Ross Kagan Marks' life reads like a bizarre Hollywood script: Nice Jewish boy, standout on his high school basketball team, secretly yearns to act. Goes to L.A., makes two films with big stars, returns to Chicago, enters family business, cheats to help struggling business, gets caught.

It was a sweet homecoming for Ross Kagan Marks.

On the opening night of the 1996 Chicago Film Festival, the Highland Park native walked down the red carpet with actor Garry Marshall at the premiere of a feature film Marks directed, "The Twilight of the Golds."

Eleven years later, the 40-year-old Glencoe resident, who left Hollywood to help his father in the family wholesaling business, plans to plead guilty to federal fraud charges, according to one of his attorneys, in connection with a scheme to sell more than a million bottles of expired or about-to-expire salad dressing.

The juxtaposition of Marks as filmmaker and fraudster has left his family devastated and friends and professional acquaintances stunned. They remember him as an ambitious yet patient director who grew up in a close-knit Jewish family on the North Shore.

"This is not the guy I knew," said John Davimos, a friend in Los Angeles who Marks brought in as one of the producers of "Twilight." "The guy I knew was a good guy, not somebody who would do the things he's accused of."

Last month, jurors in the fraud trial of Marks' business partner in the salad-dressing scam heard a different view. Witnesses, including the owner of Marks' company and his former assistant, testified how Marks carefully planned the fraud. In ordering labels to cover the original expiration dates with bogus extended dates, Marks requested sticky labels that would be difficult to remove. He also instructed his assistant to set up a toll-free hot line that falsely assured consumers that the salad dressing was fresh and that the original expiration labels were incorrectly applied.

On July 18, Marks' business partner, Charles Farinella, was convicted on two counts of wire fraud and one of count of violating food labeling laws. He faces a maximum of 43 years in prison but likely will receive a lighter penalty when he is sentenced Oct. 3.

Marks did not stand for trial because his attorneys have told the court that he plans to plead guilty, said Jodi Garvey, one of his attorneys. Marks is scheduled to appear in court Sept. 26.

The U.S. attorney's office in Chicago declined to comment on whether Marks would serve any jail time because he has not entered his plea. Through his attorneys, Marks, who is free on bond, declined to comment for this story because his case is still pending.

Marks' sentence may be influenced by his past criminal record. In March 2006, Marks pleaded guilty to charges of counterfeiting after Cook County sheriff's police seized from his Des Plaines warehouse more than 60,000 pieces of costume jewelry that were repackaged as designer-name earrings, bracelets and necklaces. He received 18 months' probation but was released early from those conditions on May 1, 2007.

"This is a person you look at and say he ought to go to jail," said Harley Lewin, a New York attorney who represented Liz Claiborne Inc., owner of the designer jewelry brands that were counterfeited, when it filed civil claims against Marks. "This is a well-bred guy. This is a guy who should have known better."

Growing up in Highland Park, Marks excelled on the high school basketball team. But he had another passion that he kept hidden from his family. During the summers Marks enrolled in acting classes at a nearby women's college and Chicago's Columbia College.

"[Acting] was this very private part of my life," Marks said in a 1996 interview with the Tribune. "I had this secret desire to express myself."

But he pursued his basketball ambitions at Occidental College in Los Angeles after graduating from high school in 1985. Two years later, though, he transferred to New Mexico State University and began taking theater and film classes. "There aren't too many 5-9 Jews in the NBA," he said in the Tribune interview.

After graduating in 1990, he moved back to Los Angeles, where he attended a two-year graduate program for aspiring directors at the American Film Institute Conservatory. His thesis film was "Showdown on Rio Road," completed in 1993.

In Hollywood, Marks was fortunate to have an experienced hand mentoring his budding film career: His father-in-law, Mark Medoff, a Tony Award-winning playwright who has written several plays and movie scripts, including "Children of a Lesser God."

Medoff invited his son-in-law to adapt one of his plays, "The Homage That Follows" into a movie. Marks raised the $400,000 production budget with help from his father, Jeffrey, and shot the movie in just 20 days. "Homage" starred Blythe Danner as a lonely widow in New Mexico who hires a handyman-cook (Frank Whaley) who becomes obsessed with the widow's daughter (Sheryl Lee). Told in flashbacks, the story involves a killing.

The movie, which premiered at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, received just a half-star rating from a Tribune critic.

His next film, "Twilight of the Golds," also was adapted from the stage. The play, written by Jonathan Tolins, is about a young couple who must decide whether to abort their child carrying a collection of genes believed to cause homosexuality. The movie starred Garry Marshall, Faye Dunaway and Jennifer Beals.

Showtime Networks Inc. financed the $3 million project, Davimos said. Tolins, who also wrote the television adaptation, said Marks identified with the script.

"It was a very realistic portrayal of the kinds of families Ross and I grew up in," Tolins said. "Ross understood the family dynamics. It's about high expectations in a close-knit Jewish family."

On the set, Marks got along with everyone, Tolins said, despite having to work with some notoriously temperamental actors.

"Ross was unflappable," Tolins said. "He never seemed like he was taking anything too seriously."

At the Chicago premiere in October 1996, Marks was happy to be back in his hometown to show off his movie, Tolins said. Afterward, he took all of his friends and family out to dinner at a big steakhouse.

But that was the last movie Marks would make. After "Twilight," he returned to Chicago to work with his dad. His friends said Marks had the skills and laid-back personality to be a director but became disenchanted with show business.

"It's a tough way to make a living," Davimos said. "He made two independent movies, and those don't make a lot of money."

Tolins said: "Ross had done what he had set out to do. He had gotten to direct a movie with big stars. He proved he could do it." He added: "I think he preferred Chicago to L.A."

All in the family

In Chicago, Marks had a family business to fall back on.

It was a wholesale distributor of housewares, toys, tools and other general merchandise, started by his grandfather, Morton Marks. The inventory was a mix of imports, closeouts and manufacturing overruns sold to discount and dollar stores.

Morty Marks was the consummate salesman. A gregarious sort, he rarely left the house without a pocket full of inexpensive gifts -- earrings, rings and novelties, said his grandson Scott Marks.

"He would give a gift to someone and say 'You have no obligation unless you want to,'" Scott Marks said.

On Sundays, Morty Marks would spend time with his grandchildren, taking them to the zoo or the movies. "My grandpa was an incredible man, and he was my best friend," Scott Marks said.

In the 1980s, Morty Marks passed the business, Division Sales Inc., to his three sons. After his oldest son and president of the company, Lloyd, died in 1991, a dispute broke out between Lloyd's estate and Jeffrey Marks that resulted in Ross' father controlling the business in the mid-'90s, said Scott Marks, Lloyd's son. The feud also splintered the family, and Scott Marks rarely sees his cousin Ross.

In the late 1990s, when Ross Marks joined Division Sales, the company had started to struggle, according to people familiar with the business. In 2001, with creditors squeezing the company, Division Sales went through an out-of-court insolvency proceeding in which a trustee was assigned to liquidate assets. The result was that Matthew Coleman, a Highland Park private-equity investor, bought the assets. Ross Marks became the president of the company, also named Division Sales, and the company's offices moved from Itasca to Des Plaines. Marks did not have an ownership stake in the company but had the potential to own 40 percent in the future, according to transcripts of Coleman's testimony in the Farinella trial.

Marks was immersed in the day-to-day operations, traveling to trade shows to meet customers. During a Las Vegas trade show in August 2002, he helped sell a collection of name-brand costume jewelry to Dallas-based discount retailer Tuesday Morning Corp., according to a civil lawsuit filed by the company against Marks in 2004. The retailer believed the samples to be authentic, court papers said.

A few months later, Marks approached Tuesday Morning again with new jewelry samples branded with the Monet, Nine West and Napier trademarks owned by Liz Claiborne Inc. During the sale negotiations, Marks and a member of his sales team sent the retailer an e-mail saying that the jewelry "looks unbelievable!" Marks and his sales staff provided assurances that the jewelry was not fake and did not violate any trademarks, Tuesday Morning said.

In May 2003 the retailer bought about 2 million pieces of jewelry from Division Sales for more than $4 million. It sold 60 percent of it during the holiday shopping months of November and December at prices ranging from $22 to $74, according to court documents and Cook County investigators.

Around the Christmas season, Claiborne had received a tip from one of its business partners that Tuesday Morning was selling its name-brand jewelry. The fashion label did not typically do a lot of business with Tuesday Morning.

Claiborne, which like most fashion designers is constantly on the lookout for counterfeits, hired a Chicago private investigator to look into the matter. The results were then shared with Cook County sheriff's police.

The police executed a search warrant on the Des Plaines warehouse on April 12, 2004, and confiscated seven pallets of jewelry. Most of the pieces were individually packaged in small plastic bags that had bar code labels stuck to them. Some of the earrings were mounted on authentic-looking cardboard backs. Authorities also seized rolls of counterfeit labels.

"I thought the labels were really good," said Colin Simpson, assistant Cook County state's attorney. "If you sat and compared the real one to a counterfeit one, you could hardly tell."

After further investigation, authorities learned that Marks had purchased junk jewelry in bulk at a cost of between 99 cents and $4.99 per item. People familiar with the investigation said Marks was struggling to turn around Division Sales and saw the jewelry as a potential way to stabilize the company.

Police arrested Marks on Sept. 30, 2004, and he was charged with multiple counts of possession and manufacturing of counterfeit trademarks. In a news conference the following day, then-Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan called the matter "one of the most extensive cases of fraud that we have seen."

Elaborate label scheme

The Cook County probe also turned up evidence of other possible illegal activities at Division Sales, according to court documents and witness testimony.

In May 2003, Marks and Farinella purchased 1.6 million bottles of Henri's salad dressing from manufacturer ACH Food Cos. of Memphis. They paid $50,000, or about 3 cents a bottle, for several flavors, including creamy garlic and "sweet 'n sour." Farinella was president of a separate wholesale distributor called American Merchandise Group Inc. in Woodridge that leased warehouse space from Division Sales.

All of the salad dressing had labels indicating "sell by" dates ranging between January and June 2003. And the manufacturer could guarantee the products' freshness only for 180 days after the dates on the labels.

Federal regulations do not require expiration dates on food products, except for infant formula and some baby food. "Sell by" dates, also expressed as "best when purchased before" or "use by," usually refer to product quality and are not safety dates. But it is illegal to put a false label on a food product.

Nevertheless, Marks and Farinella hatched a plan to relabel the bottles with "best when purchased by" dates of May 25, 2004, to boost sales of the salad dressing to retailers, federal prosecutors said.

Marks was particular about the labels, his assistant, Cynthia Ann Gatto, told jurors.

"He said he wanted a label with a strong adhesive so that if it was applied to anything else underneath it, if you were to remove the label it would take anything underneath off of it with it," Gatto testified.

Farinella then paid $5,714.72 to a St. Louis company that employs handicapped individuals to apply the bogus white labels to the bottles, federal court documents show.

When customers began asking questions about the new labels, Marks ordered Gatto to doctor a letter in which ACH purported to authorize the relabeling, the assistant testified. An ACH official testified that he never gave permission for the dressing to be relabeled.

Farinella also lied to customers by saying that he had a letter from the FDA granting him permission to relabel the dressing.

On instructions from Marks, Gatto said she also recorded an outgoing message on a toll-free number for consumers who had concerns about the dressing. The recording falsely portrayed ACH as guaranteeing the product's freshness or providing a full refund.

Marks and Farinella sold all of the bottles for $546,000, or 34 cents a bottle, a profit of 31 cents a bottle. The investigation provided scant evidence that anyone became ill from eating the salad dressing, court papers show. So federal prosecutors focused on the fraud.

"This is a case about greed, ruthlessness and the bottom line," Assistant U.S. Atty. Juliet Sorensen told the jury in her opening statement at Farinella's trial. "It's a case about fraud and deceiving the public, from deceiving the big retail chains to deceiving your mom-and-pop grocery store, to deceiving customers who shop at the grocery store."

Scott Marks has not paid much attention to his cousin's legal problems. He said he was sad to hear that Division Sales went out of business in 2004.

But the family's business legacy is not entirely destroyed. Morty Marks' third son, David Marks, runs his own wholesale company.

Still, Ross' woes, Scott Marks said, are "hurtful, very hurtful."

Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts)