#Wine fraud Rudy Kurniawan’s rise, fall, and future plans

Normally, when ICE sends a deportee back to their home country, the US government picks up the tab for the plane ticket.

Rudy Kurniawan, however, isn’t interested in a freebee.

“They’ll give him the worse seat on the plane,” said lawyer Jerry Mooney of his client, who would rather splurge on first class when he’s sent back to Jakarta, Indonesia.

“Rudy is concerned about his seat on the plane?” asked former prosecutor Jason Hernandez upon hearing the news. “Nothing has changed.”

In the 2000s, Kurniawan was a free-spending star of the haute wine world — chartering private jets and owning a Mercedes, a Land Rover and a Lamborghini. Dining out, he didn’t hesitate to round up his tip to the nearest thousand.

After buying an $8 million new house in a gated community in Los Angeles, he planned to convert the garage into a climatized home for his massive Champagne collection. But in 2012 he was unmasked as a master counterfeiter of the rarest bottles. His wealthy victims, confident that they were too smart to be fooled, purchased an astonishing $30 million of faux wine from him. Nearly every bottle had been fashioned by his own hand.

The now-44-year-old is the only person ever prosecuted by the feds for selling fake wine. He was released from a Texas prison on Nov. 6, after serving nearly nine years — straight into the hands of ICE. Kurniawan now awaits deportation at an ICE holding facility in El Paso.

Kurniawan arrived in the U.S. in the mid-1990s on a student visa. Before discovering wine, he worked part-time in a California golf pro shop. The epiphany that changed his life, he claimed, came at a 1999 family dinner at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Scanning the wine list, Kurniawan ordered the priciest bottle: Opus One, a so-called “cult” Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon that cost about $300. From the first taste, he was hooked. The next day, he got busy purchasing every vintage of Opus One that he could locate. (Kurniawan claimed that he was bankrolled by a $1 million monthly allowance.)

Soon, he moved on to trophy bottles from Bordeaux and Burgundy. Uncorking them day and night, Kurniawan discovered that he had a talent for precisely remembering what he tasted. It wasn’t long before he was accepted into exclusive circles of wealthy American collectors — his welcome warmed by the very expensive bottles he brought and opened at their tastings. As one of those collectors put it, “If you bring the great bottles, you get invited.”

Still in his mid-twenties, Kurniawan became known as a wine dealer with kingpin clients including Brian Devine, former CEO and chairman of the giant Petco chain of pet supply stores. (Devine would be fleeced to the tune of $5.3 million.) Kurniawan also began auctioning oceans of wine, mainly with New York-based Acker Merrall & Condit; in just two Acker auctions in 2006, $35 million worth of Kurniawan’s bottles were sold. The most expensive was a jeroboam of Burgundy’s most prestigious wine, Romanee-Conti, vintage 1971, purchased by real estate mogul Michael Fascitelli.

It was an $85,000 fake.

Between 2004 and 2011, using his “black” American Express card, Kurniawan purchased $40 million worth of top-end wine in the US and Europe. But as authentic treasures grew harder to find at any cost, Kurniawan didn’t give up. Instead, he turned to making his own in his Arcadia, Calif., kitchen — and was able to fool even major wine critics. His basic method: Blend old commercial grade wine from France with young American wine made from the same variety of grapes. Recycling his old bottles, he’d re-label them as legendary French vintages.

Fooled tasters would note how a bottle had the funk of old wine, but an amazing youthful fruit underneath. And they were correct on both counts.

Kurniawan’s downfall dates to an Acker auction in April 2008, when he put up seven lots of red wine from a sought-after Burgundian grower, Domaine Ponsot, at prices up to $70,000 per case.

The only problem, according to the domain’s fourth-generation proprietor, Laurent Ponsot, was that those wines, vintages 1945 to 1971, could not have been real — because at that time, his father did not yet have access to the famed vineyards claimed as their origin.

When the FBI arrested Kurniawan on a March morning in 2012, agents discovered a sophisticated in-house counterfeiting workshop at the home he shared with his mother. On hand were 18,000 expertly made fake labels that beared the names of the crème de la crème of French vineyards.

Wine counterfeiting is low on the list of crimes the government chooses to prosecute. Kurniawan’s case might never have been taken up if not for the effort of New York prosecutor Hernandez, himself a passionate wine collector. Shortly before Christmas 2013, a federal jury took under two hours to find the defendant guilty of wine fraud and making false statements to a loan company.

As for Kurniawan’s claim that he was funded by a $1 million monthly allowance from his family, one of his victims — billionaire businessman Bill Koch — sent investigators to comb Asia, where they found no evidence of this wealth. But two of Kurniawan’s uncles were convicted of embezzling almost $2 billion in Indonesia; that money was never recovered and may have been moved to secret accounts offshore. Was Kurniawan able to dip deeply into that money to fund his lifestyle? No other explanation for how he was able to spend so many millions has emerged.

Incredibly, though, he may still be able to bounce back.

“I’ve had inquiries about [him working] as a tasting consultant,” said Mooney. Kurniawan could even go right on copycatting sought-after wine, so long as he told purchasers that he made it. His model, Mooney pointed out, could be prolific American art forger Ken Perenyi, who went from illegally peddling his copies as the real deal to selling “signed” copies of paintings by first-tier artists after the FBI began to surveil him.

“Collectors would love to know what a great old wine tastes like,” said Mooney. “Rudy already knows. He could make it to order.”