A Fatal Legacy: The Rise and Fall of Caviarteria

Dreamland

It was still dark when the manager of the Friendly's restaurant in Danville, Pennsylvania arrived to open up. At a little past four on the damp, chilly Monday morning of April 16, 2001, he went inside, barely noticing the black Mercedes E-Class parked near the front of the building. The car's tinted windows were rolled down about two inches, and the radio could be heard playing inside.

This was not an unusual sight. There were a number of bars nearby, and patrons who'd enjoyed a little too much hospitality sometimes slept it off here rather than risk encountering a state trooper. Interstate 80 runs a mile north of the restaurant, and even though Danville is a small town in Pennsylvania's smallest county, it is well patrolled by police.

Probably a drunk, the manager thought, or a couple doing what couples do in parking lots at night. Inside the restaurant the lights came on, the breakfast rush started, peaked and ebbed. The Mercedes did not move; the radio was still playing.

The man in the driver's seat was a stranger even to himself. The soft dark hair that sometimes fell over his brow was gone, shaved off hours earlier. His head was bald and raw, covered with nicks and scrapes from a razor. Missing too were his Prada suits and shirts, emblems of his status in the wealthy environs from which he came. On this night, as he found his way 150 miles west from Manhattan's Upper East Side to this small town of 5,000 or so souls in Montour County, Pennsylvania, he was dressed for a purpose in a black leather jacket, black sweatpants and a black T-shirt. Even his boxers were black. A black leather gun holster was strapped to his right ankle, and inside was a black semiautomatic pistol.

Not until 1:30 P.M. that day--nine hours after the car had first been seen--did someone peek through the crack of the driver's-side window. A body was in the car, every interior surface of Which was sprayed with blood. The roof had been punctured by a bullet.

• • •

Scott Lynn, the Montour County coroner, arrived at the scene about an hour later and was ushered past the yellow police tape. The victim was slouched over, with both hands in his lap. In each hand was a pistol: a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver in his right, a compact Sig Sauer nine-millimeter in his left. Lynn noted two contact wounds on either side of the head--entrance wounds--and two star-shaped exit holes in the back of the skull. Either wound would have been fatal on its own.

At first sight, nothing about the body or its possessions--$335 in bills, 50 cents in change, a piece of tinfoil, an empty plastic bag, two vitamin E capsules and a scrap of paper bearing the scribbled digits of a phone number--suggested anything about the life of the man in the driver's seat. Indeed, the initial evidence was perplexing and contradictory, with the superficial appearance of suicide. But could this man have shot himself twice in the head with what had to have been simultaneous firings? Lynn and the state troopers asked themselves if the scene had been staged--and what could have led to such a brutal public termination.

Searching the car, the police found a New York State driver's license in the name of Eric Sobol. The photo on the license matched the face of the man now disappearing into a gray body bag.

The crown prince of the caviar trade was dead.

• • •

Las Vegas, August 29, 1997: It was a 2,000-square-foot palace of indulgence dressed in gold and marble. Eric Sobol's greatest achievement, a new branch of his family's caviar empire, was set inside a decadent haven of consumption at the new Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. This shopping emporium, themed in grand Roman style, featured marble pillars, statues of deities and murals depicting Pompeian street scenes. There were fireworks and trumpets that night, and Tony Bennett sang as a celebrity crowd, including the likes of Michael Jordan, strolled in and out of Sobol's 100-seat Caviarteria restaurant.

"It's like a dreamland," he told a reporter.

Eric Sobol was handsome and wealthy. Though less than five and a half feet tall, he was an intense, physical man, fearless, according to his friends. He worked out religiously and kept up a year-round tan thanks to regular vacations in St. Barts. Women first noticed his eyes, which were a striking shade of cornflower blue. One month shy of his 40th birthday, Sobol presided over one of the most exclusive food-retailing operations in the nation--the Caviarteria chain of specialty restaurants, bars and stores founded in 1950 by his father, Louis. Under Eric's guiding hand, Caviarteria had grown into one of the largest retail caviar outlets in the world, selling nine tons a year. There were boutiques in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and Miami, and at New York City's SoHo Grand Hotel and the gourmet emporium at Grand Central station, as well as the family's jewel box cafe just off Park Avenue, where Greta Garbo and Burt Lancaster had been regulars. Eric Sobol's A-list clients now included Sting, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sean Connery, Sharon Stone, Tommy Mottola and residents of the White House.

From the outside, the world in which Eric moved seemed incredibly glamorous--a Park Avenue existence in which $120 caviar sandwiches were accompanied by glasses of Taittinger, and a lunch bill for two could exceed $500. A life of luxury and opulence had been built on something as simple as the lightly salted eggs of the sturgeon.

Caviarteria was Sobol's legacy, but it was also a gift he never wanted. He had spent the better part of his life running from this inheritance, but fate and circumstance conspired to place him at the head of the family company in 1992, a time of massive upheaval in the business. The "black gold" that had made a small fortune for his father and turned Caviarteria into a New York institution would slowly poison the lives of Caviarteria's second-generation caretakers.

Eric took the helm during a decade known as caviar's dark age, when mobsters and smugglers moved in and took over the once aristocratic trade. Caviar went from a niche delicacy sold like fine jewelry to a commodity worth killing for. The 1990s were boom years, with the Clinton economy burning hot and bright and with cheap imports flooding the U.S. and Europe. Eric rode the wave until it crashed. When the bust came and the party ended, many in the business were crushed--for Eric, the pain of having squandered his family's legacy drove him to suicide. It was the end of an era.

• • •

"Hi there, I'm Caviarteria."

The beaming smile and outstretched hand belonged to Bruce Sobol, Louis's firstborn, a big brother to Eric and the affable public face of Caviarteria. Bruce was a gourmet and connoisseur, a bon vivant and raconteur, a man who could get a table at Le Bernardin at a moment's notice and who knew all the top chefs in town. He possessed a splendidly educated palate; he could taste any dish and tell his companions every ingredient and seasoning in it.

In 1998 Bruce welcomed a photographer from a New York business magazine into Caviarteria's chic bar just off Park Avenue, and soon Bruce and Eric were seated next to each other in one of the plush booths. In front of them nestled a mound of silvery-black beluga caviar in a cut-crystal bowl that was in turn cushioned on a bed of crushed ice. Both men held glasses of champagne.

Eric raised his glass to the camera and, wearing a tight smile, slid his arm behind his brother's back. It was a moment of togetherness as staged as the photograph. Bruce, the man who presented himself as Caviarteria and had lived and worked inside the family business since he was old enough to hold a mother-of-pearl spoon, was in fact only the vice president, the number two, standing behind his younger sibling, Eric, who'd stepped over him to take Caviarteria's crown.

Away from the cameras, the pair rarely occupied the same room. Their union had been the business equivalent of a shotgun wedding, arranged in the best interests of the family. They were brothers, but that didn't mean they belonged together--Eric and Bruce were like night and day, polar opposites in nearly every possible way. So different, in fact, that their friends often found it hard to believe they were even related, never mind children of the same parents. It had been that way since they were kids growing up on the Upper East Side.

Black Gold

Caviar often comes packed in tins coated with gold, which is said to be the only metal that will not react with the delicate mix of salt that preserves the roe. From the Caspian Sea, where fishermen get perhaps $20 for a kilo of sturgeon eggs, the delicacy travels west, gaining in value as it goes, until by the time it reaches New York, some 8,000 miles away, the price hits $1,700 a pound, or $105 an ounce. By comparison, whole black truffles retail at $35 an ounce and foie gras at $15 an ounce.

About 90 percent of the world's caviar comes from the Caspian region, with three kinds occupying the apex of the trade--beluga, osetra and sevruga. Beluga is the king of caviars, the most expensive and the most popular.

The United States is the leading consumer of caviar, and New York City has the largest appetite: In one year, 66 tons arrived there. The importers--a small, tightly knit clique of specialist wholesalers--in effect control the market. Once the caviar makes it through customs, it is cut into smaller tins and jars as small as one ounce and then distributed to restaurants, retailers, cruise lines, airlines and mail-order companies. The retailer's markup is typically 30 to 40 percent.

• • •

When Lou Sobol entered the caviar trade in 1950, he had different ideas about caviar. "He loved food, and he loved people," says Sybil Sugarman, Lou's sister-in-law, "and he couldn't understand why only the Rockefellers of this world could eat caviar." To Lou, caviar, like all gourmet foods, should be an affordable luxury, something for everyone now and then. He hit on the scheme that would change his life: Instead of selling large quantities to a small number of rich people, he would sell small quantities to large numbers of people.

Lou figured out what worked and what didn't. The shop was the business's public face, but the real money was made behind the scenes. Eighty percent of his business was mail order, with half of the purchases made between Thanksgiving and New Year's. The business was prosperous enough to enable Lou to raise his family in affluence. He and his wife, Ruth, enjoyed their indulgences--Caribbean cruises and holidays in Turkey, their favorite destination.

Conservative, honest Lou sat on a chair behind his store counter for 40 years, his eyes shining behind big glasses, greeting customers like old friends whether they were movie stars or shoeshine boys. He sold expensive food, but he was a mom-and-pop storekeeper at heart--and proud to be so.

Not that he was one to stand still. Over the years he tinkered with the basic premise of Caviarteria. He opened a small boutique in Beverly Hills that generated comfortable profits and gave Caviarteria a visible presence on the West Coast. He also teamed with a small Russian restaurant in Manhattan--opening a little counter inside the restaurant itself--but the venture failed. To Lou's astonishment, the Russian staff had no idea how to handle and serve caviar, and it wasn't long before he walked out on the project. Yet he still believed the idea of a chain of caviar bars was viable.

Growing Pains

Grade school best friends Yonel Dorelis and Eric Sobol lived across the street from each other on East 86th Street when the boys were eight years old. Another friend, Michael Raynor, lived 11 blocks north, on 97th Street. All three went to P.S. 6, at the time one of the city's best public schools. Dorelis remembers half the kids being from Harlem and half from Park Avenue. "It was a good school," he says, "regardless of how much money your parents had."

Bruce Sobol, 16 months older than Eric, was a quiet boy who spent hours writing poetry and reflective prose. "Bruce just wanted to read a book," says his boyhood friend Larry Wertheimer, "and listen to the Grateful Dead and Lou Reed."

In sharp contrast, Eric was chiseled, hawkish and aggressive. "He loved to fight," remembers Dorelis. "I mean, we were all pretty much into duking it out, but Eric had a taste for it. If a group of guys was coming toward him on the street, he went right through the middle of them; they were either going to get out of his way or they were going to start fighting. Either way, Eric's attitude was 'fuck you.'"

At the age of 12, Eric decided he wanted to be a pro football player, and he pursued that dream into his early 20s. A running back, Eric made football his whole life, his every dream and the subject of each waking minute. Raynor still finds himself in awe of Eric's determination: "He was very strong-minded. When he made up his mind to do something, boy, that was it." Eric refused to hang out with his friends after school every day until each one had thrown him 100 passes to help him practice his moves. He slept with a football in his bed.

While Eric would wake up at six A.M. to go running, Bruce preferred to sleep in. "He liked to sit and read and smoke Parliament cigarettes until the ashtray was overflowing," remembers Wertheimer. While Eric was pounding the track and pumping iron, Bruce used to slip down to Central Park to play Frisbee and smoke pot with the kids who hung out at the band shell. "We smoked a lot of weed together," says another friend, Al Cihak.

The Sobol boys grew up prosperous, protected and indulged by their father, who had survived a POW internment in Europe during World War II and wanted his sons to have everything he'd missed. "I think he lived the childhood he'd never had through Eric and Bruce," says their aunt Sybil Sugarman. "And I think as a result they didn't learn how to fight for what is really important."

Bruce apprenticed himself to the business at an early age, but Eric started hanging in Harlem. "I know he got into some pretty heavy shit," says Dorelis. "He got into drug deals where guns were waved around, but he didn't care. He was into the thrill. If someone pointed a gun at him, Eric would laugh and say, 'Fuck you.'"

His friends remember a kid with a wickedly dry sense of self-deprecating humor who beat up purse snatchers in his neighborhood and refused to curse anywhere near a church or synagogue. To his great credit, he kept his boyhood friends to the end of his life.

Bruce took up the position as Lou's heir apparent by learning the trade, working in the shop after school, throughout college and on weekends and holidays, and developing his knowledge and love of food, wine and the New York restaurant scene.

He took classes at Columbia University and for a while juggled his duties at the store with academics, but in 1986 he dropped out. "That part of Bruce was really frustrating," says his wife, Lydia. "The intelligence was there, the interest was there, and the intention was there, but he never followed through. He lived for the moment." That year, Bruce finally joined Caviarteria full-time, working side by side with Lou.

• • •

Eric made it perfectly clear that he wanted nothing to do with the family trade. Despite his small stature, he played for Mesa State College, a Division II school with a strong football program, and later became a standout with the semipro New Jersey Rams. Nine NFL teams, including the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants, eventually offered him a tryout. But as Eric would be reminded in the years to come, ambition and dreams simply weren't enough. "He was good, but they said to him, 'You're just not good enough,'" says Dorelis. Eric kept to himself whatever pain he might have felt as his dream disintegrated. "He never let on to any of us how he felt. It was as if he just reached inside himself and flipped a switch from on to off."

Eric next set his sights on Wall Street and, through connections with friends and money borrowed from Lou, leased a seat on the commodities exchange, trading oil futures and working at Four World Trade Center. Life on Wall Street, though, was a disaster. Sobol family friend Eric Sepe estimates the youngest member "lost at least $250,000 of Lou's money. It may even have been as much as a million. He was a terrible trader."

Back at Caviarteria, Bruce was also in trouble. His taste for high living and hedonism had long ago come to include cocaine. His recreational dabblings had blossomed into drug abuse. "Bruce wouldn't show up until two in the afternoon," remembers David Mills, Caviarteria's former general manager. "If he did five hours a week in some weeks, that was a lot. His father couldn't rely on him, although as (continued on page 159)Fatal Legacy(continued from page 116) the eldest he was next in line to take over."

Then in 1988, at the age of 68, Lou was diagnosed with myelodysplastia, a precursor to leukemia. Soon after, he was exhausted and too sick to run the business full-time, but he knew he couldn't leave it in Bruce's unsteady hands. His only option was to turn to his second son.

Legacy

With Eric at the helm, Caviarteria began to enjoy a new lease on life. "When he first came in, Eric did a fantastic job. He found all sorts of problems, and he fixed them," says Sugarman. "But Lou was there to keep control." Eric believed that a number of key personnel were embezzling from the company. He cleared them out, straightened the finances and set about getting Caviarteria back on track.

Brenda Black had just moved to New York from North Carolina when she met Eric in a Chelsea billiard parlor in 1989. Black, who was selling makeup at Bergdorf Goodman, says the famous Sobol blue eyes had attracted her. In November 1990 their engagement was announced in the Times, and in February 1991 they were married. "I thought he was beautiful," she says. "He had such a noble spirit. He fought for what he believed in--and he believed in Caviarteria."

Bruce, however, was deeply hurt at being passed over in favor of Eric. Dorelis remembers hearing about a heated exchange that took place in the store as Bruce tried to consolidate his Caviarteria position.

"This is my birthright!" Bruce screamed to Eric, his new boss.

"You're a fuckup!" Eric shouted back. "You can't be relied on for anything."

On February 19, 1992, Louis Sobol died of leukemia. He was 72. Eric took control of Caviarteria as chief executive and president. Bruce agreed to stay in the background, handling marketing and public relations. The caviar boom was about to begin.

The Donald Trump of Caviar

In the last week of 1991, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, and by early the next year 15 new independent nations had been formed out of the former USSR. Under Communism, the Caspian sturgeon fisheries had been tightly regulated. The state controlled the supply and price of caviar and preserved the sturgeon stocks. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, anyone with access to a boat took to the Caspian Sea, hoping to strike it rich.

By mid-1992, sturgeon poaching had become rampant, and black-market caviar began to make its way west. A year later the trickle had become a flood. Tons of cheap caviar poured into Europe and the U.S., most of it entering under the radar of the various customs and health agencies policing the trade. Russian police officers trying to crack down on the trade were murdered, their families intimidated. In one notorious incident, an apartment complex housing Russian border guards was blown up; 68 people were killed, including 21 children. The target of the attack was a lieutenant colonel who had declared war on those he called "sturgeon pirates."

•

The New York Rangers game was entering overtime when an announcement came over Madison Square Garden's public address system: "Will Eric Sepe please go to the security office immediately for an urgent message."

Sepe, a childhood friend of Bruce Sobol's now also working at Caviarteria, scrambled from his seat and ran to the security office, his heart in his throat, his mind racing.

"Eric. Eric, it's Paul."

Paul was a small-time printer Eric had recently contracted to configure a print advertisement for Caviarteria. The two had agreed to a price of $80 for the work.

"Eric, for God's sake, don't go to work tomorrow," Paul said. "I just talked to Eric Sobol on the phone. He said he found the invoice. He thinks we're ripping him off, and he says he's going to come around here and kill me and then find you and kill you, too."

That kind of aggression was typical of Eric, says Sepe, who had worked for Lou on and off for 10 years. "As soon as Eric joined the business, I knew it was over for me," he says. Sepe quit the next day.

As Caviarteria's chief, Eric Sobol was perhaps even more dogmatic than he'd been in any of his previous career incarnations. "He went into Caviarteria and it consumed him," says Sugarman. "I remember Eric saying to me, 'I have a dream,' and that dream was an extension of Lou's dream. He wanted to have caviar bars all over the world." Sepe is less kind. "He was like a snarling junkyard dog we had to keep locked away from the customers," he says.

Eric's first move at Caviarteria's helm was to make his father's dream come true: In 1994 he moved the store to 59th Street and Park Avenue, transforming it into a caviar bar and store. Eric personally oversaw every aspect of the design. The transformation was a great success and encouraged him further.

"One bar wasn't enough," says Dorelis. "Eric wanted to be the Donald Trump of caviar." Raynor also witnessed the ambition in his friend. "He wanted to be the biggest caviar merchant in the world," he says, "to show other retailers, such as Petrossian, that Caviarteria was the biggest and best in the world. I wish he'd stayed still after building the 59th Street store and making it beautiful. Business was going well, he was making a lot of money, and he was happily married. Everything was prosperous." The brothers' friends also recall exotic vacations, new cars and expensive clothes. "Eric went to St. Barts probably every three months," says Raynor, and Bruce's pals remember his splurging on bottle after bottle of champagne and always picking up the restaurant bills they racked up. "He was so generous," recalls Robin Wertheimer, a Sobol family friend.

In those good times, the Sobol brothers appeared to resolve their differences and accept their roles in the family business--Eric behind the scenes in the warehouse, doing deals and looking after the paperwork, and Bruce in the front of the house, doing TV and newspaper interviews and promoting the Caviarteria name, which in itself was worth millions.

But Eric didn't stay behind the scenes for long. Raynor says Eric told him he wanted to take Caviarteria public on the stock exchange. Eric began to chase that dream with a series of expansions and in 1997 opened a branch in Grand Central Terminal's newly refurbished food court. The next year he opened a luxurious new caviar-and-champagne bar at the SoHo Grand Hotel.

As Eric surveyed the floor at the National Restaurant Association Show in late 1997, he must have felt his hunch had been right. That year a record number of caviar dealers signed up as exhibitors. Interviewed at the event, he was bullish. "Our sales jump every year," he told reporters, and he outlined his plan for more bars, concluding, "It's like everything else. If something looks successful, everyone wants to get into it."

Fueled by cheap black-market product, caviar became wildly popular. The amount of caviar legally imported into the U.S. grew from 32 tons a year in 1991 to 95 tons a year by 1997, and the illegal trade was several times that amount.

"Demand is staggering," a Four Seasons hotel public relations representative said in 1998, as restaurants across the country moved caviar from an occasional à la carte feature to a menu staple. Like cigars and rare malt whiskeys, caviar entered the mainstream. Ivana Trump wanted to sell it on cable TV.

Caviar dealers were soon competing not just for the biggest market share but also for the media boasting rights that went along with it. At any one time at least three dealers, including Caviarteria, were claiming to import "more than 50 percent of the caviar consumed in the U.S." Eric claimed to be selling nine tons of caviar a year. "We fill three Fed Extrucks a day during the holidays," he told one interviewer.

In 1997, caviar's golden year, Eric embarked on a third opening, a two-story emporium featuring a 100-seat restaurant at the new Forum Shops at Caesars in Las Vegas. Soon he was crisscrossing the country, shuttling between Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and New York. Dorelis, then living in Las Vegas, says Eric even bought a house in Sin City just to be closer to his fledgling operation.

David Mills, then manager of Caviarteria, traveled to Las Vegas with Eric during preparations for the opening. "He was wildly excited about it," says Mills. "He thought it would be great." Mills, for his part, couldn't see it.

"You have two types of people in Las Vegas," he says, "the high rollers, who are comped all the way and pay for nothing, and the small-timers, who feed the slots and get a $6 lobster or steak. I thought expanding there was a huge mistake, and I told Eric so." Sitting next to the other Forum shops, which included a Virgin Megastore, Gap, Cheesecake Factory and Stage Deli, Caviarteria was uncomfortably out of place.

True to form, Eric could hear only his own voice. "I think Vegas is going to be the big action for us," he told an interviewer.

"I think that was the beginning of the end," says Dorelis. "Las Vegas became a millstone around Caviarteria's neck."

Enter the Feds

On January 17, 1998, a gray New York winter day, special agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service arrived at St. John's University in Queens. All of the biggest caviar merchants and traders had been summoned to a meeting with the U.S. government to be told their world was about to change.

Less than a decade after the fall of the USSR, uncontrolled sturgeon poaching and caviar smuggling had pushed the species to the brink of extinction. In response, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species decided to list the fish as endangered. As of April 1998, anyone wanting to import sturgeon eggs would need a Cites certificate, a license specific to each shipment. If the contents of the shipment didn't match what was on the license, the caviar would be confiscated by the FWS, which had been charged with policing the caviar trade.

One agent, whose name cannot be revealed because he still works undercover, recalls walking into the meeting and being greeted by the sight of a short man in a camel-hair coat, standing in the middle of the room and bellowing abuse at another attendee.

Eric Sobol was unleashing his ire that afternoon on Vladislav Tartakovsky, a smuggler who'd been supplying him with caviar until the two fell out over money. Tartakovsky had opened his own caviar bar, Simply Caviar, blocks from Caviarteria's Park Avenue location. He had also poached Eric's two senior managers, who allegedly took Caviarteria's prized client list with them. Eric was apoplectic. He launched a $20 million lawsuit against Simply Caviar and Tartakovsky, and as the row spilled into New York gossip columns, Eric was reported to have been seen banging on Simply Caviar's windows screaming "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" at startled diners. "At first I thought it was some deranged homeless person," Tartakovsky said in the New York Post, sending Eric into further paroxysms.

At St. John's, Eric took one look at the face of his rival and stormed over. The argument soon got so heated that the FWS called the meeting to order early to avert a fistfight breaking out. Once in command of everyone's attention, the government laid down the new laws for the dealers and retailers. "It was a headsup," says one FWS agent, "a verbal and written warning."

Most ignored it altogether, and soon the feds were making big busts and arresting some of the most well-known names in the trade. The sign-in sheet for the St. John's meeting would become a memento of the caviar business's spectacular crash: Just three years later, half the people listed were either in jail or under indictment for smuggling or dealing in illegal caviar, which overnight went from being a minor customs offense to a federal felony akin to ivory trafficking.

The scale of the smuggling--and just how far it permeated the caviar trade--was illustrated in October 1998, when undercover FWS agents arrested seven caviar mules at New York's JFK Airport. They were carrying 16 suitcases containing about 1,000 pounds of illegal caviar, a haul worth just short of $1 million.

Investigators learned that all the mules had been contracted by Eugeniusz Koczuk, who ran Gino International, a Connecticut-based caviar wholesaling company. When the FWS raided Koczuk's home, it found dozens of tins of black-market caviar crammed into three refrigerators.

Documents seized in the raid showed that in the months after the new regulations had been introduced, Koczuk had smuggled approximately 20,000 pounds of caviar into the U.S.A single October 1998 shipment of more than 400 pounds, smuggled inside mules' suitcases, went primarily to Caviarteria. The retail value of that caviar was nearly $250,000.

•

Perhaps, Eric thought, he would be able to do one more big deal. After the new rules came into effect, Eric contracted with a supplier in Russia for $1.3 million worth of osetra caviar. Two shipments cleared U.S. Customs and a preliminary FWS inspection in late autumn 1998 and were moved to Caviarteria's Long Island warehouse. Samples the FWS took from the shipment, however, came back positive for traces of eggs from endangered Siberian sturgeon, which do not exist in the Caspian. According to an agent on the case, problems also arose in authenticating the caviar's origins. The Cites certificates showed that some had come to the U.S. from Lithuania and another portion from the United Arab Emirates. "This was odd, because neither country is caviar-producing," says the agent. "We suspected this was black-market caviar being brought in through third-party countries to hide its true origin."

The FWS arrived at Caviarteria's warehouse to impound the caviar. "Enforcing caviar violations was new to us and to the dealers," the agent explains. "We had started seizing caviar, and obviously the businesses were pissed at us. We sat down and started to describe to Eric what was happening and why, and he just flew off the handle--he was heading toward total irrationality. He was shouting and waving his hands around and refused pointblank to let us impound the caviar."

While Eric was stomping around and shouting in his paper-strewn office, his trouser leg rode up, allowing the agents to see a gun strapped to his ankle. "He was waving his hands around, getting angrier and angrier. People do stupid things when they're in that state," the agent says. Worried the incident was about to blow out of control, the agents told Eric they were armed and ordered him to put his hands flat on his desk.

The gravity of the situation seemed to bring Eric back down to earth, and he reached for the phone and called his lawyer. Soon he had issued a $10 million suit against the federal government over its seizure of the osetra, vigorously defending his caviar shipments' legitimacy.

The legal case became a crusade he would pursue to his death--or perhaps it pursued him.

Bruce

In 1997 Bruce had been clean for about a year, a poster boy for the power of family, which had intervened in his downward spiral from coke and booze. At the age of 38, he one day found himself in the cookware section of Macy's, giving a presentation to shoppers. He was teamed with Lydia Wagner, a pilot turned fine-wines expert. She was there to educate shoppers on the joys of champagne, he on those of caviar. Champagne and caviar were a natural match, they told the audience. They were made to go together.

Wagner remembers Bruce as a sensual, cultured man who romanced her with poetry and fed her oysters topped with dollops of caviar. Eighteen months after meeting, they were married, and shortly after, the entire Sobol family celebrated the arrival of its first grandchild, a girl named Lucy.

Yet Bruce's psyche was far from healed. When Lydia met Bruce, he was suffering from occasional bouts of depression and taking medication to relieve it. From her new vantage point within the Caviarteria family, Lydia could see why.

In the late 1990s the glut of cheap caviar had resulted in spectacular annual sales increases for Caviarteria: 20 percent, 25 percent, 27 percent. Eric was selling beluga at $49 an ounce, less than half its usual value, and it was flying off the shelves. After opening the Las Vegas store, Eric expanded into Florida. In February 2000, riding high on huge sales thanks to the millennium celebrations, Eric opened a Caviarteria in Miami's South Beach.

But trouble was looming for Caviarteria. The bargain-basement caviar Eric had used to finance his expansion was drying up fast. The Cites rules, now strictly enforced, choked the pipeline from the Caspian to the U.S., and supplies began to get increasingly scarce. U.S. Customs and FWS officials were impounding record amounts of caviar.

Prices started to rise as, one by one, U.S. dealers were arrested and indicted on smuggling charges. By the beginning of the new millennium, many major players were under federal indictment. The principals of U.S. Caviar & Caviar and the New York-based Connoisseur Brands were arrested and charged after investigators discovered that between them they'd smuggled more caviar than twice the legal Russian harvest in 1998 alone. Arkady Panchernikov, president of Caspian Star--Caviarteria's biggest competitor--was arrested and charged with illegal caviar sales, as was Eric's old rival Vladislav Tartakovsky, who was charged with smuggling 1,700 pounds of contraband eggs hidden inside a shipping container of dried fish.

Eric watched helplessly as caviar became more expensive by the day, destroying any hope of profitability for Caviarteria's chain of shops, bars and restaurants. Records later found in Eric's office showed that none of the new outlets was making money and most were deep in debt. The money Eric spent building and opening the new locations outstripped the profits made from bar sales. In 2000, just as it had 20 years earlier under Lou's reign, Caviarteria still made the bulk of its money from mail order during that key period from Thanksgiving to New Year's. Eric had been using the mail-order profits to prop up his burgeoning bar empire, but the money had run out. According to a 2001 tax return, Caviarteria had gone from making millions in profits to showing a $2 million loss.

On occasion Eric and Bruce could barely afford to buy basic monthly supplies. Yet Eric continued with his Florida expansion plans--bars in Boca Raton and Palm Beach--at the expense of all else, including his marriage to Brenda, which began to flounder in 1997 and reached the point of no return in 2000.

Eric was living alone in a $3,500-a-month rental a few blocks from his and Brenda's former home, his days spent locked away in the Caviarteria warehouse, obsessing over the ailing business and its mounting debts, over his rivals and, most of all, over the government, with whom he'd picked the biggest fight of his life. His lawsuit against it now became his focus.

Michael Raynor saw Eric for the last time about a year before he died. The two went for a drink, and according to Raynor, "all he could talk about was his lawsuit against the government. It totally consumed him. He told me he had already spent $2 million on the case."

Yonel Dorelis had a similar conversation when he hooked up with his old friend at Caviarteria's doomed Las Vegas outlet: "He just went on and on about the government, how corrupt it was and how it had set out to get him and Caviarteria."

"They're the real Mob," Eric told his friends, who say that toward the end Eric was spending all his time on the lawsuit while his business slipped down a financial black hole of his own making. "I know he borrowed a lot of money," says Dorelis, "and not from regular banks. He was involved with some pretty serious people--ones he'd borrowed money from and did business with. Russians and possibly some guys from the Mob. People you don't mess around with."

As the pressures on Eric grew, he began to crack. Just as drugs had found their way into Bruce's life, they now entered Eric's, in the form of weed and speed. He would show up at work clearly stoned. He would erupt and have screaming fights with Bruce, the target of much of his anger. On a number of occasions, Caviarteria's staff had to separate the brothers as harsh words turned into physical altercations. Around this time, Eric had tattoos inked on both arms. On his right biceps were the words on Fatal Terrain. On his left, Death before Dishonor.

His friends recall Eric's psychological deterioration. "The last time I saw Eric, I went to give him a hug--we always hugged when we met," Says Raynor. "He was so tense. There was something in his body that said, "Don't touch me,' and I backed away from him."

Eric was drowning, but he wouldn't call for help. Sybil Sugarman remembers a conversation she had with him a month before he died. "He looked at me and said, 'Aunt Sybil. My dream. I had a dream, and I just can't do it.'"

•

The Montour County coroner ruled Eric's death a suicide. It was the ghastly fulfillment of an expressions his friends had heard him utter a thousand times. Dorelis says, "Since we were kids, if we ever asked Eric how he was, he'd always reply, 'So bad I'm going to blow my brains out.'"

Three hundred people turned out to say good-bye. Bruce paid tribute to his brother's courage. Eric, Bruce told mourners, sacrificed himself in order to save Caviarteria. According to Bruce, Eric wanted his $6 million insurance policy to pay off all of Caviarteria's debts.

"I can't Hold On"

Within weeks Bruce was embroiled in lawsuits and pursued by creditors. The books appeared to show the business in debt to the tune of $10 million. Bruce had inherited a hand grenade that not even Eric's life insurance could deactivate.

"Bruce was an intensely honorable man," says his friend Larry Wertheimer. "He wanted everyone who said they were owed money to get every single penny back. But he wasn't cut out to run the business the way Eric had left it."

Like Eric, Bruce kept his problems to himself. "He was immensely proud and didn't want to tell his friends that the business was in trouble," says Wertheimer.

On July 19, 2003, Lydia took their daughter Lucy for a long weekend in California. Lydia had Lucy call Bruce from the airport, and she told her daddy she loved him and was going to miss him. Bruce called Lydia once early Sunday morning, but for the rest of that weekend Lydia called home repeatedly and got no answer. Sunday turned into Monday, and at two P.M. Lydia's cell phone rang. It was Bruce, apologizing for not answering over the weekend. "I'm on my way to work. I'll call you later," he told her.

Their doorman found Bruce's body that evening. He had taken an overdose of sedatives, muscle relaxants and cocaine, tied a plastic bag over his head and lain down to die. He left a note written as the effects of the overdose were setting in. "The walls are closing in," he wrote. "I can't hold on." He told Lydia and Lucy he loved them.

•

A month after Bruce's death, Caviarteria was nothing but a shell. The satellite stores and boutiques were gone. The bar at 59th and Park had closed, and its little store was as good as dormant.

Eleven years after his death, Louis Sobol's dream, which had once generated an estimated $5 million a year, was in ruin, crashed by a changing world, a son who didn't know his limitations and another son who was all too aware of his.

Bruce's family and friends were numb. How could things have gone so wrong? Sugarman, her eyes wet with tears, says, "I loved my nephews. I would have done anything for them. But sometimes I look at their photos and say, 'You shits. You took the coward's way out.'"

Says Wertheimer, "In a way, Eric's suicide can be explained. He did it for the insurance. But Bruce--why the hell couldn't he see that he had so much to live for? I don't think any of us will ever understand."

Resurrection

In November 2003 a tense hearing took place at the New York Surrogate's Court. Bruce's wife, Lydia, had appealed to the court to prevent a $500,000 life insurance policy of her husband's from being handed over to Caviarteria's lawyer, Walter Drobenko. Drobenko, who had been the executor of Eric's estate, now also controlled Bruce's and, therefore, Caviarteria.

The court heard allegations from Lydia's lawyer that money from Eric's estate could not be accounted for and that the business had been grossly mismanaged. The judge removed Drobenko as Caviarteria's de facto manager and appointed a receiver--Will Tracy, a Manhattan restaurateur--to manage what was left of the business.

The court ordered Drobenko to relinquish the company's books, something Tracy says took a number of weeks and much prodding. The books were then handed over to forensic accountants.

Within a month of Tracy taking over, the Park Avenue shop was again generating impressive sales. Drobenko attempted to have Tracy removed, but the court rebuffed him.

At press time, the court-appointed accountants, according to Tracy, had been able to account for only $4 million of Eric's $6 million life-insurance money.

In the meantime, Caviarteria continues to recover. Sugarman, a sprightly 75-year-old, now manages the bar. Ruth Sobol drops by most afternoons and sits, just as her husband did, greeting customers like old friends. If everything goes as planned, Tracy hopes to be able to hand the restaurant back to the family as a going concern in early 2005.