Pubdate: Fri, 27 Feb 2015
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The New York Times Company
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Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Vivian Yee

SECRET LIFE AND BUSINESS SURFACE, ALONG WITH MANY QUESTIONS

Arthur Mondella's alternate life was buried behind a roll-down gate, 
behind a fleet of fancy cars, behind a pair of closet doors, behind a 
set of button-controlled steel shelves, behind a fake wall and down a 
ladder in a hole in a bare concrete floor.

Here, in a weathered basement below the Red Hook, Brooklyn, 
maraschino cherry factory he had inherited from his father and his 
grandfather, he nurtured a marijuana farm that could hold as many as 
1,200 plants at a time. Here, below the office where he served as 
chief of Dell's Maraschino Cherries Company, he kept a small, dusty 
library and a corkboard pinned with notes. Most of the books dealt 
with plant propagation methods. One did not: the "World Encyclopedia 
of Organized Crime."

Much about the hidden operations of Mr. Mondella, 57, who shot and 
killed himself on Tuesday as investigators found his marijuana 
plants, remains frustratingly out of reach for his family and 
friends. Investigators do not know how he distributed the marijuana, 
how long he had grown it or who helped him. Most baffling of all are 
Mr. Mondella's reasons for hiding his operation under a business that 
was, by all accounts, healthy and growing - and for taking his life 
so suddenly when he was caught.

On Thursday, the day of Mr. Mondella's private wake, the company said 
the cherry business would go on. Major restaurant chains that bought 
Dell's cherries, including Red Lobster and T.G.I. Friday's, said 
their menus would be unaffected. But at the offices of the Brooklyn 
district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, the focus was on untangling 
what part of the business was cherries, and what part was marijuana, 
at the red-brick factory on Dikeman Street.

"We're looking at the actual connections between marijuana and the 
factory and whether or not some portion of the cherry business there 
really was an effort to mask the marijuana operation," said a law 
enforcement official close to the investigation, who asked not to be 
identified because the inquiry is continuing.

Given the thick scent of cherry processing and the large amount of 
electricity the factory would naturally consume, the official said, 
"it's a very convenient place to be" to mask both the odor and the 
power needed to cultivate the marijuana plants.

Yet because the basement labyrinth was so well concealed, it seemed 
plausible that the cherry factory's regular employees were unaware of 
their boss's secret. Mr. Mondella may have been the only person with 
access to the garage where he kept several luxury vehicles and the 
entrance to the basement, the official said.

Still, the scope of the operation made it unlikely that Mr. Mondella 
was the only person involved. Spanning about 2,500 square feet, the 
underground complex included an office, a large grow room, a storage 
area, a freezer for the harvested plants and an elevator. A network 
of 120 high-end growing lamps shined on the plants with intensities 
that varied depending on each plant's size; an irrigation system 
watered them. Investigators recovered about 60 types of marijuana seeds.

The investigators had never seen a larger operation in New York City, 
the official said.

"The way you have to set that up, there's got to be plumbers and 
electricians working off the books who are very sophisticated," he 
said, "and it wasn't Arthur Mondella, as far as we know, that had 
that kind of skills."

Investigators first received a tip about Mr. Mondella and illegal 
drugs about five years ago, he said, but nothing came of it then.

As part of a separate investigation into allegations that Dell's was 
polluting Red Hook's water supply, the district attorney and the 
city's Department of Environmental Protection decided to search the 
factory for files on environmental infractions. It was during that 
search on Tuesday that they stumbled on the marijuana operation. (The 
pollution investigation is still active.)

The drug inquiry is still in its early stages. But the official said 
investigators were looking closely at whether the operation had ties 
to organized crime. Mr. Mondella would have required help to maintain 
the farm and distribute his product, the thinking goes, and an 
organized crime syndicate could have provided it.

To Mr. Mondella's family and friends, the revelations about his 
hidden operations have been "aberrant and shocking," Michael Farkas, 
the lawyer representing the Mondella family and the management of 
Dell's, said in an interview.

The company was considered among the largest producers of the 
cherries in the country. Although many cherry suppliers were 
disappearing around the time that Mr. Mondella took over the business 
in 1983, the market appears stable now, thanks in part to maraschino 
cherries' popularity abroad, said Robert McGorrin, the chairman of 
the food science department at Oregon State University, where the 
current method of processing the cherries in brine, rather than 
alcohol, was developed in the 1920s.

Law enforcement officials are just as perplexed about Mr. Mondella's 
motives. Though investigators are sorting through a substantial 
bounty of evidence, they have no hope of gaining access to the data 
on Mr. Mondella's iPhone 6, which, like other new-model iPhones, is 
encrypted with a user-created code that even Apple says it cannot unlock.

"No one seems to have had any clue that this was going on, and there 
certainly didn't seem to be any strange or traumatic circumstances 
that would've explained this," Mr. Farkas said. "The business was not 
doing poorly; the business was doing very well. We were unaware of 
any major problems in Arthur's life. Somebody knows - but we're all 
waiting for answers here."

Correction: February 26, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the size of the 
underground complex where marijuana was grown. It was 2,500 square 
feet, not 250.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom