Steve Lapham
Appearances
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
I was a pretty young prosecutor. I'd been in the civil side of the U.S. Attorney's Office for about three years.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
He brought this case to me looking for a declination, meaning a decision from the prosecutor that we don't need to pursue this investigation anymore.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
Little did he know that... He had the bad fortune to come to somebody who fancied himself a wine connoisseur.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
I just remember it being very velvety, gliding down the throat, not having any kind of tannins or bitter quality at all. It just changed my whole thinking about wine.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
It wasn't just the fact that it involved wine, but I could see that it involved a fraud on a pretty large scale. A large scale in terms of the amount of wine and grapes that were being moved, but also dollar amount, a multi-million dollar fraud.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
Wine is to California what apples are to Washington. I mean, this is a big business, and the reputation's made on quality, so that has to be defended.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
You can imagine this, a couple of regulatory agents sitting in a truck at the crack of dawn watching the fields being harvested.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
Right, so much so that Mike Licciardi had an office at Delicato. So during the crush, he would be there almost 24-7.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
I was sitting in my family room watching the evening news. A spot came on about a murder, and he was murdered with a .22 caliber bullet to the head, which is a very mafia-type way of doing it.
Blood Vines
White Zin is In: 1
People have fought over it and died over it and made lots of wine over it.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
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.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
So when we informed them that they had gotten tainted wine, then the process commences whether that wine is going to be decertified as whatever variety it is.
Blood Vines
Tainted Wine: 6
Ultimately, I think we wound up prosecuting about 17 individuals and four or five wineries.
Blood Vines
Twisted Vines: 5
It's one of the most sacred rights guaranteed to criminal defendants in the United States Constitution, the right to trial by a jury of one's peers. But the practical reality of the criminal legal system is that 97% of federal cases and 94% of state cases end in plea bargains.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
As federal prosecutor Steve Lapham recalls, The word was out that we were investigating this fraud involving Corvette Company. And he basically said, come talk to me. Jack Licciardi asked for the interview.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
And so we visited his home. It was very Alfred Hitchcock-like.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
He lives in a house with no improvements. It's very dark and grimy when we went in. The curtains were all drawn. It just seemed, I have this image in my head of it being very dark and spooky.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
The most prominent feature I can remember from him is just having this gnarled old hand with a cigar stogie sticking out of it.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
The couch was grimy with, you know, years of grease from fried-on foods or something.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
I got the impression that he was in the dark about the whole thing.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
Michael Achardi told us during that meeting that he had visited V&K Vineyards and had talked to someone, perhaps Robert Klein, he said, who was from V&K.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
So that was the basis for one of our counts in the indictment for a false statement.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
He was murdered with a .22 caliber bullet to the head, which is a very mafia-type way of doing it. I mean, obviously, we were all speculating what happened. And, yeah, we were blown away.
Blood Vines
The House of Licciardi: 3
One of the problems that Michael Lichardi faced was he had to pull a fast one on his father, Jack Lichardi. He's due to inherit a multi-million dollar a year business. So he's impatient, I think, to inherit the business and start living the good life.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
Mike Licciardi had an office at Delicato. So during the crush, he would be there almost 24-7.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
One of the problems that Michael Licciardi faced was he had to pull a fast one on his father, Jack Licciardi, who was the owner of the company and who never would have entered into a scheme like this. So he had to create these companies that were fictitious.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
He was murdered with a .22 caliber bullet to the head, which is a very mafia-type way of doing it. I could see that it involved a fraud on a pretty large scale, a multimillion-dollar fraud.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
Growers had a sense for how much Zinfandel was out there. Too much was being delivered to the wineries to make sense.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
Now, this is a guy who runs a $10 million business out of a checkbook.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
He's due to inherit a multi-million dollar a year business. And his father is very stingy or he's frugal. And Luchardi could be living the high life with the money that they're making, but his father won't let him do that. So he's impatient, I think, to inherit the business and start living the good life.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
Luchardi approached Bavaro and asked him to deliver low-sugar grapes and without field tags. What's a field tag, you ask? The field tag is essentially the birth certificate of the grape. It says, this grape, Zinfandel grape, was harvested from this field at this location.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
But for whatever reason... Bavaro did that. He delivered Carignan, Grenache, and Valdepena.
Blood Vines
The Grape Broker: 2
After that, Bavaro learned that the grapes had been misrepresented as Zinfandel.