By Maureen Farrell
Maureen Farrell read hundreds of pages of court documents and interviewed current and former employees from New York to Sarasota, Fla.
In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath.
“Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied.
“Who do you believe to be the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?” the lawyer persisted.
The executive, Steve Kourelakos, who had worked at the company for more than two decades and was being deposed in a lawsuit between owners, repeated his answer: “I’m not sure.”
It is odd, to say the least, when a top executive of a company claims not to know who his boss is. And Boar’s Head is no fly-by-night enterprise. The company is one of the country’s most recognizable deli-meat brands; it generates what employees and others estimate as roughly $3 billion in annual revenue and employs thousands of people.
But anonymity and secrecy have been central features of Boar’s Head, a privately owned company run by two intensely guarded families, the Brunckhorsts and the Bischoffs. “They’re as secretive as anybody I can think of in the industry,” said Tom Johnston, the editor of Meatingplace, a trade publication for meat processors.
That armor of secrecy has not cracked, even as the company is facing the biggest scandal in its history.
This summer, 10 people died and dozens were hospitalized with listeria, a dangerous food-borne bacteria, most after eating liverwurst prepared in a Boar’s Head factory in Virginia. U.S. Department of Agriculture disclosed that law enforcement is looking into the matter, and at least six lawsuits for wrongful death and personal injury have been brought against the company. The Virginia plant, which employed some 500 people, was shut down.
Yet no member of the Brunckhorst or Bischoff family has made a public statement. A meat recall notice and apology written on the company’s website is signed, simply, “Sincerely, Boar’s Head.”
So who is in charge?
The day-to-day operations fall to the company president, Carlos Giraldo. Mr. Giraldo, the former head of marketing, was elevated when the longtime president, Michael Martella, retired in 2021.
But in legal testimony taken before the recent outbreak, Mr. Martella and others made clear that the final word on what happens at Boar’s Head comes not from the president, but from three family members: Robert S. Martin, known as Bob, the 74-year-old grandson of one of the founders, who is referred to as co-chief executive in court documents; his 50-year-old son, Robert A. Martin, known as Bob Junior; and their cousin Frank Brunckhorst III, 61. (Be forewarned: There are a lot of Bobs and Franks in this story.)
“From morning until night, we’re thinking about Boar’s Head, how to do it. We’re constantly in contact with each other,” Frank Brunckhorst said in a deposition in 2022, referring to himself, Bob Martin and Bob Martin Jr. “It’s our identities. It’s our life. That’s what we do.”
You won’t see any of these names on the company’s website, however, and that secrecy extends through the ranks. Even senior employees know few details about financials and sales. (Current and former employees, as well as other people who worked with the company spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.)
As Boar’s Head expanded from a small deli-meat company based in Brooklyn to a well-known national brand, the families’ wealth grew. Collectively, the owners, including the two Bob Martins and Mr. Brunckhorst, along with other cousins who don’t work at Boar’s Head, received around $1.5 billion in cash distributions over almost a 15-year period, according to estimates derived from court records.
This probably would have remained hidden except for one family member’s discontentment. Eric Bischoff has sued his cousins and the company several times over the allocation of corporate shares. Some of the records in those cases have been sealed or redacted, but from those that are public, a picture emerges of family members linked by history and a business, and torn apart by tensions over money and pride.
The two Bob Martins, Frank Brunckhorst and Eric Bischoff declined to comment. In response to questions, the company sent an unsigned email saying that “our entire team — from senior management to our employees on the facility floor — is committed to ensuring consumers can continue to trust the Boar’s Head brand.” The email said to attribute the statement to a “Spokesperson for the Company.”
On a Saturday night in May 2005, hundreds of Boar’s Head employees and distributors gathered in the ballroom of Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel in their tuxedos and gowns. They were there to celebrate Boar’s Head’s 100th anniversary.
The star that evening was Bob Martin, whose dashing good looks, charisma and wealth had given him the air of celebrity among his rivals. He was said to have multiple houses and a passion for boating. Some people called him the Jay Gatsby of the deli-meat industry — a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s enigmatic protagonist.
When Mr. Martin took to the stage, a map of the United States appeared on a screen behind him, according to two people who attended. He spoke of the company’s founder, the first Frank Brunckhorst, and his decision to sell deli meats out of a horse-drawn carriage. One dot appeared on the map, in Brooklyn, marking the extent of the company’s reach in its early days.
A few decades later, in 1933, the original founder’s son (another Frank) teamed up with his brother-in-law Bruno Bischoff and a third partner, Ted Weiler. They bought a real estate business and built a meat processing plant in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Boar’s Head was officially born.
At the Waldorf, Mr. Martin, who is Bruno Bischoff’s grandson, spoke of his family’s dream to take its high-quality deli meat across the United States. Dots started popping up across the map behind him, nearly blanketing the United States. The family had achieved the dream, he said, but it was just getting started.
His cousin Eric Bischoff came onstage a little later, walking the audience through the lives and ideas of his grandfather, uncles and cousins.
The night was a show of success, glamour and family bonds. It was also the last time all of these family members would come together in public celebration. The long-simmering fissures between branches of the family would soon pull them apart.
Bob Martin and Eric Bischoff, both grandsons of Bruno Bischoff, graduated college in the mid-1970s. They started working for the family business right away.
Both Mr. Bischoff and Mr. Martin started in the Brooklyn processing plant, cycling through a variety of low-level jobs. But from the start, there was a gnawing disparity between them. In the 1960s, the company shares had been put into family trusts. When Eric Bischoff’s father died, however, his shares had been bought back by the company; his son hoped that by putting in enough time at the business, he could recoup his family’s shares.
After paying their dues, the men moved into managerial roles. Mr. Martin jumped into sales. At the time, the company was still very much a local New York business. Asking the sales team to pitch outside New York was “almost like a death wish for these guys because no one had ever heard of our product and we were very expensive,” Mr. Martin said in a deposition.
Mr. Martin’s answer was to treat Boar’s Head cold cuts as a luxury item. According to industry lore, Mr. Martin was shopping with his girlfriend at Bloomingdale’s and saw how Chanel and other companies had branded perfume stalls. He decided he’d do the same for cold cuts, persuading supermarkets to outfit their deli-counter workers with Boar’s Head aprons and put Boar’s Head posters around their stores.
While Mr. Martin was supercharging sales, Mr. Bischoff gravitated to operations. He moved to Virginia to open Boar’s Head’s first factory outside New York. (That factory is the site of this year’s listeria outbreak.) He built a house on a working farm not far from Jarratt, where the plant was located.
“I was the only one from the company that was down there,” Mr. Bischoff said in a deposition. “So I had to be everywhere at the same time.”
Still, he seemed insecure about his role in the company, which was then run by Mr. Martin’s father (another Robert). In a deposition, Mr. Martin recalled that in those days, he and Mr. Bischoff were both just employees without power. “We were at the total mercy of the elders,” he said. He remembered visiting Virginia and driving along country roads with Mr. Bischoff, who became enraged and asked him, “Why doesn’t anybody respect me?” Mr. Martin recalled answering, “You have to prove something to these guys.” By 1987, Eric Bischoff had apparently proved himself; he got about 8 percent of the company’s overall shares.
The same year, Mr. Brunckhorst, who is about a decade younger than Bob Martin and Eric Bischoff, graduated from Carnegie Mellon. Mr. Brunckhorst described in a deposition how he had wanted to take a few weeks off after final exams before starting at the company, but the elder Mr. Martin told him that he had to start right away “or you don’t come in.”
Like his older cousins, Mr. Brunckhorst started at the bottom, learning how to bone ham, make bologna and mix spices. In a deposition, he estimated he worked at least 70 hours a week in the early years and earned $7 an hour. By the 1990s, Mr. Brunckhorst started taking on bigger roles, too. Trained as a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, he took charge of the company’s financials — digitizing them and creating spreadsheets for cost projections. As the Boar’s Head name became better known, Mr. Martin’s sales push became more aggressive. If stores wanted to offer high-end cold cuts from competitors like Thumann’s or Dietz & Watson behind the deli counter, they could no longer carry Boar’s Head.
Boar’s Head sold its products to a network of purveyors, who would have to buy the delivery routes and provide their own trucks and warehouses. It was worth it: A Boar’s Head route could practically guarantee a profitable business. (One route in Connecticut, for example, cost $914,000 and generated about $3 million in sales a year, according to a 2020 lawsuit.)
Prospective distributors had to go through training and promise to abide by Boar’s Head sales policies. According to one lawsuit, the company dictates how distributors paint the delivery trucks, how they handle and rotate merchandise and what branded apparel they wear. Purveyors were told to sign detailed sales policies, but they were given only lists of certain rules, not copies of the signed documents, according to three current and former employees. Every few years, the company would update distributors in person on policy changes and have them sign again.
In 2001, the company moved its headquarters to Sarasota, Fla., in an effort to bolster a successful, exclusive partnership with Publix, the Florida supermarket chain.
Top leadership moved, too. Mr. Brunckhorst moved to a house near the new company headquarters. Mr. Martin bought a house on the tip of Longboat Key, an island near Sarasota. Mr. Bischoff stayed in New York.
The business had grown to roughly $1 billion in annual sales. The owners considered a new chapter. Mr. Brunckhorst started reaching out to investment bankers and lawyers with an eye to selling the company.
The intrafamily dynamics would quickly complicate a potential sale.
Tensions had been brewing between Mr. Bischoff and his cousins over the years. Mr. Martin would later say in a deposition that Mr. Bischoff tried to undermine employees hired by him or his father. Things got so bad, Mr. Martin said, that he and Mr. Brunckhorst offered to pay Mr. Bischoff to stay home.
Mr. Bischoff eventually told Mr. Martin that he was frustrated that he still had a smaller stake in the company than his cousins. In early December 2005, about six months after the 100th anniversary party at the Waldorf, he declared war, suing the company, Mr. Martin and Mr. Brunckhorst.
The case was settled in 2008, with Mr. Bischoff getting a larger stake, equal to roughly 14 percent of the company. That stake entitled him to a huge payout. In a deposition in 2022, Mr. Bischoff was asked if he had received about $225 million in cash payments from Boar’s Head over the previous 14 years. He didn’t contest the figure. “I don’t know exactly, but I have collected a lot of money,” he said. Based on that figure, the shareholders who owned the remaining 85 percent of the company would have received more than $1 billion in payments in that time frame.
After the lawsuit, Mr. Bischoff no longer worked at the company. Mr. Martin, who was by that point the owner running the place, stopped talking to his cousin, and employees knew not to utter Mr. Bischoff’s name around the office.
Mr. Brunckhorst had stepped down from day-to-day operations at the company in 2003, but “was as active as he always was” in the business, Mr. Martella said in a 2022 deposition. In that deposition, Mr. Martella, who served 20 years as the company’s president, said Mr. Brunckhorst still decided how much Boar’s Head would spend on capital improvements to update the plants and equipment as well as whether the company would pay distributions to the family.
Mr. Brunckhorst didn’t go to headquarters often, but when he did he would arrive in a T-shirt, shorts and flip flops, according to three people who saw him, a striking contrast to his cousins, who typically sported blazers. Mr. Brunckhorst “didn’t like talking over the phone,” Mr. Martella said. “And he definitely didn’t like email.” When there were important matters to discuss, Mr. Martella would be summoned to Mr. Brunckhorst’s house.
The tight rein on information extended down the ranks. In 2022, Craig Fair, who was senior director of finance at the time, called Boar’s Head “very, very privately held to the point where it’s very siloed.” Employees on his finance team weren’t allowed to see even basic information about Boar’s Head sales or even the tonnage of meat the company shipped. “That’s how ownership wanted it, and that’s what we did,” Mr. Fair said in a deposition, admitting the secrecy made his work difficult.
While the owners weren’t always present at headquarters or at the plants, they were firmly in charge. “Frank and Bob were always directing the course of the company as far as what we should do and what we shouldn’t do,” Mr. Martella said in a deposition. “I suggested it. They approved it.”
As Mr. Kourelakos, the chief financial officer, put it in his 2022 deposition: “The owners run the company.”
Bob Martin’s son, Bob Jr., joined Boar’s Head in the mid-2000s after working for a marketing agency in New York. As he moved into a leadership position, the younger Mr. Martin cut a far different figure from his charismatic father. Nervous about public speaking, Bob Jr. would often read from notes when he talked to the staff.
The elder Mr. Martin has long kept a private office in the penthouse of the company’s headquarters in downtown Sarasota, where few gain admittance. Even Mr. Martella said in a deposition that in 10 years, he had entered the sanctuary only twice. Bob Martin Jr., by contrast, has an office on the floor with other executives.
Bob Jr. made his own mark. He championed packaged hummus, which the company started making in 2014 and has become a big seller. He became a shareholder. His father quietly transferred shares to his son, who, by 2016, held 15 percent of the company. This enraged Mr. Bischoff, who sued Bob Martin again, saying the transfers violated a shareholder agreement. (A Florida judge threw out the suit, but Mr. Bischoff is appealing the decision.)
By 2022, some senior executives said in depositions, Bob Martin Jr. had taken over his father’s role as the elder Mr. Martin pulled back. But in a deposition that year, Bob Martin insisted that “we operate in a group.” If there’s an issue, “we’ll speak together, Frank, myself, Bob, about damn near everything.”
A nonfamily president runs the day-to-day operations of the company. Mr. Martella was known for checking on employees or even driving to their houses when they had difficulties. He flew frequently to the company’s plants and had close relationships with the purveyors.
He was replaced by Mr. Giraldo, who started at Boar’s Head more than a decade ago after a career at Tropicana and other consumer products companies. Like the younger Mr. Martin, Mr. Giraldo was focused on marketing and innovation.
The listeria outbreak this summer forced the company to publicly address safety concerns. But there were signs of trouble at the Virginia plant for several years. In 2022, U.S. inspectors warned that conditions at the plant posed an “imminent threat” to public health. They pointed to extensive rust, deli meats exposed to wet ceilings, green mold and holes in the walls.
This September, Boar’s Head said it would hire a food safety officer who would report to Boar’s Head’s president, though it never mentioned Mr. Giraldo’s name. The company also announced the names of four food safety experts who would investigate problems at the company and come up with solutions.
The company released extensive biographies on each of these new safety members on its website. The names of Bob Martin, Bob Martin Jr. and Frank Brunckhorst were nowhere to be seen.