I imagine that some of the wine is insured. That means that the insurance companies may have to pay out, but they will also go after the owners, and alongside the deep pockets of some of the owners, there will be some serious civil consequences to add to the criminal ones.
You know I go back more or less to the beginning of the business, being their 85th storage customer (way before working there off and on over the years). The real problem was the owner Dan Barteluce’s ego. He and his (childhood?) friend Don Kurt started the business. With Chris Cree MW as their “wine guy” / sweat equity partner. Didn’t take long for Chris to get the boot. A few years later Dan pushed out Don. Somehow along the line he plucked his daughter out of fashion school to run the businesses. The entire Barteluce family had no experience in the wine industry nor really retailing (Dan is a high end architect). The place ran great because there were many hardworking and trustworthy people there. Ralf Kuettel, Eric White, Cynthia Sexton, Maria-Teresa Appendino, Heather Willens, Mark Vergili, Tom Trembley, Tom Lester, and many more my 58 year old brain can’t remember.
During my last couple of years at CWS 2007-2008 things downstairs were fine. Ask customers who were there for their candid feedback. But upstairs things were getting shady. Amelia had started dating Michael who lived in Chicago I believe. Absent a lot. Don’t want to be sued for libel. But certain retail staff were curious to amble about downstairs. Eventually I painted a thick red line on the floor. No retail staff past that without being accompanied by storage staff. (Maybe Bob remembers that, he probably overlapped with the Toms.) At some point I had a blowout “disagreement” with Dan. He said are you telling me it’s your way or the highway? I said, no Dan, of course not. Two months later I moved to Charlotte, NC to get away.
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Yes, I distinctly do remember that red line on the floor (and yes, I did work with the two Toms; I remember you stopping by to visit us a few times while I was there). When I started, it was explained to me that nobody from the outside was allowed past the red line without a storage employee escorting them at all times. During my time as a Wine Storage employee, I knew that there were customers whose accounts were past due for whatever reason. And if, after some months, they took no steps to rectify things, the Storage Manager (the aforementioned Tom Trembley, Tyler Raynolds or Tom Lester) would close their account and, as far as I am aware, impound their wines. I myself never took part in any of this process, so I don’t know what happened from that point. But I was not aware of any theft of wines by the Wine Vault staff. So it’s a little surprising to me to hear that this may have been going on during my tenure. If it was, I can tell you that none of my Storage co-workers was involved in it or even knew anything about it.
I have no problem believing that it was going on during the time after I had left, since pretty much all of the original staff with whom I had worked were gone by the first part of 2018, with the exception of two individuals. After Michael fired a half-dozen employees on the last day of February 2017 (Our “Black Tuesday”), he had the back office upstairs in the Wine Vault take over billing the Storage customers (Storage had been doing its own billing prior to that), so the lines between the two parts of the total Chelsea Wine Vault/Storage operation got a bit blurry from that point on.
For my part, I never had a problem with Dan Barteleuce, and neither did any of my co-workers in Storage. It’s interesting to hear the early history of the place. But again, the whole thing ran like a well-oiled machine, and we all largely got along great and everyone I worked with made it a great place to work, until Michael came in and, together with Amelia, bought out Dan and took over completely.
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