From a safe, Ellsberg had lifted the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of how successive presidents lied to the public to cover up the failings of the Vietnam War. But thats not an issue I deal with., I dont even know what it was, to be honest with you.. His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. He started cleaning pizza parlors and drugstores. Vidovich shrugged it off, saying the flaw amounted to putting the descriptions on the wrong pages and quickly appealed. The FDA sent a warning letter, and Wonderful pledged to study the chlorine levels in the bathing tanks. These are trees and vines raised in nurseries and put into the ground at a cost of $10,000 an acre to satisfy the worlds growing appetite for nuts and fruits. He worked as a gardener in Los Angeles and then heard about the almond trees on the other side of the mountain where the living was so much cheaper. Thank you for reading! These are donations from other farmworker families, but theyre not for her and Manuel and the kids. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. I had not seen any. The uncle died at age 22 fighting in Afghanistan. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. They dumped their stolen car into the canals black waters and got away with murder for the next 32 years. For the promotions of the upcoming Keanu Reeves movie the makers are revealing exclusive posters for the feature made by handpicked artists around the world. Each tree produces 38 pounds of nuts. Because it is a community of all Hispanics.. He sat behind a desk without clutter and stood up to shake my hand. When you first meet John Vidovich, everything from his ball cap to his dirty boots tells you hes a farmer. The next day, I drive to a spot a few miles beyond the trailer park where the county road dead-ends in a pomegranate orchard, or what used to be a pomegranate orchard before a Caterpillar came crashing through. When I look around here at what weve built and then look back at my life in New Jersey, I think, How did it happen? For one man and woman to build something like this would be almost impossible today.. She is determined that their lives will play out differently from the lives of their parents, but she means no disrespect by this. She had her own bookabout her genius as a marketergoing. He could collect the rents while he slept. If youre messing with peoples lives and it doesnt work, thats serious. It had to work. Tens of millions of dollars spent on philanthropy in Lost Hills wasnt just good for the people, she discovered. This water basically came from a land owned by someone who's also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. Food and Beverage Manufacturing . Menu. She was the daughter of Jack Harris, a film distributor, who moved the family to Los Angeles when Lynda was 15 to produce movies. She washes two kinds of lettuce and cuts up fresh papaya to mix into a salad. The abundance of that water in good years has created this overreach of agriculture. Olson did not indicate what the response might say. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. I tried not to stare at the gold that was everywhere: heavy-legged gold furniture, paintings in thick gold frames, gold-leaf carpet, and gold-fringed drapes. Executive Team Culture Ratings from Discover Employees TOP 15% Discover's Executive Team scores in the Top 15% of similar sized companies on Comparably See Detailed Executive Team Ratings 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. I now hear whispers of water belonging to farmers two counties away being pumped out of the ground and hijacked in the dead of night to irrigate the nuts of Lost Hills. We tell the children about the fields when they are young so they dont know the fields when they are old, she says. More than a dozen family members have followed Lupe and Manuel to Lost Hills. He was semi-retired living in Clovis when another Kings County farmer, Pat McCarthy not Vidovich called him to do some work for Angiola. By: jdubble07. Ultimately,youre going to dry up that aquifer under the earth, and thats whats happening now. Whichever dish they choose, workers are asked not to take a bite until they have considered Lyndas latest concoction: an ounce of apple cider vinegar cut with ginger, mandarin juice, and turmeric served in small plastic cups like the wine of Mass. Be respectful, truthful, and The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. We saved the best for last, he says. Too many almonds. At one point, he was moving nearly 30,000 acre feet a year, according to Angiolas records. Later, Page would run for and win a seat on the Kern County Water Agency board. So the question before me was how are these guys farming? Im not going to live forever, even with the massive amounts of pomegranate juice Im drinking. He accused Resnick in 2008 of using various shell companies to monopolize control of the Kern Water Bank. Lynda has a son who works as a musician and a son who suffered a birth trauma and lives in a care facility. Lupe and Manuel, like many of the residents, grew up next to each other in a pueblo called San Antonio deep in the state of Guerrero, a mountainous region of dramatic beauty. Whether its the glint of a 15-carat, yellow canary diamond ring, a 25th wedding anniversary gift from Stewart, or one of the pomegranate-colored rubies she says are a girls best friend, its hard to tell from the back row. Resnick wanted no part in my story. But when your neighbor is going to lose his crop, you do what you can to help him., I tell Vidovich this sounds almost charitable. The project would consist of a small reservoir, more like short-term storage cells, along the California Aqueduct just north of Kettleman City where floodwater off the south fork of the Kings River would be captured. Never mind that this is one of the most over-drafted basins in California or that the land is sinking a half-foot a year. Theres Cheat Death for their antioxidant-rich pomegranate juice and Get Crackin for their pistachios and Untouched by Man for their Fiji water. The dam ends up holding and the levees, too. All but a handful come from Mexico. Bruce Springsteen turned it into a song on his Ghost of Tom Joad album. Of course, I know everyone in the world, she told one reporter. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. What? Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. Its his pipe, not mine. LOIS HENRY: Is John Vidovich planning to sell off the valley's lifeblood? Stewart and Lynda created a new brand, the Halo, from the same variety of mandarin. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. In a valley of dead rivers, each one killed on behalf of agriculture, the aqueduct was the one river still alive. A road will pick up and connect me to where the tube is going. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. For now, theyre selling to farmers like Resnick who can pay the price. He became more involved with De Anza, working with his dad, whom he describes as bigger than life.. No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. Boswell pumps reach 2,500 feet into the earth looking for water to grow crops, looking for water to sell. The jolt and shudder would tear out the roots of a lesser species. This is Lynda.. 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. It hardly ceases for the next five months. Because the urban places would pay a hell of a lot of money for it. They do that because they love it., A POM craze followed. 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. Then I get lucky. Even as the supplies of federal and state water have dropped to near zero, agriculture in Kern keeps chugging along, growing more intensive. One of his frat brothers was a wealthy kid whose father ran a janitorial business. I'm not sure that it (location) being one of the busiest places in Kings County is the right place for that. Resides in Beaver, PA. I stand over the pipes and give them a hard slap. But I had some good people helping me.. Vidovich says the animus against him goes back to his 2009 sale of State Water Project (SWP) contract rights tied to land he owned in the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. "At a time of high food prices and record farm income, this bill lacks program reform and fiscal discipline," Bush said in a statement May 21. She divorced her husband in 1968 and began dating Anthony Russo, who worked at the RAND think tank in Santa Monica with military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The great drought is officially over. He purchased his first 640-acre section in the late 1970s and kept adding more sections of almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, and citrus until he stretched the lines of agriculture like no Californian before him. He is also known for his water deals. He started buying consistently in Kern, Kings and Tulare counties throughout the early and mid-2000s and continues to add properties sometimes at a blistering pace. When John Vidovich was appointed as fire marshal in September 2014, he was given the difficult task of cleaning up the city of L.A.'s stubbornly antiquated Fire Prevention Bureau, making it more . When Lynda learned that half the students receiving thousands of dollars in company scholarships were dropping out of school, she wasnt deterred. This is Twisselman. No one is out and about. This is the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a bar. This project may not be fully thought out," said Neves. So beginning in the 1940s, Kern farmers went out and grabbed a share of not one distant river but two: the San Joaquin to the north and the Sacramento to the north of that. Though he also acknowledged that during the drought he sold some to fellow Dudley Ridge landowner Stewart Resnick, who owns the massive Wonderful Company. Before we go much further, you should probably know a little more about Vidovich. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. I know theres a more forceful way to ask the question, but to what end? To provide context for the size of his subsidy, Vidovich estimated that the current California drought, which has led him to irrigate an additional 24,000 acres, will cost his business tens of millions of dollars this year, while the subsidy brought in $1 million. He got into UCLA and joined a Jewish fraternity. She deftly places her body between him and me. 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I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. Arax: They lose their livelihood. My husband would have been shot dead like the others, but he was lucky. "I think what they're doing is, there's a lot of issues with the farm bill, so they're trying to find scapegoats.". High 61F. Each bush is saddled with more than a hundred pomegranates the size of softballs and baseballs. He studied the situation. The scale of productionand the ability to process, market, and sell its own cropsallows Wonderful to be mostly mediocre in the fields and remain highly profitable. Lost Hills sits on an upslope. One year, it delivers 900,000 acre-feet of snowmelt. You may have never heard of John Vidovich, but his impact on the day-to-day life of the average southern San Joaquin Valley farmer is difficult to be understated. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. Theres a mythology out there that Angiola is stealing water, he said. What is the phone number of Vidovich John - De Anza Properties? I cash them the same. To read more copy and paste or select. John Vidovich is a real estate developer who specializes in land use and development deals involving everything from mobile home parks and large apartment complexes to wine vineyards and pistachio farms. He did his internship at Alkaloid - the la. By the time he died an old man on his tractor in the Cupertino Hills, where he had planted grapes again and was making wine, the transformation of his valley by the silicon chip was complete. When a farmers orchards encompass 186 square miles, finding the field man can be a challenge. No. Stewart and Lynda planted 15,000 more acres and bought a juice plant. He saved up a down payment for a raisin ranch west of Fresno, where my father was born in the worst of the Great Depression. The city manager is in the process of coordinating a response, "said Gornick. Theyre all chasing Bobby, whose 325-pound bench press, 335-pound squat, and 455-pound dead lift make him the sole member of the 1,000-Pound Club. I get it. Deadly in the rush of harvest, deadly in the quiet of fog, deadly in the blur of Saturday nights when the fieldwork is done and the beer drinking becomes a second humiliation. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. Lets call it what it is, he says. This is my wife. He doesnt wave me off or give chase. "The plan is to hold a special meeting on Tuesday, then submit," he explained to The Leader via a text. This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. The harvest begins in January with one type of mandarin and ends in December with another type of mandarin and in between spills forth everything in your supermarket produce and dairy aisles except for bananas and mangoes, though the farmers here are working on the tropical, too. The graders, sorters, and beeping forklift drivers head to an immaculate caf, where the Wonderful Saladroasted chicken, mixed greens, cilantro, pistachios, and slices of mandarin in a blue cheese vinaigrettesells for $3. Get an email notification whenever someone contributes to the discussion. We are horrified by the lack of regard for both neighbor and nature, and we hope that the community will accept our deepest and most sincere apologies and find it in their hearts to forgive us. They pledge to donate the 380 acres to charity. The Resnick story certainly deserved a book, but did he really want me to be the one to write it? "A small farmer, if he gets his whole limit, it keeps him in business, whereas for us, it's a very small fraction of our revenue," Vidovich said. The crops we grow can only be grown in a few places in the world. And then they pump more groundwater. It should be right here, but I dont see it. "Ten percent of farmers get 70 percent of the payment," Perez said. In the trailer next door, Lupes cousin Margarita lives with her husband, Selfo, and their three young children. Number two, Angiola is trying to maintain the local aquifer by retiring land to limit pumping. What market share has been lost in Asia and the Middle East, the company is looking to get back in Mexico with its spicy Latin line of nuts. They had survived the drought. Most Los Altos residents don't know it, but one of their neighbors known locally as a developer and political candidate moonlights as a farmer, one currently receiving a dose of notoriety. His company has donated items to Stratford Elementary School and recently helped Kings County Sheriff Dave Robinson create a pheasant-raising and release program for jail inmates to earn credit. Wheres it coming from? Vidovich later made an offer for Page to come work for him as a consultant or, as Page says in his slow drawl, his firemancause I put out fires.. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. The farmers responded that the path of a bee wasnt something they could supervise, and they threatened to sue him back. You and I look at this meal, he says. Its going to be what its going to be. Chance of rain 40%. Angiola was rehabbing old wells, drilling new ones and installed a large pipeline. One day, gunmen mowed down residents with AK-47s and threw grenades at the church filled with parishioners. The land to him isnt real. It takes a lot of work to get ahead. She and Manuel were able to buy their trailer several years ago. No one pushes their product harder. It was this persistence and, above all, good timing that explained his bigness. I follow one of the engines of harvest as it rolls into an orchard like a tank. Be Proactive. He paved over the last orchard in the Santa Clara Valley with some apartments and then went looking for another valley where he might build his own empire. Though the project is billed as flood control, the agreement also allows Vidovich to move groundwater. Movies. All the new water pours into the delta, and what doesnt go out to sea fills up the aqueduct again. Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. It was the same distance that allows them to control more land and water130 billion gallons a yearthan any other man and woman in California and still believe it isnt enough. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. The river is nothing if not fickle. Now shes getting lots of credit.. Tonight, feeling no pain, hell sit in one of the strip clubs in Bakersfield and maybe buy himself a fancy lap dance.. No journalist had written a word about his rise as an agricultural giant, how he had turned public water into private water by grabbing control of Californias largest water bank, a project jump-started with $74 million in taxpayer money. Conceived by Lynda, it cost one fortune to build and a second fortune to light up. Marketplace is a division of MPR's 501 (c)(3). Each tree produces 22 pounds of nuts. This is a company that runs its resources to the max, he tells me. This is the closest to hills it comes. Somehow, it made its way to Lynda. 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. Its the summer of 2016, eight weeks before the big pick, and Im zigzagging across the almonds and pistachios, square mile after square mile of immaculate orchards lined with micro-irrigation systems and heavy with nuts. My health, knock on wood, is good. The truck driver hits the wide open of Highway 33 and traces the serpentine of the aqueduct. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. Angelica, one of four sisters, runs the restaurant. April 17, 2020. John A Vidovich, age 60, Moneta, VA Background Check Locations: Long Beach CA Possible Relatives: Crystal Nicole Purdue, Erin Eileen Vidovich Show More John L Vidovich, age 65 View Full Report Address:***** Lisbon Rd, Beaver, PA. We hope you enjoy Finding Lost Hills., The 11-minute film opens with a shot of swirling dust. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. Vidovich, in 2009, according to media reports, sold the rights to 14,000-acre-feet of state water from a Kings County water district to southern California for $73 million. As for making a major water grab in the Central Valley, Page said Vidovich has nothing on the Wonderful or JG Boswell companies, both of which have far larger land holdings than Vidovich. Longtime Los Altos resident Stephen John Vidovich, founder of De Anza Properties of Sunnyvale, died of an apparent heart attack June 19 as he was driving a tractor on his property in the Cupertino hills, said his son John Vidovich. 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. He needs nearly 1,000 acre-feet a day for 165 daysthe length of nut-growing seasonto hang a good crop across his acres in western Kern. Notifications from this discussion will be disabled. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. You know so I could say, Well, I didnt pass because I was so busy with this project.. Sandridge Partners received most of its subsidy for upland cotton production but also received payments for growing six other commodities. When nature bites down hard, and the government flow gets reduced to a trickle, growers in Kern turn on their pumps and reach deeper into the earth. His father met his mother, the cantors daughter, and they married. Page met Vidovich in 2005 when Page was farming 400 acres out near Wasco. I did sell water out of Kings County to an urban user and people didnt like it, Vidovich said. The feedback were hearing is No. In fact, some of the workers think that we havent gone far enough., The workers arent around for a quick survey. "I have sent my opinion to three county supervisors and our city manager. Look it, Im from Beverly Hills. If those seem like minute details for the head of a major development company to trouble with, hes even more hands-on with Sandridge Partners LP, the family business he formed for farming acquisitions. He wanted to stay in the customer service business and heard from his doctor that Teleflora, the giant flower-delivery company, could be bought for a buyers price. John Vidovich just wants to farm, he says. Thats all fine and good, Resnick replied, but what about the $1 million-plus hed spent on lawyers fees? Or he can devise a scheme to steal water from a neighbor up the road. The food is more. Its loaded, Bernard says. They issued a commemorative medal of Tiger Woods winning the 1997 Masters that offended the golfer. He ran, unsuccessfully for city council in his hometown of Los Altos Hills in 2006. I was prepared to knock on the door, but a housekeeper, flanked by two blow-dried dogs, greeted me on the front steps and led me inside. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. He was tough on the outside. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. Second, Im a farmer, Vidovich says. One of the neighbors watched in disgust as the bulldozers tore into the hillside. She wanted to tell the story of the pomegranate, he told me with a touch of sarcasm. His operation is extensive and very smart.. When you first meet John Vidovich, everything from his ball cap to his dirty boots tells you, Positive Cases Among Kern Residents: 310,095, Recovered and Presumed Recovered Residents: 305,002, Percentage of all cases that are unvaccinated:71, Percentage of all hospitalizations that are unvaccinated:83.13, Source: Kern County Public Health Services Department. I pity the outsider trying to make sense of it. Ninety-nine is the deadliest highway in America. We're not trying to stop enterprise, okay," he added, suggesting that Lemoore's citizens, over the years, have invested heavily in Lemoore and might have problems with a feedlot and slaughterhouse within shouting distance of the city's population. This isnt any road. Here, a crew has dug a culvert beneath the road and hiked the pipeline under the asphalt that divides one field from another. His father grew grapes, cherries, and apricots in the Santa Clara Valley back when Stanford University still had a reason to be known as The Farm. They were married only a short time when Manuel decided to cross the border almost 20 years ago. Because Lupe had no papers, she followed the coyote for many more miles until they reached a steep pass. If she has her way, they will go to college, too. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. The Iranians dont irrigate their trees. Along a fan of the Kings River, a raisin farmer in Selma shows me his well thats coughing up sand. Its known as a census-designated place, which is another way of saying that Kern County has every reason to neglect it. It will be interesting to see what the regulatory boards say. Water is what led me to Stewart Resnick in the winter of 2003. He had no papers, like so many others, just an image of what this side of the border looked like. Died on 26 Oct 2005. On a fog-drip night in January 1972, two men walked into my fathers empty bar with gloves on and shot him to death. Rain for Rent, the pipes say. His ego had gotten the best of him, he conceded. He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. The image of water moves on and on through miles of western Kern. He makes $10.75 an hour. On Oscar night, she handed out free samples to the stars at the Vanity Fair party. "Would I build there if I had the money? In his best Borscht Belt nasal, he takes a jab. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. He used to work for the Resnicks before Stewart put him in charge of the district. When your current subscription expires later this year, you will be able to renew at losaltosonline.com/users/admin/service/purchase. But not even the two projects working in perfect tandem can defy drought. Groundwater and floodwater are two very different things. He was dressed in the latest slim-fit style. The deed had been done in a series of hidden meetings in Monterey. Research is showing that grapeseed oil is healthier than corn oil and canola oil and may be better for you than olive oil, he tells me. Hes fishing right now. His second son is a psychiatrist. On one side of the road and the other, for miles in both directions, the dirt belongs to Wonderful. Like the wheat barons of the 1870s who lived on San Franciscos Nob Hill, Resnick isnt of this place. Sandridge Partners received federal farm subsidies totaling approximately $1.06 million last year, the largest of any agribusiness in the nation, landing it a headline role in this year's debate. The biggest farmer of them all is tearing out 10,000 acres because he doesnt have enough water to cover the nuts to harvest. At age 81, he's gotten so big, he doesn't know how big. I saw horrible things, Margarita says. Bernard, hard to believe, is driving straight toward the aqueduct. From now on, theyll grow on land that offers a double protection against drought.