john vidovich billionaire

That company led to another company, and he soon owned half the commercial alarm accounts in Los Angeles. Turn onto Twisselman Road off I-5 and continue west until it intersects with the California Aqueduct. Stewart and Lynda created a new brand, the Halo, from the same variety of mandarin. By then, Wonderful, if it still exists, will be a portfolio run by men even farther away than Beverly Hills. The drought is driving prices and shifting business practices. I had finished the last chapter of The King of California, a book I wrote with a good friend about J.G. Due to the drought, this water would be impossible to replace, it said. At age 81, hes gotten so big, he doesnt know how big. Scott: So we should talk about the labor that makes this all possible. General Partner. Then he motions to Lynda, whos standing off to the side of the light-dimmed stage. It looks like no other campus in the valley: a modern, minimalist two-story design that uses paneled wood and fabricated metal, wild colors, and terraced landscaping to create the feel of a high-tech mountain retreat. There was a majordomo of the house, a butler, a chef, a sous-chef, three housekeepers, a limo driver, and a trio of assistants who worked in the basement, juggling Lyndas calendar and the buying, wrapping, and shipping of gifts she handed out to her Rolodex of highfalutin people. Stewart had made it clear that Lynda would not be joining us. EMEA +44 20 7330 7500. But she doesnt dictate this or that. Angelica would prefer not to get into the details of their financial arrangement. Now its the Bobcats turn. No water in the ground to make up for the missing government supply. Lessons? he says, sounding perplexed. No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. He lingers in the crowd long enough to shake hands with a friend from Bel-Air whos planting thousands of acres of pistachios in the worst ground of Tulare Lake. Arax: That is the question that you know Im dealing with in this magazine piece. Uneasy about a slowly-marching plan to siphon Valley water for Southern California, farmers and some water managers are worrying about the growing shadow of one of the regions largest land owners. The way the Bobcat goes full steam, it takes but a few seconds of splendid violence to uproot a tree. Because its so much fun to say that Lost Hills has been found., The room full of growers applauds. I didnt grow up here, but if it wasnt for California, its openness and opportunities, I wouldnt be sitting where Im sitting., No other farmer, not even Gallo, had cornered a market the way Resnick had cornered the growing, buying, processing, and selling of pistachios. More than one ballad was about the valley, so he came to Fresno. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. He replenished it by shipping water from his property in Tulare County, 25 miles away, infuriating locals there. She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. By the time he drove back, he was a citrus grower. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. On a Facebook page with postings in Spanish, they offer a glimpse of life inside pistachio world. They give thanks for a job that provides decent wages and access to a free wellness center next door staffed by a full-time doctor, physicians assistant, registered dietitian, and marriage and family therapist. The grass is a color green on the verge of blue, and the cutouts for trees are razor etched. Were building infrastructure, and they dont like it.. The wide-open middle of California did its lullaby on me again. He tells me to meet him in Lost Hills. Round 1, No. Bernard, whats happened? For college, he picked California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo over the hill and majored in agriculture business. The family takes showers in it, and she washes their laundry in it, and if she runs the water long enough, she will use it to wash her vegetables and cook her rice and potatoes. He doesnt feign surprise when I tell him about the pipeline, but he dismisses it as a private matter between private parties. I park the car and walk across the barren rows. Its his pipe, not mine. A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. I study the terrain. The fight between the Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by the J.G. "Stakes are higher than ever," Myers told CNBC. A giant pistachio nut flashes on the big screen. In blue jeans and running shoes, he cuts a slim figure, with closely cropped gray hair and steely blue eyes. I try again to pin him down, but hes a man who likes to think of himself as wily. He was a big drinker, a big liver who loved the fast life. A bunch of trees are going dry, he says. What if the endless days without rain become endless years? It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. She tells me her not-so-silent partner is Lady Lynda, who was so bothered that Lost Hills didnt have a sit-down restaurant of its own that she sought out Angelica. You dont lose one drop at all.. How come?, We dont need it anymore, he whispers., Back at the plant, Lynda is meeting with Wonderful doctors, nurses, and farmworkers. Angiola has become a critical element of Vidovichs water moves, transferring water across the Valley for additional sales, so much so that it put him and the district in hot water. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. Hes farming water. Big fish eat the small fish here. Central Californias family raisin farms are drying up, Commercial bees, the unsung heroes of the nut business, From California to the Midwest, examining the perils of industrial farming and the risk to food, Drought has California farms destroying crops, rather than pay for water, Californias drought is all but over, but some wells are still dry, The color of the year has a political past, A California farm battles drought: Were out here trying to survive, Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on, Seasonal foreign workers fill critical landscaping jobs, enabled by easier access to visas. No longer does it have to be a career that brings Mexicans to their hands and knees. The farmer moved the rain. Water is what led me to Stewart Resnick in the winter of 2003. He and Lynda decided in 1984 to buy the Franklin Mint, the maker of commemorative coins and other kitsch, for $167.5 million. A tree crop, with the investment of years and irrigation equipment, can be worth $40,000 to $50,000 an acre; in contrast, row crops are about $10,000 an acre. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here, he says. Im 80 years old. He has painted the interior and put down two new patterns of linoleum, one to mark the living room and the other to mark the kitchen. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain who donated to Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, says that Florida Gov. Then he turned and faced me. The new plant, the size of seven super Walmarts and built at a cost of $300 million, rises out of a clearing like an apparition. They rely only on rain, which concentrates the flavorful oils. Boswell Company for 26 years and now advises the regions growers on water and land management issues. He had left for the cornfields a few minutes before the killings.. Brad Steinwede. That still leaves the majority of the workforce beyond his cajole. I stand over the pipes and give them a hard slap. Many are here without documents, after all. But you take some risks in business. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. I kept my notes and tapes and waited for another day. This is a park for the people, to give them a break from their hard lives. Theyre our future, she says. It becomes scorn because they cant allow it to become pity or self-hatred. I retrace the road I came in on and cross old Tulare Lake, which rose by flood and sank by drought. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. But this wasnt the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. As we hop down from the van to inspect the pomegranates on the eve of harvest, Resnick motions to Bernards belly. Im here to show the farmer that ags footprint needs to get smaller.. Their tongues loll to their knees. I grew up in the suburbs where our playgrounds were named after the pioneers of fruit and canals of irrigation shot through our neighborhoods to the farms we did not know. The region plays an important role in California agriculture but its also ground zero for many of the states most difficult water management problems. Cotton still grows on the lake bottom, but less and less each year. Look, I delegate a lot of things, obviously. I sort of remember growing up on a farm, he said. That was eight or nine years ago. Photo courtesy of Trent Davis Bailey/The California Sunday Magazine. Stewart refers to the occasional trek between Lost Hills and Beverly Hillsroughly 140 milesas a carpetbaggers distance. It seems even longer, he says, if you add in the psychological distance of being an East Coast Jew in a California farm belt where Jews are few and far between. Mattress maker Tempur Sealy International (TPX) is also in the mix with a P/E ratio of 14.1 relative to five years of annualized 29% earnings growth. The gas to and from the orchards costs him $80 a week. Sure enough, cozied up next to the bank of the aqueduct, I see a glint. If he were on the scene today, hed have to add sashed Queens to the list. I walk into the supermarket El Toro Loco, and the clerk directs me to the back office, where a tobacco-chewing Yemeni named Anthony Hussein is sitting beneath a photograph of an uncle in his U.S. Army uniform. His partner in the mandarins once told me that when Stewart is done with you, hes done with you. This is how the land of Wonderful is keeping alive its trees. On vacation in the south of France, he heard about a farming company called Paramount that needed a buyer for some of its orchards in Kern County. The 789 acre project . What started as a dispute about a tube of plastic under a muddy ditch is escalating into a bitterlegal fight between the two multimillion-dollar businesses, pitting old power against new money and ambition. Even if it leaked, it would simply add water to the canal, Vidovich insists. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. This is the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Who is going to use it? said attorney Herr, according to SJV Waters Henry. But Paramount isnt Paramount anymore. How will courts rebuke of Berkeleys natural-gas ban affect the national movement it began? Because the road ends here, there is no physical way to follow the canals flow. It was linear, logical, fluid, and quite nearly destined. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. He doesnt wave me off or give chase. Whos it going to? The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground. They had survived the drought. So how do we do even better next year?. He makes $10.75 an hour. Two men sit inside separate cabins of a small tractor with pincers on one side and a catcher on the other. And you know why? More than half our employees are obese or near obese, Anzaldo tells me. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. It will carry his private water on his private land, never leaving the regions geological basin. And then they pump more groundwater. The aqueduct was built with tax money, yes? If you study his moves, you can see a method to the acres he is accumulating. She is here and there, but I have never seen her up close. This is the first installment of a new SUNLIGHT Series: Kings of the River, a review of the machinations and battles on the oft-overlooked Kings River. Lois Henry is the CEO and editor of SJV Water, a nonprofit, independent online news publication dedicated to covering water issues in the San Joaquin Valley. Nearly a third of the harvestthe nuts grown by Wonderful, the nuts grown by hundreds of farmers who belong to the Wonderful brandwill come through these gates. Hilly, wooded and overlooking the bay just south of San Francisco . Up and down the Central Coast, restaurants are boycotting their wines. Stewart was the second of their four children, the only boy. They both knew what they wanted. It isnt going down because he wont let it go down. A minute later, I reconnect with the pipeline and pursue its length for a football field. The Federal Trade Commission found Wonderful guilty of false advertising and ordered the Resnicks to stop claiming that POM cured heart disease and erectile dysfunction. He works year-round for Wonderful. She had her own bookabout her genius as a marketergoing. We hope you enjoy Finding Lost Hills., The 11-minute film opens with a shot of swirling dust. While some counties and water boards prohibit water exports, others dont. In the summer of 2010, hed spent several days documenting the deplorable conditions of the modern company town. None of this is my idea. The fog is our history. While Vidovich owns less acreage than Boswell, more of it is devoted to high-value orchards. I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. They were actually harvesting record crops. I pity the outsider trying to make sense of it. Here and there a mulberry tree, its canopy pruned back, breaks up the red-smeared sky.. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees. Today, at 81, his money is all but gone, and South African conservationist John Hume is throwing in the towel . Unlike many other billionaires, they could poke fun at themselves. John Vidovich lives in Los Altos, CA; previous city include San Jose CA. And that scares the hell out of everybody who lives here.. And Vidovich has said if he . Lupe and I walk to the far side of the trailer park to find Gustavo. The brick-hard ground cant be bought. He and Lynda wanted to run their own ads for their own brand. The FDA sent a warning letter, and Wonderful pledged to study the chlorine levels in the bathing tanks. Thats a billion-dollar crop. Thats all fine and good, Resnick replied, but what about the $1 million-plus hed spent on lawyers fees? Developer, farmer and water trader John Vidovich plans to build a beef feedlot and processing plant near Lemoore according to a preliminary application filed with the county. Eat a corn tortilla instead, she urges. Everything but the turkey had come from his orchards. He had no papers, like so many others, just an image of what this side of the border looked like. So everybody should have it, right? Since then, his Sandridge Partners has accumulated ownership or control of thousands of acres of farmland across the Central Valley 123,424 in Kings County alone, per ParcelQuest, focusing on land with secure surface water rights or where groundwater is abundant. It was the early spring of 2008, and this time his secretary didnt hang up on me. . From Dudley Ridge, pipelines belonging to the farming empire of The Wonderful Company (owned by Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick) the move the once-Angiola water via pipeline to Kern County to irrigate the companys fields of pistachios, pomegranates, and citrus. Each time I called, his secretary hung up the phone. Antioxidants that delivered 32 grams of sugar in each serving didnt come cheap: $11 a bottle. But that still doesnt mean that most people in town can afford to eat here. This sale made headlines because it was engineered by one farmeran outsider from the cityfor his benefit only. It also means giving back.. This is an offering of cake handed down from king and queen to serfs. We were asleep at the wheel. How much was plunder? Boswell told me what a fool he and his forebears had been for wasting water, sun, and soil in California to raise fiber, of all things. Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. On Thursday, the newly formed committee was suddenly flush with cash: Two businesses, VG Investments and VO Limited Partners, poured a combined $94,400 into the campaign. The nut must be hurried from bin to truck to processing plant to keep it from discoloring. This was the same distancegeographic, psychicthat allowed him and Lynda to clear-cut the oaks and to kill the independent pistachio commission, to grab a water bank that belonged to the state and to pretend for 30 years that Lost Hills wasnt a place of dire need. I enter an equipment yard where a Wonderful farmhand is standing next to a tractor. The Newsom Water Resilience Portfolio has seven investment principles, none of which includes the actions of water entrepreneurs, such as farmer John Vidovich who has been trying to put together a voluntary speculative groundwater market in Kern County for dry years. When they get on their high horse, you dont want to argue with them.. You have no idea the people on my VIP list who drink it. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. Ultimately, it drives a lucrative if sad mission, as uttered by the looming giant himself. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. The checks the workers bring in here from Mr. Resnick are the same checks they bring in for years. Either way is a trespass. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. Arax: So because there is no groundwater out in Lost Hills, they came up with this idea of pumping groundwater from 40, 50 miles away. The stacks of bottles gave him no answer. My life is about California. The company has built lucrative apartment, condominium, mobile home, hotel and office projects all over the South Bay and Peninsula, from Redwood Citys Trailer Villa RV Park to Los Altos Gardens condominiums, with imported European appliances and hand-cut marble. This is a lot of gestures to unpack, and as I exit the grounds, I keep turning around to get one last look thats true. Like J.W. This is one of the ways the Nut King and the Pomegranate Queen are defying the California drought. At the plant, we built our gyms, and we have stretching and walking activities. You and I look at this meal, he says. One way or the other, we got rid of our last farm a few years before I was born and moved to the Fresno suburbs. Of all the wonders of Wonderful, this is the one I find most mystifying. Vidovich wrote out a check for the full amount, then went looking for the water to prop up Resnicks monopoly. I walk up and reintroduce myself. His frat brother got bored, as rich boys do, and Resnick bought out his half interest for $300. Because a human picker is not needed in the almond and pistachio groves, the nut harvest doesnt spread around money the way it spreads around dust.
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