Cirque Du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust (5 page)

But building a winery was still not enough to sustain his father’s range of interest, as it turned out. With his mother living at the school some 45 miles away Dirgham found it acceptable to leave his youngest son and go on mysterious travels overseas. This young, enthusiastic, hard working child was often left alone at the vineyard home for extended periods of time. Tareq can’t explain those absences, except to confirm that Dirgham Salahi speaks seven languages, including Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, German and French. There were always whispers that Dirgham Salahi worked for the CIA or a similar government agency. Such claims can’t be verified today. However it must be included that in Tareq’s stated opinion, his father could have also been absent on occasion to be in the company of other women. His mother was seldom at the main house with her husband, and Dirgham’s restless attention span was known by all of them.

“Every Thanksgiving my father would gather us around the table, me and my best friend Gregory, and tell us his stories about how President Kennedy had sent him on missions.” Tareq also recalled that his father claimed to have been “to embassies in the Middle East.” He would tell us, ‘I’ve lived a most amazing life. I’m proud of what I’ve done for my country.’”

Both Tareq and Gregory recall the year Dirgham brought out a special briefcase to show the boys. He told them he’d used it during his missions for the government. It was a regular looking briefcase with a standard leather bound grip handle but when the handle was laid down flat on to the top of the case it triggered a mechanism to record both audio and video.

“It was real pre-James Bond stuff,” Tareq says. “Back then no one would ever have thought a briefcase could record anything!” Asked how often his father might have gone off on government business, Tareq replied, “How much was that a part of his life? 5 percent, 20 percent? I just don’t know.”

Years later, Gregory had the opportunity to fly with Dirgham and Corinne Salahi to a reunion vacation in the Dominican Republic. “After a bit of cognac drinking on the plane,” Gregory recalls, “Dirgham began to reminisce about what he’d done for the JFK administration. He spoke of his ‘Ambassador-like’ duties. He told me there was a street in Jerusalem named Salahi Street, comparable to New York’s Park Avenue. It made me think he’d done work for our government somewhere in the Middle East.”

One morning when Tareq was about eight or nine—and well into a three week stretch fending for himself eating canned spaghetti, chili, and frozen pizza—he was walking away from the house to catch the school bus when a scruffy looking man approached him carrying a rifle over his shoulder. Tareq didn’t feel particularly threatened or alarmed by the sight of the rifle since he walked around with one himself sometimes. Any warning cues that an older boy might have picked up at that moment went over his head.

“He said to me, ‘You live there?’ and I answered him, ‘Yeah.’

He wanted to know if it was okay if he went hunting on the property that day. I told him no because there wouldn’t be anyone home all day. Looking back today I see what a stupid thing that was to say.” But the boy just walked on to the bus stop and never gave it another thought.

Today, looking back on the scene that confronted him when he got home that afternoon, he says, “There was blood on the light switch and blood on the floor. And Tender, my Doberman pinscher, didn’t greet me at the door as usual. I followed the blood path and saw my dog was laying there dead.”

Tareq later described hearing rustling downstairs in the back of the house. The boy quickly grabbed up his fully loaded rifle. Then, maintaining the composure to act, in spite of having just discovered his loyal pet brutally slaughtered, he made a quick sweep of the upstairs before he picked up the telephone and dialed the operator for help. Tareq was sure some of the blood and bits of flesh he saw on the kitchen floor belonged to whoever had broken into his home. He thought he saw a man running away through the back vineyard but he couldn’t be sure he was alone in the house.

“There was no such thing as 911 back then,” he said. “So it seemed like forever waiting for the police to come on the line.”

He remained in place, holding his rifle in his lap, while the first connection on the line was to the wrong Sheriff’s office. Time dragged. Finally, he was transferred to the Fauquier County Sheriff dispatch. He told the officer on the phone about everything he had just encountered inside his home and that he was alone.

“I told them I’d just gotten robbed. They said it would take them at least thirty minutes to get way out there to our property. I remember telling the officer that I had a rifle and I knew how to use it. He said to me, ‘Son, if you see somebody you don’t know, you squeeze that trigger!’”

Deputies arrived to find that the house had been thoroughly tossed. Gone were Dirgham Salahi’s collection of gold coins, plus pieces of Corinne’s silver and all of her jewelry. Guns and other valuables that were kept under his father’s bed were gone. The robber appeared to have spent much of the day making trips back and forth to wherever his car had been parked.

After this episode the traveling Salahi parents decided they would rent out a garage apartment to a local Sheriff’s deputy and his wife. That’s how Terry and Donna Shrum came into Tareq’s life. As soon as they moved in, they began making sure young Tareq got off safely to school each day, had a nutritious meal at night, did his homework, and went to bed in the main house at a decent hour. He thrived under the sense of structure that they provided. He often spent the weekends with Terry shooting guns on the property or eagerly pulling apart and reassembling a piece of vineyard machinery.

His farm boy existence ended at the age of twelve, when Tareq was sent away to boarding school at the Randolph-Macon Academy, a college-prep military school in nearby Front Royal, Virginia. He is remembered there as a student who made good grades, but the place was important to him in the larger scheme of things, because that’s where he met his lifelong pal, Gregory.

Gregory is the child of a well established and wealthy Virginia family and is now an accomplished computer software executive who lives in the DC suburbs with his wife and three children. He smiles broadly remembering their carefree youth. He’s a plainspoken man with his feet solidly planted on the ground.

“During school breaks we’d all go to Tareq’s house and party. It was always a lot of fun—just to be away from school,” Gregory recalled with a big grin and a glance over at his buddy.

Tareq finished the thought, “My parents wouldn’t be home and we’d go stay there a few days. I remember a lot of Sunkist Coolers. We had a blast every time we went.” No parents, no rules and no worries. Tareq developed into a young man who grabbed life with gusto; no one had ever told him he couldn’t.

In interviews, Tareq has sadly admitted that he was never very close with his mother. He describes Corinne Salahi as a stern and unaffectionate woman who was mostly absent from his daily life. His image of her is a woman with constant monetary concerns. Tareq says it was he and his father who shared so much, especially their mutual passion for the vines and the product they created.

Dirgham was a self-taught vineyard owner and winemaker, and while he dreamed of expanding the Oasis property, he also understood his limitations. His hopes for the future were wrapped up in his youngest son, who showed a true interest and craving to learn the craft. It was decided Tareq would attend the University of California, Davis and enroll in the famed Viticulture and Enology Department so he could learn the real business of winemaking. The plan was for Tareq to return to Oasis upon graduation, following a stint working in California’s famous Napa Valley Wine Country. He embraced all of it, and also did a brief tour of Australia’s wine industry before heading home to Virginia in 1994, filled with youthful drive and ambitious dreams.

Tareq says his father had always promised him that in return for all of his work and loyalty; someday Dirgham would sell Oasis to him, outright, for one dollar.

The most useful lesson Tareq took from his education was that many people in business focus entirely upon the completion and delivery of their products, but the truly successful ones realize, if they can find ways to improve their whole industry, the results lift everyone up and the benefits can be immense. He came home with big plans for his little corner of the world.

Tareq played as hard as he worked after his return to Oasis. He got right back in with the Virginia polo playing crowd, which in the 1996-97 season included Susan Cummings, the daughter of a billionaire arms dealer with a 350 acre estate in nearby Warrenton. Cummings murdered her Argentinean boyfriend, polo aficionado Roberto Villegas, in her home on the morning of September 7, 1997, while he ate breakfast.

The Salahis feared Tareq would have to testify at her trial, because prosecutors believed the couple’s final, fatal argument might have been sparked by Villegas’ sale of one of Susan’s horses to Tareq. The Salahis’ budding wine business was not yet strong enough to survive a public scandal, so they were relieved when the heiress’s legal team used the domestic abuse/self-defense strategy. The jury found Susan Cummings guilty of voluntary manslaughter. The heiress was sentenced to serve just
60 days
in the Fauquier County jail.

She got out nine days early.

When Tareq returned to Virginia after completing his education in California he brought a lady friend back with him, but the relationship soured within the year. Being a healthy young man with money, Tareq dated a range of female companions. He did have one particular girlfriend for nearly four years, but still there was never a woman who made him yearn to settle down and marry.

Although he and his father had much in common, Dirgham preferred his old car to bounce around the dusty country roads, wine-stained blue jeans and dirty fingernails; while Tareq bought fancy sports cars and a boat and wore tailored jackets and imported loafers. He indulged his love of polo and bought fine horses. To outsiders he looked every bit like a wealthy, single playboy, but no matter how hard he worked or how much he increased the vineyard’s business, he felt his mother’s withering disapproval each time he rewarded himself. He decided that it was a good thing that she spent most of her time at the school in Alexandria.

On the business front, Tareq set out to apply the knowledge of the production of sparkling wines that he had made his specialty at UC Davis. It was a labor intensive effort, but one Tareq believed would pay real dividends in the form of word-of-mouth advertising amongst true oenophiles. His inspiration was that the introduction of a fine Virginia Cuvee could be just the thing to put Oasis on the wine lover’s map. He had already produced his first successful batch in 1999, bottled with a handsome label that read:
Oasis Celebration 2000.
Now Tareq boldly wrote to the editors at
Wine Enthusiast
magazine and invited them to come to Virginia to have a taste. It was an audacious move that could have easily backfired. As it was, they took their time in showing up. But once they did, Oasis Vineyard found itself ranked as one of the magazine’s “Top 10 in the World.”

We were impressed with Mr. Tareq Salahi’s passion
for his sparkling wines and his focus on methode champenoise at the University of California, Davis. It’s no surprise that this Oasis Brut Sparkling Wine is one of the Top 10 Sparkling Wines & Champagnes in the World! We tasted a record
5,184 wines from 24 countries over the last 12 months. The Oasis Brut Sparkling Wine NV has been selected as one of only 10 sparkling Wines & Champagnes in the world have been awarded this prestigious honor

- The Wine Enthusiast

And
The Wine Spectator
magazine continued the praise of Tareq’s creation.

Oasis Celebration 2000 Brut - “Something quite solid… A satisfying, fruit centered sparkling wine with plenty of crisp apple flavor and rather full body.

- The Wine Spectator

Oasis became the largest and most successful winery in the region, selling tens of thousands of cases of wine each year. It was due in large part to the innovations of the partner/son. Tareq continued to follow his vision that the best way to make Oasis even more profitable was to sell the entire region as a tourist destination. He set about enlisting other wineries to join him in his marketing efforts. He launched the first website for a Virginia winery, urging visitors to ask their local stores and restaurants to stock Oasis wines. He invited civic and business groups to have their meetings out on the new back deck at Oasis overlooking the vineyard pond. Weddings, anniversary and birthday parties were booked too.

Things kept looking up. Governor Jim Gilmore appointed Tareq to the Virginia Wine Board, on which he continued to serve during the administration of Governor Mark Warner. When Tim Kaine became the governor in 2006, he would appoint Tareq to the Virginia Tourism Corporation in recognition of all the benefits the commonwealth received each year from the rapidly emerging wine industry.

Tareq’s visions were becoming a reality while he helped make Dirgham’s dreams for the property take shape. Tareq traded in his smaller boat for a sumptuous 40-footer that he christened “Celebration.” He docked it at the marina near the Pentagon, not far from the Georgetown nightclub district. He bought an Aston Martin sports car to dazzle the ladies as he drove them back and forth between the boat and the nightlife. Then, one fateful night in the summer of 2000, at the Café Milano in Georgetown, Tareq Salahi found himself being introduced to a tall, willowy platinum blonde named Michaele Holt. She turned to him with a megawatt smile and he felt himself stopped cold in his fancy tracks. Today’s public may be familiar with Michaele’s charisma, but Tareq had no defenses prepared. She struck him as the most beautiful woman in the world. What chance did he have? For crying out loud, the Gipsy Kings were actually playing in the background. Tareq Salahi had just walked smack into a close encounter with the First Kind.