The Los Angeles Wine World’s Enduring Murder Mystery

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When Prohibition came into force in 1920, it was meant to end the production, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages.

Instead, it was the beginning of perhaps the most infamous criminal period in US history because, very simply, most Americans liked a drink – and many didn’t care where it came from.  

At the time many wineries were based in downtown Los Angeles, which was surrounded by agriculture, and was the center of the wine region’s trade. There were more vineyards in the valleys just a few dozen miles away too. 

Barely a dozen of them made it to the end of Prohibition in 1933, and some merchants paid a higher price for their barrels and bottles than falling foul of the new law.

Austrian-born Frank Baumgarteker was a successful Californian vintner who disappeared in 1929, and his mysterious disappearance hit the headlines for decades afterward, perhaps because it had all the ingredients of a murder mystery.

Baumgarteker, 43, owned a winery in downtown’s Lincoln Heights, Western Grape Products in Cucamonga, some 47 miles east, as well as vineyards, several ranches, and a trucking company.

A day or so before his disappearance, he cashed two checks for a total of $1,500 (nearly $27,000 today), and after lunch with an associate on November 25, he said he was driving to his trucking company to deliver the payroll – and was never seen again. 

Later that day, Baumngarteker’s wife Mary received a letter from Frank postmarked from San Diego, much further south than the trucking company location. It urged her not to worry, that he would write or call, and that “business was bad, as you know.” 

Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, UCLA Library Special Collections

Mary was surprised, as this was the first time he had written to her in English, rather than their native German, and she recalled that before he left, Baumgarteker said he was “approached by six Italians from Chicago,” demanding that he sell them his operation. 

Baumgarteker had acquired one of special licenses that were an exception to Prohibition, and was now providing wine for “medicinal purposes,” the others being for “cosmetics,” home brewing, and sacramental use. 

Previous to that, Baumgarteker had been approached by a man named Zorra, who wanted to set up a still in the winery, but the vintner had refused point blank. 

Zorra was an associate of the Sicilian-Italian crime family who were looking to get control of bootlegging and whiskey making in the city, and Baumgarteker may have known his fate was sealed after kicking him out, as he told his secretary “I have signed my death warrant.”

Some reports gasped that Al Capone himself had been one of the six, and while this was soon proved to be false, it certainly sold newspapers.

Two days after Baumgarteker left LA that day in 1929, his custom-built purple Cadillac was found in a garage in San Diego with his empty wallet inside. 

An eyewitness had seen a man driving the car whose description did not fit that of Baumgarteker, and police found other items that did not belong to him, as well as a secret compartment containing checks and bills, but the only real clue was a splattering of distinctive red clay. 

Sharp-eyed detectives suspected it was from a location in Riverside County that was known as a “gangland cemetery,” but his disappearance kept hitting the headlines, as it was less than a year since the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago had shocked the country. 

Just a few weeks later in early 1930, the downtown winery was raided by federal agents, who seized 700,000 gallons of wine and 200,00 gallons of brandy, and arrested five employees. At the time it was the biggest haul in Southern California history, and people wondered: were the Feds showing they meant business to whoever was (now) in charge?

In May, police thought they had found Baumgarteker’s body in a vat at the Cucamonga winery, but it was in fact Stiffano Botta, who had been overcome by fumes while cleaning the container.

A few months after that, the rumor mill went into overdrive when an LA crime boss, Tony Buccola, who claimed to know what happened to Baumgarteker, himself went missing. 

More ominously, Baumgarteker’s other Western Grape partners, Joseph Neuman and Arnold Bosch, subsequently disappeared too.

Less than a year after Baumgarteker’s disappearance, Neuman’s car was found with the door open and the keys inside, but no sign of him. There was suspicion that he had been playing ball with the mob, but had stepped out of line and was “taken for a ride.”  

Some said Baumgarteker had been cooperating with the mob and slipped up too, but his story just wouldn’t go away.   

Over the next few years there were “sightings” of him in places across America, Mexico and even in El Salvador. Skeletons were examined in Arizona, Mexico, and the Mojave Desert, among others, but none proved to be Baumgarteker, who had distinctive dental work and a metal plate in his shoulder.

Following the plot of a good mystery, the issue of money came into play in 1937, when it was revealed that Baumgarteker had life insurance policies worth $360,000 (nearly $8m today). 

The insurance companies weren’t paying out of course, and instead offered a reward of $20,000 (nearly $440,000 today) for information, and Mary eventually had to go to court to fight them. She had offered her own bounty of $1,000 (nearly $22,000), also to no avail, and now some wondered whether Baumgarteker had left to start a new life.

After all, he had said “business was bad, as you know,” in his last letter, and there was a case of tax fraud pending against him and several others at Western Grape. 

In 1940, the Swiss-born Bosch, Western Grape’s manager and resident chemist, who had repelled an advance from “Italian gangsters” in 1930 and perhaps assumed he was going to be left alone, wrote his son saying he was “leaving for the desert,” alongside a cryptic mention of “a couple of million of dollars.” 

He too was never seen or heard from again.

Almost twenty after Baumgarteker’s disappearance and soon after Mary’s death in 1949, the LAPD got a tip, and excavated the basement of a Lincoln Heights home that once belonged to a bootlegger. Once again, nothing was found.

Finally, in 1977 notorious mafia hit man Frank “Bomp” Bompensiero was murdered. He had many confirmed kills on his record, and more suspected. Baumgarteker was one of the latter, but since his body was never found, we will never know.

In 2018, Angeleno Wine Company began operations in downtown Los Angeles. They were the first winery to open in the area since Prohibition, but the only dangerous decision now is whether to order red, white or rosé… 

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