In the basement, police discovered a hydroponic system for cultivating marijuana.
Arthur Mondella is mourned. Up until the moment of his death, on February 24, 2015, he ran his family’s company, Dell’s Maraschino Cherries, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. His daughters Dana Mondella Bentz and Dominique Mondella, who run the company now, miss him every day. They remember him in their prayers and wish he could see how they’ve done with the business. Their great-grandfather Arthur Mondella, senior, and their grandfather Ralph founded it in 1948. Dell’s Maraschino Cherries processes and sells nothing but cherries—about fourteen million pounds a year—from its single Red Hook factory. Dana, the president and C.E.O., is thirty, and Dominique, the vice-president, is thirty-two.
One might not expect that Mondella’s death also would have saddened many of New York City’s beekeepers, but it did. People in the beekeeping community, or their bees, had crossed paths with Mondella in 2010, less than five years before he died. In fact, the complications in Mondella’s life that led to his demise had a minor but significant bee component. The first small signs that all was not right with him arrived buzzing in the air. Though circumstances put Mondella and the bees on opposite sides of an issue, the beekeepers still speak admiringly of him, and express regret at his unhappy end.
The summer of 2010 was the hottest ever recorded in the city. By July, heat reflected from the pavement had scorched the leaves of street trees, creating a false, uncolorful fall. In gardens, blossoms dried and withered, and the weeds by highway entrances took on the appearance of twisted wire. As summer progressed, to add a further touch of the apocalyptic, bees returning at the end of the day to hives in Red Hook began to glow an incandescent red. Some local beekeepers found the sight of red bees flying in the sunset strangely beautiful. All of them had noticed that their honey was turning red, too.
What next? they wondered. Bees go through a lot. Colony-collapse disorder—the decimation of entire hives—has been a worrisome problem worldwide. Pesticides, parasites, lack of flowers and other forage, erratic weather, and disease have caused drastic declines in bee populations. Hornets sometimes get into a hive and eat bees, honey, honeycombs, and all. Because the red bees were city bees, nobody took the sudden change in the color of their honey as a promising development.
Until March of that year, it had not been legal to keep bees in the city. A few beekeepers had evaded the ban by camouflaging their hives with faux-brick contact paper or otherwise making them blend in with the rooftops. The outlaws got a kick out of defying former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had initiated the ban. Immediately after the Board of Health voted to lift it, the number of beekeepers multiplied. According to David Selig, a restaurateur who began keeping bees on the roof of his Red Hook apartment building in 2006, the number of hives in the area went from about three to more than a dozen. In the summer’s unprecedented heat, water and nectar became harder to find.
At Added Value Farms, a public garden and composting site in Red Hook, Tim O’Neal, who teaches biology in middle school and at Brooklyn College, looked into the problem. O’Neal also keeps bees and writes a blog, Boroughbees. In it he speculated that the red honey might be connected to the nearby service depots for M.T.A. buses, and to a substance called ethylene glycol. Bees, pets, and children have been known to sample motor fluids that contain ethylene glycol, because it tastes sweet. The results are sometimes fatal. He thought the bees might be bringing back spilled transmission fluid or antifreeze from the depots, and he advised his fellow-beekeepers not to taste any red honey until it had been tested. Cerise Mayo, a food and farm consultant who kept bees both in the garden and on Governors Island, just off the Red Hook shore, wondered why her island bees, separated from land by six hundred yards of water, were also producing red honey.
No one is sure who first began to think of the cherry factory. Bees were observed flying in its direction and visiting puddles of red juice around it on the sidewalk. In early September, O’Neal took chunks of honeycomb from hives in and near the garden, put them in fifty-millilitre sample tubes, and mailed them to the state apiculturist, in Albany, for testing. About a month later, he received the results: the honey tested positive for F.D.&C. Red No. 40, a food-safe dye, which is an ingredient of the maraschino syrup used by the Dell’s factory.
The Times story contained no quotes from Arthur Mondella, who had not returned phone calls asking for comment. It noted that Mondella had been in touch with Andrew Coté, the founder of the New York City Beekeepers Association, to try to find a solution. Coté is the most famous beekeeper in New York. He keeps bees at several city sites, including on the grounds of the U.N., and sells New York City honey at the Union Square Greenmarket. He is a handsome, hazel-eyed man of French-Canadian parentage, with a suave black beard going gray. Coté’s life has included many adventures, such as hanging upside down nineteen stories above Times Square to remove a swarm of bees from a window washer’s stanchion with a special low-suction bee-vacuuming device he built himself, and securing hives on a roof at the request of Secret Service agents who planned to position snipers there and did not want any bees getting into a sniper’s ear.
“The red honey tasted terrible, by the way,” Coté told me one afternoon at his market stall. “It was sickly sweet, kind of metallic-tasting, and watery. But, after the story went all over the place online, I could’ve sold a ton of it. I had dozens of customers asking for it. And all that red honey ended up being thrown out, and those beekeepers lost a season of production.” He showed me a few vials of the red honey he had kept as souvenirs.
Meanwhile, also taking an interest in the story, the authorities saw an opportunity. According to later news reports, there had been rumors starting in 2009 that Mondella was growing marijuana. Law enforcement hoped that the attention being directed at the cherry factory might reveal more about what went on inside it. Quiet inquiries were made about the factory’s floor plan.
Arthur Ralph Mondella was named after his grandfather Arthur and his father, Ralph. The family came from Naples, though Ralph was born in America. In Italy, Arthur, senior, had been a baker, and he wanted to get out of that business because he did not like working seven days a week. He and Ralph began making maraschino cherries in a small factory on Henry Street, in Carroll Gardens. The cherries, which traditionally embellish ice-cream sundaes and cocktails, were not steeped in maraschino, the Italian wild-cherry liqueur. (Since Prohibition, most maraschino cherries have not contained maraschino.) Instead, the Mondellas used a secret recipe involving sugar, citric acid, red coloring, and a curing process that never subjected the fruit to hot water. The cold-water-only approach preserves the cherries’ crunch, the family says. All of the production was small-batch and hand-done. The hours turned out to be just as long as those in a bakery.
Arthur, of the second American generation of the family, was born in 1957. He grew up in Bay Ridge, attended Xavierian High School, and got a full scholarship to New York University. After graduating with a degree in finance he went to Wall Street, where he found a job with an investment firm. He did not want to work in the cherry factory at all, but in 1983 his father had a heart attack and Arthur set aside his financial career to take over the company.
Arthur, senior, was long dead by then. When Arthur, the grandson, examined with an ex-Wall Streeter’s eye the company he had inherited, he saw room for improvement. In the nineteen-seventies it had moved from Carroll Gardens to Dikeman Street, in Red Hook. Mondella set about expanding that location into two adjacent buildings, and eventually the factory occupied a total floor space of thirty-eight thousand square feet. He scaled up what had been essentially a mom-and-pop operation; his mother and his sister, Joanne, worked there, too, but he ran the show, increasing production capacity and acquiring large-volume food-service clients. In 2014, he made a seven-million-dollar investment in automation so that one day the place would “run itself,” as he told his daughters.
Despite automating, he wanted to keep his human workforce intact. By all accounts, he cared about his employees. Lots of ex-offenders had jobs at Dell’s. The Red Hook Houses, a nearby low-income housing project, supplied him with workers who needed the paycheck. Mondella was known for giving salary advances, and loans whose repayment was not vigorously pursued. He hired a homeless man, provided him an advance for a deposit, and let him use a company truck to move into a new apartment. Gang tattoos could be seen on the muscular, maraschino-red-stained arms of guys on the factory floor.
The most commonly used news photo of Mondella shows him leaning into a cherry-processing machine, small and serious-looking behind the mass of bright-red cherries in the foreground. He is wearing a white lab coat, and a plastic shower cap covers his hair. (“A terrible picture of him,” his daughters say.) He was a slim man, not tall, with dark eyes and a seamed, careworn face. He used “colorful language,” according to several accounts. In his office he had a video monitor that showed the factory floor, and when he saw something going wrong he would appear suddenly and yell at those responsible. Unless he was meeting a customer, he dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but he always wore white sneakers, and asked for new pairs every year from his family for Christmas. He always ended up getting red stains on his white shoes, and he went through a lot of them.
He lived on Staten Island, in a distant neighborhood called Graniteville, until he and the girls’ mother divorced. Dominique and Dana and their mother stayed in Graniteville, and Mondella moved back to Brooklyn, where he eventually married a Ukrainian woman. They had a daughter, Antoinette, who is more than twenty years younger than her half sisters. Later Mondella divorced again and moved in with his new girlfriend. But during all this time he spent most of his life at the factory.
Dominique and Dana both went to Moore Catholic High School, on Staten Island, and then to St. John’s University, where Dana got a degree in accounting and Dominique got a degree in finance. Mondella said that after college one of them had to work for him. Dominique had worked off and on at the factory since high school, doing many jobs, from billing customers to booking flights for her father’s business trips. After she graduated, she went back to the company full time. Dana was hired at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the international accounting firm, and began a job at its midtown office right out of college, often putting in sixteen-hour days. She met a man in banking, Tom Bentz, and they married in 2013. He also works for the family company.
The smell of maraschino cherries, not unpleasant but eye-wateringly strong, fills the factory, and the floors remain sticky even though they’re constantly mopped. Sometimes neighbors in apartments overlooking the building caught a few whiffs of marijuana along with the cherries. David Selig thought the smell of pot might be the result of workmen smoking it on their breaks. Later news stories said that a postal employee had told authorities that marijuana was being grown on the premises. But the police had failed to find suspicious signs. An increase in energy consumption consistent with the use of grow lights had not been detected, possibly because the factory had its own gasoline-powered generators, and a drug-sniffing dog had not been able to discover a definitive scent of marijuana. Independently, environmental investigators, acting on a tip, began to look into possible violations in the dumping of wastewater from the cherry-manufacturing process into the sewer. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn D.A.’s office more or less forgot about the marijuana investigation.
Inquiry into what might be going on at the cherry factory did not proceed much beyond rumor and speculation. The heightened attention caused by the bee episode had increased the factory’s visibility. In 2013, Brooklyn elected a new D.A., Kenneth Thompson, who set out to clean up pollution in the borough. His office decided to take a look at some stalled environmental cases.
“Don’t get us wrong—he wanted us to learn, but at the factory he would’ve wanted to make the decisions for us,” Dominique said.
When the raid finally happened, it was a surprise. On February 24, 2015, a Tuesday, during working hours, officers from the Department of Environmental Protection, the New York City Police Department, and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office came to the cherry factory with a warrant to search parts of the premises for evidence of illegal dumping of wastewater. A lawyer for the company later described the action as a “guns blazing” raid, which it was not, but the officers did arrive in numbers. Their warrant hadn’t allowed for the searching of Arthur Mondella himself. As the officers moved through his factory, he became more and more agitated. While examining some shelves, they found what appeared to be a false wall. They told him they were going to send for a warrant to search behind it. As they waited for the warrant, Mondella excused himself to use the bathroom. Once inside, he locked the door and would not come out.
The police tried to persuade him to unlock the door. He refused, and asked them to bring his sister, Joanne. They did. Through the door, he said to her, “Take care of my kids.” Then he shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum pistol he had been carrying in an ankle holster.
To have strangers going through his factory must have seemed, for such an inward and self-created man, as if invaders were rummaging around in his brain. The factory was his world, he had thought out everything in it—he was it. When he suddenly could not control what was occurring in it, or what was about to occur, he could erase the nightmare only by erasing himself. Experience has shown that the revealing of a secret life can be a motivation for suicide. But nobody saw the catastrophe coming, or imagined the aloneness of this man.
Behind the false wall the officers discovered a ladder leading down to a large basement, twenty-five hundred square feet, and space for about a hundred marijuana plants in a well-set-up system of hydroponic cultivation under L.E.D. grow lights. They also found about a hundred pounds of harvested marijuana, a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash, and a small office containing a desk with books on plant husbandry and a copy of “The World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime.” In a garage area they came upon a collection of vintage cars, a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce among them, which suggested that Mondella led a flashier life when not at the factory. Later reports mentioned his use of cocaine, his boat, his lavish spending in restaurants, and his fiancée, a former Penthouse model.
Had Mondella lived, he could have gone to jail for two or three years; more likely, he would have received probation. The D.A. charged the company with criminal possession of marijuana in the first degree, a felony, and with failing to comply with laws relating to wastewater dumping, a misdemeanor. The company pleaded guilty to both charges and paid a fine of $1.2 million. After that judgment, no further charges were filed. The D.A. did not want to destroy a successful local business that provided a number of Brooklyn residents with jobs. Also, investigators had been unable to find evidence to prove that the marijuana was being sold, nor had they tried very hard to find such evidence. The volume of the operation, obviously larger than was needed for personal use, implied that Mondella had been selling it. How, and to whom, and who helped him build the farm—who serviced the plumbing, the wiring, the grow lights—remained intriguing questions he was not around to answer.
In his will, Mondella left an estate that included $8.5 million in cash, more than enough to cover the fine. Dana and Dominique received fifty-five per cent of the company between them; Joanne, their aunt, got twenty per cent; and twenty-five went to Antoinette, their half sister. The older daughters decided to take personal charge of the business they now controlled. After the news of the raid, some customers dropped Dell’s for other cherry suppliers, but by travelling the country to meet with customers individually Dana and Dominique were able to keep most of them, and later persuaded a few who’d left to come back. Most of their large-volume restaurant chains stayed on.
In May, 2016, Dana and Dominique sued the city for recklessness and negligence in the death of their father, saying that the raid to search for environmental violations had been only a ruse, that officers had obtained a warrant fraudulently, and that the police should have taken their father’s gun from him to protect him from harming himself. Their lawyer, Richard Luthmann, of Staten Island, characterized the raid as a “cowboys and Indians” operation that got out of hand, and asked for fifty million dollars in damages and penalties. The following April, Judge Leo Glasser, a federal judge in the Eastern District, issued a ruling in which he called the claims “preposterous” and threw the lawsuit out. The officers had no duty to protect Mondella from suicide, Glasser said. The warrant did not call for searching him, he was never in police custody, and no one could have reasonably expected that he might shoot himself over a misdemeanor environmental violation.
As for Mondella’s possible criminal ties, his ex-brother-in-law, Salvatore Capece, the former husband of Joanne, served five years in jail for money laundering, and Salvatore’s brother, Vincent Capece, had a rap sheet for drug offenses that went back to the nineteen-eighties. In 1994, Vincent participated in a smuggling ring that brought seventeen million dollars’ worth of marijuana from California to New York in sealed metal containers, a crime for which he was given a thirty-three-month sentence. Mondella and Salvatore Capece had been known to spend time together. Glasser’s decision made no reference to these circumstances.
Though I never met Luthmann in person, I found him helpful on the phone. A follow-up story of December 16, 2017, made me wonder if I had been talking to the same guy. It said that Richard Luthmann—identified as a Staten Island attorney; yes, it was the same guy—and two other men had been arrested for wire fraud, kidnapping, extortion, brandishing a weapon, identity theft, and money laundering. There were eleven charges in all. The alleged scheme involved a scrap-metal-dealer co-conspirator; the sale to foreign customers of shipments of scrap metal that turned out to contain mostly concrete blocks; a blind client of Luthmann’s whose identity the conspirators used in order to set up bank accounts and launder almost half a million dollars obtained by this fraud; and the later kidnapping of the scrap-metal dealer for the purposes of extorting an extra ten thousand dollars from him at gunpoint.
Luthmann is a big man who appears in many photos wearing a red bow tie, a tight-fitting powder-blue suit, and round glasses. He once challenged a rival in a lawsuit to settle the issue through trial by combat. Luthmann spent twelve weeks in jail before his release on bail a few weeks ago. He has denied all the charges and is awaiting a May trial. During his incarceration, the deadline lapsed for filing an appeal of Dana and Dominique’s suit against the city. Luthmann is currently banned from practicing law, so another lawyer will take over the intra-family lawsuits, which are still pending.
Every summer, Mondella used to host a barbecue for his employees, providing all the food and doing the cooking for everyone. There was no barbecue the summer after he died, but in 2016 the tradition resumed, close to his birthday, June 25th, and in 2017 the company continued it. On the day in July when the event took place, I wandered around Red Hook in the morning, checking out the beehives at Added Value Farms, then sheltering under a tent there during a downpour. The rain slackened to a drizzle. Dana was sending me e-mails saying the barbecue was being delayed until the rain stopped. Red Hook is a waterfront place, with the Statue of Liberty a near neighbor across the harbor, and a high, oceanic sky that’s larger because none of the buildings are tall. I strolled past businesses that are part of the neighborhood’s current incarnation—Fleisher’s Craft Butchery, Widow Jane Distillery, Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie, Flickinger Glassworks. The hot, humid air smelled of the open water it was blowing in from.
Finally the rain quit and patches of blue sky opened up. On Dikeman Street’s wide sidewalk, next to a delivery gate for the cherry factory, workmen were sitting on folding chairs beside a table laid with sodas and picnic paraphernalia. Tom Bentz, Dana’s husband, was cooking burgers, hot dogs, and marinated chicken breasts on a gas grill the size of a small bus. It had different grilling venues, and ventilator hoods, and shelves, and control knobs of varying sizes. Someone’s CD player was blasting rap music with lyrics that did not mess around. Tom, Dana, and Dominique wore black T-shirts printed with the Dell’s logo in white. Most of the workmen wore sleeveless shirts, and all were red-spattered and generally a sunburn shade of maraschino red.
Leon Perry, who began his job at the factory after his release from prison twenty years ago, told me how Mondella had loaned him money for rent when he started out. Minnow Johnson, a mechanic, said Mondella had funded his studies at trade school. Arthur Casey remembered when Mondella paid for his three-hundred-dollar cab ride home one night when he had to work late.
Afterward, during the cleanup, Leon Perry pointed to the grill, which Tom was scraping with a metal spatula, and said, “This was his grill.” For a moment it was as if Mondella himself had materialized there on Dikeman Street, analogized by this amazing piece of equipment.
Tom looked at the sky. “It cleared up,” he said. “That was Dana and Dominique’s father looking down.” The guys posed for a group photo, smiling, with red arms around one another’s shoulders, and then went back to work.
I asked Dominique and Dana why they had decided to take over running the company themselves. After all, they could have assembled a committee of consultants, asked for input, done a search for a plant manager, let someone else direct the business day to day. Or they could have sold it; recent years have seen the buyout of other maraschino-cherry companies by large corporations like Green Giant Foods.
“This was his life. It was his blood, sweat, and tears,” Dominique said.
“It’s definitely been very stressful, but I always think positive,” Dominique said.
The fame of Andrew Coté, the beekeeping expert who helped Mondella, has only grown. Lately he has branched out into other countries, riding a surge of interest in beekeeping worldwide. The last time I talked to him at his stall in Union Square, tour organizers from China stopped by to discuss arrangements for his upcoming lectures there. He said that reporters had called him when Mondella died. “It was a dark hour. Arthur was not looking to hurt anybody. He had honesty and integrity, and he made it clear, when dealing with the red-honey problem, that he cared about the bees’ welfare.” Coté also pointed out, apropos of Tim O’Neal’s original ethylene-glycol theory, that recently some hives in East New York had produced a green and poisonous honey whose main ingredient turned out to be antifreeze.
David Selig, the restaurateur who had been the factory’s nearest beekeeping neighbor, has created one hit restaurant after another. A recent success, Rockaway Taco, has inspired him to move from Red Hook to that distant part of the city. Selig is another Canadian offspring, a wiry man with dark, Gallic features and a greeter’s easy manner.