Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (27 page)

He put a pipe and handcuffs on the table. Jacques explained he was going to demand from her husband half a million francs. Beatrice sensed a shyness and an indecision in Jacques, that he didn’t have brutality in him—perhaps the same qualities that that first bank teller had sensed. Beatrice responded that her life was not worth that much. She asked Jacques if he wanted a cup of coffee and talked him down to three hundred thousand francs.

It just so happened that that particular morning, Luc did not go to the offices right away. He first went to a quarry to look for some stones for a château improvement project. The quarry had been especially wet and muddy that morning and Luc figured that before going to the office, he would change his mud-covered shoes. As he approached the back door, Beatrice shouted that she was being held hostage and that Luc should not come in. As Luc fled on foot into St.-Émilion, which was only about 150 yards down a dirt path, Beatrice gave several ideas to Jacques on how he might easily escape. Minutes later the police arrived.

Beatrice ran upstairs and Jacques followed her into the room at the top of the stairs. As they listened to the police enter the house, Jacques told Beatrice that if it came to it, he was going to kill her and then himself. In the time of their brief exchange, a police officer had made it to the top of the stairs undetected. Jacques fired and missed—at the trial it was a matter of debate whether Jacques was actually trying to hit the officer or accidentally pulled the trigger—but the second shot fired definitely came from one of the gendarmes and there was no question that it hit Jacques in the chest.

Lying on the floor, Jacques begged Beatrice to tell the police that he did not hurt her, which in fact Beatrice did tell the judge at the trial. Beatrice represented herself, as she didn’t want to make a fuss of it all. It was largely because of her testimony and her unwillingness to press charges, because, as she said, she felt sorry for Jacques, that he was sentenced to only fifteen years, rather than the life term that would have been typical for such an offense.

Despite what Jacques would tell police, the idea to hold the vines of Burgundy hostage was not his alone. While he was serving his sentence in a high-security prison on the island of St.-Martin, his very first year there he got to talking to the wayward son of an aristocratic family. The man suggested to Jacques that if he could take the vines of Burgundy hostage as he had tried to do with Beatrice, there would be no gunplay involved, no police, no resistance of any kind; because in Burgundy, the best vineyards are owned by very quiet, very old-money aristocrats, who care a great deal about their privacy, especially when it comes to their vines. The last thing in the world they would want to do is draw attention to the fact that their vineyards are vulnerable, or even worse, that their precious
terroir
had been poisoned or contaminated in any way.

Jacques did about nine years of his fifteen-year sentence for the Bordeaux job. For the last eight, all he did was think about the Burgundy project. He began writing to Cedric about it in 2000. In those letters he also told his son that only fools work because
the government only taxes away the workingman’s earnings. He told his son that he was good for nothing, and ridiculed him for not having a driver’s license. He advised his son that it was better to plan for big jobs, like the one he was going to do in Burgundy, and he wanted Cedric to be a part of it. He told his son to just sit tight and wait until he got out and they would do this together. He sent him magazine clippings with articles about Burgundy and told him to pay close attention to the vineyards around Vosne and Chambolle-Musigny.

Jacques was so excited about the prospects of the Burgundy project that when he was released from prison in November 2008, he went to the Côte d’Or even before he went home to see his wife and son. Doing various jobs in prison, over those nine years, Jacques had earned about eighteen thousand euros. One of the first things he bought, after the train ticket to Burgundy, was a bike to ride through the vines of the Côte de Nuits. In prison he’d researched the top domaines and top vineyards. Romanée-Conti was the obvious choice. Musigny was selected because it was another
grands crus
vineyard and, as it turned out, it was close to the area of the woods where in November 2008, Jacques had begun to build his cabin.

Jacques spent a couple of weeks in the Côte de Nuits in November. He began to count the vines for his maps and dig out the earth in the woods above Musigny for his cabin. Throughout January and February 2009, he made several trips to Burgundy to finish his cabin and collect the information for his maps. At the local hardware stores, he bought the herbicides and headlamps and various supplies he would need.

In May 2009, he and Cedric began drilling the vines of Musigny. They drilled at night between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. By
Cedric’s count they would drill about one hundred vines each night. They would scratch away the soil at the base of each vine, drill a hole, put a very tiny piece of black wire in the hole, and cover the vines. Jacques didn’t want the vignerons to find the wires until he wanted them to. They did this procedure together from May 2009 until October 2009.

For more than sixteen years of Cedric’s life, from the time he was ten until he was twenty-six—in other words, for most of the time Cedric had been alive—his father had been in prison. Drilling the vines and the preparations that went into it was the most time Cedric and his father had ever spent together.

Jacques would not let Cedric stay with him in his cabin. He instructed Cedric to set up a concealed tent elsewhere. During the day, he wanted Cedric to work the harvest, which he did for a few days, but then he quit because he couldn’t get along with the other
vendangeurs
. Most times, during the day, while Jacques went off into Nuits-St.-Georges or Dijon, he would instruct Cedric to sit somewhere and make sure that no one stumbled upon their operation.

But there were times, Cedric told the detectives, when his father would walk with him or visit him at his tent and they would talk. Cedric was going through a rough spot with his girlfriend, Margot. She wanted to break up with him, but Cedric thought she might be the one. He really loved her. He also liked rap music and wanted his father to listen to some of his favorites. Jacques advised his son not to worry about Margot. He thought she was too common, and Jacques didn’t like common people.

He was always telling his son about the aristocrat he’d met while he was in prison. Jacques loved that aristocrats were educated and he loved the way they spoke. They just had this way of
speaking, he told his son. Aristocrats didn’t listen to rap. They listened to Mozart and Bach. Jacques reminded his son that he had always listened to Mozart and Bach, and that he had read quite a bit, and that he had his high school baccalaureate, which he had acquired in prison. Jacques thought that if things had gone differently, if fate had gone another way, he himself would have made a fine aristocrat. Instead he was the son of Antoine and Françoise, born to lowly Polish immigrants.

He told Cedric that when they collected the money he was going to buy a church, one with an organ; he was going to wire the church with the best stereo system and he was going to learn to play Mozart and Bach. As far as the money, his plan was to give Cedric three hundred thousand euros, which would have been the take from the Musigny piece, and Jacques was going to keep the million euros from the Domaine. But Jacques had said he would hold Cedric’s money in an account because Cedric didn’t know how to handle money.

Jacques referred to Musigny as the “spare tire.” The real thing, the special target, was Romanée-Conti. Jacques wouldn’t even let Cedric work that vineyard with him; that one was his. He drilled that one all on his own. When Cedric left his father for the last time in Burgundy, it was just after the harvest, sometime in October 2009. By then, according to Cedric’s guess, they had drilled thirteen hundred vines in Musigny and seven hundred vines in Romanée-Conti. To be exact, Jacques had drilled 728 vines.

As far as the poisoning of the vines, only four were injected: the two in Romanée-Conti and two in Musigny, all of which Jacques did sometime after his son left Burgundy that fall. The poisoning, the Colissimo packages, the mailings, the note in the vineyard, that was all Jacques alone. He was proud of himself for that. As Cedric would put it to police, his father said that now he
was the Blackmailer and everyone was listening to him. Jacques referred to himself as “Le Maître Chanteur,” the Master Singer.

Shortly after the arrests were made, with Jacques being held in a prison in Dijon, and Cedric under house arrest that allowed visits to his psychologist, the police informed the owners of Romanée-Conti and de Vogüé that both had been victimized. Until that point, other than the police and Jacques and Cedric, the only person who knew that there were two domaines involved was Pierre-Marie Guillaume. He was also the vine specialist for de Vogüé; that domaine’s vineyard manager, Eric Bourgogne, had called him just as Monsieur de Villaine had done. And just as he was asked, Pierre-Marie kept the confidence of his clients.

When Monsieur de Villaine was made aware that de Vogüé had also been targeted, he suggested the owners and senior staffs meet and decide how to handle the media, should it come calling, and the legal prosecution. The domaines were in agreement on the media: Should the press call, they would be forthcoming, but they hoped no calls came. They feared publicity might inspire copycats, and, frankly, they did not want the limited poisoning to be scandalously represented as if their whole parcels had been contaminated. That could be devastating for their business.

On the legal matter, the domaines disagreed. As the information of the case came in, Monsieur de Villaine and Claire and Marie Ladoucette all supported the prosecutor’s recommendation that Jacques be penalized to the fullest extent of the law. After all, this was the first case of its kind. The prosecutor, Éric Lallement, believed it was important to send a message that such crimes against the vines of Burgundy would be met with the harshest sentences. As de Vogüé’s
chef de cave
, François Millet,
put it, “Burgundy is a place that has been and must be free of such evil so that man can focus on the poetry of nature that God has given us, and we can focus on our responsibility to honor that.” It was critical to discourage anyone and everyone from doing something like this ever again.

However, when it came to Cedric, unlike the Ladoucette sisters, Monsieur de Villaine believed that the son and the mother had both suffered enough throughout their lives because of Jacques. The Grand Monsieur wanted the most lenient sentence possible for Cedric. Monsieur de Villaine had listened very carefully to the police when they had described Cedric and Martine’s life. He had paid close attention to Prignot’s rendering of her time with Cedric during that first interview and in subsequent interactions.

For Monsieur de Villaine, there was something in the notion that the only way Cedric could connect with his father was in the vineyards of Burgundy. Here was this Cedric Soltys, with no family roots of his own to speak of, an
enfant
born into a godforsaken
terroir
that his own father had ignored, abandoned; willing to commit a crime, if that’s what it took to be with his father, and having those moments, as dark and misguided as they were, in the vines and
terroir
of Burgundy. As perverse as it might be, the Grand Monsieur saw something divine in that, and he did not think it was necessary or just to take action against the son.