On a sunny Friday afternoon in the summer of 2001, Ilana Edelstein noticed a locksmith working on the gate to her 7-acre estate, Windsong, in Montecito. She scared him off, but was confronted moments later by two strangers in a sedan parked inside the gate. Her longtime partner, Martin Crowley, co-founder of Patrón Tequila, was on an Italian cruise, and Edelstein was effectively defenseless.
Suddenly, squad cars pulled up and out jumped the sheriff. Relief at last, she thought. Moments later a white BMW sedan followed, out of which stepped Crowley. Suddenly it dawned on her that the sheriff was not there to protect her but to remove her from the premises. Together with Crowley, she had found an unlikely fortune in an artisanal hand-blown glass bottle labeled “Patrón.”
For both, it was the beginning of the end.
“We had broken up two months before this s— happened. I was fine. It was over, but I imagined we would be the best of friends. We were so connected and close,” recalls Edelstein, a shapely blonde with a South African accent and warm blue eyes. Today she lives in a house a few blocks from the water in Marina del Rey, where she works in financial services.
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Edelstein and Crowley had met through a friend in 1989, 12 years before the incident. At the time, she was an unmarried 36-year-old with her own financial services company. She felt an instant connection with Crowley, a 6-foot SoCal native with puffy hair and dark eyes who lived in a guest cottage in Hermosa Beach. He had come down in the world after losing $8 million on various enterprises ranging from hotels
to vineyards.
Crowley’s friend John Paul DeJoria, who had struck gold 10 years earlier co-founding Paul Mitchell hair care products, employed him to redesign part of his Malibu estate. Over tequila one night, they speculated on which brands Mexican aristocrats likely prefer.
Months later, on a journey to Jalisco, the heart of tequila country, Crowley decided to taste test the product from each factory he passed. One in particular stood out, Siete Leguas.
“He said, ‘John Paul, do you believe this is the smoothest tequila?’” recalls DeJoria about Crowley’s discovery. “Yeah, smoothest I’ve ever had,” he responded.
Key to Casa 7 Leguas’ taste was distiller Francisco Alcaraz, who currently holds title of Master Distiller at Patrón. After tinkering with the formula, Alcaraz came up with a new product, and Patrón was born. “We put in an order for 1,000 cases. ‘Martin, we have a business. You can run it. I’ll help sell it. I’ll sit in on sales meetings,’” recalls DeJoria.
Laws dictate tequila must draw a minimum of 51 percent of its juices from Weber Blue Agave grown only in Jalisco and surrounding states. At Alcaraz’s urging, Patrón was the first brand to export 100 percent Blue Agave tequila processed the old-fashioned way in small batches. While the process is slower and more costly than modern production methods, the proof is in the tasting.
Crowley and Edelstein worked tirelessly to conjure singular packaging fit for a singular product – a trademarked hand-blown bottle with a neon green ribbon and a bumblebee on the label. The result was a unique brand that cost roughly $35 per bottle, when competitors were selling for less than half that much.
“Patrón is what it is because it’s a product of love,” Edelstein maintains.
“We were in love. We weren’t looking for a tequila. It evolved as part of us. It wasn’t apart.”
But the couple had an uphill battle trying to convince the public that tequila, which at the time was considered firewater for frat boys to get drunk on, could be an upmarket libation worth the extra cost.
DeJoria, Crowley and Edelstein fanned out to every trendy bar and restaurant in LA, offering tastes to bartenders and invitations to sales events with sexy models, all part of a grass-roots campaign that involved swag, T-shirts, hats and the like. The big break came in 1991, when they organized a taste test against leading brands like Herradura, Sauza Conmemorativo and Cuervo. The setting was Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in West Hollywood, with a guest list including Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and screen legend James Coburn. A loss would be a setback that would be hard to overcome for the fledgling brand.
Needless to say, Patrón prevailed and became the preferred brand of numerous celebrities. Clint Eastwood gave it a starring role in his movie “In the Line of Fire,” David Bowie sipped it in “The Linguini Incident,” and subsequent celebrity junkets brought in people like Kevin Costner, Pierce Brosnan, Sean Penn and Dennis Hopper. In the years that followed, Patrón singlehandedly created a market for premium tequila. Today it generates $1 billion annually in 130 markets worldwide.
In Edelstein’s book, “The Patrón Way,” she writes of parties with strippers, luxurious yachts and cars, as well as the 7-acre spread in Montecito, out of which the couple ran the business.
“It certainly can change people,” she says of the fortune they accumulated and its impact on Crowley. “For 13 years, acknowledging his downfall before, he was a conscious, connected human being.”
Throughout the constant rise of Patrón, Edelstein had maintained her financial services company until one day Crowley urged her to give it up. With the millions they were earning, there was no need to keep working. The two were never married, and there were no documents entitling her to one red cent of the Patrón fortune.
“I give you 100 percent trust,” is how Edelstein characterizes her relationships. “I’ve never believed a piece of paper makes someone trustworthy.”
Things began to sour on a 2001 trip to Poland to buy a vodka factory. If Edelstein played any role in meetings, it was her calm demeanor balancing out Crowley’s full-throated bravado. “I was the credibility. Martin, when you met him, you might like him, you might not; more didn’t. With Martin it was all ‘me, my and I.’ ”
During a conversation with Poland’s treasury secretary, Edelstein confessed that when she met Crowley he was bankrupt after losing $8 million in investments. After more than a decade of managing the books, marketing, training and overseeing staff, it was the first time Crowley had upbraided her for a decision related to the business, she says.
“He said once, ‘Kings and gods live like this, and I should be able to have anything I want,’ ” Edelstein recalls as the first sign of an unwelcome change in Crowley. “I said, ‘What in God’s name do you want that you don’t have?’ ”
He didn’t have an answer. In 2001 they decided to call it quits, but it was Edelstein’s understanding that she was welcome to remain at Windsong until she found a place of her own.
“All I care about is that I brought something to your life, I added something to your life,” she says she told him. After 12 years, his response was, “No, not really.”
“I should have known then that I had a problem,” says Edelstein.
In fact, she had received a fax five days before the eviction, requesting she move out of Windsong. Earlier on the day of the eviction she called her sister’s husband, who told her not to leave the compound until he arrived from LA. It was he at whom Crowley pointed when he said to the sheriff, “Arrest that man! He’s on my property.” Edelstein locked her Jeep, blocking the single-lane driveway, and took her brother-in-law’s car back up to the house. The maneuver bought her some time in which to call her attorney and figure out what to do.
After having her evicted, Crowley sued her. She lost and appealed the case, and finally decided to call a meeting to find out why he turned on her. “It was nothing you did,” she says he told her. “The attorneys were telling me what you could do.”
“If two adults make a decision to marry each other, they should figure out how to unravel it without a court getting involved. The problem is people stay together too long to the point where they hate each other or hurt each other,” is how Edelstein sees it. “We vowed if things changed we would never do that. We were doing it.”
Years into their relationship, Edelstein learned of Crowley’s cardiomyopathy, a potentially fatal condition he kept hidden. Alcohol was verboten, so at tastings and other business-related events, they worked out a pantomime in which she would surreptitiously trade his full glass with her empty. If Crowley wasn’t vigilant about his condition, Edelstein was. But once they were separated, his health rapidly deteriorated until his death in April 2003.
Today, her message to Crowley belies the conflicting emotions she still feels: “You could have had your best friend and the best person in your life for the rest of your life, you dumb idiot, and be alive because I was keeping you alive, because I was the only one paying attention to your condition.” She pauses, collecting herself. “He didn’t need to die. We had an amazing experience together. Martin singlehandedly changed my life, and it had nothing to do with money.”
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Since Crowley’s death, the market for premium tequila has grown 238 percent, Patrón along with it. Earlier this year, George Clooney and partners sold their premium brand, Casamigos, for $1 billion. “They do 125 cases a year. Patrón does about 3 million,” figures DeJoria. “That puts our value, if we go on the same premise, way over $10 billion.”
Near the town of Atotonilco El Alto in the highlands of Jalisco, Hacienda Patrón’s doors are open. The site includes a factory, a chapel for workers, compost recycling plant, guest rooms, gourmet restaurant and bar where the namesake tequila flows in all its variations. In the courtyard is a fountain and reflecting pool as well as a pair of sculptures depicting John Paul DeJoria and distiller Francisco Alcaraz, facing each other from opposite ends of the space. Crowley didn’t live to see the building completed, and Edelstein has never visited.
