Returning from his sabbatical, Martel began to prepare Robert for the witness stand. But he quickly realized he had a problem on his hands: Robert would either respond too quickly, saying the first thing that popped into his head, or answer defensively. He’d begin his answers with a windup such as “The simple fact was…” and weave long and elaborate trails of intersecting defensiveness and self-justification.
Martel would later joke that Robert would react to even the most direct questions—such as “What is your name?”—by answering defensively, “Well, it’s Robert Mondavi, but I didn’t have anything to do with that, really….” But he knew that if Robert answered questions that wayon the stand, Alioto would demolish Robert Mondavi and his case. So he decided to go out on a limb.
Martel asked if Robert would mind his phoning someone for help with their problem. He wanted to consult a psychiatrist he had used as an expert witness in previous cases. Robert readily agreed and Martel walked from the conference room on the thirtieth floor, where they had been working, to his office on the thirty-first and got the doctor on the phone, asking if he could buy a half an hour of his time. The psychiatrist agreed and Martel summarized the history of the Mondavi family’s troubles—the immigrant Cesare buying the Charles Krug Winery and insisting that his two sons work together, Robert and Peter’s escalating disagreements, their fight and Robert’s subsequent ouster, his formation of the Robert Mondavi Winery and the critical praise it had received for the quality of its wines, and Robert’s attempt to dissolve the winery his father had created.
It didn’t take long for the doctor to diagnose the problem. He suggested that the cause of Robert’s defensiveness was his guilt over having defied his father’s wishes that the family work together, his attempt to dismantle his father’s life’s work, and, worst of all, having succeeded in making even better wine than his father ever had. Martel hung up the phone and headed back down to the conference room.
“Bob, are you up for this?”
“Yes, go ahead,” Robert told him.
Robert might be feeling guilty, Martel told him, from having achieved so much more than his immigrant father had and for betraying his father’s wishes that his sons work together in the family business.
“Oh, my God,” said Robert. From that moment on, he began answering questions simply and directly.
But Martel still had to grapple with another problem: Robert’s tendencies to interrupt and to answer too quickly. Martel’s solution was an old-fashioned shopkeeper’s bell. Martel would tap on his “Pavlovian” bell to signal every time Robert began to answer the question too quickly, often even before it had been asked. The device managed to cure Robert of both his bad habits.
Meanwhile, Alioto tried again to prevent the case from going to trial. This time he summoned Cliff Adams to his office in City Hall and made an offer that initially might have seemed attractive to a cash-strapped vintner such as Robert: The family would pay him $3 million for his stake in Charles Krug if he promised to drop all claims against them. As the two men walked together up Sutter Street, Alioto warned that the trial would tear the family apart and suggested that Robert was just as culpable as Peter in the whole mess. Apprised by Adams of Alioto’s offer, Robert again rejected Alioto’s offer. The stage was set for the long-awaited war of the wineries.
The trial was set to begin in May, 1976. Both of Napa’s superior-court judges had recused themselves from the case, citing potential conflicts of interest. So the court had brought in a “circuit rider” named Judge Robert D. Carter—a veteran judge from Stanislaus County who, after undergoing a successful coronary bypass operation, traveled around the state, stepping in to handle lengthy or complex cases. Instead of a jury, the judge would decide this case. When Judge Carter pulled into downtown Napa and parked his silver Airstream near the courthouse to hear Mondavi v. Mondavi, he was in for one of the longest, most closely watched, and complex cases in Napa County history.
In anticipation of a long trial and large crowds, the case took place in a double-wide trailer that had been converted into a large temporary courtroom. Joseph Alioto represented Rosa, Peter, Mary, and the Krug directors. On the other side, John Martel, his longish curls hinting at his other life as a rock musician, represented Robert. The opening statements were, respectively, described as bombastic and intense by a reporter who covered the trial. Robert’s supporters sat on one side of the courtroom or sometimes in the jury box, while Peter’s sat stone-faced and silent on the other side. Rosa, then eighty-six, remained at home, where she took long naps on the porch. The courtroom was packed, as friends, rivals, reporters, and the simply curious waited for the story of the Mondavi family’s feud to unfurl fully in public for the first time. As one lawyer observing the scene recalled, the opening round histrionics “made the Scopes trial look like a cotillion intermission.”
Robert reached out to his mother, who had been struggling with pancreatic cancer in the year leading up to the trial. He’d slip quietly into Rosa’s house toward the end of the trial, kissing her on the cheek and sitting down for coffee with her in the mornings, before the trial day began.
According to one account, during one of these visits mother and son began arguing in Italian, their emotions rising. Rosa fell off her chair. As a friend rushed to help Rosa, Robert stood looking down at his ailing mother, stunned into inaction by what had happened and perhaps worried about what effect the fall might have on her. He helped his mother up and the two of them got her into her bed. After Robert had gone, Rosa expressed her despair: “I have two sons. One has short legs and he is a saint. One has longer legs and he is a devil.”
Before dawn on July 4, 1976, soon after this incident, Rosa Mondavi died of heart failure in her home. She suffered what appeared to be a stroke, described as a “cerebro-vascular” accident, soon after the trial began. The editor of The St. Helena Star couldn’t let the date pass unnoticed in an editorial. He called Rosa and Cesare “living testimonials to the very core of the Declaration of Independence, the right to the opportunity to use one’s own potential to the very best of one’s ability.” Neither the Star’s nor the other local obituaries of Rosa mentioned that she died in the midst of a lawsuit that was ripping her family apart.
But the feud was impossible to ignore at her funeral service. Anthony Cook captured the scene in an article he wrote for New West magazine:
The first awkward moment came after the Lord’s Prayer. Monsignor William Serado, pastor of the St. Helena Catholic Church, stood before the tightly packed congregation of 250 mourners and offered a blessing for the dearly departed, Rosa Mondavi: Let us offer each other the sign of peace. Almost in unison, the mourners shifted their eyes to catch a glimpse of Rosa’s two sons and two daughters, standing in the first three pews with their families. What would they do? Time stopped, as the morning sunlight filtered through the stained-glass figure of St. Helena, the mother of Constantine. Then, reluctantly, Rosa’s children exchanged tentative, embarrassed handclasps. The moment passed, and they turned away from one another to stare straight ahead at the altar….
Father Sixtus Cavagnaro, a close friend of Rosa’s during her last years, stood up to speak. His words were Italian, and they rolled forth with an intensity that riveted even the few in the crowd who couldn’t understand a word. Father Sixtus pointed to Rosa’s coffin. Signora Mondavi is gone, he said. So what good does this greed do? Let your mother rest in peace. Stop this family war before you are all six feet under!
As the service drew toward its end, the brothers, Robert and Peter, sat like stone. A group of mourners approached the bier. Joseph Alioto bent to grasp a handle. His friend, Fred Ferroggiaro, reached for the other. Then Rosa’s brother, Nazzareno Grassi, joined them, along with Andrew Johnson, manager of the St. Helena branch of the Bank of America. These were the pall-bearers, all picked by Peter. The four carried Rosa’s coffin down the blue carpet, past her friends and family and out into the July heat. Rosa’s children followed at a distance, girding themselves for the last rites at the family mausoleum.
There were separate receptions held on the grounds of the Krug Ranch following the service.
Rosa’s death weighed heavily on Peter, who had always been very close to his mother. Afterward, he seemed to change, becoming angrier and even more resentful of Robert. Rosa’s death and the court battle also took its toll on Helen Ventura. The younger of Robert and Peter’s two sisters had decided to switch her allegiance to Robert, away from the rest of the family. She filed her own suit for dissolution of the family company by piggybacking on Robert’s request. Helen had learned that there’d be no place at Charles Krug for her son, Peter Ventura. Seeking to cash out her shares in the company, she hoped that by separating business and family matters, the Mondavis might ultimately come back together as a loving family, rather than as warring business partners.
Another reason Helen decided to back Robert was what she perceived as the shoddy treatment she and her son had received from Peter and Mary, stating in court documents that Peter “dominated and controlled” the family shareholders who supported him while limiting information to those who didn’t. Robert, in turn, had surely done his best to convince his sister to side with him: Helen had heard some of the key conversations between Peter and Mary concerning their brother’s shareholdings in Krug and her testimony could strengthen his case.
Rosa’s death, coming as it did in the middle of the trial, was a major blow to Helen, a warmhearted woman who loved her mother and her siblings. But Helen’s suffering from the family’s legal implosion had begun long before that. About a decade before, around the time of Robert’s expulsion from Krug and when Helen was living in the house she’d built on the Krug Ranch, she grew despondent. Elsa Maganini, who had known Helen and considered her a friend since the 1940s, maintained that she was close to having a nervous breakdown.
Helen tried to kill herself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in the mid-1960s, around the time of Robert’s expulsion from Krug.
She survived and after the school year ended she pulled her children out of Santa Clara University for a Roman holiday, of sorts. Helen, Peter, and Serena departed for Italy, where they initially lived in a hotel suite and were chauffeured around town, then were cooked for and waited upon in a private apartment, with her family back in California paying the bills. They spent eighteen months in Rome, but returned at her family’s request when the tensions began escalating even further. Helen’s emotional problems had eased when she was abroad, but returned in full force when she came home.
By 1975, as Mondavi v. Mondavi was heading toward trial, Helen’s lawyer had produced a letter from her doctor in West Los Angeles to explain why she had ignored questions from the Alioto team and would not appear for her deposition, which had been scheduled for mid-December at her lawyer’s office in Bakersfield.
In a letter dated December 9, 1975, Dr. John P. Moffat, her attending physician, wrote to the court to explain Helen’s problem.
Mrs. Ventura has been undergoing office psychiatric consultations for emotional problems of Depression and other related psychological symptoms. Her previous history indicates hospitalization for the above problem.
I have been seeing her on a 1–2/week basis since June 1975 with gradual progress. A key factor in her slow progress has been her deep tied emotional problems with her biological family which I understand now is in litigation proceedings. The effect of this unresolved family affair has seriously undermined progress in her resolving her depression.
A premature legal interrogation at this point would seriously harm Mrs. Ventura’s psychological progress and may well precipitate intense suicidal feelings and impulses.
He went on to strongly recommend that the court not force Helen to undergo a “legal interrogation” at this time. But that doctor’s note only helped her avoid being questioned for a few months more. On April 5, 1976, the Alioto team finally received written answers from Helen and her lawyer to their interrogatories. She then had been scheduled to appear in court on July 6, 1976, to testify as a witness in the case. Her lawyer, Bruce F. Bunker, told the court that her appearance would not be possible because of Helen’s precarious mental condition. The judge ordered that Mr. Bunker produce documents relating to Helen’s hospital admissions as a psychiatric patient, including history and examination record for each admission and her discharge summary, as well.
Helen suffered another emotional collapse shortly before Rosa’s death, and at one point during the court battle, Helen also completely stopped communicating with some members of the family. She ended up in the hospital more than once. Joseph Maganini, who was Helen’s second cousin, in retrospect, expresses skepticism about the causes of her emotional problems. “The only thing wrong with Helen was nothing that money wouldn’t cure,” says Joseph years after the trial and after Helen had died.
The court battle resumed five days after Rosa’s funeral. Martel and Bruce MacLeod had moved into a two-bedroom condominium at the nearby Silverado Country Club, which the winery had rented for them. With the trial normally starting at ten A.M. and running until four P.M., Robert’s lawyers were working around the clock to prepare for the next day. Martel would return from court in the late afternoon and he and MacLeod would change into their running clothes and run around the golf course together.
As they jogged, Martel would tell MacLeod what had happened in court and who was scheduled for the following day. They would then return to the condo, eat frozen dinners, and go back to work. At ten or so, Martel would go to bed and MacLeod would stay up late into the next morning, poring through documents and preparing areas of questioning. To unwind, he’d uncork one of Mondavi’s reserve Chardonnays, polish it off, and collapse into bed. Martel would wake up to find MacLeod’s suggested themes and supporting documents for the next day’s attack.
Joseph Alioto and his partner Richard Saveri, in turn, commuted between San Francisco and Napa during the trial, arriving in front of the courthouse in a long black chauffeur-driven limousine. From the outset, there was distrust, gamesmanship, and ill-disguised animosity between the two lead attorneys. Alioto’s habit of creeping up behind Martel and reading documents over his shoulder annoyed the younger attorney, who would ask Judge Carter to order Alioto back to his seat.
One day, Martel took matters into own hands. The court was resuming after a lunch break and Martel could tell that Alioto was getting close, since his love of garlic-laden lunches clearly announced his approach. He waited until Alioto had come up behind him, then, acting as if he didn’t know his opponent was near, spun suddenly and “accidentally” drove his elbow into the famous attorney’s solar plexus. But Alioto did not budge and simply smiled. To Martel “it was like hitting a car door.”
Even so, Alioto’s cross-examination of Robert didn’t yield the solid gains that the famous attorney had hoped for. Robert had made it through several days of testimony and cross-examination, holding up well under the pressure. Yet it hadn’t been easy.
Sometime during that period, his nephew Peter Ventura recalls spending a fitful night with Robert and Marjorie at their home on the ranch during the trial as he lay sleepless in one of the twin beds in Michael’s childhood room. He heard a strange thumping noise and wondered what it could be. Finally, he realized that Robert was hitting the soft part of his fist against the wall as he paced the hallway outside the room where Peter was trying to sleep. He knew that because he could hear his uncle repeating over and over, “Only the strong survive, only the strong survive, only the strong survive.”
Robert had survived Alioto’s tough questions, and his lawyers and sons exulted in his performance on the witness stand. On the late afternoon after the last day of cross-examination, Martel was sprawled out on a chaise in back of the condo, watching the ducks on the pond just outside the back door. He was alone and in running shorts, though he felt too exhausted from the day to run. Michael and Timothy Mondavi came walking up along the pond, having apparently circled the condo upon finding the front door locked. They wore their usual khakis and short-sleeved shirts and were grinning widely.
“This is for getting Dad through these past weeks,” Michael said, and Timothy handed the lawyer a magnum of their reserve Cabernet. The brothers were proud of the wine and Martel was touched by their surprise appearance. They were effusive about the way their dad had successfully duked it out with one of the great cross-examiners of all time. The three men laughed about the shopkeeper’s bell and the quick-fix, telephonic visit with the shrink.
Alioto’s client, Peter, had a much tougher time of it on the witness stand. Martel systematically broke him down, laying bare the intense sibling rivalry he bore toward his brother and the lack of any substantive evidence of wrongdoing on Robert’s part. One key issue in the case concerned Peter’s allegations that Robert competed against the family company by wooing away grapes and growers in the Central Valley from the old partnership by paying them more than Krug was willing to pay. Yet, when pressed for the source of his information, Peter couldn’t provide specifics. Oliver Tecklenberg, Peter’s employee and “man on the scene” in the Central Valley, couldn’t back up the story. Peter’s own testimony on the issue revealed to the judge the depths of his hatred of Robert. One example of this involved the grape contracts that Robert had allegedly taken away from Krug.
“What prices he paid for the Thompson Seedless, I don’t know. But I imagine it was well above market,” said Peter, who was on the witness stand.
“Why do you imagine that?” asked Martel.
“Well,” said Peter, “that is how he operates.”
“What do you mean when you say this is the way he operates?”
“He pays well above market in whatever he does,” replied Peter.
“Why does he do that?” asked Martel.
“Well, some people are geared that way. He’s a promoter.”
“What is he promoting when he pays a hundred-dollar premium?”
“Well,” said Peter, finally goaded to anger, “he’s promoting himself, his ego, and his greed. And he thinks that he’s the God Almighty in the wine industry.”
Another key moment involved Krug’s bulk wine purchases. All along, Alioto and Peter had contended that the high markup in prices of the wines sold by the new partnership to Krug—the same partnership that had cut Robert out of any profits from his corporate stock—was justified by the wine’s high quality. MacLeod’s sleuthing proved it was not. He’d managed to piece together the precise route of the grapes sold by the new partnership. He’d discovered the paper trail documenting where individual loads of grapes were grown, crushed, blended, and ultimately transformed into wine. He struck gold with his discovery of documents that proved that at least some portion of the blended wine Krug was selling had alcohol levels too low to be classed under California regulations as real wine. Martel used that to his advantage: With a dramatic flourish, he accused Peter of peddling grape juice.
Girded with MacLeod’s discovery, Martel challenged the witness directly.
“So that there’s no mistake about it, sir, I am about to show the Court that some of your wine wasn’t really wine at all,” Martel said.
The courtroom exploded. After a half day of systematic questioning, during which Martel filled up a huge chalkboard with scribbled dates, vineyard locations, vat numbers, and chemical data, Peter was confronted with evidence that some of his juice could not be classified as wine under the state of California’s rules. Although it was mainly a semantic argument on Martel’s part, since Peter could blend lower-quality wine to bring it up to state standards, it was a blow for the defense.
Another revealing instance was the sale by the new partnership—the one from which Robert had been excluded—of 226,373 gallons of dry red wine from the Lockford Winery at $1.16 a gallon. Soon after, the new partnership sold the same wine to Krug for $1.45 a gallon—a $.29-per-gallon markup—apparently as a way to funnel money from Krug to the new partnership, bypassing Robert. Yet even before the sale was made to Krug, Peter had written to the manager of the Lockford Winery complaining of its poor quality; he had sold to his own winery a wine he apparently knew was inferior.
More damning to Peter’s case was a sale between the new partnership and Krug that Robert had tried, but ultimately failed, to block. On February 17, 1975, at a temporary restraining hearing, Robert tried to halt a sale of 168,816 gallons of dry red wine by the new partnership to Krug for $1.05 a gallon. The court turned down Robert’s request for a restraining order and the sale went through based upon Peter’s testimony that the 168,816 gallons were “high quality wine,” words that he would later regret. For during the trial, Martel produced a letter written by Peter almost seven weeks before the injunctive hearing stating that there was a serious problem with a large portion of that wine and it was not even usable.
Peter’s dismal performance as a witness was reflected in his deteriorating physical condition on the stand. At the start of his cross-examination, he chose to stand, explaining to the court that his back was more comfortable in that pose. But as the cross-examination continued day after day, he was forced to bring a specially outfitted corrective chair resembling a sling into the courtroom to help relieve his pain. “By the time we’d been through some of those transactions with him, Peter could hardly sit up. He had basically collapsed,” recalls MacLeod.
As Martel destroyed Peter’s credibility, Alioto sensed that the case was turning against them. He tried to prepare his clients for the possibility of defeat. Alioto warned Peter, “It doesn’t look good.”
Meanwhile, Peter’s lead attorney was preoccupied with other matters during much of the trial, courting the beautiful and dynamic younger woman who would eventually become his second wife, Kathleen Sullivan, daughter of New England Patriots owner William “Billy” Sullivan Jr. During the trial, rumors of their affair hit the San Francisco Chronicle and Martel couldn’t resist ribbing his Roman Catholic counterpart one day in the hallway at a break.
“So how are things progressing with Ms. Sullivan?” he asked.
Alioto, as Martel had hoped and expected he would, blew up.
“Those sons of bitches! I’ll tell you this, I’ll sue the Chronicle when I get through with this trial and within the year I’ll own that fucking newspaper!”
“So I take it, Joe, you’re telling me this isn’t true?” Martel asked him.
“Of course it is not true,” Alioto declared. “What do you think?”
But Martel knew that every lunch hour Alioto would disappear into a local floral shop and arrange to have flowers delivered wherever Sullivan was staying. Alioto’s troubled domestic life had made the papers even before then, when his first wife, Angelina, disappeared for eighteen days “visiting missions.” After a police search, she turned up, explaining that she had meant to “punish” her husband for his neglect. Angelina filed for divorce in 1975 and the estranged couple spent the next three years wrangling over an estate she valued at $8.7 million. In 1978, soon after their divorce was finalized, Alioto, who was then sixty-two years old, wed the thirty-five-year-old Kathleen Sullivan.
Alioto may have been distracted—he ended his second term as San Francisco’s mayor in early January 1976—but his warning to Peter about losing the case was prescient. On August 12, 1976, Judge Carter handed down a decision, written with the spare eloquence of a Steinbeck novel, that was a scathing condemnation of Peter, Rosa, and Mary. Finding that they’d engaged in a “deliberate and calculated execution of a scheme to defraud Robert,” the judge found them guilty of fraud, abuse of authority, and persistent unfairness to minority shareholders. He also ruled that Krug’s “majority” directors—Peter, Rosa, Mary, Helen, John Alioto, and Fred Ferrogiaro—were guilty of much the same thing.
At the same time, he concluded that “Krug is no longer the family corporation originally envisioned, but instead has in reality become a corporation for Peter and his family.” With that reasoning, he ordered the sale of the Charles Krug Winery so it would no longer divide the family—the largest dissolution of a profitable business ever ordered by a California court at the time.
Judge Carter’s decision handed Robert a complete moral vindication. “If one thing is evident from this entire litigation, it is the fact that Robert Mondavi is not and never has been a man of greed,” wrote the judge. Even so, he awarded him additional damages totaling more than half a million dollars in cash and another $489,451 in attorneys’ fees. As for Peter’s “defensive afterthought” that “Rainier sought to capture the fine wine market and take over and destroy the Krug Corporation,” he ruled them “simply unfounded charges and totally lacking of evidentiary support in this case.”
From his written decision, Judge Carter viewed Robert as a man of integrity who had been deeply wronged by his family, while Peter fell far short of that, as his treatment of growers, self-dealing, and inconsistencies to the court demonstrated. Afterward, some observers of the Mondavi brothers would compare them to Cain and Abel, describing their problems as a case of modern sibling rivalry.