domaine. Lalou was born in Paris but grew up in the vineyards. She claimed that by the age of three she already liked to be with her father as he tasted and discussed wines with clients. She loved tasting, and the smell of, wine. She studied at the Sorbonne, and at the University of Bonn in Germany. In addition to her native language, she spoke fluent German and Spanish. The only thing she loved as much as wine was mountaineering.

More than anything, she adored her father. She spent much of
her life striving to impress and please him. Once, she broke off an engagement because her papa didn’t care for the man. Lalou may not have been the son her father had hoped for, but she was every bit as clever as four foxes. In the male-dominated wine trade, she was determined to demonstrate to her father that she was every bit as smart and tough as any man. In all pursuits, Lalou’s goal was to prove herself to be the very best, to make her father proud—whether she was climbing the Alps or scaling the Olympus of Burgundy.

Monsieur de Villaine didn’t need Wilson Daniels to point out for him that Société Leroy’s gray market scheme simultaneously eroded the hard-earned status of the DRC’s wines and elevated those from her own domaine. The Société Leroy also had vines in many of the same parcels as the Domaine, Romanée-St.-Vivant, Grands Échézeaux, Échézeaux. With the ’88s, while she depressed the value of the Domaine’s wines from those appellations, the prices for Maison Leroy’s bottles from those same vineyards remained constant or in fact elevated, depending on where Lalou set them.

It wasn’t a matter of the wines selling. Wines from those appellations from the exalted names of Leroy and the Domaine would sell. Price was equated with prestige, and more concretely, it was the foundation for subsequent years’ pricing. If the American market had paid $125 for ’88 La Tâche in 1991 (when it should have been paying $250), it was unlikely the market would be willing to pay $300 in 1992 for the ’89 La Tâche.

Aubert focused on the immediate business impact and the Domaine’s obligation, as he saw it, to reimburse Wilson Daniels. He asked Lalou for the Société Leroy to reimburse the Domaine. She refused, maintaining she had done nothing wrong, that what happened to the wines happened to the wines.
C’est la vie
.

Aubert felt the Domaine had no choice but to file a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, he also felt that Lalou had demonstrated clearly
that she put herself and her company’s interests over that of the Domaine and all of its family shareholders, including her own sister, and nieces and nephews. The whole affair made him sick with anxiety. His wife, Pamela, and his sisters would remember that they had never seen him so distraught.

Aubert reached out to Lalou’s only sibling, her younger sister, Pauline, who agreed with Aubert. Or so she said. Aubert needed Pauline’s support, her vote, at the next family shareholder meeting to oust Lalou and appoint her replacement.

In the days leading up to that family shareholder meeting in December 1991, Aubert’s sister Marie-Hélène called their other sisters, Christine and Cecile. Typically, all three of them skipped the meetings and entrusted that their perspectives and best interests would be represented by their own sons and by Aubert and their other brother, Patrick. This time, however, Marie-Hélène realized that Aubert needed them to be there for him. She called her sisters and rallied them to attend.

The day of the vote, it was a full house at the Domaine. Everyone was there, including Pauline and Lalou. The awkwardness of what everyone knew would be voted on was in the air.

While Aubert had been assured that Pauline would cast the vote from her family’s side that was necessary to make the change, he was not sure if she would have it in her to vote against her sister, to her face, in front of their children and nieces and nephews. When the matter was put up for the vote, all of the hands from the de Villaine side were raised in favor of impeaching Lalou; with her sister looking on, Pauline raised her hand for the electoral exclamation point. Without saying a word, Lalou turned and left the Domaine. Beyond the red gates, her husband was waiting for her in the car; she got in, they drove off, and that was that. For a few months anyhow.

The representative of the Leroy family who was voted to
fill Lalou’s slot was Pauline’s son, Charles. He lived in Switzerland. Only three months after he was appointed, while driving between Switzerland and France, he was killed in a car accident. The next time Pauline and Lalou saw one another was at the funeral. They didn’t speak to each other. As Lalou would recall years later, “What was there to say?” Lalou had plenty to say, and she put it in a lawsuit.

Not long after her nephew was buried, the very next day as it was fixed in Aubert’s mind, Lalou filed a countersuit against the Domaine for what amounted to slander and wrongful termination. The court ruled in favor of the Domaine, ordering Lalou to pay the damages with interest. Lalou was prohibited from ever holding a leadership role within the Domaine, and Société Leroy was stripped of its distribution rights with the Domaine.

The courts could do nothing to keep Lalou out of the Domaine’s backyard. She had already acquired the Domaine Noëllat in Vosne, on the opposite side of the tiny town from the DRC.

Lalou was determined to make wines more critically acclaimed than the Domaine’s. She believed she had been humiliated and felt betrayed by the Domaine, which she believed her father had saved not once, but twice: the first time by buying Chambon’s shares and saving the Domaine from outside interests and the almost certain divisions that would have occurred in its wake; the second when her father insisted that the phylloxera-infested vines of 1945 be torn up and replanted. She felt she had been betrayed by her own sister, whose son took her place. It was accepted as an open secret throughout Vosne, through the Côte d’Or, that Lalou had not forgotten.

W
ith more than two decades on the job, Inspector Pageault had lived the truisms of detective work that as a boy he heard his father discuss at the dinner table. The wild-goose chases of Monsieur PlayStation and the writer Bessanko had affirmed the one that goes, Every investigation comes with a dead-end lead. Two other bits of cop gospel he knew: No matter how good your instincts, there will be elements of an investigation you never see coming; and, Solving a case does not necessarily mean you have explained what happened. The Romanée-Conti investigation, Pageault was now beginning to realize, was one hell of a textbook example of all three.

Only fifteen minutes after Jean-Charles drove away from the cemetery, one of the members of the Police Nationale’s stakeout team who had been scanning the area with night-vision binoculars drew the team’s attention to movement in the vineyards, on the hillside to the southwest of the village of Chambolle-Musigny. Someone was moving on the hill, about one o’clock from the cemetery’s front gate, out a quarter mile or so.

Inside one of the white vans parked nearby, Pageault turned
his binoculars on the hillside as directed. He could hardly believe what he saw: the silhouette of a man walking down the slope, moving through the vines toward the road at the bottom of the hill. The figure was on a line straight for the cemetery across the road.

Now where in the hell did you come from?
he thought.

Pageault reminded the team to wait for his word and until then to remain vigilant for any other suspicious activity. If he had to make a bet on how this pickup would unfold, Pageault would have wagered a month’s pay that it would involve a car or a motorcycle. In preparing for this night, the team had mapped out potential routes a pickup vehicle, or vehicles, might take, and then did their best to position officers to minimize the chances for a chase.

Pageault watched the man step from the vines, cross the narrow road, and enter the cemetery. A few minutes later, the man exited the cemetery carrying a trash bag, turned left, and began walking east along the dark road toward RN-74. Pageault watched the figure walk for about fifty yards. He—along with everyone else on the stakeout, linked by their silence on the radio—watched and waited, and listened for the sights and sounds of an approaching vehicle. An accelerating motor. Tires on gravel. A car pulling from a driveway or side road. But there was nothing.

Pageault watched the man walk for about another fifty yards.

Still nothing. None of the officers reported any other suspicious activity in the vicinity.

Seconds passed like seasons.

Finally, Pageault gave the word to move in for the arrest.

While some officers stayed put in position, in the event there indeed was another piece of the pickup that might get spooked
and attempt to rush off, at least a half dozen vehicles zipped from all directions toward the man on the road with the trash bag. The police surrounded him and bathed him in spotlights. Hopping from their vehicles and approaching him with guns at the ready, they ordered him to drop the bag and raise his hands above his head. Blinking into the spotlights, the man did as he was told.

Pageault did the frisking. He couldn’t wait to lay eyes on this guy. He was dressed in a black winter parka, black knit hat, like the one the person in the Colissimo security video wore, black boots, and jeans. A punk of a grown man, with a wide face, pug nose, eyes filled with a mix of resignation and “fuck off.”

In the pat-down, Pageault found a headlamp, 523.75 euros, a receipt for a nearby hotel, a ticket for a train to Dijon, two pens, a pair of black gloves, and a couple of bank cards. No weapons.

Flipping through the bank cards, Pageault said, “So you’re Jacques Soltys?”

The man confirmed that he was Jacques Soltys. He said he had been arrested before, that he knew how the game went from this point on and he wasn’t interested in playing. If Inspector Pageault was wanting to know more, this Jacques Soltys said, the cop was wasting his time because Jacques wasn’t going to say anything else until he saw the judge.

Thirty minutes later, at 8:15 p.m. on that February 12, Jacques, was deposited into a chair in a room inside the Police Nationale’s Dijon station. Manu took a seat across from him and discovered that Jacques’s defiance was a bluff. Jacques answered one question, then another, then another, for an hour. The more Jacques talked that night, the more Pageault didn’t know what to make of him and his tale.

After the start with the elaborate maps, the couriered packages, the dead vines, not to mention the seemingly simple
brilliance of the whole devious scheme to essentially seize as hostages the most valuable vines in the world—after all of the speculation, what Jacques now said by way of explanation was unbelievable because it was all so remarkably unremarkable.

Often, during an interrogation, for strategic reasons Pageault would fake incredulity, but in his initial interview of Jacques, over and over again he was genuinely astonished.

Only minutes into the interrogation, Pageault asked, “How could you be sure that the letters you sent via the postal service would arrive at the Domaine?”

It was the most basic of questions about what had appeared to be one of the most unsophisticated aspects of a crime. One minute police were convinced they were dealing with a masterful plot thoughtfully conceived and well orchestrated, and the next the clever bad guys were sending notes via regular mail. The disconnect represented one of the most confounding developments in the case for the police.

“Sometimes,” Pageault said to Jacques, “the post office makes mistakes. The roads are bad. The delivery can be late.”

The inspector was doing his best to goad Jacques into revealing some “truth” that the police might have been missing. Jacques’s response, however, did not hint at any buried misdirection.

“I trusted the post office,” Soltys said matter-of-factly, as if he were annoyed by what he perceived to be the detective’s inferior intellect. “I trusted that if you post a letter in Dijon, it will get to its destination the next day, that’s all. I didn’t check on that. I didn’t check on the postman, or whatever.”

“How did you come up with the idea to extort the DRC and Vogüé?”

“I came up with the idea by myself,” Jacques said. “It was all
my thinking. I needed money and I found that was a way to get some. I picked those two domaines because of their reputation. I came last year to plan my project. I camped a little bit in the summer. I went into the vineyard to count the vines. Then I drew on a large piece of paper.”

It was almost as if Jacques couldn’t help boasting.

“Do you have some specialized expertise in viticulture? Did you ever work in the vines or study viticulture?”

“I went to the Lycée Viticole in Beaune for a while. I come from wine country. I know wine well. I was the owner of a vineyard in Champagne. I sold the grapes.”

“Where did you stay when you were in the Côte?”

“Mostly in a cabin that I built in the woods.”

“Where?”

“It is not relevant to your investigation. Maybe when I talk to the judge.”

Inspector Pageault pulled back. For now, Jacques had said more than enough. Little by little, in broad strokes, Jacques had provided an overview of the whole crime.

The next morning, February 13, still skeptical of what Jacques had so willingly revealed, the inspectors drove the four hours to his home in the Louvois area of the Champagne region. There, in a tiny, squalid house, with curtains drawn closed and no sunlight, they found his wife, Martine, and the only child of Jacques and Martine, twenty-seven-year-old Cedric.

The front door opened from the street into the kitchen. The detectives noticed the sink filled with dirty dishes. Pageault drew Prignot’s attention to a note that had been printed out on a computer and taped to the wall above a couple of bowls on the floor that said: “Be sure to feed the cats. ONLY wet food.” In an adjacent room that, for lack of a better word, served as Jacques’s study,
they found a wall covered in black spray paint: the phrase “Nique Ta Mère” (Fuck Your Mother) punctuated by a giant swastika.

Pageault interviewed Martine and Prignot talked with Cedric.

Pageault sensed immediately that, although she was trying to pretend otherwise, Martine was overwhelmed, heartsick, and mortified. He got the impression that this was how she had felt for most of her life with Jacques. It was as if she were surprised to see them here, but also, she wasn’t. Martine apologized for her appearance and for the state of the home. She said she wasn’t expecting any visitors and had not yet had a chance to prepare herself for the day.

A plump woman in her late fifties, Martine had short fluffy hair that parted in the middle. She wore a housecoat and slippers and was without her false teeth, which made her even more self-conscious. There was the whiff of booze about her and something she wore smelled of urine.

Manu started off with small talk to get the basics. Martine was unemployed but used to work in a cardboard factory, which seemed fitting, for as she described her life, as much as it was with Jacques, it seemed just as flimsy. The last time she had seen her husband was fifteen days earlier. He had said he was going to Dijon. Since November 2008, when he’d returned home from prison, Martine said, he had left the house off and on for periods of two to three days. Yes, from time to time, Cedric went with him. No, the family didn’t have a car. Sometimes her husband traveled around on a moped or a bicycle. She had never heard anything about Jacques going into Paris and knew nothing about
any Colissimo mailings. Likewise, she hadn’t seen any cardboard tubes or maps.

Pageault had no trouble believing Martine. The detective doubted she even knew what day it was.

Over with Cedric, Prignot was stunned. Cedric so readily admitted he was part of the vine crime that the inspector was caught off guard. She, too, had begun by trying to ascertain a bit of Cedric’s biography. He worked as a gardener with the municipality of Épernay, planting perennials on the sides of the roads and that sort of thing. He lived in subsidized housing in Épernay and often came to his parents’ place on the weekends, which was why he was there. Prignot informed him that his father had been arrested and why, and asked Cedric what he knew about it. Just like that Cedric came out with it.

“I was aware that my father wanted to blackmail vineyard owners. He’s been telling me about this for years. It’s an idea that came to him while he was in prison.”

“Did you father tell you recently that he actually did it?”

“About a week ago,” Cedric said, “I received at my home in Épernay a postcard that my father sent me from Burgundy in which he explained to me that he was expecting a success. What he wrote exactly was that in a few weeks we would know the results. I still have this postcard in my room in Épernay.”

“What was your reaction to what your father was doing?”

“I know his past. All the things that he has done. They have made me depressed. I have tried to commit suicide several times. And I took a few things I should not have taken. I was on ecstasy, LSD, cocaine, heroin. I stopped by myself five years ago, without going into detox. Those products made me depressed. Ruined my health, and my ability to think.”

“Besides the fact that your father was keeping you informed, did you have any part in the destruction of the vines or attempted extortion by your father?”

“Yes. I drilled the vines with him in one of the two domaines.”

According to the notes Inspector Prignot kept of the interview, it was at this point she informed Cedric that considering he had just incriminated himself, she was going to stop the interview and formally place him under arrest.

She informed him he was entitled to a lawyer. Cedric did not want to consult with one. Considering the revelation that he suffered from depression and had attempted suicide—and considering the fact that Prignot was already sizing up that Cedric was awash in comorbid mental issues, and that, basically, this was all one sad mess—she asked Cedric if he wanted to see a doctor. He did not. Also, he said, he hoped to keep this news from his boss. Cedric did not want to lose his job planting flowers. The job had been a fresh start for him.

Over the course of the next hour, Cedric provided a detailed account of what he and his father had done, and when and where. Just as with Martine, Pageault and Prignot had no doubt Cedric was telling the truth.

Indeed, it was just the two of them, the father and son, behind the plot. They weren’t working for anyone. Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Jacques had been working exclusively for himself, which it was becoming clear he had been doing his whole life, at the expense of his wife and son. And Cedric, he was working for his father.

Cedric told Prignot that he had been looking forward to his cut of the money, and that was part of why he participated. Cedric said he was also afraid of his father and didn’t feel like he could tell him no. He was concerned Jacques might sell away
their family home, leave his mother and him for good; that his mother would be left homeless.