| DelWine had reported about the fraud and arrest in March 2012. The Indian- American U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara who gave consent to arrest and strip-search the Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade in New York in the recent ongoing saga, had said in a statement ‘Mr. Kurniawan's days of wine and wealth are over.’
In a Statement last Wednesday, Bharara said, “Rudy Kurniawan perpetrated a vintage fraud scheme, not only peddling counterfeit wine, but concocting, bottling, and labeling what he foisted on his victims. As the jury found in its verdict today, Kurniawan was also the author of a fictional tale that enabled him to defraud a lender out of $3 million. He now stands to pay for his fraud with time behind bars in a federal prison.”
This may be a fiction in India where such a trial may take years but it may soon come true for Kurniawan as he was convicted by the 12-person jury last week in a trial that began twenty months after the arrest, on December 9 and lasted over a week and the jury returned the verdict on December 18 in 2 hours. Handcuffed and arrested from his home in Los Angeles at that time, Kurniawan faces up to 40 years in prison for making, selling and attempting to sell more than $1m worth of counterfeit wines and fraudulently securing a $3m loan. Sentencing has been fixed for 24 April unless the defence lawyers manage a successful appeal before then, resulting in a retrial.
Kurniawan allegedly forged labels of rare and expensive, collectible wines and affixed them to bottles filled with blends of fine wine with much cheaper wines or vintages of the same wine. He then sold the counterfeit wines claiming he had discovered a wine cellar in Europe. He created and maintained thousands of counterfeit labels for rare and expensive wines spanning from at least the 1899 vintage to more modern vintages, according to the indictment against him filed in May 2012. There were labels for several top French estates from Bordeaux and Burgundy, including Mouton-Rothschild, Latour, Rousseau, La Mission Haut-Brion, Domaine Roumier and Le Pin, as well as from California's Screaming Eagle.
A significant number of labels that showed Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, from various vintages over the past century were found in his house that looked like a wine factory according to prosecution. Incidentally, Kurniawan was known as 'Dr Conti' for his supposed in-depth knowledge of the renowned Burgundy estate.
Several illustrious wine producers, collectors, auctioneers had deposed in front of the jury, the most important evidence being from the renowned Burgundy producer Laurent Ponsot. One of the bottles of Domaine Ponsot in Burgundy he attempted to sell at auction in 2008 for $14,000-18,000 was passed off as a 1929 vintage, even though the producer did not start estate bottling until 1934. Other wines were billed as having been bottled at a specific vineyard between 1945 and 1971, even though Domaine Ponsot said it didn't start using that vineyard until 1982.
Aubert de Villaine, co-director of the Burgundy’s iconic Domaine Romanée Conti, whom I had met again last month at the World Wine Symposium at Villa d’Este and attended the prestige tasting of two of the estates which were in all probability also a victim of the fraud, was another important witness who flew to depose in front of the jury. A mild looking and normally very soft spoken Aubert reportedly told Decanter, 'I am never pleased to see a man condemned, but he is guilty. I hope that this very hard ending of a very sad story will serve as an example: to make counterfeit bottles is no longer a safe and simple way to make a lot of money quickly.'
Another important witness was the Palm Beach billionaire William Koch who had earlier filed a suit against the Christie’s auction house for auctioning and selling him fake bottles purportedly owned by Thomas Jefferson, claiming that they knew it was fake and were in collusion with the seller. He had testified at the trial and said he had been conned by Kurniawan and, among other purchases, spent $2.1m on 219 bottles that had been consigned for auction by the defendant. Expressing satisfaction at the verdict, he reportedly said, 'the criminal conviction of Kurniawan has brought to justice one of the world’s most prolific counterfeiters of fake wine.'
The appeal will perhaps focus on the fact that the court had erred in allowing items seized in his home to be used as evidence. These items included wines, bags of labels, corks and stamps for well-known chateaux.
Acker Merrall Condit, one of the world’s biggest auctioneers, was mentioned several times during the trial as one of the auction houses to whom Kurniawan consigned a significant number of wines and owed large sums of money.
Those following the court proceedings around the wine world have expressed a sense of relief over the conviction, hoping that this will help stop the perpetration of the crime of selling fake wines which has been happening with increased frequency. Welcoming the verdict, Ponsot says, " I cannot say I'm happy that someone is going to jail. I don't feel pity. He did it, that's for sure."
For the FBI notification issued from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, headed by Preet Bharara, detailing the conviction, click here
Tags: Rudy Kurniawan, Indonesia |