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The Fall of the Cherry King

Investigators went to the Dell’s Maraschino Cherries factory looking for illegal dumping. They found a secret marijuana farm instead.Credit...Kyle T. Webster

On his desk, Arthur Mondella kept jars of the glossy-red fruits, Dell’s Maraschino Cherries, that seemed to make everything else possible: the yacht, the Porsche and the Rolls-Royce, the Rolexes, his daughters’ tuitions, the loans — often forgiven — to the workers he’d given second, third and fourth chances. On the wall, he had mounted a large television to keep watch over the business he had helped build since childhood.

On his ankle, he strapped a gun.

Now, the district attorney’s investigators stood in his marble-floored C.E.O.’s office, just outside the door to his private bathroom, and pleaded for him to come out. “Get my sister” was his response.

Joanne came. “Take care of my kids,” he told her through the closed door. Then he fired one shot, killing himself with a bullet through the temple.

Why, would become the second mystery. The first was the 2,500-square-foot marijuana farm that Mr. Mondella had installed in a secret basement under the factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn, behind an unmarked roll-down gate, behind the cars, behind a pair of closet doors, behind a set of button-controlled shelves, behind a fake wall and down a ladder in a hole in the floor.

The investigators, who had come to the factory on Dikeman Street to look into allegations of illegal dumping, had caught a whiff of the hidden drugs and a glimpse of an odd-looking wall while probing around the garage. They told Mr. Mondella they would come back with another search warrant. He said he had to use the bathroom.

In the days after Feb. 24, the investigators would find hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and several more luxury cars. They’d find sophisticated grow lamps and irrigation equipment. They’d find an underground office with a small library of dusty horticultural books. They’d find a copy of The World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime.

But they still haven’t found the answers to fundamental questions about Mr. Mondella’s secret life: How did he operate what one law enforcement official involved said was the largest indoor marijuana growing operation any of the investigators had ever seen in New York City, and what drove him into the drug trade? Why did he unravel so quickly, killing himself before so much as consulting one of his many lawyers? His family appears to have been ignorant of his other life, and his iPhone’s contents are locked.

At 57, Mr. Mondella seemed to have stepped out of an old Brooklyn movie, a tall, gravel-voiced, hard-bargaining man who charmed women, impressed men and was said to shoulder all the burdens of his family and of many of his employees, too. He would do almost anything for the people he cared about, his friends said. He killed himself, some of those closest to him say, because he couldn’t face his family, or because he wanted to spare them.

“Everyone who truly knew our father knows he was a loving, caring, generous man with a tough exterior,” his daughters, Dominique Mondella and Dana Mondella Bentz, said in a statement. “We have many special memories of our father and love and miss him very much.” The sisters, along with their father’s sister, Joanne Capece, have assumed leadership of the company. They declined to be interviewed for this article, though they answered some specific questions about the company through a spokeswoman.

“None of us had even the slightest clue that he was living this double life, but if there were ever a smart and savvy enough businessman to pull off such a feat, it would be Arthur,” Michael Farkas, one of Mr. Mondella’s lawyers and friends, said, sounding almost admiring.

He went on: “We’re talking about all this stuff, what a great guy he was. But it’s kind of ironic, because he had this entire separate life that nobody knew about.”

What if, he said, they hadn’t known Arthur at all?

Arthur Mondella was born into the cherry business.

His father, Ralph Mondella, and his grandfather Arthur Mondella Sr. founded the business in a 1,500-square-foot Brooklyn storefront in 1948. From childhood, Arthur was in and out of the factory, perpetually splotched with bright red dye. The work was tough and the hours long. Arthur saw no future in it.

“We saw how hard it was,” said Dominick Casale, 55, a friend from Mr. Mondella’s teenage years. “It wasn’t until later that we realized how lucrative it could be.”

In a rust-colored Lincoln Continental with a white interior and a white roof, Arthur and his friends cruised around, taking their dates to the haunted mansion in Long Branch on the Jersey Shore or, when they were older, to Pastels, the disco off Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. Other times, they gathered at an Italian social club on Court Street in Brooklyn.

He was suave, with polished manners and a steady supply of spending money. He dressed sharply. He always had his dates home on time.

“He knew how to treat a girl, whereas these other crumbs — oh, God, don’t even talk to me, go away,” said Linda Lieber, who dated Mr. Mondella briefly when they were teenagers and became good friends with his sister. “He could make you feel like a queen.”

Determined to avoid Dell’s, Mr. Mondella graduated from New York University with a finance degree in 1979 and headed for Wall Street, settling in for several years as a portfolio manager at Merrill Lynch. At the time, the family business had been forced to reduce production because of the high price of sugar.

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At the Dell’s plant, even the cloying scent of brining cherries did not stop some of the workers from identifying another smell emanating from the back of the factory.Credit...Kyle T. Webster

“When I first got out of school, I really had no desire to work for my family’s company, even though I spent a lot of time there when I was a kid,” he told Crain’s New York in January, in an enthusiastic portrait of the company. “I also didn’t see much of a future there.”

But he got pulled in anyway. In 1983, a heart attack and triple-bypass surgery forced Ralph Mondella to retire. His son went back to Dikeman Street.

Over his father’s objections, Arthur Mondella set about automating the plant to increase production, he told Crain’s.

Under his leadership, Dell’s grew, attracting customers like T. G. I. Friday’s, Checkers and Red Lobster. As Red Hook’s warehouses became artisanal food facilities and its scruffy homes filled with artists, Dell’s, once a shrinking vestige of the neighborhood’s industrial past, gobbled up new warehouses on Dikeman, Ferris and Beard Streets.

His mother, Ann, and his sister worked in the front office. Two of his daughters and his nephew would find jobs at the plant, too. According to the Crain’s article, by this year Dell’s was processing a billion cherries a year, and pulling in $20 million in annual revenue.

Mr. Mondella’s lifestyle suggested that his choice to abandon finance for the sweetened-cherry business had been a good one. His tax returns, shown to a divorce lawyer last year, put his income at approximately $400,000. His spending suggested a much larger figure.

He loved collecting diamond jewelry, loved going to car shows in Atlantic City, loved trying new restaurants, loved showing everybody a good time. Just ask any of the friends — including an ultra-loyal cadre of longtime Dell’s workers — whom he often invited out for dinner and clubbing, or to cruise around the Jersey Shore on his yacht, named the Gold Digger after a former girlfriend. Those close friends and several other current and former workers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to alienate Mr. Mondella’s family or other employees.

His sister’s ex-husband, Salvatore Capece, who had spent five years in prison on money-laundering charges, was a frequent companion, hanging out with Mr. Mondella at the factory. (Mr. Capece’s brother, Vincent Capece, also went to federal prison, on marijuana-smuggling charges.)

And there were drugs. Mr. Mondella regularly snorted cocaine in his office and on the yacht, according to one current and one former employee.

Out at Peter Luger, where he usually ordered the rib-eye steak, or at Meatpacking District clubs like Bagatelle, he carried stacks of cash, $20,000 in each pocket, said the current employee who had worked for Mr. Mondella a long time and was part of his social group. He would blow through it all in a night.

“He always wanted to be the top,” the employee said. “He never wanted to be around someone that had more money than him. He’d give it out like it was water.”

Whenever he went to Ponte Vecchio, an Italian restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the waiters knew to expect a good night: a big order with bottles of expensive wine, and a tip of 30 or 40 percent.

“He was my best customer,” said Mohamed Said Ahmed, 43, a waiter there. “We used to say, ‘Arturo’s coming, don’t worry; Arturo’s going to come, we’ll make money.’ ”

He held his mother’s birthday party at the restaurant, and his daughter’s wedding reception. He took his second wife, Yevgeniya Mondella, whose lawyer described her as a Ukrainian mail-order bride, and their daughter, Antoinette, to dinner. Most recently, he took his fiancée, Gina Halas, a former Penthouse magazine model and a former adult-film star. Ms. Halas, the old flame for whom he had named his yacht, had left her husband, an erotic cinematographer in Florida, to reunite with Mr. Mondella.

“I’ve never seen my daughter so happy,” her mother, Lana Ricci, said after his death. “He lived for other people.”

To many of his workers, he was a benign ruler. He paid well, offering a starting wage of $9 an hour in 2013 — when New York’s minimum wage was still $7.25 — with the possibility of a raise every six months. Lunch was free: sandwiches from a nearby deli, and pizza on Fridays.

“He was cool; he took care of everybody,” said Karl Matthie, 25, who worked in the warehouse and factory in the fall of 2013. “You can’t beat that.”

If a worker was struggling with child-support payments or was behind on his bills, Mr. Mondella was there with his checkbook, many of his employees said. He told them he would take it out of future paychecks, but more often than not, he never did.

He was the Mondella patriarch, the man who always took his mother to the doctor, the one everyone in his extended family would turn to in sticky spots. Sometimes, they wouldn’t even have to ask. Mr. Farkas, his friend and lawyer, recalled that Mr. Mondella would come to him saying, “I have to help these people. We have to take care of this.”

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Credit...Kyle T. Webster

“He never, ever said no,” the longtime employee said. “It would be, ‘What do you need?’ On the spot, he’d make sure you was all right. Always, if I was down and out. He was a person to look up to, because he was successful, and he was smart, really smart.”

But most important for many of those he hired over the years, he was willing to look past criminal records and checkered histories when giving out jobs.

“He just innately understood that people aren’t bad because they may have a criminal past,” said Mr. Farkas, who often handled legal problems for Dell’s workers.

But if they broke his rules, his anger came like a battering ram.

If something went wrong, Mr. Mondella, who had a permit to carry a gun, would burst from his office, gun dangling from his hip, cursing everyone in sight. “One minute he probably would be joking, and the next, he’d be screaming and cursing at the top of his lungs, and he did that to everyone,” including his mother, said Steven Coppedge, 54, the factory’s maintenance manager from June 2009 to June 2010. Cursing, he said, was “just his vocabulary.”

If a handful of cherries tumbled to the ground: “Four cherries — that’s a dollar twenty-five,” he would say.

Mr. Coppedge was one of several employees fired for refusing to work the hours Mr. Mondella demanded, which included evenings, some weekends and many holidays. Mr. Mondella would arrive early in the morning in his white Porsche, and stay until late at night. Sixteen, 17 and 18 hours a day were common.

Dismissals for any and every reason were common. But those who wanted to come back usually found that Mr. Mondella was willing to give them a second, third or even fourth chance.

About five years ago, employees said, someone broke into the factory through the roof and stole a $50,000 Rolex, $60,000 in cash and a gold-plated Desert Eagle pistol from Mr. Mondella’s office. His paranoia peaked. Believing it was an inside job, he singled out a few of his most loyal workers, interrogated them and fired them.

He installed extra security cameras throughout the factory, watching the security footage from his office or remotely when he was away. If he saw something that was not being done the way he wanted it done, a voice on the factory-wide intercom, would ask the worker in question to pick up the phone. Over the phone, he would yell.

“There was no security guard,” Mr. Coppedge said. “He was the security.”

Over the years, neighbors complained about cherry syrup running into the surrounding streets and backyards. In 2010, the factory attracted attention when bees in the area began turning red after feasting on cherry syrup and bringing it back to their hives to make maraschino-tinged honey. Around the same time, a tip came into the office of the Brooklyn district attorney at the time, Charles J. Hynes. Marijuana, it said, was being grown at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries. Nothing came of it. The district attorney’s office would not comment on the current case, saying that the investigation was ongoing.

Among Mr. Mondella’s many rules was one that seemed minor, if odd: Workers were told not to spray the floors in the back of the factory, toward the garage where Mr. Mondella kept his cars. People had been fired for doing that. There was an unexpected smell back there that, even with the factory’s thickly cloying scent of brining cherries, some of the workers could identify right away. No one said anything. If asked about it, Mr. Mondella replied it was just the wood pallets getting wet, several workers said.

Sometime last year, the bedrock of his life shifted.

He divorced Yevgeniya Mondella, his wife of eight years. Adam Edelstein, his divorce lawyer, said he was the picture of generosity, providing her with a settlement worth around $100,000 a year. Mrs. Mondella’s lawyer, Eliot Tannenbaum, said her former husband was high-strung and domineering. He had to be pushed to improve on his prenuptial agreement, Mr. Tannenbaum said: “It was like he owned the world, and he didn’t understand why anybody would take a contrary course.”

Mr. Mondella became engaged to Ms. Halas. Yet his other relationships were cracking. Mr. Capece seemed to disappear after the two argued, the longtime employee said.

He fought with his mother and sister, and all but stopped speaking to them, said the current employee and a former one.

Last fall, he told the longtime employee and friend that he was sober — no more cocaine. But he was more volatile than ever. His black mood hung like smog.

It did not help that he was in pain, recovering from jaw surgery that made it difficult to eat, Mr. Farkas said.

At the office of the newly elected Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, a group of prosecutors met to discuss if dormant cases left over from Mr. Hynes’s tenure could be reopened. One file focused on Dell’s: not the marijuana tip, but rumors that the factory was illegally dumping toxic substances.

On Feb. 24, two dozen investigators from the Department of Environmental Protection and Mr. Thompson’s office showed up at the unmarked gray building on Dikeman Street.

Mr. Mondella tried to keep them in the processing area, but they soon headed for the garage. The employees who looked up to him, who partied with him, who had guessed or learned his secret, exchanged glances. The investigators had no trouble recognizing that smell. They herded the employees upstairs for questioning, and then everyone heard the shout from below.

“Shots fired! Shots fired!”

A correction was made on 
May 10, 2015

An article last Sunday about Arthur Mondella, the head of Dell’s Maraschino Cherries who killed himself in February as investigators were about to unearth a large marijuana farm at the cherry factory, misspelled, in some editions, the surname of his second wife’s lawyer, who discussed their divorce last year. As the article noted correctly in one other reference, he is Eliot Tannenbaum, not Tanenbaum.

How we handle corrections

Elisa Cho contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rise and Fall of the Cherry King. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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