To solve the looming estate tax problem, Peter put his head together with his accountants’ and lawyers’ and hit upon a drastic plan. They would immediately terminate the old C. Mondavi and Sons partnership and create a new one in its place to be called C. Mondavi and Company. As a sop to Robert, they offered him a token 10 percent limited partnership in this new entity. Peter and his lawyers would later argue that his reason for unilaterally dissolving the old partnership and creating a new one where Robert’s interests were slashed was that Robert had been competing with Charles Krug in lining up grape contracts in the Central Valley. But in the letter that Peter wrote to Robert dated September 26, 1972, urging him to quickly sign the documents necessary to carry out this plan, he never mentioned the supposed competition from Robert that would later be a key issue in defending his actions.
Buried in the fine print of the new partnership’s legal documents was an even more troubling fact. Robert would be shut off from any means of participating in Krug’s profits, which would be diverted to the other members of his family instead. The plan also radically tilted the share ownership of the new partnership: Rose would get 30 percent, Peter 30 percent, Mary 15 percent, and Helen 15 percent, with Robert’s stake just 10 percent—and a limited interest at that. But perhaps the most painful part of the proposal was the condition that the general partners—Rosa, Peter, and the two sisters—“would have the right to purchase all or any portion of the interest or shares of any limited partner [there was only one, namely Robert] his heirs or personal representatives on thirty days’ notice for the nominal amount of his share of capital, together with his share of the profits up to such a date—with no payment to be made for goodwill.”
It was an outrageous suggestion, particularly in view of the Schlitz offer for Charles Krug. Behind the dry language of a business partnership, Robert’s mother, brother, and sisters were trying to cut him out of the profits and value of the family business that he had helped start and had labored on for more than two decades.
Understandably, Robert refused to sign the papers. But soon afterward, Peter, Rosa, Mary, and Helen formed the new partnership anyway, excluding Robert entirely. By doing so, Peter and Rosa boosted their shares in the company even more to 35 percent, while Mary and Helen’s stayed at 15 percent each. On paper, his mother and brother had wiped out Robert’s interest entirely and divided it between themselves.
Helen, though, had begun to have her doubts. She had not been involved in the discussions leading up to the formation of the new partnership and Mary, as corporate secretary, simply presented her with the papers to sign. Helen, who was on the phone at the time the papers were laid before her, refused. Straightaway, she called her son, Peter Ventura, who by then was a practicing attorney in Bakersfield. Peter talked with his mother. Helen then handed over the phone to Mary, who spoke with Peter and then handed it back to her. Peter warned his mother that she would find herself a limited partner like Robert unless she signed. It was a heavy-handed threat from the family directed at a woman who was struggling with emotional problems at the time. On her son’s advice, Helen signed.
A new personality entered the fray a few years before the “majority directors” began their efforts to squeeze Robert out of his inheritance. Citing rules prohibiting elected officials from being involved in alcohol-related businesses, Joe Alioto stepped down from C. Mondavi and Sons’ board in August 1969 and asked his son John to take his place. Then in his mid-twenties, John was running a family steamship business. As he recalled the request, his father phoned him, explained the problem about not being able to serve as C. Mondavi’s chairman any longer, and asked him to serve as a director instead. “You’re the business guy, so I want you to do this for me,” John Alioto recalled his father telling him. Although John tried to talk him out of it, explaining he was far too busy for such a commitment, Joe Alioto wouldn’t take a no.
John’s father didn’t keep him entirely in the dark about the family feud. He summed up the personalities neatly, describing Robert as “the guy with flair” and Peter as the “steady plodder” who ran the business. As John Alioto recalled it later, his father had sized up the situation as a personality clash between brothers. But the most important thing Joe Alioto communicated to his son concerned his clear role on the board, which was to support “Mama Rosa” and her younger son. “Your job is to vote with Peter and Rosa,” he instructed.
By 1972, John Alioto started to worry that he had waded into treacherous waters. A meeting on November 17, 1972, was the first gathering of the board since Peter had informed Robert of the plan to dissolve the old partnership. Eventually, the explosive subject of the relationship between the old partnership and the corporation arose.
Peter Ventura moved that the corporation buy and operate the old Lodi partnership, which he and Robert supported as a way to liquidate their branches of the family’s interests. Peter Mondavi objected on the grounds that it would “constitute an untold financial burden and entail yet another several million dollars of borrowing” and “would cause cash flow problems.”
The motion was voted down. Rosa was brought into the room from the kitchen, where she was cooking, to cast her vote. John Alioto—following his father’s instructions—voted with Rosa and Peter. Robert was the sole dissenting vote, since even Peter Ventura, whose allegiances between the two brothers wavered in the early days of the fight, cast his vote with his grandmother and against his uncle Bob. While it was clear that this loss infuriated Robert, he remained politely restrained and businesslike during the meeting. Even when he voiced his objections, saying, “You can’t do this to me,” he kept his temper in check.
Only afterward did Robert’s bitterness emerge. The meeting had concluded and he sat down in front of Rosa’s large stone fireplace to have a quiet word with Fred Ferroggiaro. Robert turned to John Alioto and said, “You’re doing a good job for your client, you’re cutting me out.”
That meeting was a turning point for John Alioto. He had grown up as one of Joe Alioto’s six children and couldn’t escape dinner conversations about court trials. So it didn’t take long before he realized the feud would erupt into a lawsuit—and that agreeing to do for his dad this seemingly simple favor was going to cost him a lot in terms of time and reputation. He demanded and received legal indemnification from Krug in return for serving as a director. “My father had thrown me into the midst of a lion’s den,” he says. “He knew it was going to result in litigation.”
After Peter, Rosa, and the rest of the family set up the new partnership in 1972, Adams advised Robert to go to court. Suing his own mother, brother, sisters, and the high-powered Bank of America executive Fred Ferroggiaro was not something Robert took lightly. But after mulling it over for weeks, he came to the conclusion that a lawsuit was the only way he could protect his and his children’s birthright.
Adams drafted Robert’s first complaint on November 21, 1972, and filed the suit on December 11, about two months after Robert had learned of the plan to form the new partnership and a few days after learning of Peter and Rosa’s intention to sack him from C. Mondavi and Sons’ board. It sought a supervised dissolution of the new partnership and a full accounting of its assets. It also asked for an injunction to halt the board from firing him. Robert had dropped a bombshell on his family and would feel the emotional repercussions of naming his mother Rosa in the lawsuit for the rest of his life.
The complex case moved slowly. Peter, Rosa, and the other defendants answered Robert’s charges and filed a barrage of cross-claims of their own on February 2, 1973. Adams countered by filing a petition on June 13, 1973, in San Joaquin County Superior Court seeking removal of Rosa and Peter as trustees of the Cesare Mondavi Trust. In a hearing, the flamboyant court veteran Joseph Alioto ran rings around the tweny-six-year-old Adams. The judge dealt Adams a blow: He decided to remove both Robert and Peter as trustees, leaving Rosa alone in that role. That laid the groundwork for pitting son against mother.
At the conclusion of the hearing, the judge came down from the bench to pay his respects to the famous Joseph Alioto, who was then running for California governor. The judge was Italian, Alioto was Italian, the Mondavis were Italian, and so everybody started speaking Italian, leaving Adams at sea as the interpreter stopped interpreting.
It rapidly became clear to both Adams and Robert that he needed a lawyer with more experience in court. So as they drove back from Stockton, Robert and Adams discussed hiring a litigator. And not just any litigator: He had to be the toughest, wiliest courtroom gunslinger they could find, since he’d be facing Joseph Alioto, who seemed bulletproof.
Adams interviewed more than half a dozen attorneys before narrowing the field down to three. One candidate, John Martel, was, to put it mildly, unconventional. The son of a state dairy inspector, Martel had grown up in the Central Valley town of Modesto. Because of his family’s modest means and his father’s limited ambitions for him, Martel graduated from public high school and Modesto Junior College. On his own initiative, Martel then went on to the University of Oregon on a partial basketball and track scholarship, where he studied business administration until the Korean War intervened midway through his junior year. He joined the air force and became a pilot, training to fly missions over Korea but never getting the chance: He received his orders for Korea the day the truce ending the war was signed. Young and aggressive, Martel was devastated that he wouldn’t see combat. He had hoped to get over there and drop bombs on cows and rice paddies.
With three years of paid tuition coming to him from the GI Bill, Martel decided to enter Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley. Not long out of law school he found himself trying murder cases. Eighteen months later, he jumped to a leading private defense firm, Bronson, Bronson and McKinnon, where his pay inched up an additional $50 to $400 a month; the hours were as long, but the challenges were different. Then in 1964, at the urging of Frank Farella, a friend who also had worked at Bronson, Bronson and McKinnon, he joined Tom Elke, Farella, and Jerry Braun at a young firm that became Farella, Braun and Martel. There he continued his courtroom winning streak, capped by a case in 1968 in which a Richmond, Virginia, jury awarded his client in an antitrust case the highest monetary judgment in the state’s history. The case was later overturned, but it gained national attention.
But by the mid-1970s, Martel was beginning to feel burned out. So he took a break and explored his creative side by writing songs and performing them at local clubs. In mid-April of 1975, he took a three-month sabbatical and traveled to Los Angeles, where he put together a backup band. With original songs titled “Stoned and Alone,” “Unwanted Child,” and “Handwriting on the Wall,” he was good enough to earn bookings at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and the Palomino Club in West Hollywood. In publicity photos from the time, he bears a striking, if somewhat dissolute, resemblance to the actor Tom Selleck. With his dark, shoulder-length curls, mustache, and casual charm, Martel played under the stage name “Joe Silverhound” and wore tattered blue jeans and Western-style button shirts onstage. One of his songs, “Survivor,” won an American Songwriters Award.
Because Martel hoped to land a contract with a big record company, he kept his other life as a lawyer under wraps while he was pursuing his music career. He was juggling several complex cases, including defense of a subsidiary of the Bank of America in Washington, D.C., while performing weekends fronting a trio at the Blue Crystal Lounge in San Francisco. He was drinking a lot—regularly tossing down multiple shots of tequila offered by fans between breaks at the clubs—and leading a complicated life as a single man. His marriage to his first wife had ended in 1969, undermined by his long hours at work. His personal life at the time was “somewhere between a shambles and a shipwreck.”
Several months before his sabbatical and departure for Los Angeles, Martel had received a call from Adams asking if he’d be interested in meeting a vintner from Napa Valley named Robert Mondavi. Martel said he would, and in early August of 1974, Robert and Cliff Adams visited Martel at his firm’s offices in the Russ Building at 235 Montgomery Street, a neo-Gothic structure that had towered over San Francisco for four decades as the city’s largest office building. Robert and Adams passed beneath vaulted ceilings, with hand-chalked colors between the ribbings, and walked through an entryway resembling that of the Chicago Tribune building. A frieze of mythical creatures stared down at them as they stepped into the elevator and pressed the button to take them to the penthouse on the thirty-first floor.
Martel, who was wearing a suit and had trimmed his hair for the occasion, met them at reception and led them to his office. It was well-appointed, with oak parquet floors and exposed brick walls. The two visitors sat facing Martel’s desk. A framed photograph of Martel’s muse, Jerry Garcia, and a cartoon drawing of two lawyers with their guns drawn at each other hung on the wall. Beyond his desk was a sweeping view north of Coit Tower, Alcatraz, and, on a clear day, the southernmost tip of Napa County, a commanding view intended to impress his clients.
Martel already had some inkling of the personalities involved in the mounting conflict at Charles Krug. Before the meeting with Robert and Adams, Martel had rung his friend Jack Davies, owner of the Schramsberg Winery, whom he had known for years. Martel knew the case was going to be explosive and wanted to gauge what he was getting into if he agreed to take it on. He probed Davies for his perspective on the feud between the Mondavi brothers, which by then had become grist for gossip in the valley.
“Well, they’re both very difficult,” Davies said. “But if I had to pick, I’d rather work with Bob Mondavi: You can trust him.”
With that in mind, Martel listened closely to what Adams and Robert had to say on their first meeting. Martel had seated his visitors so that they were sure to see his “ego wall,” covered with honors he had received. Martel’s firm was a relative upstart in the San Francisco legal scene with only seven partners and ten associates, and thus was not an obvious choice. Martel knew he faced competition from more established litigators in town, all eager to represent Robert.
After a forty-minute meeting, Robert finally stood up, signaling the end of the interview. He and Martel shook hands and then Robert got a shrewd glint in his eyes as he sized up the forty-three-year-old lawyer.
“John, I like the cut of your jib,” said Robert. “But I have one last question. Why should I hire you instead of all the other lawyers I’ve met?”
Martel barely paused before answering, never breaking his eye contact with Robert or loosening his grip. The two men stood in the doorway, still clasping hands.
“Because I don’t lose cases and I don’t intend to start with yours,” Martel said.
Robert’s use of a nautical term amused Martel, since it seemed to him that his client had probably never been on a sailboat, let alone handled a jib. Yet Martel didn’t care what Robert’s background was, what he looked like, or whether he knew the difference between a yawl and a ketch. His dreams of landing a recording contract had subsided. Martel had become single-minded in his effort to land this dynamic first-generation Italian-American vintner as a client. In turn, what struck Robert and Adams about Martel was his strong drive to win. “Here was the guy who really wanted to beat Joe Alioto,” says Adams.
The interview ended and Robert and Adams left the Russ Building. They quickly agreed that Martel was the gunslinger they’d been looking for.
On the other side, Alioto was flexing his legal muscles on the rest of the Mondavi family’s behalf. A year and a half before this meeting, Peter and Rosa and the other defendants had countersued Robert. On February 2, 1973, they charged him with breaching his fiduciary duties to the old partnership by competing with it and usurping partnership and corporate opportunities. Worse, they argued that Robert had engaged in an antitrust conspiracy with Alan Ferguson and Rainier to monopolize the wine business and eliminate Charles Krug as a competitor.
Given the relative size and market power of the two wineries, it was a tenuous argument tailored mainly to suit Alioto’s antitrust specialty. With Rainier’s help, the Robert Mondavi Winery had grown to case sales of a hundred thousand in 1973, while Charles Krug’s case sales that year topped a million, more than ten times as much. Yet Robert had to take it seriously, since the argument was being made by the formidable Joseph Alioto, known nationwide as “the King of Antitrust.”
Alioto and his team didn’t let up on the pressure as discovery started. They claimed that Robert, with Rainier’s backing, had become a powerful and “intolerable” competitor to Krug; that he sold wine that competed with Krug’s offerings and supposedly purchased grapes in the Central Valley and North Coast of California in competition with the rest of his family, offering growers $25 to $50 more per ton than Peter while still serving as a C. Mondavi and Sons director.
“At all times that plaintiff was promoting this detrimental competition, he was attending meetings of the Board of Directors of defendant corporation, accepting partnership distributions and participating in the partnership business as a general partner,” Alioto maintained. “As such, he had full access to both the sensitive pricing information discussed and disseminated at meetings of the corporation or partnership as well as their books and records”—a claim that was patently false, as the judge hearing the case would later declare. Alioto also argued that the rest of the family “had no legal obligation to subsidize a competitor.”
One touchy issue that Alioto attempted to evade, by muddying the waters, was the question of which brother was the better businessman—a question Robert had first raised in pushing for dissolution. Alioto attacked the idea that Robert was a more competent businessman than Peter by emphasizing how shaky the finances of the Robert Mondavi Winery were despite its rapid growth. In 1975, said Alioto, the Robert Mondavi Winery showed a net loss (after taxes) of $729,000, while Charles Krug showed a net income for that same year of $97,246. Both operations—the young Robert Mondavi Winery and the more established Charles Krug Winery, he argued, were both “presently experiencing serious financial difficulties.”
Unintentionally, Alioto’s argument undercut his contention that Robert’s money-losing winery posed a serious competitive threat to Krug. But he was right that it was on shaky financial ground. With his legal costs piling up, high interest rates, and a bulk wine surplus weighing down the industry, Robert’s winery lost three quarters of a million dollars in 1974, and even more in 1975. In the meantime, new wineries were cropping up everywhere across the valley, encouraged in part by the apparent success of the new Mondavi winery on Highway 29. The Napa County Planning Department was flooded with architectural plans for new cellars or remodeling plans for the old “ghost” wineries that had been abandoned during Prohibition. Grape prices began climbing as two of California’s largest lenders, the Bank of America and Wells Fargo, predicted that Americans would be drinking far more wine by the end of the decade.
To the outside world, Robert’s tightened financial straits were not evident. At sales functions, Robert was “as good a pitchman as anyone’s ever seen,” according to Ted Simpkins of the fast-growing distributor Southern Wine and Spirits. Robert made sales calls all day, going on to dinner with customers at night, and eventually rolling into his hotel around midnight—finally ending his day after reminding Simpkins to pick him up again the next morning at seven A.M. Simpkins and others found him exhausting.
Robert put on a great show, but his young company’s footing was not nearly as solid as he suggested. In earlier years, it had been able to buffer its bottom line by selling off bulk wine. But when the bottom fell out of that market, the Robert Mondavi Winery was in a bind. The Molson Brewing Company, which owned 49 percent of Rainier, began to wonder if it would ever see a return on its investment. “The Canadians were getting very impatient,” recalls Cliff Adams.
Molson expressed its concern by summoning Robert to Seattle to meet with the company’s chief financial officer shortly after the Robert Mondavi Winery reported its disastrous 1974 loss. Robert brought Michael and Cliff Adams with him to the meeting, where the winery’s poor recordkeeping and accounting systems came under fire. Robert would later blame the situation in part on an accountant he wasn’t happy with. But his own unchecked spending, his inability to stick to a budget, and his refusal to submit expense accounts also worried Molson.
The crisis reached a head when Molson attempted to seize control of the company from Robert and Michael. Because of modifications that had been made to the partners’ operating agreement in 1972, Molson couldn’t strip Robert of his leadership role. Yet the Canadian brewer did win one key concession: It forced the Mondavis to install Alan Ferguson as the company’s overseer, sitting just down the hall from Robert at the winery. Charles Daniels’s friendship with Robert grew strained, since he became increasingly identified as being Rainier and Molson’s man at the winery.
Considering the desperate cash crunch that the Robert Mondavi Winery was facing, it didn’t help that Robert also lost the sizable monthly support he had been receiving from his family. Six months after Krug filed its cross-claim against Robert in February of 1973, and shortly after the conclusion of Krug’s fiscal year, Peter and Rosa finally decided to terminate Robert’s contract as a consultant to Krug, which had been worth $9,000 a year to him. “After almost six and a half years of patient indulgence,” the family decided “to discontinue the financing of a competitor (albeit a son) from the proceeds of the family operations,” Alioto said in the pretrial briefing.
Peter and Rosa were fighting battles on other fronts. Struggling with the same bulk wine market crash as Robert and the rest of the industry, Krug decided after the 1974 harvest to break contracts with growers to buy grapes from them at a previously set price. What had been a seller’s market suddenly became a winery buyer’s market, and Peter attempted to take advantage of this by insisting on paying less for the grapes—thus damaging Krug’s important relationships with growers. It was a step that Robert and Cesare had refused to take in the late 1940s.
Andrew Pelissa, a dairy-farmer-turned-grape-grower in the valley, as well as a number of other growers, filed a complaint against Krug with the California Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Market Enforcement. Pelissa and others were so outraged by Peter Mondavi’s actions that they refused to sell grapes to him the following year, and began selling to his brother Robert and other vintners instead. In a letter dated September 8, 1975, from Pelissa to Robert, the grower explained,
It is our feeling that C. Mondavi and Sons is no longer a family controlled operation, but rather is solely controlled by your brother, Peter. We find doing business with Peter impossible as he has seen fit to blatantly break [his] written contract with us.
Pelissa then went on to write that he had decided not to deliver any grapes to C. Mondavi and Sons “as long as it means dealing with Peter.”
Peter’s actions would end up forcing the younger Mondavi son to contend with an additional legal morass, and when the dispute came out in the trial, it would undermine his lawyers’ efforts to portray him as a man of integrity.
As the case moved toward trial, Robert wrote Cliff Adams on August 8, 1975, informing him that he wanted John Martel to take over the case. Martel and his team—a young partner named Victor James “Jim” Haydel III and a recent graduate from the University of Chicago named Bruce R. MacLeod—swung into action, brainstorming different strategies. They decided to come out with all guns blazing, adopting a far more aggressive approach to the case than Adams had taken.
Their plan was to ask the court to dissolve Krug as a corporate entity on the basis of general mismanagement. Robert and Adams had initially rejected the notion of trying to dismantle the venerable family winery, in part because they didn’t believe it could be done. Later, however, as the remaining goodwill dissipated between the feuding parties, Robert changed his mind and gave Martel the green light. This would turn out to be one of the most important decisions of his life.
The firm filed amendments on July 17, 1975, against Robert’s family and Krug’s board of directors, charging them with a breach of fiduciary duties and seeking involuntary dissolution of the winery on the grounds of mismanagement. “It was a very tough, scorched-earth strategy,” Martel says. There were few, if any, cases where it had worked. They also sought a temporary restraining order against Peter and the others to stop the new partnership from distributing profits. “If we’d won, it would have been a devastating blow to the other side,” Martel recalls.
But on February 13, 1975, Joseph Alioto dazzled the court and Martel failed to convince the judge to grant the order. Although he didn’t admit it to his client, Martel, like Adams, was beginning to feel outgunned by San Francisco’s powerful mayor: “I felt I had been run over by a truck at that hearing and had forgotten to even take down the license number.” Not long after Martel’s defeat, Alioto had called to invite him for a chat, explaining that this fight between the Mondavis was really not good for the company or the family and claiming he’d really like to see it resolved.
Martel made the trip from the Russ Building to the mayor’s office, in City Hall. As he entered Alioto’s inner sanctum, his footsteps echoed on the polished stone floors. The sheer size of the rooms made Martel feel as if he were walking into a throne room, approaching a king. Alioto did not rise from his large chair behind a fortress of a desk. Martel’s chair had been strategically positioned lower than the mayor’s—a move to make his visitors feel diminished in his presence. Alioto then proceeded to lecture Martel at length about why he should advise his client to drop his case.
“Joe, I thought we were here to talk settlement,” Martel said.
“Yeah, settlement in this case is simple,” growled Alioto. “You quit.”
Martel left the meeting furious and even more determined to beat his adversary in court. He and his team dived more deeply into the case, interviewing witnesses, arguing motions, and preparing to launch a new discovery attack. By April of 1975, the time for Martel’s long-planned three-month musical sabbatical arrived. With Robert’s uneasy consent, Martel turned over the case to Jim Haydel and Bruce MacLeod and left for Los Angeles, guitar and chord charts in hand. Haydel characterized Martel’s absence to the judge in a letter as “an extended vacation,” never elaborating that the purpose of Martel’s break was to front a rock ’n’ roll band in L.A.
Meanwhile, MacLeod set up camp in the “Rose of the Vineyard,” the reconditioned railcar that the brothers, in happier days, had set up as a tasting room and had named after their mother. The car was filled with boxes of documents that Krug had been ordered to produce by the court, and in the summer the heat beat down on the metal car, melting MacLeod as he pored through thousands and thousands of sheets of paper.
But one day, buried in that mountain of documents, he made a crucial discovery: a dozen handwritten internal memos that criticized the quality of the bulk wines that Krug was purchasing. They would prove invaluable when it came time to attack Peter’s credibility and management skills on the witness stand. He felt that rare lawyer’s rush: In this sweltering old railroad car, he had discovered what could be a stunning piece of evidence.
Euphoria swiftly passed, however. For MacLeod was having less success in other areas. In what he’d later describe as the “most frustrating day in my life,” he deposed “Mama Mondavi” in the “little brown house,” her home on the Krug Ranch. Rosa and her attorneys had insisted to MacLeod that as she spoke only Italian, she preferred a specific woman interpreter who was also a personality on a local Italian-American television show.
MacLeod would ask Rosa a question through the interpreter and then the elderly woman would answer, speaking at length in Italian. The interpreter would beg her to stop, explaining that she couldn’t keep up anymore. After the first few questions, it became clear to MacLeod that Rosa was talking about something entirely different from what he’d ask. When he tried to steer her back to the point, her attorney, Richard Saveri, would protest: “Wait! She hasn’t finished her answer!”
Adams had suffered a similar experience with Rosa back in December of 1973, when he took her deposition. In this case, Adams deposed Rosa in Joseph Alioto’s offices in San Francisco with all four of her children present, as well as an interpreter.
“How long has this dispute between your sons existed?” Adams had asked her then.
“Irrelevant!” claimed Saveri, chiding Adams for “keeping Mrs. Mondavi for this inquisition.”
Again and again, Saveri interrupted Adams’s questions and Rosa, in turn, claimed not to know the answer to even the simplest questions because, she said, she could not read English.
But from Adams’s frustrating encounter, one theme emerged from the transcripts: Rosa’s simmering anger toward her firstborn child.
For example, when Adams asked her if she understood the complaint, Rosa had said, “I think that [Robert] wanted to do to me bad things but for motive I don’t know.”
“What bad things?”
“He wished to force me to sell the winery,” answered Rosa, never explaining during the deposition why she felt Robert was trying to force her to sell Krug, but making it clear that her eldest son had gone against the wishes of her husband and the rest of the family.
Most strikingly, in both of the depositions she gave for the case, the barely educated grandmother managed to outsmart Robert’s lawyers. “Rosa probably spoke pretty good English, but she didn’t let on,” says MacLeod. She “pulled that strategy off to perfection.”
Around that same time, however, Peter proved less circumspect than his mother. During a deposition taken by Richard Saveri, Peter vented his frustration and sheer rage at Robert over what he perceived as the unfairness of his older brother’s having gotten to live on the ranch over the years while he and his family lived in town. This was in response to a straightforward question from his own lawyer Saveri about Peter’s proposed purchase of twenty acres of land on the Krug Ranch to build a home. It was an issue that had been discussed at a board meeting and was relevant to the allegations of self-dealing that his siblings had made against him. But the question triggered Peter’s rage and this spontaneous venting:
Now, my brother has a home he lived in all of his life, one time for a long, long time. He paid practically no rent, I guess, for a long time. He paid nothing, then he finally paid a piddly sum. I had to build my own home. I had to. He didn’t pay for a god-damned thing. He got everything for nothing.
Peter then went on to rail against his sister Helen for what he considered her leaning on the family for money:
Do something for everyone else, but don’t ever do anything for yourself. Take care of everyone else, but don’t do it for yourself or your own family, but undermine your own family before anybody else…in 1974, December of 1974, with Helen bitching for more and more money, I—we sent money down to her. What did I have to do? I have to cosign a note in which—no one knows about it—otherwise she would never have gotten that money. She wanted to borrow money for speculation in the cattle feed business to save on income tax.
What I have to do—she pestered my mother till she was teary-eyed, and then she finally had to plead upon me—and where am I going to get the money?—so they called the Bank of America. You know who had to go down there.
A few months later, Peter’s simmering resentment toward his siblings would reach a full boil in court.