The tragedy that could remake the middle tier

On Monday, the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America issued a brief press release announcing that Bob Hendrickson, the interim chief executive and president of Republic National Distributing Co. (RNDC), had passed away. Subsequent reporting from BevNET and Shanken News Daily put him at 65 years old; neither had the cause of death, though social-media chatter suggests it may have been a heart attack. Regardless, Hendrickson’s apparently sudden passing is a tragedy, and it complicates the state of play for the embattled company he’d been leading for less than a year.

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