Michael’s case gets a boost when Delicato Vineyards, once his main buyer, gets caught covering up mislabeled wine. Can Michael avoid jail time by proving wider misdeeds across the wine industry? Meanwhile, danger still looms on the homefront: Michael’s wife Norma receives a chilling call from Robert, whose behavior is becoming increasingly erratic, violent, and suspicious.Listen to Blood Vines on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting www.wondery.com/links/blood-vines.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What previous events led to Michael's case?
Previously on Blood Vines. He had big ideas, big plans, and he was going to open a recording studio and a production company.
It's just the way that my brothers think. They're in it for themselves.
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.
He was suicidal. He's got gas going in that house and he's got all the windows shut.
I was paranoid. I suffer from bipolar disorder.
They went to at the ranch and they had Robert had bought this gun. So Michael shot it and it backfired.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did Delicato Vineyards get implicated in the scandal?
I never saw Robert acting in a mean-spirited way to anybody.
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.
I totally believed Robert was innocent. I thought he was at times a little strange, but I never thought him capable of something like that.
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.
As Joanna put it, Family knows family. You know, especially in an Italian family like ours, you know, the Italian Sicilian family.
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.
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.
But at night... You would see him with, you know, some women that were trophy-style gals that were all primped up. Koolhoven just shook his head. He was fast. I mean, Fast Freddy was definitely apropos. as a moniker or his nickname, whatever.
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.
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Chapter 3: What new evidence emerged for Michael's appeal?
As Steve Lapham remembers, So Michael Licciardi filed a motion for a new trial claiming that we had withheld this information about Delicato being involved in the fraud. But it was a confused theory because Delicato was the victim of Licciardi's fraud and they simply made some bad choices after learning that they had been victimized. In Lapham's argument won out before a judge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My name is Wayne Peterson. I had been an investigator for the San Joaquin County DA's office out of Stockton.
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.
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