As booze runs go, a bankruptcy trustee's effort to reclaim hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wine, champagne and spirits in the U.S. Virgin Islands has become a magnum opus.

The wine is part of the Chapter 7 estate of Jeffrey Prosser, who once ran the territory's local phone company, a daily newspaper and a bank, but has spent the past half-decade wrangling with creditors and trustees in bankruptcy court.

Court-appointed trustee Jim Carroll valued the wine at roughly $400,000 in pleadings, although Prosser estimates it is worth half to three-quarters of that amount.

The critical question, according to court papers, is whether the wines still have value.

Carroll alleges that Prosser "willfully and in bad faith dissipated and destroyed" the wine, rendering top-shelf bottles plonk through negligent storage. He has asked a bankruptcy judge to hold Prosser in contempt.

For his part, Prosser calls the charge a "preposterous theory" that is part of a ruse to attack him personally. He notes that one of the trustee's agents jeopardized the wine by unplugging an air conditioner in the storage room.

The wine dispute illustrates the heightened acrimony that has marked the long bankruptcy case -- and the way tensions can be exacerbated in a forum as small as the U.S. Virgin Islands.

A pair of New York wine experts were dispatched, in the company of U.S. marshals, to the Virgin Islands to examine the bottles. Local police have looked into the dispute and, in a letter circulated through the bankruptcy parties, dubbed Prosser's wine room a crime scene. The inquiry has rippled through the local government, with the acting chief of police denying that there is an investigation, and an officer with ties to Prosser in danger of losing his job.

Bear in mind, the real litigation has yet to begin. Arguments on the motion for contempt will commence in the coming weeks in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Virgin Islands.

Those proceedings should be interesting. Even for the often hostile environs of bankruptcy court, Prosser's case has been tortuous.

Prosser's holding company, Innovative Communications Corp., owned the Virgin Islands Telephone Corp. and the Virgin Islands Daily News, among other holdings. Prosser himself owned the Virgin Islands Community Bank.

David Einhorn's hedge fund, Greenlight Capital LP, pushed Innovative into bankruptcy protection in 2006. Prosser had warred for years with Greenlight and the Rural Telephone Finance Cooperative, Innovative's lender and largest creditor.

Relations did not improve in Chapter 11.

An examiner appointed by the court summed up the tenor of the case in two sentences.

"Unwilling to engage in any meaningful settlement discussions with Mr. Prosser, Mr. Prosser's major creditors unnecessarily litigate every issue raised in this case in order to exasperate and humble Mr. Prosser while extracting their pound of flesh," Steven Felsenthal wrote in 2008 pleadings.

"For his part," Felsenthal continued, "Mr. Prosser seems intent on incessantly pursuing futile litigation so that these bankruptcy estates, like the estate in Charles Dickens' fictional Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, will be devoured by legal costs, leaving nothing for creditors."

Subsequently, the RTFC has taken ownership of the phone company. Most of the significant assets have been sold, though the wine and other property are still being liquidated.

The drama surrounding the wine started in July, when a representative of Christie's visited the St. Croix residence where the wine was stored. The New York auction house had previously sold wine from Prosser's collection but found the current stash of wines unmarketable.

Photographs submitted to the court show bottles overflowing from a refrigerator with the door left open and no. racks.

The "Oxford Companion to Wine" states that storage temperatures should range from 50 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit. An affidavit from Christie's wine specialist Charles Antin states that one air conditioner in the storage room was unplugged and another was not fully functional. There have been varying accounts of the temperature.

"The storage space appeared to be equipped with a non-functioning cooling unit as the temperature in the room was warm, almost equivalent to the temperature outdoors, which was upwards of 90 degrees," Carroll's pleadings state. "The bottles of wine were warm to the touch."

Prosser said the accusations are part of the "all-out war to get me" that has permeated the bankruptcy.

"There has been a very large effort over the last four years to find me guilty of some criminal act," he said.

Prosser does say that the wine may not have been stored to Christie's specifications, because he did not consider it an investment that would be brought to market.

"I was never concerned that it was perfectly stored because I was buying it to drink," not to collect or to sell through an auction house, Prosser said. He estimated that the wine was kept mostly at 60 to 65 degrees, adding that "humidity control in the Caribbean is impossible."

Moreover, Prosser's camp alleges that the July inspection was "a ruse," and charges that the trustee's representatives themselves jeopardized the wine.

Prosser was represented at the July inspection by Oakland Benta, a former head of the U.S. Virgin Islands Police Department. Benta for several years headed security for Prosser, and has worked with the police department's training academy.

Benta said during a telephone interview that he represented the Prossers as a friend of the family.

After the July wine visit, Benta noticed that one of the air conditioners was unplugged after the trustee's team left the storage room. He plugged it back in.

On Prosser's behalf, Benta filed a report with the police. He denied that he is on Prosser's payroll and said he has requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation administer a lie detector test, which he says would show that Prosser had not made payments to him.

Prosser's pleadings in the contempt case allege that the trustee's team attempted "to bolster their ruse by unplugging the air-conditioning in the wine storage facility!"

In a deposition, Antin acknowledged that he suggested a colleague unplug an air conditioner.

"On the way out, I mentioned to my colleague, you know, turn off the lights, you might as well unplug this one, it's not working," he said, according to the transcript. He explained it as an effort to "be green."

Carroll's attorneys and Christie's declined to comment on the dispute.

Elevating the complexity of the dispute is an investigation of local law enforcement into what occurred during the inspection.

In November, a letter from U.S. Virgin Islands Police Officer Cuthbert Cyril, who like Benta works in the training division, circulated among the bankruptcy parties.

The letter stated that the local police were investigating the wine matter. "It is important that the crime scene remain intact during the course of this investigation," the missive stated.

A subpoena was issued for Carroll. However, according to pleadings, at a bankruptcy hearing a Virgin Islands assistant attorney general denied knowledge of an investigation and withdrew the subpoena. Assistant Attorney General Carol Thomas-Jacobs, who did not return calls, told the court that the training bureau does normally conduct investigations.

Cyril acknowledged that there was an investigation in a telephone interview, but would not comment on whether the training department often investigated cases.

Benta said that police officials at the training bureau are sworn officers, and can conduct inquiries. It is not unusual for the attorney general to be unaware of an investigation during its early stages, he said.

Carroll's pleadings state that there is "not one shred of evidence or reliable information to convince the Court that the alleged criminal investigation is anything other than a hollow threat or ruse created by the debtor himself."

A Dec. 20 story in the St. Thomas Source quoted Acting Police Commissioner Henry White as saying there is "no investigation" into any of the Prossers' property.

Benta said that he has been recommended for termination, although a final ruling would come from the U.S. Virgin Islands governor. Commissioner White told him that his association with Prosser had put the department in a bad light, Benta said, and drawn criticism from the governor and the attorney general.

Police regulations prohibit officers from associating with felons, Benta said, but Prosser has not been charged or convicted of a felony. Moreover, he said that the Christie's deposition bears out the substance of his report, that the air conditioner had been unplugged.

"It is a sad day for me to know that the police department has now become malignant," he said.

The question of whether the disputed wine is any good remains unanswered.

The trustee picked up the bottles in December and moved them to a storage facility.

A pair of experts with the rarefied credential of Masters of Wine examined the bottles before the move. Mary Ewing-Mulligan, proprietor of the International Wine Center in New York, and Lisa Granik, a Fulbright Scholar who has been on the faculty at Georgetown University and Moscow State University, have filed reports, according to the court docket. It is unclear when the documents will be made public.