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The idea was to enroll at Rutgers and study to become a doctor. This is Twisselman. Former L.A. Fire Marshal John Vidovich has filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging he was "unlawfully and unceremoniously ousted from his job" in August 2016. I park the car and walk in the direction of a scattering of buildings slapped together with stucco and corrugated tin. Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. He was short, bull-like, and didnt take crap from anyone. While water has been moved, bought, sold and traded in California for decades, most deals have typically involved small supplies. Future of state housing is at stake in UC ruling, governor says, Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis, erved as Santa Clara County Planning Commissioner, Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information. Arax: This place called Lost Hills, it is kind of a modern-day company town not unlike Hershey, Pennsylvania. Business got so brisk that he bought two trucks and hired crews. No picking of crop agitates the earth like the picking of almonds and pistachios. Its ridiculous, he said. California growers, in the grip of drought, have produced 900 million pounds of the green nut. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. If this were any other part of Kern, the farmers would be reaching into the earth to make up the difference. Iranian pistachios show up in Tel Aviv as nuts from Turkey. It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. I thank him and hurry down the dirt road through the almonds, eyeing the rearview mirror to see if a Resnick truck is following me. The men and women who planted, irrigated, sprayed, and picked our crops were phantoms. Vidovich did not immediately respond . Whether its Fresno or Kings or Tulare or Kern counties, hes grabbing land where the groundwater is plenty or a river runs through it or the aqueduct spills its north-to-south flow. The three of them spent two weeks of all-nighters making copies. The uncle died at age 22 fighting in Afghanistan. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. A native of Sunnyvale, Vidovich was the son of a Bay Area real estate scion. Stewart and Lynda planted 15,000 more acres and bought a juice plant. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. They resent howhe sold $73 million worth of water rights to Mojave Water Agency in Southern California. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. When Resnick plants, he plants his trees wall to wall. Lynda spent $150,000 at an auction to buy the beaded gown and matching bolero jacket, the Elvis Dress, that Princess Diana had worn on a visit to Hong Kong. This road ends abruptly at the rise of a second fence. Then it hits me. Sandridge Partners plans new beef processing plant | John Lindt Nowhere to turn, I turn back around and roll down my window. Its happening. The bosses wont speak of it, he says. One cousin arrived only last week. Young men and women from Teach for America will do their two-year stints at the complex and live in village housing. The price for pistachios has climbed from $4.50 a pound to an unbelievable $5.25 a pound. More pumping, locals say, worsens the regions destructive land subsidence. Past Bakersfield and the high school football stadium where Frank Gifford and Les Richter, two future NFL Hall of Famers, squared off in the Valley Championship in 1947 in the driving rain. Now its the Bobcats turn. It is one more way to extend the brand. Im down.. I saw horrible things, Margarita says. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. His ego had gotten the best of him, he conceded. Name. Stewart Resnick is the biggest farmer in the United States, a fact he has tried to keep hidden while he has shaped what we eat, transformed Californias landscape, and ruled entire towns. The farmers responded that the path of a bee wasnt something they could supervise, and they threatened to sue him back. All Access Digital offer for just 99 cents! 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. 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. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. Vidovich didnt have to wait long for a buyer to come calling. Its also in the real estate business, developing and marketing master planned communities and business parks. What can I say? The curtains were made of a fabric woven in Venice and substantial enough that they might finish off a person who happened to be looking out the window in the throes of an earthquake. Lost Hills sits on an upslope. John Vidovich. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. Hes oblivious, or so it seems. The juice isnt selling like it used to. 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. This was Lost Hills before Lynda got involved. The pipeline, bankrolled by his investment firm Sandridge Partners, is an efficient and conservation-minded way to ship water, he says. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. He and his forebears from Georgia had dried up Tulare Lake, the biggest body of freshwater this side of the Mississippi, and planted 100,000 acres of cotton outside the town of Corcoran. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. 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. Lynda sent the first batches of POM, week after week, as gifts to David Bowie, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney head Michael Eisner. Thousands of Wonderful acres lay bare. He unfolds a $20 bill from a wad he keeps inside a bent paper clip, and we take a seat in the far corner. We saved the best for last, he says. But this outwardly unassuming multimillionaire has become a lightning rod of controversy. China, for one, prefers the Iranian pistachio. Ultimately, it drives a lucrative if sad mission, as uttered by the looming giant himself. See All Contacts. But Paramount isnt Paramount anymore. Plastic drip-irrigation lines stick out of the ground at wrong angles. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. Whatever remains is not nearly enough to make up for the shortfall of imported water from the state. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. 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. I saw her a few months ago. The Mojave Water Agency in the high desert needed a backup supply to serve its growing communities of Barstow and Apple Valley, Hesperia and Victorville. Boswell had done for the town of Corcoran. But if he thinks youre defying him, hell start with, Nobody realizes the good Ive done for agriculture. Then he moves on to, Do you know who I am? The Resnicks brought him aboard in 1999, and now he works alongside Lynda and consults daily with the company chef. Lupe says no one in her family, and none of her friends living in the trailer park or on the other side of town, drinks the water that comes out of the pipe. Vicente Fernndez, the king of Ranchera music, is crooning to no one, but it wont be this way in 30 minutes, Hussein tells me. Days Inn or Motel 6. A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. 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. Her brother-in-law was killed recently in a car crash along Highway 46. Once, he came home from school and discovered the family car gone. He was going to Vegas, hanging out with his own Damon Runyon characters, and making plans to get even bigger. Though his father passed 13 years ago, the son a graduate of Santa Clara School of Law and inactive lawyer continues to manage the real estate firm with holdings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Salt Lake City, and San Diegos North County. One out of eight has diabetes. His account appeared in the Earth Island Journal, a small environmental quarterly out of Berkeley. When a farmers orchards encompass 186 square miles, finding the field man can be a challenge. Because it is a community of all Hispanics.. Then hed lose his temper and get the strap out.. Somehow, it made its way to Lynda. Already, Wonderful has bulldozed 8,000 to 10,000 acres of pomegranate trees over the past few years to send more water to its nuts. Already, they are paying $69 a month to the local utility district. Because, while he does farm thousands of acres of pistachios, almonds [] He used to work for the Resnicks before Stewart put him in charge of the district. Selling the farm to migrant families has required Lynda to rebrand agriculture. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. It wasnt a midlife crisis, he told me. For a silent minute, we dig into our bowls. He never knows when, but the pattern is the same, based on flight radar recordings. This was Lost Hills, where the people are dependent on the Resnicks from cradle to grave. His story is the one Ive been carting around in my notebook for the past few decades, sure I was ready to write it after five years or ten years, only to learn of another twist that would lead me down another road. He had no intention of farming it, either. Relatives arranged his passage, paying the coyote the new rate of $12,000. 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. Father Stephen excelled in land deals, trading the toil of farming for successful real estate offices and expense accounts. Stewart and Lynda created a new brand, the Halo, from the same variety of mandarin. Vidovich is the owner of Sandridge Partners, LP a farmland investment firm that has undertaken more than 100,000 acres of Valley farmland. The speech of his parents and grandparents, the Yiddish-inflected New York with its humors and cut-to-the-quick impatiences, had not left his own speech in the half-century since hed come to California. The stock is up 33% in the last year and more . Rethink Your Drink is the latest slogan. A portion of his wages will be set aside each month to pay down the debt. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. Vidovich claims that he was . Youre the one who leads the way on selling agricultural water to the cities. Among other projects, he developed the posh Quarry Hills subdivision in Los Altos Hills with 22 multimillion-dollar luxury homes, where he now lives in a 15,000-square-foot house on 10 acres and a vineyard. When I got out of law school, I probably had 100 people I was employing.. 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. But the one thing he cant control is what hes most dependent on water. On the south end stands the Wonderful Community Center, where residents are urged to attend thrice-weekly Zumba and core-training sessions, healthy cooking classes, and weekend cultural outings featuring the likes of Americas Premier Latino Dance Company. So were seeing a shift now and then to have nature imposing its will on the situation. To fix the subsidence, and keep the town dry in the next flood, residents and the state prison are having to pay $10 million in extra taxes. Altogether, Resnick has purchased 300,000 acre-feet of water from farmers and water districtsat a cost of $200 millionto cover his shortfall during the drought. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. Month after month, she made ends meet on a $1,600 budget. Ive gone too far. My grandfather lost the farm to vine hoppers is the story he told. 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. As far as the company can tell, no active salmonella has ever traced back to the plant. She didnt understand his drive. Theyre no longer in danger. If the workers doubt the benefit of the enzymes from apple cider vinegar, video banners stream a continuous message of bad food habits to be broken and body mass indexes to be measured and met. The court settlement allows him to take the water to Dudley Ridge, but it cant go outside Kings County. So off the developers went in search of farm water. Theres a mountain range to my left and a mountain range to my right and in between a plain flatter than Kansas where crop and sky meet. A day later, I get a call from Mr. Resnick. John Vidovich, Student Loan Corp: Profile and Biography Today, at 81, his money is all but gone, and South African conservationist John Hume is throwing in the towel . Across the field, a heavy machine is stacking whats left of the trees into giant mounds. On Oscar night, she handed out free samples to the stars at the Vanity Fair party. The pipeline will pose a constant and continued threat to the easements function, compromising the structural integrity of the easement through saturation and subsidence or by negligent maintenance, wrote attorney Leonard Herr. A flour tortilla. My grandfather, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, traveled 7,000 miles by ship and train in 1920 to find out if his uncles exhortationThe grapes here are the size of jade eggswas true. She walks off the stage with Stewart. A member of the commission, on the eve of its demise, told me, Stewart wants to be a benevolent dictator. The wealth-tracking platform provides ongoing updates on the net worth and ranking of each . Late to the states water game, the regions farmers are the first to have their supplies curtailed. View the profiles of people named John Vidovich. I come upon a Wonderful field man in a four-by-four truck who listens to my bewilderment and takes pity. Have we gone too far? Meanwhile, without water, his cattles corn crop is stunted. No stranger enters this zone unless its to get rid of a body or dump waste from cooking meth or drown a hot car. No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. Vidovichs supporters like Wilson say he loves to help people, donating laptops to the struggling Stratford school district and inviting local Native Americans to his property to harvest reeds and teach basket-weaving traditions. Already mechanization is changing, you know, the labor situation. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. Id have to say that fully half of my success has been luck. Instead, Southern California water users in the arid desert municipal and industrial alike now hold the rights. Every mogul, every movie star. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. The project would take five days to completewhen the canal wasnt in use. All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. So how do we do even better next year?. It gives me the luxury to keep on working. Judge Orders Boswell, Vidovich Back to Their Corners in Ditch Bank Theyre listening with their heads bent down. 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. Pink and white oleanders divide the highway, and every third vehicle that whooshes by is a big rig. It is leaning more heavily on groundwater, say locals, because its selling or transferring portions of its surface supplies from the State Water Project and Kings River. Tomorrow? He brought great ideas to the table and helped make and then execute tough choices. Its loaded, Bernard says. He spends much of his off hours fixing it up. Too many almonds. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. Lemoore Council likely to respond to proposed feedlot near Lemoore and Boswells response has a tough Spaghetti Western quality. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. In the distant background, under the gaze of a 10-foot-tall marble goddess, sat Stewart in a gold-skirted chair, head down. His face is still blank. The truck driver hits the wide open of Highway 33 and traces the serpentine of the aqueduct. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. It took time to gain the respect of the people, and I was afraid. I try to calculate how many hundreds of aluminum sections need to be linked seamlessly, or at least watertight, to cover the distance of a mile. As he drives off, he throws a clue out the window. Its not easy to hear, but Im not going to sugarcoat this, she says. He gambled on the price of nuts going up, and he gambled on the water never going dry. Mark Arax: Yeah. This is the west end of Lost Hills, the extraction end. Its a water-saving method, Vidovich said. This is Lynda.. In his book, The Dreamt Land, Fresno-based reporter and author Mark Arax noted that Vidovichs business moves were driven out of an almost singular commodity: water. At the time, I was heavy with state water but the state water had low allocations and I had no other water source over there (Dudley Ridge land in western Kings County), he told Henry. 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 . I walk up and reintroduce myself. The pizza dough is cauliflower, too. What happens to them if Wonderful downsizes? The historic king of the region is the J.G. Anything else I can help you with?, He seems in a hurry. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. No one pushes their product harder. It was this persistence and, above all, good timing that explained his bigness. Nothing changes. That breaks your agreement with those farmers. The food is more. He landed a steady job with a big grower and a year later paid a coyote $5,000 to bring Lupe and their baby son to Lost Hills. Here, private water jumps from Tulare County to Kern County, but government jurisdictions dont count. In a profile of Vidovich written by Lois Henry then of The Bakersfield Californian now writing exclusively for her own service, SJVWater the farmer-lawyer-real estate magnate made no bones about where local misgivings began. Lupe excuses herself to prepare dinner. It will carry his private water on his private land, never leaving the regions geological basin. Developer John Vidovich Pays $10K of George Shirakawa Jr.'s Legal Bills I cant afford to move it., But the Boswells and Vidovichescan invest to move water around, he said. Union pressured Mayor Garcetti's office to oust top fire official My head keeps hitting the sunroof. He works year-round for Wonderful. 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. Then some of the money we save goes to pay the coyote.
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