Every summer, Mondella used to host a barbecue for his employees, providing all the food and doing the cooking for everyone. There was no barbecue the summer after he died, but in 2016 the tradition resumed, close to his birthday, June 25th, and in 2017 the company continued it. On the day in July when the event took place, I wandered around Red Hook in the morning, checking out the beehives at Added Value Farms, then sheltering under a tent there during a downpour. The rain slackened to a drizzle. Dana was sending me e-mails saying the barbecue was being delayed until the rain stopped. Red Hook is a waterfront place, with the Statue of Liberty a near neighbor across the harbor, and a high, oceanic sky that’s larger because none of the buildings are tall. I strolled past businesses that are part of the neighborhood’s current incarnation—Fleisher’s Craft Butchery, Widow Jane Distillery, Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie, Flickinger Glassworks. The hot, humid air smelled of the open water it was blowing in from.

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Finally the rain quit and patches of blue sky opened up. On Dikeman Street’s wide sidewalk, next to a delivery gate for the cherry factory, workmen were sitting on folding chairs beside a table laid with sodas and picnic paraphernalia. Tom Bentz, Dana’s husband, was cooking burgers, hot dogs, and marinated chicken breasts on a gas grill the size of a small bus. It had different grilling venues, and ventilator hoods, and shelves, and control knobs of varying sizes. Someone’s CD player was blasting rap music with lyrics that did not mess around. Tom, Dana, and Dominique wore black T-shirts printed with the Dell’s logo in white. Most of the workmen wore sleeveless shirts, and all were red-spattered and generally a sunburn shade of maraschino red.

Leon Perry, who began his job at the factory after his release from prison twenty years ago, told me how Mondella had loaned him money for rent when he started out. Minnow Johnson, a mechanic, said Mondella had funded his studies at trade school. Arthur Casey remembered when Mondella paid for his three-hundred-dollar cab ride home one night when he had to work late.

Afterward, during the cleanup, Leon Perry pointed to the grill, which Tom was scraping with a metal spatula, and said, “This was his grill.” For a moment it was as if Mondella himself had materialized there on Dikeman Street, analogized by this amazing piece of equipment.

Tom looked at the sky. “It cleared up,” he said. “That was Dana and Dominique’s father looking down.” The guys posed for a group photo, smiling, with red arms around one another’s shoulders, and then went back to work.

I asked Dominique and Dana why they had decided to take over running the company themselves. After all, they could have assembled a committee of consultants, asked for input, done a search for a plant manager, let someone else direct the business day to day. Or they could have sold it; recent years have seen the buyout of other maraschino-cherry companies by large corporations like Green Giant Foods.

“This is all our father left,” Dana explained. “He didn’t have a home. His cars were taken away by the investigation. I didn’t get to sort through his things. He lived with his girlfriend, and it’s not really my place to go in to her apartment and start grabbing things. What I would’ve loved would’ve been, like, even if I had a pair of cufflinks so I had something that’s tangible of his. The only tangible thing that we have left of him is this place.”

“This was his life. It was his blood, sweat, and tears,” Dominique said.

“When my father came, the business was failing, and he took a risk, he put everything he had into it, and he made it so much better, a real success. When we came, it looked as if it was going to fail, because of everything that was happening around it. And we took a risk.”

“We put every inch of ourselves into it.”

“I lost my father, and I had to come back two days later and go to work. You didn’t have time to mourn. He wouldn’t’ve even have wanted that. He wouldn’t have wanted us to dwell. He would’ve been, like, ‘Get up, let’s go, whaddya doin’?’ ”

“It’s definitely been very stressful, but I always think positive,” Dominique said.

“I’m more realistic,” Dana said. “I try not to think about the factory twenty-four seven, but I’m dreaming about it at night, seeing the cherries, the different sizes, in my head. We sell five different sizes, from small to medium to large to extra-large to colossal, with stems and without, so that’s ten different kinds—”

“Also crushed cherries, and cherries in halves,” Dominique said. “And in different colors. Not only red.”

“It’s a statistic that a lot of family businesses don’t survive past the second generation,” Dana said. “My dad was in the third generation, and now we’re the fourth. You can make it work, it’s just a lot of hard work and dedication.”

“Growing up, he always taught us—like, be responsible,” Dominique said. “We just knew we had to step up.”

Tim O’Neal, who helped solve the red-honey mystery, tends his hives on Saturdays at Added Value Farms. The bizarre events of the summer of 2010 have never happened again. I found him smoking his bees—making them disoriented with smoke from a small hand-held device—in order to do hive maintenance. O’Neal is a tall, dark-haired man from Troy, Ohio, and he has the accent of that part of the country. “I felt pity when I heard Mondella died,” he said. “What a terrible situation. He was a good neighbor. We all live in a community together—who cares if some dude is growing marijuana? It’s practically legal now anyway. I’m sure he was putting out good product. I was shocked the situation turned out so badly.”

The fame of Andrew Coté, the beekeeping expert who helped Mondella, has only grown. Lately he has branched out into other countries, riding a surge of interest in beekeeping worldwide. The last time I talked to him at his stall in Union Square, tour organizers from China stopped by to discuss arrangements for his upcoming lectures there. He said that reporters had called him when Mondella died. “It was a dark hour. Arthur was not looking to hurt anybody. He had honesty and integrity, and he made it clear, when dealing with the red-honey problem, that he cared about the bees’ welfare.” Coté also pointed out, apropos of Tim O’Neal’s original ethylene-glycol theory, that recently some hives in East New York had produced a green and poisonous honey whose main ingredient turned out to be antifreeze.

David Selig, the restaurateur who had been the factory’s nearest beekeeping neighbor, has created one hit restaurant after another. A recent success, Rockaway Taco, has inspired him to move from Red Hook to that distant part of the city. Selig is another Canadian offspring, a wiry man with dark, Gallic features and a greeter’s easy manner.

“I have great admiration for Arthur, and a lot of empathy,” Selig said. “He was in his factory morning and night; at one time or another I’ve slept in every one of my businesses. And after years in restaurants, which in New York City have to be the most regulated industry on the planet, I know what he was facing. If the city and the feds had started in with him, they’d still be on him to this day. He grew up in this regulatory world and I’m sure he knew how it would go down. What he did was unthinking, like pushing a friend out of the way of a speeding car. He had that boyhood type of loyalty. He gave himself up for his family.”

Cerise Mayo, who was one of the first to notice the red honey, no longer keeps bees. She has dark, curly hair and brown eyes, and she wears clothes featuring patterns from nature, such as a shirt with swallows flying wingtip to wingtip. After the summer of 2010, she gave her bees away. The thought of how difficult it is to know what they’ll get into in an urban environment discouraged her. If she ever keeps bees again, she wants to be out in the country, in a more pastoral setting. “I felt horrible when I learned of Mr. Mondella’s death,” she said. “How hard it must have been to carry all the weight he had to deal with. I even saw some follow-up stories that seemed to be blaming his death on the bees. That’s crazy. The bees were just behaving like bees.” ♦