Feds: Prominent collector sold $1.3M in fake wine
By NBC News, msnbc.com staff and news services
An Indonesian millionaire who was once known as one of the world's up-and-coming collectors and dealers of rare wines was arrested on Thursday and accused of trying to bamboozle other wealthy buyers with more than $1.3 million worth of counterfeit bottles.
Rudy Kurniawan, 35, of Arcadia, Calif., was arrested in Los Angeles, where he has lived in luxury for years despite a longstanding deportation order expelling him from the country, federal prosecutors said. He is charged in New York with repeatedly trying to sell sophisticated fakes of vintages that can trade for thousands of dollars per bottle.
The criminal charges follow years of increasing suspicions about Kurniawan among top wine connoisseurs. Some of his wines were pulled from a sale in 2007 after an auction house declared them to be fakes. The billionaire yachtsman, entrepreneur and wine investor William Koch sued Kurniawan in 2009, claiming that several bottles he'd purchased from him were phony.
Prosecutors charged Kurniawan with "multiple fraudulent schemes" relating to his wine business between 2007 and 2012, including attempting to sell fake wine and fraudulently obtaining millions of dollars in loans.
The complaint was unsealed on Thursday in Manhattan federal court.
"Mr. Kurniawan's days of wine and wealth are over, if the allegations in this case are proven," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. "Rudy Kurniawan held himself out to be a wine aficionado with a nose for a counterfeit bottle, but he was the counterfeit."
He has sold millions of dollars' worth of wine in recent years, including about $35 million in 2006 alone, prosecutors said.
The complaint alleged that in one scheme, Kurniawan consigned for auction at least 84 bottles of counterfeit wine purporting to be from Domaine Ponsot in Burgundy, France, which were expected to sell for about $600,000.
Watch video report at NBC Los Angeles
Kurniawan attempted to sell one bottle that he said was a 1929 bottle from Domaine Ponsot, but Domaine Ponsot did not begin estate bottling until 1934, the complaint said.
Kurniawan also consigned bottles of wine that had supposedly been bottled between 1945 and 1971 from the Clos. St. Denis vineyard of Domaine Ponsot, according to the complaint. But Domaine Ponsot did not make wine from that vineyard until 1982.
Prosecutors said that batch of fakes was expected to sell for $600,000 until it was withdrawn from sale amid questions about its authenticity. When Domaine Ponsot investigated, prosecutors said, Kurniawan claimed to have purchased the bottles from someone in Asia. The phone numbers he provided for this buyer, however, turned out to be fakes too. One rang to a regional Indonesian airline, the other to a shopping mall.
Other fraud charges against Kurniawan are related to a $3 million loan he received from a company that wasn't named in court papers. Prosecutors said the wine collector understated his personal debts by $11 million when he applied for the loan.
Kurniawan was charged with three counts of wire fraud and two counts of mail fraud. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, prosecutors said.
'Trophy wines'
His lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.
In a 2006 profile in the Los Angeles Times, Kurniawan boasted of sometimes dropping $75,000 on a single case, and he talked of his own skill at sniffing out forgeries.
Many of Kurniawan's alleged victims were "people with a lot of money," Peter A. Nelson, of Monopole Wine, told NBC Los Angeles.
They included "collectors who look for trophy wines ... to impress their friends with or to have extravagant wine-tasting dinners," Nelson said.
Reuters, The Associated Press, NBC Los Angeles and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.
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