Michael Licciardi
Appearances
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
She was fed up with the fact that Robert had been withholding important business documents needed to split up Jack's estate. A court-appointed administrator didn't even know Jack's net worth, or how much of it was left intact. So she eventually filed her own lawsuit against Robert, one that would remove him from any estate payments, in a suit onto which Joanna, Laura, and even Michael signed.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
And if by this point you're having trouble keeping track of all of the lawsuits within the Luchardi family, I don't blame you. Just know that almost everyone had lawyered up, Robert and Michael were both fighting multiple suits, and all five of the siblings faced uncertain financial futures. Because even by late 1993, the fallout from Michael's grape cases was not over.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Michael had hoped that Delicato Vineyard's guilty plea and $1 million fine would help his cause. But then the former president of Delicato Vineyards, Anthony Delicato, provided the feds with a so-called statement of facts. And in that statement, he alleged that Delicato's cover-up hadn't occurred until after the crimes Michael was accused of committing.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
His chronology directly contradicted the argument Michael used in court.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
The court denied Michael's request for a new trial. So Michael and his lawyer were forced to stick with their original plan. They appealed his conviction to a higher court. Now, they'd have to take their chances before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Until then, Michael's situation would remain unchanged.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
He was stuck in legal limbo, all the while afraid that his brother might get away with everything, including making off with their father's fortune. But if Michael felt stuck around what to do with Robert, his sister Jacqueline decided it was time to make an appeal of her own to the Stockton District Attorney.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Through a lawyer, she began supplying various documents to assist in her father's murder investigation. These included real estate records, checks, and contracts she'd obtained, similar to how she'd produced documents countering Michael's testimony in his grape case. Jacqueline declined to be interviewed for this podcast.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
But there's no doubt that after Jack's case went cold, she was the most persistent in pursuing justice for her father. She figured that if the police weren't going to do anything, maybe the DA would. Towards the end of 1993, she finally got traction. When Jacqueline urged the DA's office to resurrect her father's case, county prosecutors reviewed the evidence police had collected so far.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
It wasn't enough to charge anyone, at least not from what prosecutors could tell. They needed someone to make dollars and cents out of all the complicated financial transactions surrounding Jack, Robert, Michael, and the family business. Perhaps the motive to murder lay there. So the San Joaquin County DA's office brought in its own investigator.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Not a street cop this time, but a white collar crimes guy. During the course of my reporting, he agreed to meet with me at his house.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Wayne Peterson has long been retired. He's in his 70s now, tall, lanky, with a white beard covering half his face. He lives with his wife and a big fluffy dog in a rural area surrounded by pine trees. And when I asked him to take me to the beginning of his investigation, Peterson immediately brought up Jacqueline.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Peterson started reviewing all of the bank records that police had obtained during earlier search warrants.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Put another way, the ATF essentially told Delicato, hey, you received a bunch of misrepresented grapes and you can't release any wine made out of them with Zinfandel labels. Because remember, for a California wine to be labeled by its grape type, it has to contain at least 75% of that type of grape.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
That was odd. But as a seasoned financial crimes investigator, Peterson at least knew where he could get them. He wrote up a new search warrant covering those 18 months of records and issued them to the banks where Jack had held accounts. The banks didn't send him everything he was looking for, but he got a lot more than the Stockton PD had obtained.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Which he spent hundreds of hours reviewing, putting transactions into databases and tracing the movements of millions of dollars. By his calculations, there should have been about $8 million in the company accounts. But...
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Of course, he had a hunch. Peterson started following Robert around. He even saw him go to a Chevy dealership one time and trade up his nearly brand-new Corvette. So you just... Meanwhile, Robert had no clue Peterson was taking down all these details.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
And as Peterson dug deeper, even stranger things surfaced, like a copy of Robert's divorce agreement with Annette, which he noticed had not only denied Annette any money, but also included a curious provision that prohibited the couple from, and I'll quote it, "...writing, publishing, communicating, or filing any cause of action pertaining to the relationship between us while married, and to keep our personal lives together confidential for a period of 50 years."
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Robert wrote that provision himself. Why was he so desperate to keep what had happened during their time together a secret? But Peterson's suspicions didn't reach a fever pitch until he discovered some peculiar irregularities on some of the checks going to Corvette Company One.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Remember, Jack had changed the name of his brokerage from Corvette Company to Corvette Company One after kicking out Michael. Peterson's discovery showed that someone had been altering old checks made out to Corvette so that the money would instead go to the new business Robert had a greater stake in. Did Jack know about this?
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Manipulating checks seemed out of character for the veteran grape broker. And it wasn't the only manipulation Peterson found. Yeah, I know the big one was a seeming forged signature on a letter giving Robert power of attorney over Jack's accounts.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
That was sent the day that he was murdered. Right. The letter in question, which gave Robert power of attorney over the company banking accounts, was signed at the bottom by Jack. Or at least it appeared to be. When Peterson had it tested by a handwriting expert, the forensic examiner said the signature had been faked.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
And if there are an unknown number of misrepresented grapes in the mix, it doesn't make the cut to be labeled as a varietal wine. But the regulators also threw Delicato a bone. They told the winery that it could still release the decertified wine under a generic label, saying something like red wine blend. That way, Delicato could still get some compensation for the bogus wine.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
And not only was it sent on the day Jack was killed, but it was also printed on copy paper found in Robert's home.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Peterson kept compiling clue after clue until by the fall of 1994, the evidence he had gathered was compelling enough for the district attorney's office to initiate grand jury proceedings. The prosecutors planned to convince a grand jury to charge Robert with first-degree homicide, and the DA decided to give Peterson the job of serving Robert the subpoena.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Peterson found an opportunity to do it at a traffic stop. When he approached Robert in his car,
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
The subpoena required Robert to appear before the grand jury that very day. So fast forward one hour and Peterson remembers being at the courthouse on the fourth floor before the grand jury room waiting for Robert to appear.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
The investigator assumed Robert was going to follow his directions, but Robert hesitated, looking uneasy. Peterson warned him again that failing to appear before the grand jury would result in a charge for contempt of court. Robert turned towards the investigator, and with palms held out, declared, Peterson could do nothing but stare at Robert dumbfounded.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
And he suddenly turned and he just kind of ignored me and left. It took Peterson a second to register what was happening. He caught the elevator doors just before they closed. And as the two rode the elevator down to the lobby, Peterson reminded Robert again that he could be charged with contempt. Robert just stared ahead. And as soon as the elevator doors opened upon the lobby, he bolted.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
He went right out of the courthouse exit without looking back. And by now, Peterson was racing too, back up to the fourth floor courtroom. He had to tell the county prosecutors the latest twist in the case, that Robert was making a run for it. In our next and final episode, a manhunt ensues. He jumps on the freeway. Which leads to one of the most sensational trials of the 1990s.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
So what is the fallout after everything's said and done for both the wine industry and the Licciardi family?
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
We'll wrap all those loose ends in our seventh and final episode of Blood Finds. Blood Vines is a production of Fox to Piscink. Our executive producers are Laura Krantz and Scott Carney. Story editing is done by Alicia Lincoln and Laura Krantz. Blood Vines is scored and mixed by Louis Weeks. I'm your host and creator, Chris Walker.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
But despite the ATF's warnings, Delicato sent out thousands of gallons worth of bulk wine with the original labels, the ones calling the wine Zinfandel. And if there was any moment of realization around the screw-up, Delicato didn't act on it. In fact,
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
You're a little punk that wrote the company for nothing, never did a goddamn thing in your life. I thought you were a person that I thought was civil. I told you you wanted to be civil with me. I apologize for shooting my father, punk.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
This podcast was made possible, in part, by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. If you're enjoying Blood Vines, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And please share it with your friends. It really helps more people find out about our show.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
And investigators found out. Because when they returned to Delicato in 1989 to look at the winery's records, they noticed some suspicious entries. Someone had changed the data in Delicato's computers to make it appear like the decertified wine never left the winery. I should note that the winery declined to comment for this podcast.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
But rather than fight the resulting criminal indictment, Delicato Vineyards negotiated a plea deal and agreed to pay a $1 million fine, at the time, the largest fine ever levied in California's wine industry. The winery's president, Anthony Indelicato, also divested his ownership stake and resigned from the company for a period of five years.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Just like his former friend, Jack Licciardi, the grape mislabeling scandal stained his reputation. But Michael held little sympathy for his father's old pal. This was a chance to prove what he'd been saying all along, that the wineries knew they were shipping out fake wines, and that he should in no way receive so much blame for the fraud.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
He directed his lawyer to file a motion for a brand new trial. So now, with his father's murderer still on the loose and two close calls already, he just needed to stay alive long enough to prove himself incorruptible. I'm Chris Walker, your guide in this series about the largest grape rod in U.S.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
history, the powerful family at the center of it, and how a stunning sequence of betrayals triggered the fall of the California dynasty and forever changed the way we make wine in America. From Fox Appasink, this is Blood Vines. Delicato's admission of guilt may have offered Michael hope for a new trial, but he also had more pressing matters to deal with.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Between his brother's civil suit and his near miss at the family ranch, he viewed Robert as an ever-present threat. And he wasn't the only one scared. According to his wife, Norma,
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Norma felt unnerved enough by the call that she implemented a special system for their four girls.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Michael and Norma downplayed their daughter's questions about the code words, and for the most part, made it appear like nothing out of the ordinary was happening. But in private, it was impossible not to worry about Robert. He seemed hell-bent on getting his older brother out of the picture.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Norma and Michael remained convinced that Robert had killed Jack to ensure that Michael lost his trial. But they needed a smoking gun to prove it. And so far, none of the evidence directly implicated Robert. Sure, his fingerprints were all over the crime scene, but as his parents' caretaker, that was to be expected.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
As for the gun itself, all the Lichardi siblings knew where Jack kept the weapon hidden under his sofa's cushions. So Michael decided to go digging for additional clues that might help detectives and unearthed some disturbing memorabilia from Robert's drug days in the mid-80s, around the time he'd reportedly threatened his parents and sister with a gun.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
This included a series of notes Robert had written Michael, scribbled on music notation paper. One of the pieces of sheet music read,
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
It was the same name that Robert used for his music studio and a reference to his late uncle. Did Robert have some kind of alter ego? And where did he get this idea that he was his uncle's son? I asked Robert about it.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
In my conversation with Robert, he also went on to deny writing those letters to Michael. But detectives found them disturbing, especially when paired with newly raised questions about Robert's mental health. Still, it was all circumstantial to Jack's murder in 1991. The police didn't have enough to charge Robert with homicide, so Michael pressed on with his secretly recorded phone calls.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
One guy who screwed up the whole company and screwed me out of my money. One rocky-fishing guy all by myself. All the rest of you put together.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Again, the quality of these tapes has degraded significantly over the years. Michael just accused Robert of screwing over the company, and Robert replied that he'd, quote, worked more than the rest of you put together. He's referring to his family members. But even through all the bickering about family and money, you can hear Michael trying to goad his brother.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
He said, they don't know who you are and what you've done. Oh, come on, I've never done anything in my life. Yeah, now you're a big fat liar.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
As the calendar rounded into 1992, Michael Licciardi finally got the break he was looking for. Not against his brother, Robert, but in the federal grape fraud case. Although a jury had determined Michael's guilt six months earlier, new evidence surfaced right as Michael was appealing his conviction.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
A big fat liar, Michael called him. But even after over 100 recorded conversations with his brother, and about a quarter of which he accused Robert of murdering their father, Michael's provocations had little effect. Robert always denied the accusations or demurred, often switching the conversation to money, including ways he and Michael could settle their civil dispute out of court.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
For Michael, any settlement with his brother was out of the question. In fact, his lawyer had actually turned the tables on Robert, arguing that the younger brother wasn't earning income or effectively stewarding the grape brokerage. So now it seemed likely the court would force Robert to liquidate the family business. It was a small win for Michael.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
But with his legal expenses from multiple cases piling up, things still felt like they were spiraling out of control. That is, until finally, a breakthrough moment, when Norma got a frantic call from the office of her husband's attorney.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Norma heard yelling in the background of the call, and she sensed an opportunity. She knew there was a good chance that Robert had a gun on him, and since Babitsky worked in a federal building, Robert could be charged with carrying a weapon on government property.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
She ended up being half right. After Babitsky called the police and reported the assault, Robert fled the building. A traffic cop pulled him over as he tried to speed away in his car. And when Robert was taken to the police station for booking, officers found a loaded gun sewn beneath the seams of his jacket. So in addition to battery, Robert was charged with possession of a concealed weapon.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Because Robert hadn't been caught inside the government building, but rather outside of it, there was just enough reasonable doubt to claim that he never had the gun on him at the lawyer's office. So the local district attorney only moved forward with the battery charge. Robert pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, but it wasn't something he could be held in jail for.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
For Michael and Norma, it was just another dead end. They could feel the whole investigation into Jack's death sputtering until finally, towards the beginning of 1993, it came to a complete standstill. The case had gone cold. Nearly a year passed with little movement on Jack's murder investigation and no new leads of any kind.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
It came in the form of a new federal indictment implicating Delicato Vineyards, the winery that Michael and his co-conspirators had sold most of their mislabeled grapes to. Throughout the investigation, Delicato had always maintained its innocence in the grape-switching scheme, and Michael never really had any solid evidence to prove otherwise.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
The district attorney's office stopped pressuring the police, in large part because the DA had recently suffered an embarrassing mistrial in a high-profile murder-for-hire case. It involved the Seattle Seahawks' former general manager, a college football star-turned-assassin, and a crossbow. Look it up. It's a wild story.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
But it meant that the DA's office was far more fixated on retrying that case than it was on prosecuting Jack's murder. So police sergeants Williams and Capron were reassigned to other tasks within the department and finally got off Robert's back for the first time in months. For a core group of Robert's supporters, it seemed about time.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
That was a housekeeper who helped out at Jack's house, Mary O'Donnell, who told me she defended Robert from the beginning. She was joined by Robert's paternal aunt, and despite his divorce from Annette, his former mother-in-law.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
But I have to say, those three were decidedly in the minority. Along with Michael and Norma, most of the Licciardi family members, including all three of Robert's sisters, viewed his behavior as too suspicious to let by.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
As the police's investigation slowed and ground to a halt, Joanna, Laura, and Jacqueline could see their brother getting comfortable. Despite not bringing in any income, he spent money right and left on luxury items like sports cars. He traveled overseas to Egypt and Europe. He made regular trips to Vegas to gamble at Caesar's Palace.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
And while he dropped all that money on his recording studio, according to David Koolhoven, the studio tech Robert had hired to help him get Fast Freddy productions off the ground, he wasn't in much during the day.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
With all of Robert's fast and loose antics, his siblings didn't see all that much of him anymore. At least not until their mom, Mary, died in August 1993, ending her years-long struggle with Alzheimer's. Her memorial forced a grim family reunion.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
His suggestions of a wink-and-nod culture at the winery were always met with skepticism or dismissal. But the new indictment revealed some mischief Michael hadn't been aware of. It stretched back to 1988, when investigators first alerted the winery that it had received 15 loads of mislabeled Zinfandel. Here's Steve Lapham, the federal prosecutor.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
All five of her children attended, Jacqueline, Joanna, Laura, Michael, and Robert, but everyone was so angry with each other that hardly anyone was on speaking terms. Without their parents as a North Star, distrust coursed through the family. And it wasn't just aimed at Robert.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
There was also still a lot of animosity towards Michael regarding the grape fraud, the scandal that had started this whole spiraling series of events. Jacqueline, the youngest sister, went so far as to write a letter to the judge in Michael's appeals case that undermined her brother's arguments. In her letter, she wrote that she'd done some sleuthing.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
And with the aid of the documents, she read through the transcripts of Michael's testimony during his initial jury trial and refuted various claims her brother had made, such as...
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
She's, of course, referencing the incident that we heard about in the last episode, when both Michael and Robert apparently withdrew money from the company without their father's permission. Essentially, her letter characterized Michael as a liar before the court, and she took just as much initiative against her other brother.
Blood Vines
Twisted Vines: 5
Robert had called me. He was talking to me about, you know, things that can happen. Do I know where your kids are at? And that's when I told him, you know, Robert, you touch my kids, I will kill you.
Blood Vines
Twisted Vines: 5
He was in our backyard playing with a dog. He felt a bullet go by. It hit the house.
Blood Vines
Twisted Vines: 5
You couldn't get away. You couldn't get out of it. You know, how can you, when you're kind of in the middle, because you've got the winery doing it, you've got the other broker doing it.
Blood Vines
Twisted Vines: 5
I believe he was wired just by the questions he was asking Michael. I even confronted Alfieri to take his jacket off. And he got offended. You know, he acted like he was offended. And so I told Michael, he's, you know, he's trying to trap you. You in that van out there.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
Well, I was 26, 25 at the time. At that age, in my little mind was no harm, no foul. It's white zen, just sugar and water and alcohol.
Blood Vines
Hangover: 7
Michael J. Licciardi, a former Stockton wine grape broker, was ordered Tuesday to a federal prison, five years after being found guilty of participating in a multi-million dollar wine grape fraud scheme.
Blood Vines
Hangover: 7
It's a story of a well-known businessman who tried to instill in his children the value of frugality and the work ethic of his Italian immigrant parents. It's a story of a son who reportedly hungered for his father's riches and a daughter who has devoted her life to prosecuting her brother. It's a story of a family that fell apart.