The Billionaire's Vinegar (25 page)

The size of the apparatus required for wheel-engraving drove home the fact that the “Jefferson bottles” would have had to be sent to an expert engraver, which didn’t fit neatly with the narrative of offhanded bottle-marking long conjured by Broadbent and Rodenstock. More damning, the experiments made it clear that the Jefferson bottles couldn’t have been engraved using a pedal-driven copper wheel, which would have resulted in more-ragged lines. Instead, the bottles had clearly been engraved by a modern method: a power tool with a flexible shaft.

Probably a dental drill.

“We believe Rodenstock did the drilling himself,” Brad Goldstein said. “It’s easy.
Jim
did it.”

C
HAPTER
19

T
AILING
M
EINHARD

I
T WAS JUST BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS
2005,
AND
B
ILL
K
OCH
sat at a table in his fourteenth-floor corner office in West Palm Beach, quietly cocky as he described his planned response to his investigators’ findings. “I don’t like lawsuits,” Koch said, “but they can be a good tool.”

The room featured views of the water and souvenirs from his America’s Cup win. Koch often wore conservative suits lined with psychedelic vintage Pucci silk—a sartorial expression of what he considered to be his hidden wildness—but on this day, with his baggy dark brown khakis, striped button-down shirt, and mop of white hair, he looked like a suburban Midwestern dad. A recent knee replacement had left him with a temporary limp, but he was as aggressive as ever.

His doubts mounting, Koch had decided to yank his bottles from the MFA show, at the last minute changing the catalog wording to “reputedly purchased by Thomas Jefferson.” But pulling the bottles from the MFA show only motivated him to further expand the investigation.

By now, Jim Elroy had zeroed in on Hardy Rodenstock, searching for any and all biographical information about the elusive German. As with Koch’s lawsuits against his brothers and his preparation for the America’s Cup, when he deployed frogmen and spy helicopters to gather intelligence, Koch availed himself of a range of investigative tactics. His team, led by Elroy, had tracked Rodenstock to Hong Kong. Among the facts the investigators learned was something Ralf Frenzel had stumbled upon twenty years earlier: “Hardy Rodenstock” was a fictitious name. Hardy Rodenstock was really Meinhard Görke.

Frenzel had been eating at a restaurant in Essen in the 1980s when the waiter said, “You work with my father.” The waiter’s last name was Görke, and he informed Frenzel that he was the son of Meinhard Görke, better known as Hardy Rodenstock. This was the first Frenzel had heard of Rodenstock not being Hardy’s real name, of his being a father, and of his having been previously married. The name change didn’t strike Frenzel as a big deal. In the German music business, stage names were common. Rodenstock’s girlfriend, Tina York, and her sister Mary Roos had been born Monika and Rosemarie Schwab, and Jack White, a Berlin music producer who was a regular at Rodenstock’s tastings, had changed his name from Horst Nussbaum. It was the secrecy about Rodenstock’s real name—and his family—that made an impression on Frenzel. When he mentioned the encounter with the son, Rodenstock seemed unsettled.

Two decades later, Koch’s investigators, who viewed the name change in a more sinister light, were discovering other interesting things as well, including the fact that Rodenstock owned a company that manufactured perfumes and essences. And they had obtained the sealed court documents from the Frericks dispute. They were amazed to learn that, contrary to all the press reports at the time, a court had decisively sided with Frericks (when the Munich court, on December 14, 1992, found that Rodenstock “adulterated the wine or knowingly offered adulterated wine”). The investigators’ findings now filled a fat spiral dossier and two CD-ROMs.

E
LROY WAS EMPLOYING
some “very clever” methods in his investigation, Koch said now at his office as he stood up to go to lunch. Koch drove a visitor, along with Oxbow’s publicist, Brad Goldstein, and general counsel, Richard Callahan, in his Maybach to the Palm Beach Yacht Club. The car featured a flat-screen TV on the back of each seat, puffy headrests, and four different cell phones positioned around the wood interior. At lunch, Koch sat with his back to the water. He reported that Broadbent was backpedaling now, saying the wine “tasted like a wine of that period” and retreating from the assertion that it was definitely Jefferson’s. He said he was about two months away from being ready to sue.

Koch told a story about a nationally prominent appellate lawyer who had stayed at his house and was discovered trying to abscond with $70,000 of Koch’s wine in his suitcase. He told other stories about wine merchants he’d sued over undelivered wine, and a wine consultancy he had funded that had become, without his knowledge, a party to tax evasion. And he and Goldstein described how Goldstein had approached
Wine Spectator
to offer it an exclusive on the story of a spectacular fraud. Although
Wine Spectator
had covered several episodes in the Jefferson bottles’ history, despite Marvin Shanken’s ownership of one, the editors now demurred, saying it was “a sensitive subject.” That was the Goldstein/Koch version of events, anyway. Later, Thomas Matthews, the magazine’s executive editor, wouldn’t recall Goldstein specifying that the bottles at issue were the Jefferson bottles; the magazine had been covering counterfeit wine for years, and according to Matthews, Goldstein had demanded that Koch himself author the article. “We don’t let a collector write his own story and make allegations we haven’t investigated,” Matthews says. In any case, all these experiences had soured Koch on the wine world.

Nor were any of the chief members of his legal and investigative team likely to have leapt to the defense of that world. Callahan, Koch’s lawyer, allowed somewhat sheepishly that he ordered cardboard boxes of wine from a Massachusetts chain retailer and kept them in his basement. Goldstein, compact and pugnacious, seemed intimidated when it came to wine. In general, he brought the native cynicism of a former investigative reporter to his work: he suspected that Hardy Rodenstock and Michael Broadbent had a hidden financial relationship. He assumed Bill Sokolin had been an insurance scammer. He was quick to question whether even documents signed by Rodenstock had actually been written by him. He spoke with a hardboiled swagger, saying things like “We’ll keep going until that man feels my breath on the back of his neck.”

For all his anger, Koch also seemed energized by the pursuit, and he and Goldstein were convinced they were living a real-life caper film. “This is
National Treasure,
” Goldstein kept saying. In the car back to the Oxbow office, they amused themselves by speculating who might play them on the big screen. Koch had skirted the edges of the entertainment business. In the early nineties he had made a ham-fisted play to buy MGM; he called the film studio “Metro-Golden-Mayer” in a press release he claims was unauthorized, misidentified then-owner Crédit Lyonnais as “French Lyonnais,” antagonized industry powerbroker Michael Ovitz, and was laughed out of Hollywood. More recently, he had wed Bridget Rooney, of the Pittsburgh Steelers–owning Rooneys, who was the mother of actor Kevin Costner’s son. Now someone suggested Michael Caine could play Koch, and everybody laughed.

M
UCH REMAINED FOR
Koch’s team to do before filing a lawsuit. Some was legal preparation. Koch had bought the bottles more than fifteen years earlier, and they needed to determine whether the statute of limitations for fraud had run out. Koch’s lawyers advised him that the statutory clock only started ticking once a victim became aware of a potential fraud. Even though Koch had paid a Munich lawyer a few thousand dollars in April of 1993 to look into the Frericks-Rodenstock dispute, Koch now said he didn’t remember doing so. After Rodenstock and the Munich lawyer disputed this, and records disproved Koch, he said that the lawyer had reassured him of the bottles’ authenticity, and that he first heard of Monticello’s doubts during the run up to the Boston MFA show in 2005. Koch said he had never read the
New York Times
or
Wine Spectator
articles that publicized Monticello’s skepticism years earlier.

Koch and his lawyers still needed to decide whom to sue (Rodenstock, Christie’s, Broadbent, Farr Vintners?), where (Germany? England? America?), and whether to seek out other plaintiffs. Koch initially sought allies in his cause, and Kip Forbes seemed amenable. The Forbes family had already decided to sell their bottle through the books and manuscripts department at Christie’s in May 2006 as part of a dispersal sale of their historical American documents collection. But they withdrew the bottle from the sale, citing restrictive New York laws governing the sale of alcohol. The other reason was that Kip had been contacted by Koch, and he wanted in.

To build a strong case against Rodenstock, Koch knew that it was necessary to amass overwhelming evidence, and the investigation proceeded along several parallel tracks. One was to methodically create a paper trail linking Koch’s bottles to Rodenstock. In early January, Koch himself faxed Rodenstock from a family-owned apartment in New York, asking the German to affirm that he was the source of Koch’s Jefferson bottles and that he believed they had belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Faxing Rodenstock from New York was deliberate. Koch’s lawyers viewed it as a favorable venue for their lawsuit, and communications routed through New York would help to justify it as the proper jurisdiction.

A week later, Rodenstock bit, responding with a fax sent to the New York number. Rodenstock said he had already answered the questions posed by Stanley Los, reiterating his and Broadbent’s case for a Jefferson attribution and the story of the carbon-dating test he had commissioned. He ended with a cheery postscript: “I have heard that you have bought many fantastic wines at the spectacular Zachys auction. Congratulations!”

All this was the groundwork necessary for Koch to make his case about the Jefferson bottles. But what mattered to him, ultimately, was not just the Jefferson bottles, but the integrity of his entire collection. Accordingly, in March 2006, Elroy was dispatched to Château Pétrus in Pomerol. His mission: to authenticate two Rodenstock-sourced magnums of 1921 Pétrus. Koch had bought one of them at the “spectacular” Zachys auction for $33,150 and said he knew it came from Rodenstock because the consignor, a San Francisco tech entrepreneur named Eric Greenberg, had told him so. (Greenberg, who was reputed to have 70,000 bottles in his cellar, would later deny this.) Now, with a lawyer present, Pétrus officials found eight faults with the bottles. They called the Rodenstock-Greenberg-Zachys bottle “a very impressive fake made by a master forger of wine…the cork was too long and the metal cap and label on the wine appear to have been artificially aged.”

Elroy had brought his glass experts with him on this trip, and the men, along with Philippe Hubert, visited Château d’Yquem to inspect the two Jefferson bottles, one full and one empty, in its possession. As with Koch’s four Jefferson bottles, the experts determined that the engravings on these two had also been made with a modern power tool. Later they would reach the same conclusion about the Forbes bottle.

Elroy then let Hubert take a gamma-ray reading from the Pétrus magnums. The wine inside showed no trace of cesium-137, but the bottle glass itself emitted a post–World War II level of radioactivity.

On April 10, Koch faxed Rodenstock again. This time he asked for a meeting “over a good glass of wine, at a place of your choosing…. A short exchange of information face-to-face will accomplish more than a number of faxes and telephone calls.” A month later, writing “from the sunny Kitzbühel,” Rodenstock responded. He was testier this time, saying that “the matter is settled. From a legal point of view the purchase and the sale are barred by the statute of limitation.” He denounced “the yellow press” for covering the Frericks dispute—“that farce”—“in a very primitive way.” Legally, he said, it was Farr Vintners with whom Koch should be speaking; he saw no point in a discussion, and in any event “my English is unfortunately also not so good to speak with you about all the things I have already told you in writing.” He claimed that he had “had all of the faxes I have sent you translated from German to English.” For the first time he offered a detail about his supposed Parisian source: “The person from whom I have bought the bottles at the time was about sixty-five years old. I don’t even know if the seller of the bottles is still alive today.”

After all this, his amiable tone returned: “As said, if you would like to drink some fantastic wines with me in a nice circle of wine friends at a trip to Europe, I will gladly organize a wine tasting in your honor. Is there a wine you always wanted to drink but you don’t have in your wine cellar? I would be glad to fulfil you that wish if I should have this wine in my cellar.”

K
OCH EXPANDED HIS
investigation to the contents of his entire cellar, and hired David Molyneux-Berry, the former Sotheby’s wine director who had first deemed the Frericks bottles fake, to vet his collection. The Englishman spent weeks in Koch’s cellars, in Palm Beach and on Cape Cod. The weather was poor, and he worked from nine in the morning to six in the evening without surfacing for sun or air.

Simultaneously, another collector joined Koch’s cause. A Boston entrepreneur named Russell Frye had recently sold his cellar through Sotheby’s for nearly $8 million, the auction house’s second-largest wine sale ever. But Sotheby’s had rejected a lot of Frye’s older bottles as fraudulent, and had put him in touch with Molyneux-Berry and Koch.