john vidovich documentary

Hes a 61-year-old developer who grew up on a farm in Sunnyvale in the heart of what would become the Silicon Valley. The plastic unfurls across the grove like a giant roll of Saran Wrap. I dont know. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. Vidovich and a co-defendant were found guilty in 2014 of conspiracy to breach a land sale contract and ordered to pay nearly $130 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The space for a familys secrets is only a few feet. Not the people. You cant reverse diabetes, but you can control it with a blood sugar level between 6.5 and 8. I enter an equipment yard where a Wonderful farmhand is standing next to a tractor. As he walks away, I notice his $400 sneakers. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. Scott: How sustainable is this operation given that California only recently came out of a long drought and may actually be headed there again soon? Each face wears its own weary. Yes, the pipeline belongs to Resnick. Read our full comments policy: losaltosonline.com/comments, $5.00 Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts. Inside, a trainer watches over a line of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. 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. His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. Im actually not supposed to talk about it.. At the buildings he was cleaning, he noticed that no one was watching the front and back doors. Theyll take home $11 an hour for their labors. His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. His father bought a neighborhood bar and ran it with the same iron fist with which he ran the house. It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. What kind of place is this? He sold rights to more than 14,000 acre feet a year to the Mojave Water Agency in San Bernardino County for a headline-grabbing $73 million. He was 13 and standing inside the Rutgers Pharmacy on the first day of his first job. Every time I see it, Im inspired and proud of what weve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. When the Depression struck, his parents migrated to Middlebush, New Jersey, where they bought a few trucks and peddled coffee and pots and pans. I cut across Twisselman Road to the pipeline gliding along the aqueduct like a silver snake. You Have Found Lost Hills! 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. The Lemoore City Council Tuesday night (Jan. 18) will discuss a proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse proposed for the southwest corner of Highway 198 and Highway 41. This isnt any road. Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $4.25. Digging in was its own wisdom, he discovered. He paid em three times what anyone else wouldve for their land and now theyre all gettin water because of his policies, Page said. He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields. They may have been associated with this organization before or after these years as well. In the late 1970s, he went looking for a hedge against inflation. Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. Because when we dont manage it, they end up with severe chronic health issues and amputated limbs., Anzaldo is a man wired for solemn, but he does manage to smile once during lunch, when talking about the 1,150 workers whove earned bonuses of up to $500 for losing a collective 14,000 pounds in two years. It was good for the bottom line. That company led to another company, and he soon owned half the commercial alarm accounts in Los Angeles. But thats the way it is. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. Highway 46 shoots past Resnick almonds and takes you straight into town, population 1,938. The water is being taken from unsuspecting farmers in an irrigation district in Tulare County more than 40 miles away. Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. "What I was most alarmed about was how I, and most people in the area, knew nothing of this proposal," he told The Leader. All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. All but a handful come from Mexico. Theres Cheat Death for their antioxidant-rich pomegranate juice and Get Crackin for their pistachios and Untouched by Man for their Fiji water. The sellers include farmers in the Tulare Lake basin who are pumping so much water out of the ground that the levees protecting the town of Corcoran are sinking, not by inches but by feet. It goes to doctors and nurses, trainers and dietitians, who track the weight of workers, prod them to exercise, and wean them off soda and tortillas. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. Tell me, he asked, though it wasnt entirely a question. Please log in, or sign up for a new account to continue reading. This is one of the ways the Nut King and the Pomegranate Queen are defying the California drought. The farmer moved the rain. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. They dumped their stolen car into the canals black waters and got away with murder for the next 32 years. But when the Kings does flood, as its doing now, millions of acre feet rush north to join up with the San Joaquin River and empty into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Well, maybe just a little guilt, but thats Jewish. He said the prod for all their giving in Lost Hills happened in Aspen, of all places. It is the ditch up the road, the one that carries no water, that is filled with old mattresses and spent appliances. Its been more than a year since he gave me the cold shoulder at the pistachio conference. The deed had been done in a series of hidden meetings in Monterey. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. When Resnick plants, he plants his trees wall to wall. Fallowing the farm until the footprint gets smaller and smaller. Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. Arax: They lose their livelihood. Example: 138 Main St. Because he hadnt done it with Daddys money or what he considered a superior brain, he attributed his wealth to luck and to a simple lesson he had learned early in life. The highway runs two lanes here, three lanes there, through miles of agriculture broken every 20 minutes by fast food, gas station, and cheap motel. We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content. How come?, We dont need it anymore, he whispers., Back at the plant, Lynda is meeting with Wonderful doctors, nurses, and farmworkers. The son, 5 foot 6 and thin, with closely cropped blond hair and blue eyes that fix on you, isnt concerned about ingratiating himself. "There are a lot of good places for it (feedlot). It comes out like pee, says her 11-year-old daughter. On the way out, the voice in their head, Lyndas voice, goads them to give one more hour to the Wonderful Fitness Center. He needs every drop he can get., Dont you know? But most of this water has been spent by the Resnicks and other account holders in years two, three, and four of the drought. Resnicks billions rely on his ability to master water, sun, soil, and even bees. The aqueduct brings the water, yes? Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. Stephen Vidovich died in 2007, at the age of 81, driving a tractor near one of his remaining vineyards. Twenty miles outside Fresno, I cross the Kings, the river that irrigates more farmland than any other river here. "The plan is to hold a special meeting on Tuesday, then submit," he explained to The Leader via a text. 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. Everything but the turkey had come from his orchards. This is an offering of cake handed down from king and queen to serfs. He remade himself into a graduate of the UCLA law school, a cleaner of Los Angeles buildings, a vendor of security alarms, a seller of flowers in a pot, a minter of Elvis plates and Princess Diana dolls, a bottler of Fiji Island water, a farmer of San Joaquin Valley dirt. High 61F. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. But you take some risks in business. My life is about California. For now, theyre selling to farmers like Resnick who can pay the price. The rain of almonds has moved on to the next tree. It took time to gain the respect of the people, and I was afraid. Whether those pipes end on Vidovich lands or Resnicks is hard to know. Satellite images from NASA show the area around the well fields Angiola was pulling from is the epicenter for land subsidence in eastern Tulare County from overpumping. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. Stewart tries to interrupt, but hes not the boss in this room. So in that time, we started cleaning windows, too. They named the business Clean Time Building Maintenance. I thwack both lines. They rely only on rain, which concentrates the flavorful oils. She is determined that their lives will play out differently from the lives of their parents, but she means no disrespect by this. He was a small, trim man, no more than 5 foot 5, in his early 70s with thinning silver hair and brown eyes rimmed in pink. I ask him how the drought has affected Wonderful. He used to work for the Resnicks before Stewart put him in charge of the district. The imported flow arrives by way of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project, the one-of-a-kind hydraulic system built by the feds and state to remedy Gods uneven design of California. John, his oldest son, had served in the military as an intelligence officer and graduated from Santa Clara law school. If their fears come true, the Los Angeles water grab in Owens Valley would pale in comparison. The drought?. I don't think it would ever be very comfortable if you had an embargo and were denied food.". I try again to pin him down, but hes a man who likes to think of himself as wily. His father, Stephen Vidovich, formed De Anza Properties and helped develop the valley. What if he dropped his lawsuit and the two of them worked together to solve their water problems? What happens to Wonderful? It was Lynda who came up with the idea of flowers-in-a-gift. Roses are short-lived, she reasoned, but the teapot or watering can that the flowers arrive in is a keepsake. 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. Hes never put a dusty boot on the neck of a shovel and dug down into the soil. So everybody should have it, right? By the time they returned to Beverly Hills, he had lost interest in a book about his life, at least one that I might write. This is how Resnick became a pistachio, almond, and pomegranate grower. He isnt farming dirt. Thats all fine and good, Resnick replied, but what about the $1 million-plus hed spent on lawyers fees? On a fog-drip night in January 1972, two men walked into my fathers empty bar with gloves on and shot him to death. The wildfires cant be far behind. 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. Giant pincers manned by a single worker grab the tree by the throat and start shaking. Stewart was the second of their four children, the only boy. What can I say? The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. Who would have thought that people would be asking their bartender to fix them a Pomtini? he said. This was the same road that took me to Selma, the raisin capital of the world, to pack peaches and plums for Mel Girazian, my fathers old friend. Notices were sent to the oversight agencies, including the City of Lemoore, Caltrans, and other relevant agencies. Hes not only able to irrigate his nut trees with an imported flow of groundwater40,000 acre-feet in some years. For now, shes playing country western music on the sound system and trying to lure a combination of oil-field workers, supervisors at Wonderful, and travelers driving the last miles of James Dean. The Southwest Kings GSA is chaired by John Vidovich, who runs Sandridge Partners, which owns hundreds of thousands throughout the San Joaquin Valley. So, if i cant make money on that water farming, I will sell it eventually to an urban area and thats a right I have. With water from the delta becoming more unreliable, he said, farmers have to hoard land for the groundwater. She delivers it in classic Lynda style. Instead of trying to sell the fruit as a piece of fruit, they squeezed its seeds into POMWonderful. A fully equipped teaching kitchen will turn the harvest into school lunches. Angiola agreed not to pump more than 36,000 acre feet a year, or more than 130,000 acre feet in any consecutive five-year period. He owns the land next to the aqueduct where the reservoir would be built and is the one who brought the floodwater project idea to Semitropic a few years ago. On the shallow bottom, the women fished mussels and clams with their toes. Because the more you invested in your employees and their communities, the more productive they became. EIN: 41-0953924. Just get started became one of his guiding principles. My grandfather lost the farm to vine hoppers is the story he told. Then hed lose his temper and get the strap out.. PRIVACY POLICY. The citrus is still handpicked but all the nuts are machine picked, and thats idled workers as well. Join us for a free, virtual event for International Women's Day on March 8! Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. When youre making the kind of money were making, whats the upside? That breaks your agreement with those farmers. During paid breaks, they do their 15 minutes of Zumba, take a walk along a designated path, and munch on the free fruits and veggies put out for them. Its artificiality had achieved a permanence; its permanence had created my California. Kings Officials Unhappy About Water Proposal, Local Water Guys Eyeing Kings River Flood Water. I stand over the pipes and give them a hard slap. They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. Its not easy to hear, but Im not going to sugarcoat this, she says. But that money enabled me to go into Angiola (a water district in Tulare County) and have other water sources.. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. Shes designing the curriculum.. Shes designing the school. The baseballs will be crushed into juice. 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. He is also known for his water deals. The biggest misconception about John is that he wants to sell water to LA, he said. Stephen Vidovich retired but kept a watchful eye on the company, getting daily reports and giving advice, John Vidovich told the San Jose Mercury News after his fathers death. TV Shows. I follow one of the engines of harvest as it rolls into an orchard like a tank. It exists as one thing they can almost rationalize out in the fields. When a copy found its way to The New York Times, Lynda was pursued by federal prosecutors until they concluded she was more dilettante than radical. The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in between. Kingdom. Phone Number: (724) 495-**** John T Vidovich, age 84 View Full Report Address:***** Butternut Ridge Rd, Elyria, OH. Chance of rain 100%. But why is insulin so expensive in the first place? Now, Pace said, Vidovich will do the same thing on a larger scale by moving Kings and Tulare groundwater to Kern County. A portion of his wages will be set aside each month to pay down the debt. In contrast, John Vidovich, who helms Sandridge, comes from a Silicon Valley farming-turned-developer family. No longer does it have to be a career that brings Mexicans to their hands and knees. I cross the Tulare County line heading south into Bakersfield, and there in front of me, for no eye to miss, stands the Wonderful Citrus complex with its four-story storage building designed in the shape of an almighty box of Halo mandarins. A balancing of books in an office in the city has decided that this orchard and others around it, covered by too little water, can go. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. Along a fan of the Kings River, a raisin farmer in Selma shows me his well thats coughing up sand. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. Olson did not indicate what the response might say. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. Wheres it coming from? One of the most dramatic alterations of the earths surface in human history took place here. 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. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. In his best Borscht Belt nasal, he takes a jab. The dam ends up holding and the levees, too. John Vidovich and the Discover executive team are rated an A- by 65 employees. The piece, I was told, had left Lynda embarrassed and fuming. Vidovich digs 17 new wells, several to the depth of 1,400 feet, and pumps groundwater into ditches and canals that move the flow across miles of flat lake bed. A large water pipeline being built near Lemoore in Kings County is raising eyebrows as much for its possible uses as for the name associated with its construction John Vidovich. He was tough on the outside. None of the sales taxes go to City Hall because Lost Hills isnt a city. But theres no denying his desperation. I think I paid $9 million. Promotional Rates were found for your code. Who anticipates that you cant fill a water bank for six or seven years?, Come on, I say. The footprint of agriculture has grown a good deal beyond what the water can cover. He is a single man who rents a bedroom from other family members for $150 a month. It must have wounded all the more because she and Stewart thought of themselves as progressive Democrats. Farmers near Pixley already have sued him once for taking too much water out of their ground and moving it. 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. How much was plunder? And he served two terms on the Santa Clara County Planning Commission, appointed once in 1990 and he again in 2010, igniting controversy among activists concerned about sprawl. More than half our employees are obese or near obese, Anzaldo tells me. He was a big drinker, a big liver who loved the fast life. His father met his mother, the cantors daughter, and they married. Fifty-three percent of our employees are obese, and 12 percent of them have diabetes., The growers start to fidget. Its just smart business. The nuts are kept there a few more daysany longer and the ants will attack themto complete their drying. He says his bosses have been instructing him to cut the water each irrigation. Bernards eyes are fixed straight ahead. But I had some good people helping me.. Died on 26 Oct 2005. If youve ever had Wonderful Pistachios, POM Wonderful pomegranate juice or Halo mandarin oranges, youve had produce grown on one of the largest farms in the world. I pull over into the dirt of a pomegranate orchard, the ancient fruit that the Resnicks have turned into POMWonderful, the sweet purple juice inside a swell-upon-swell bottle. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. But inside he had these weaknesses. As in most significant projects, there will be public hearings to review the proposed project's impacts. Yet Vidovich said he is not personally a booster of the farm bill, and that his company might be better off without it. Manhattan was 30 minutes in one direction; the Jersey Shore, 30 minutes in the other. He doesnt know what pipeline means. The juice isnt selling like it used to. It gives me the luxury to keep on working. Between March and May of this year, 25 new sales were recorded in Kern alone, according to ParcelQuest, a web service that tracks real estate deals by county. A dozen or so U.S.-grown crops are traded as commodities on the stock market, and the greatest subsidies go to corn, wheat, cotton, soybean and rice. When asked if he applies the skills he learned in his military intelligence training to his life today, he answers that we all use the things we learn through life. Mr. Vidovich was a descendant of one of the pioneer farm families that settled here from Croatia . Only after the media were alerted did Stewart and Lynda claim to have discovered the clear-cutting. On the day the trees fall quietly upon the orchard floor, no one is here but the Mexican on his tractor. Thirty-five percent of our pre-diabetic population has gone into the healthy range, she tells the team. 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. He got himself into this jam. Five years ago, they decided to get rid of the nacho chips, french fries, and soft drinks. John Vidovich serves as the Vice President, Business Development of Discover. Past Delano and the first vineyards that Cesar Chavez marched against. He makes $10.50 an hour, and the company provides him with a 401(k) plan and medical insurance. Past McFarland and the high school runners who won five state championships in a row in the 1990s. (See sidebar online.). By locking up the land, he said, Vidovich will be able to deny smaller farmers like him and Pace the water they need for their own operations. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. It isnt a lot of water., Im not going to give you the numbers. Number two, Angiola is trying to maintain the local aquifer by retiring land to limit pumping. Antioxidants that delivered 32 grams of sugar in each serving didnt come cheap: $11 a bottle. Theres no waiting around. When I started to realize the socioeconomic issues of the Central Valley, I decided to stop writing checks to other charities and bring my business acumen into the project. It is one more way to extend the brand. He works year-round for Wonderful. To grow, Big Ag needed a bigger and more dependable supply. But I couldnt have picked a more cinematic name than Lost Hills. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. No stranger enters this zone unless its to get rid of a body or dump waste from cooking meth or drown a hot car. 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. He doesnt wave me off or give chase. I dont believe we should be sending water to LA, he said. I didnt see our creation, much less the figures bent under the canopies of vine that our creation counted on. Buttonwillow, California Search Background Check John Vidovich was associated with Sandridge Partners, L.P. between 2018 and 2021. 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. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. However, first-term councilmember Frank Gornick, West Hills College's longtime chancellor and one of the guiding forces behind the expansion of the college in Lemoore, says he isn't opposed to a feedlot and processing plant. Of all the property available in Kings County, I'm not sure why he chose that property. He was about my size, but he was very tough. Thats 281 square miles. When I got out of law school, I probably had 100 people I was employing.. He points to the young almond trees that envelop his 20 acres like a siege. Or at least this is what I can glean through the car window. When I tell her my name, she whispers into his ear. This was Lost Hills before Lynda got involved. Resnick wanted no part in my story. The concept changed the industry. Observers worry that Vidovich plans to pump Kings and Tulare counties dry, park that water in Kern County and then sell it to the highest bidder in dry years, leaving a once-thriving farm district barren. I park the car and walk in the direction of a scattering of buildings slapped together with stucco and corrugated tin. These trees are pruned by a machine that hedges one side and then the other, he says. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. Now they have to keep that up, right? Yes. "I am a farmer and a big farmer," Vidovich said. His oldest son is retired in Seattle. I ask her if she is concerned about wasting water, given the drought and the distance the water has traveled20 miles from a well in Wascoand that the cost goes up the more they use. It was a permanent water loss for Kings County and put Vidovich under a lingering cloud of suspicion among area farmers and water managers. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. He takes a look at his watch. At this point, he said, he uses about 30 percent of his land for farming and 70 percent for water. Russo and Ellsberg needed a place to photocopy the 7,000 pages, and Lynda volunteered the Xerox machine at her ad agency on Melrose Avenue. Why not California? Do they sense the shaming about to come? Amy Scott: Theres a stunning aerial photo in the magazine that shows these green green trees surrounded basically by dust. So were seeing a shift now and then to have nature imposing its will on the situation. Mark Arax: Yeah. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. Growers a tenth the size of Resnick flee the dust in their Ferraris to their second houses in Carmel. The nets of the Chinese during the Gold Rush caught terrapin that was served as turtle soup in the fanciest restaurants of San Francisco. Hes planting ground that no one has ever planted before. But this wasnt the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It becomes something else as soon as they encounter their workers in another guiseas a fellow shopper at Costco or as the parents of the kid who goes to school with their kid. He was semi-retired living in Clovis when another Kings County farmer, Pat McCarthy not Vidovich called him to do some work for Angiola. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. Where do you begin with a man of great riches if not the distant places you might have in common? Welcome to the club. Menu. Winds WNW at 10 to 20 mph.. Iranian pistachios show up in Tel Aviv as nuts from Turkey. His law license is inactive, according to the California State Bar Association website. Boswell had done for the town of Corcoran. Vidovich says his quote was clipped and sewn back together to make it sound bad. First off, Hurley said, hes not Vidovichs henchman. They both knew what they wanted. "I think what they're doing is, there's a lot of issues with the farm bill, so they're trying to find scapegoats.". I call the manager of the Lost Hills Water District. It will be interesting to see what the regulatory boards say. Drought turning to floodit is the story of California. As you know, our philosophy at Wonderful is doing well by doing good. john vidovich documentary. 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. One year, it delivers 900,000 acre-feet of snowmelt. 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. Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. A few weeks later, I found myself riding up the elevator of a high-rise on the Westside of Los Angeles.

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