Heck family rift fraught with emotion, intrigue

One of Sonoma County's wealthiest wine families, with a half-century of success punctuated by personal feuds, is now torn by an emotional dispute over millions of dollars and a highly publicized sexual encounter.

The dispute, tinged with sordid details, pits Korbel champagne baron Gary B. Heck, owner and chief executive of a $159 million-a-year wine empire, against his estranged daughter, Richie Ann Samii, a west county horsewoman and trust fund beneficiary.

Documented in 23 volumes of court records dating to November 2006, the father-daughter conflict has churned claims and counterclaims of fraud and conspiracy, the rights to a Guerneville-area ranch, the income stream from a 19-year-old family trust and even a death threat posted on the Internet.

Behind the Korbel label, a sparkling wine served at presidential inaugurations and produced at a landmark Russian River winery, lies a family fight over money, image and strong emotion.

Samii contends she has been denied millions from her trust fund, with dividends improperly used to pay the winery's taxes, while her father says the trust was never meant to afford his children a free ride.

Heck alleges his daughter's sexual encounter on Korbel property made her a threat to the company he dedicated his life to growing, a liability that he says still exists. The encounter, which led to Samii's arrest and an eventual dismissal of criminal charges, triggered the falling-out -- and the court fight -- between the champagne boss and his daughter, a rodeo barrel racer.

A Superior Court judge who issued a restraining order to keep Samii away from her father found the high-stakes case troubling, laced with "anger, distress, character assassination."

Last month, Samii, 39, a mother of three and married to her third husband, agreed to move out of the 160-acre Korbel-owned ranch near Guerneville where she has lived for the past 11 years, tending horses, dogs and zebras.

Heck, 61, agreed as his part of the April 16 settlement to pay Samii $250,000 for moving expenses and credit against a future settlement of their legal battle.

But the heart of their dispute -- Samii's allegation that her father and several business associates conspired to deprive her of $9 million in trust-fund proceeds -- seems unlikely to be resolved, nor a family reconciliation achieved, anytime soon.

For now, father and daughter must legally stay apart under a judge's restraining order that keeps Samii 100 yards from her father. Heck obtained the order in September after saying in a court filing that Samii threatened to kill Korbel employees and posted a bizarre threat against Heck on her MySpace page.

Conflicting accounts

Their court records and attorneys offer conflicting views of a family whose wealth from sparkling wine has uncorked a sour, unceremonial struggle.

Heck's attorney, Robert O'Brien of Los Angeles, said that Samii, heir to a 5.2 percent share of the family business, F. Korbel & Bros. of Guerneville, is making a desperate attempt to secure money from her tapped-out trust fund.

Samii's attorney, Richard Zitrin of San Francisco, said it took him a year to unravel the means by which Heck, as co-trustee of his daughter's trust, diverted $5 million of her money into paying Korbel's taxes.

"She is the ultimate poor little rich girl," Zitrin said. "She has no money."

How much money Samii, a 1986 graduate of El Molino High School in Forestville, received from the trust and her wine magnate father is sharply disputed.

His lawyers say she received nearly $874,000 from the trust from 1989-2006, and that Heck's gifts to his daughter have amounted to an additional $250,000.

"Gary's been incredibly generous to her over the years," O'Brien said.

Samii's attorney said the trust, established by her grandmother, yielded $731,000 that was paid into an account Korbel officials controlled and used to defray about $470,000 in expenses. Counting about $100,000 in gifts from her father, Zitrin says Samii received $372,000 over 18 years.

Neither Heck nor Samii, the former Richie Ann Heck, would comment for this story.

Both attorneys insist they will prevail.

Zitrin, who took Samii's case on contingency, said her legal bills total nearly $2 million, and he is counting on a settlement or verdict to compensate both of them.

"We will win," Zitrin said. "We are in the right."

O'Brien declined to say how much the case has cost Heck. Samii's allegations are "frivolous," he said. "We don't think her position has any merit whatsoever."

Sordid allegations

As much as the dispute focuses on money, it began with a sexual episode at Korbel Champagne Cellars near Guerneville on April 27, 2006.

The Korbel estate, a cluster of historic brick buildings and modern structures ringed by vineyards, is a popular tourist stop along the Russian River. It's also the site where Bohemian immigrant Francis Korbel and his brothers founded their champagne works in 1882.

Korbel's descendents sold the business, by then one of the nation's best-selling sparkling wine producers, to Adolf Heck in 1954. News reports at the time put the price at $700,000. Gary Heck, Adolf's son, said in a 1984 interview that it was more like $400,000.

After taking over the company in the early 1980s, Gary Heck guided Korbel through a period of double-digit growth over the course of the decade. Korbel says it now sells more than 1.3 million cases of champagne a year.

In the 1990s, Heck acquired Kenwood Vineyards, Valley of the Moon Winery and Lake Sonoma Winery, turning F. Korbel & Bros. into the 12th-largest U.S. wine company based on case sales, according to Wine Business Monthly. The privately held company reported revenues of $159 million in 2007.

Gary Heck has "worked his whole life to build the company," his attorney said.

What happened there two years ago triggered the dispute.

Richie Ann Heck and her then-fiance, Christopher Samii, were arrested on April 28, 2006, a day after an encounter with two 23-year-old female Korbel employees. The two women told Sheriff's Department detectives that the couple drank beer with them at the winery delicatessen after hours, then sexually assaulted them at the nearby pool house.

They said that Christopher Samii raped one of them and that both were forced into oral sex, according to the investigative affidavit filed in court. The District Attorney's Office, following an eight-week investigation, dropped the charges against Heck and Samii for lack of evidence.

The couple, on the advice of their attorney, Chris Andrian, left town while their case made repeated headlines. Heck and Samii stayed for several months at luxurious Los Angeles hotels, running up a $90,000 tab, O'Brien said. Their legal bills came to $75,500.

Korbel officials tapped Samii's trust fund to pay the $165,500 total, much to Richie Ann Samii's dismay. But the rift between father and daughter had just begun.

Samii fired, evicted

In July 2006, Samii was fired from her $37,000-a-year job as manager of the Korbel-owned ranch on Highway 116, where she had lived since 1997, tending dozens of animals, including horses, cows, goats, dogs and two zebras. In the wake of the sexual episode, her father had determined that her presence on company property was a liability and told her to move, O'Brien said.

In a sworn deposition on Nov. 8, 2007, Zitrin asked Gary Heck if he had been angry with Richie Ann since the episode.

"Angry, and -- more disappointed and more upset than anger," Heck said.

Asked why he was angry, Heck said: "Because of what she did at the deli and after the deli in which she put the company in jeopardy and the company is still in jeopardy over horrendous lawsuits. The statute has not run on her case. The girl could still sue. She put the company in terrible, terrible liability and jeopardy."

(The two women who said they were victimized in the sexual episode filed a personal injury claim against Richie Ann and Christopher Samii on April 16. The lawsuit did not name Korbel or Gary Heck.)

In November 2006, Samii was given 30 days to vacate the ranch. The eviction, she argued in court papers, violated promises her father had repeatedly made that she could live there for as long as she wanted.

That action triggered a flurry of legal claims in which Samii contested the eviction and subsequently challenged her father's handling of the Richie Ann Heck Trust, established by her grandmother, the late Richie C. Heck, in 1989.

The April 16 settlement, approved by a Sonoma County judge, resolved the dispute over the ranch. Samii, who shares custody of her two younger children with ex-husband Tom Anderson, will move in with her mother, Heck's ex-wife Marilou Heck, in Guerneville after vacating the ranch.

What remains is the battle over money.

The trust was created to pass a portion of the Heck family's wealth directly from Richie C. Heck to her granddaughter, bypassing a generation and thereby saving estate taxes.

Richie Ann Samii contends that her father, as co-trustee of her trust, paid about $5 million in Korbel dividends to her trust and, without her consent, improperly used most of it to pay the company's income taxes. Accounting for interest over 18 years, Samii was defrauded of $9 million, her lawyer said.

Complex legal issues

The arguments are complicated, but Samii challenged Korbel's practice of passing its tax liability along to the company's shareholders. She and her brother, Aaron Heck, each hold a trust with 5.2 percent of the company's shares. Gary Heck holds the remaining 89.6 percent of shares in Korbel.

Samii, who was 21 when the trust was created, said she never agreed to the tax pass-through and that the millions in dividends therefore should be hers.

Gary Heck said that his daughter accepted the tax pass-through, and that if it were not in place, there would have been no Korbel dividends paid to her trust at all.

"She is the beneficiary of a trust that was never intended to produce significant income," Heck said in court papers filed Jan. 9, 2007. "This was consistent with the family ethic of working in the business to earn a living."

Korbel's long-standing practice, O'Brien said, is to reinvest all after-tax profits to grow the company. Dividends were distributed to Samii's trust primarily to cover the income tax liability, but there was always some money left over for her, O'Brien said.

The trust terminates when Samii reaches age 45 and the 13,000 Korbel shares become hers. A report by the trust's administrators estimated the market value of the stock at $2 million to $4.5 million.

For now, Samii has scant resources.

In a personal letter to his daughter in August 2001, Gary Heck reminded her that he had repeatedly warned that her "frequent withdrawals" from the trust fund were "depleting the account."

"I am writing this letter to notify you that at this time the monies in the account are now exhausted and will not be available for any future purchases or expenses," the letter said.

It was signed: "With all my love, Dad."

In a deposition on June 26, 2007, Samii was asked by Korbel attorney Bela Lugosi of Los Angeles about financial problems between her and her father. "It's been like that ever since, I would say, every day since 1992," Samii said.

Heck family feuds have been waged in court for decades.

Adolf Heck, the patriarch, prevailed in an eight-month legal battle with his brother, Paul, who claimed that Adolf had squeezed him out of the family business. Paul died during the trial in 1977, and a judge subsequently ruled that his financial mishaps were his own doing.

After Adolf Heck died in 1984, his mistress, Veronica Ann Miramontez, with whom he had lived for his last 23 years, filed a $40 million claim against his estate. Richie C. Heck, who remained married to Adolf, and Gary Heck agreed to pay Miramontez $3.5 million.

Gary and his former wife, Marsha Heck, married in 1988 and together bought KFTY Channel 50 in Santa Rosa for $2.25 million in August 1990. About a year later, Gary Heck fired Marsha Heck as chief executive of the TV station and she moved out of their home. He filed for divorce in October 1991.

Gary Heck sold the station for $7.8 million in 1996.

Escalating emotions

Heightening tensions in the current dispute are Samii's threats against her father and other Korbel officials, documented in court papers. They culminated in the restraining orders, which also required Samii to surrender any firearms in her possession.

Court records from the civil case say that in March 2007, Samii threatened to shoot any Korbel employees who came onto the ranch, and in August a message was posted on her MySpace page, calling her father a vulgar name and displaying an image of a kitten sighting down the scope of a rifle pointed out a window.

Korbel's motion for protective orders said that Samii's threats of violence, including a threat to burn down the ranch if she was evicted, "evidenced profound instability and indeed craziness."

Superior Court Judge Gayle Guynup issued the protective orders in September, saying there was "clear and convincing evidence" of Samii's threats.

Zitrin said he did not dispute the judge's decision, but called Heck's pursuit of the order "an attempt to paint Richie in a bad light and to paint her into a corner." The MySpace posting was "very foolish," he said.

To date, Samii has not turned over any firearms, according to court records that say the Sheriff's Department conducted a fruitless search at her home. Her former husband, Anderson, said in a sworn declaration that he had left behind nine guns when he moved out of the house.

Samii's threats and the missing guns are a "bizarre and dangerous" situation, O'Brien said.

Samii has not violated the order, Zitrin said. "There were no guns on the property, period," he said.

It is a family feud with no foreseeable resolution, in which the attorneys for both sides -- and a Superior Court judge -- paint the conflict in highly personal terms.

In granting the protective order, Guynup said in court that the case was troubling "because of the level of anger, distress, character assassination. Every, every witness that testified . . . has had a financial interest that may color their testimony."

Samii has been a "tower of strength" in the face of pressure from her father and his attorneys, Zitrin said. "But it seems Gary Heck has decided to use his power and money in an effort to destroy his daughter."

Heck is saddened by the events of the last two years, O'Brien said. "The family hopes that Richie Ann will get the help she needs," he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.