True Crime Campfire - Red Wine, White Lies: Wine Fraudster Rudy Kurniawan

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

In the old Hans Christian Anderson tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the emperor was the kind of clothes horse who’d make Anna Wintour look like a frump in a burlap sack. This guy was all about the fashion, and the more extravagant the better. So one day, a couple of con men came blazin’ into town, pretending to be the best tailors in the biz. They swept into the emperor’s castle, bragging about the spectacular wardrobe they could make for him…for the right price. And it got even better than that. These tailors had magic powers. They could create a fabric that could only be seen by those who are good enough, smart enough, and powerful enough. Well of course our boy and his ego couldn’t resist, and he set the two “tailors” to work, creating the kind of threads that would blow the roof off of any room he strutted into. Of course the tailors weren’t tailors at all, and they had no magic powers. They just wanted the cash…and the cache. So when the day of the big reveal came along, they finessed it. Rolled in a fancy garment rack full of empty hangers, and presented them as the finest wardrobe in the land. When the emperor saw the empty rack, of course, his first thought was…oh no…oh God…I can’t see it! I’m not good enough! Presumably everybody else was thinking the same thing—oh no, why can’t I see it? There was a moment of panicky silence. And then, the emperor gasped the fakest gasp he’d ever gasped, and said “I LOVE IT!” And later that day, the whole kingdom was treated to the sight of their ruler, catwalking down the main street in the buff. And everybody clapped, and everybody had something to say about how beautiful the clothes were. Better that than admit ya got got. This is one of those stories that never goes stale. We see it every day, that essential human urge to save face, even at great personal expense. Today we’ll tell you about a fraudster who knew this all too well, and decided to try his hand at faking out one of the wealthiest, most discerning crowds in the world: the wine snobs. Sources:2016 Documentary "Sour Grapes" by Jerry Rothwell, Reuben AtlasCNBC's "American Greed," episode "Vintage Wine Fraud"The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/sep/11/the-great-wine-fraud-a-vintage-swindleFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In the old Hans Christian Anderson tale of the emperor's new clothes, the emperor was the kind of clothes horse who'd make Anna Wintour look like a frump and a burlid. lap sack. This guy was all about the fashion, and the more extravagant the better. So one day a couple of conmen came blazing into town pretending to be the best tailors in the biz. They swept into

the Emperor's Castle, ragged about the spectacular wardrobe they could make for him, for the right price. And it got even better than that. These tailors had magic powers. They could create a fabric that could only be seen by those who were good enough, smart enough, and powerful enough. Well, of course, our boy and his ego couldn't resist, and he set the two tailors to work, creating the kind of threads that would blow the roof off of any room he strutted into. Of course, the tailors weren't tailors at all, and they had no magic powers. They just wanted the cash, and the cachet. So when the day of the big reveal came along, they finessed it,

rolled in a fancy garment rack full of empty hangers and presented them as the finest wardrobe in the land. When the emperor saw the empty rack, of course, his first thought was, oh no, oh God, I can't see it, I'm not good in a lot. of. Presumably, everybody else was thinking the same thing. Oh, no, why can't I see it? There was a moment of panicky silence, and then the emperor gasped the fakesas gasp, he'd ever gasped, and said, I love it! And later that day, the whole kingdom was treated to the sight of their ruler, catwalking down the main street in the buff. And everybody clapped, and everybody had something to say about how beautiful the clothes were. Better that than admit you got got. This is one of those

stories that never go stale. We see it every day, that essential human urge to save face, even at great personal expense. Today, we'll tell you about a fraudster who knew this all too well, and decided to try his hand at faking out one of the wealthiest, most discerning crowds in the world, the wine snobs. This is Red Wine, White Lies, the story of Rudy Cornelan. So, campers, we're going to start this one in April 2008 on the Coke Door, a narrow limestone slope in Burgundy, France, only 30 miles long, and the origin of what many consider the finest wines in the world. The vineyards there are some of the most expensive agricultural land on the planet, and often surprisingly small, only like a few acres. So obviously, the number of bottles from any given vineyard every year is really limited, like a few thousand. So a highly desirable product plus scarcity equals big money, and bottles of good burgundy can go for tens of thousands of dollars, which is just, for God's sake.

Ugh. For fermented welches, that's wild. Although, huh. Maybe I should marry a French person from Burgundy. leave all this podcasting behind. Oh, uh-uh. No, I was with you until he said that last part. Only if he agrees

to subsidize me as well. And then that'd be all good. It's big business, of course, but very much still tied to the families and small villages that have been making wine for decades or even centuries. And in April, one of these winemakers, a guy named Laurent Ponceau,

got an email from a friend in New York with kind of a weird question. Hey, um, when did you start making clothes on denie? Ponceau was curious, like, why do you want to know? His friend said, well, because there are a bunch of them up for auction here in New York, supposedly bottles from the 40s to the 70s. Now, Ponceau was flabbergasted. His father hadn't started producing Closan Denis until 1982,

so these wines could not exist. They were fakes, no doubt about it. Ponsault demanded to know who was that. telling these wines? The answer, Rudy Kornayawan, a young Indonesian man living in California who was making big waves in the rarefied world of wine collecting. So who was this guy? Well, Rudy Kronawan came to the U.S. in the late 90s on a student visa to study accounting. His love affair with wine began in 2000, when at a family dinner on Fisherman's Wharf, he ordered a bottle of Opus 1, a classy California wine that at 300 bucks was the most expensive

bottle on the menu. Now, Rudy didn't know anything about wine back then, so he just went for the priceiest one he could find. The exact opposite of how I pick wine from restaurants. I just like the, I pick the label I like the best. That's pretty much. Is it red or what? I don't know. I like that label. This was a purchasing habit of Rudy's that would get more and more outrageous over the next decade or so. Expensive equals good. And I'm sure it made him a real treat whenever his family took him out to dinner. Like, wow, look at this menu. They have so many. Yeah, I'll have the lobster and the filet mignon. Thanks. My mom would have laughed my ass out the door. In the case of the opus one, expensive actually did equal good. Rudy loved it so much that this dinner became kind of a

watershed moment in his life. He decided right then and there that from here on out, he was going to be a wine guy. Kind of like Batman, but with less punching and more spitting. It gets so gross that they spit it out. Like, I realize that just makes me sound like a, of, you know, a peasant, but like, ew, it is, switch, switch spit, swallow it for God's sakes. Anyway, just wasting it. You're going to get hammered off of wine if you do that. Yeah, I won't allow.

Yeah. Why do you think I was saying that? That's the goal, isn't it? Rudy was charming, kind of nerdy and enthusiastic and always quick to smile, and he made it a point to meet and befriend as many people as he could in the wine buying community. People liked him right off the bed, this enthusiastic young newbies sticking to the shallow waters of Californian wines at auctions and letting more experienced buyers share their knowledge with them, which they were happy to do, as people with a hobby usually are, when literally anybody shows even the slightest crumb of interest. I mean, I know I'll show off my collection of 1980s vintage trapper keepers to anybody who'll listen, no matter how much they beg me to stop. And then, Rudy faded out of the wine scene for a little while, only take.

come back in 2002 with a whole new attitude. He would show up to various auctions with a posse and tell anyone who cared to listen that he was determined to become a player. Now, it's tempting to dismiss this as ridiculous posturing, kind of like, what if Niles Crane had grown up playing way too much Grand Theft Auto? But as it happened, as everybody would soon find out, Rudy actually did have what it took to become a player in the wine world. For the most part, what it takes, to be a player in the wine world is money, mullah, smackeroonies, greenbacks, the old filthy lucre. Your bank account must be at least this tall to go on this ride. And money Rudy had. He told the LA Times that he was spending up to $1 million a month buying wines. And not

Californian wines anymore, but the absolute top shelf stuff from Burgundy. Bordeaux. A million dollars a month. I just had a stroke. I'm sorry. That is fucking criminal. Oh, it makes me going to punch him in the mouth.

Soon... Good God Almighty. Yeah. Soon, Rudy was dominating fine wine auctions in New York. He had swagger. If he really wanted a wine, he'd just put his bidding paddle up

and keep it up, not even bothering to play the whole back and forth game of, I hear 5,000. Do I hear 5,500? Whenever somebody else bid, he'd pay more. It was a power play. They both annoyed and impressed people.

And most importantly, it got him the two things he wanted, the wine and the attention. It wasn't that hard to stand out in the she-she-pants world of wine buying. One largely made up of rich white dudes, where at any moment somebody might ask you, without a trace of irony, where you summer. and where if a woman showed up to bid, people would ask her whose date she was. Oh.

Rudy, young, charming, and making home run swings with his wallet, was making a name for himself. He had pretty much come out of nowhere, so of course people were curious to know where the hell his money came from, what he did for a living. Rudy's answer was nothing. He came from a wealthy Indonesian family, he said, and they gave him a $1 million a month allowance. Oh, my God. And that was all Rudy would say about it.

His family was very private, he told people. The people around him, his posse, were a little less tight-lipped, though. They claimed Rudy's family owned a beer distribution company with exclusive rights to sell Heineken throughout all of China. Or maybe it was Guinness? It depended which posse pal you happened to be speaking to. Oh, my God, here we go again with this shit. Listen, for God's sake, people. Tell everybody the same lie. Say it with me. Tell everybody the same lie. This is how you get caught. Jeez, Louise. A million dollar a month allowance is just mind-boggling for most of us. A million dollars alone is a dream amount of money, life-changing money, and Rudy was getting it every month. Of course, he was also spending up to a million a month on wine. And you don't need to be a math-wiz to figure out that.

But that could lead to trouble. Right, because man cannot live on wine alone. Well, I mean, you could probably for a little while, but you'd be real drunk and have to sleep in the bushes. Rudy was putting together one of the most enviable sellers of fine wine in the world. But he wasn't just buying wine. He was also selling it. This is normal enough in the world of collecting. Prices fluctuate, interests change.

And Rudy had rare wines that lots of people wanted. Not everyone was willing to help him sell his wine, though. Early on, at least one auction house refused to help him because he couldn't provide any records of ownership, receipts from where he'd gotten the wine. So for some people, there was just the faintest whiff of doubt about whether Rudy was the real deal. It was only a faint whiff, though.

Lots of people were perfectly willing to buy Rudy's wine. The wine market was booming at the time, with regular auctions where just incredible amounts of money changed hands. The sellers were making bank, the auction houses were making bank, and the collectors were getting their hands on rare treasures they'd never dreamed would be available, which made them the envy of their wine-swellin piers. It wasn't really a situation where people wanted to ask a lot of questions, and Rudy had built up a lot of credibility. For one thing, he was insanely good at blind tasting. He could ID wines with no idea whatsoever of where they came from. Dude could spot a bojolet at 100 yards,

pallet like a wizard. Now, most people are terrible at, blind tasting. Can't even tell two pretty different wines apart. There have been studies on this and they never failed to crack me up because they confirm something I've always kind of suspected about wine snobbery that it's basically just a big game of the Emperor's new clothes.

Not that you couldn't tell like a really shitty wine from a good one. Like that screw top stuff that you open it and it goes and it like strips the paint off the walls. Like I could probably tell that you know from a good wine. But most of us couldn't tell a $500 bottle from a decent

$50 one from Trader Joe's. Honestly, three-buck ain't nothing to sneeze at. It got me through college, and most of my adult life, actually. Well, that's definitely nothing to sneeze at. There are some strong psychological elements here, too. Take some middle-of-the-road wine and present it as an expensive, rare one, and you're probably going to get rave reviews. Offer that same wine in a $15 bottle, and people's perceptions of the quality will mysteriously

crash. That's the case for most of us. But for good sommoliers and gifted amateurs like Rudy, it's not that complicated of a trick. Have a really sensitive palate, a good memory, and drink a lot of wine. If you're good at blind tasting, what you're doing is recognizing the taste and remembering where from. And in the high-rolling world of fine wine collecting,

being able to identify priceless gems as well as Rudy could provided major cachet. Nothing could serve as better evidence that he was one of the boys. And who, boy, did Rudy have himself a posse of boys? Buckle up for this. In New York, he fell in with a tasting group who called themselves the 12 angry men. What were they angry about, you ask? Well, they were livid, you see, that sometimes people had the goddamn nerve to bring inferior wines to dinner parties. I know.

Can you imagine? You didn't bring a bottle of wine worth more than a normal person's rent? How dare you, you plebe? You're worse than Hitler. Wine Hulk smash. Oh, I'm sorry, Stephen. Did my bottle of barefoot mosquito disappoint? Well, good, because it's not for you. It's for me. Let me drink my cheap wine in peace. Christ. These guys were predominantly wealthy, middle-aged dude bros with nicknames like Big Boy and King Angry. I know. Give it a minute to sink in. Big boy. And they like to throw parties with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wine. Oh my God. So I wonder, do any of these golden gods have some useful wine advice for us normies out there? Why?

Yes. Yes, they do. Here's one little gym, quoting here from the documentary Sour Grapes, which was one of our sources for this case. Buy 96 champagne. If you can't afford that, buy O2. If you can't afford that, drink fucking beer. Oh, thank you, sir. May I have another? Let me guess. This was King Angry, right? That's classic him.

I don't know. It has a soups-on of the big boy about it for me. I'm not sure which one it was. Now, a group of rich wine dudes being elitist snobs is one of the least surprising surprises on God's Earth, and that was not what made the hangary boys notable. That was the tasting notes they wrote up for the dinners, which pushed the usual boundaries with the kind of enthusiastic edge lordiness you usually don't see outside of a smart mouth 15-year-old working on his high school paper. They compared wines to weed, cocaine, and quote, chocolate sex, whatever the flying fuck that means. Wine was like pure sex in the nose and sweaty sex on the beach. And this is for wines they liked. Like, this wine is awesome. It's like having sand in your ass crack for a month.

Like, what do you mean? Sweaty sex on the beach sounds horrible. horrible. I don't even want to know what pure sex in the nose would feel like. I mean, I try to be open-minded, okay? But, ew. Get in the corner. What does that mean? Get in the corner. You know the one. It's labeled. Katie's kingshaming corner. No nose sex. Do not stick a penis in your nose. I'm going out on a limb with that one. Do not. Don't stick a dick in your nose. It's not a good idea. And it gets worse. Some of their notes compared the wines to the Vajee of a nun or a teenage girl. Ew, creepy.

And they'd email these tasting notes out to thousands of people in the wine community, which is, as you know, a very starchy community of people. So obviously trying to get a rise out of people to kind of establish their rep as the bad boys of wine, which I'm sorry, guys, you're too rich. If you're on a first name basis with your investment banker, you do not get to be the bad boy. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules. That's just how it is. Plus, they went by Big Boy and King Angry, both of which made me cringe so hard I swallowed myself.

I'm still not over it. I'm going to call the second one King Engie. He's King Angi from now on. Rudy quickly found a role in this group as the nerdy expert. In just a few years, he had put together an encyclopedic knowledge of wine to go with his rare tasting ability. and he got a nickname of his own, Dr. Conti, after the Romani Conti, one of his favorite wines. Dr. Conti continued to make friends. He described himself as a drinker rather than a collector, saying,

Wine is something you open and you share. And he liked to share. Even if he was having dinner with millionaires and billionaires, he would order the finest wines on the menu and pick up the tab, which would climb as high as $50,000. for one meal, which again, it's just criminal. If you're spending that much on a meal, you need to be horsewhipped. I'm sorry.

We'll give it to our Patreon instead, and then I won't horsewhip you. Then you're cool. We'll sit around and drink wine with you for 50K. I hope you like Yellowtail and 19 crimes. And apparently, even millionaires like free food and drinks. Rudy's rep as a generous guy definitely helped him win friends and influence people. Every now and again, though, people saw another side of the usually carefree Rudy. At these lavish dinners, Rudy would tell the Somalié to keep the empty bottles and send them on to Rudy without washing them first.

This, he told one, was so they would look authentic for a photo shoot he was using them in. One time, a waiter accidentally threw a bottle out, and Rudy flipped the fuck out. He threw a tantrum like a toddler in a $5,000 suit, screaming and yelling that he wanted his bottle back. He went so far as to make the restaurant staff go out to the dumpster and dig through the trash till they found it. Weird. Yeah. But in the world of wine collecting, it's not unusual for someone to have a few quirks. Rich people are just kind of weird.

It must be the fact that no one tells them no. Yeah. If Rudy liked keeping used wine bottles, so what? Red flag, you say? Sorry, I don't know what that means, but let me tell you about this awesome dinner Rudy treated me too last week. One of Rudy's buddies and the 12 hangy boy toys was a guy named John Capon who ran an auction house in New York. Capon was the main force behind the wine bros attempts to be the wild and crazy guys. And he was the instigator of those weird tasting notes.

In 2006, the wine market was booming. Bottles bought just a few years before had doubled or more in value. And Rudy, who in just five years, had acquired one of the deepest and most desirable sellers in the world, decided to cash in. Arranging a sale through John Capon's auction house. This was not just any sale. Capon, a former hip-hop producer, set about creating buzz. Rudy stayed in the background. The wines went to auction with a note,

the seller wishes to remain anonymous, which only built up more mystique. It could have been anyone. Tupac, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, any allegedly dead celebrity. The wine cellar up for sale was described as beyond compare. Some of the greatest wine treasures in the world. Capon called it the seller, with a capital T-H-E. And all the build-up paid off. The sale was a phenomenal success, making over $10.6 million. In fact, it was such a hit that only nine months later, Rudy and K-Pond had a follow-up sale, The Seller 2. Which sounds like a bad horror movie, you know, like, the Seller 2, what's that weird smell? The Seller 2, what's that stain in the corner? Seller 2, is that a dead mouse?

Combined, the two auctions sold over $34 million worth of wine, big money. And at the time, a record amount for sales from one-person seller. And not only big money for Rudy, of course, John Capon's auction house made out like a bandit, too, with commissions of up to 20% being normal in the wine trade. I mean, just imagine what 20% of that kind of money is. And equally valuable for Capon was the attention that these mammoth sales brought in. All of a sudden, his little bitty auction house was up there with the big boys. Out in California, Rudy was living it up.

He spent tens of thousands of dollars on custom suits, half a million on a collection of watches, ridiculous, and started an expensive renovation of a Bel Air mansion. He bought a Lamborghini, a Mercedes, a Range Rover, an artwork by Andy Warhol and Damien Hurst. That ain't cheap. In 2007, he managed to spend $6 million on his Amex card. Anything that said luxury he wanted. He loved the lavish lifestyle. He loved the attention. The the seller sales might have been listed as anonymous,

but people in the biz knew perfectly well that Rudy was the man behind the curtain. Rudy'd gotten exactly what he wanted. He was a player. But before too long, red flags started popping up like daffodils in springtime. There's a wine, a 1961 Latoura Pomerol that is practically the Holy Grail for collectors, a wine you dream just of seeing, never mind actually owning. A whole case hadn't been seen on the market for years. But one of Rudy and John Capon's sales was described as having just under three cases, all from the same importer, and in his possession, for decades. For decades, Rudy is a dude in his mid-20s, so what the heck did preschool Rudy's birthday wish list look like?

I want a Nintendo, some Thundercats, a transformer in three cases of 1961 Latoura Pomerol. Just, no, no. Rudy's wine sales were starting to have subtle notes of a bullshit. At a tasting in New York for Rudy's wines, one of the actual winemakers from Burgundy happened to be there. The wine, he said, didn't taste right. He wondered whether it was even a burgundy. So there continued to be a nagging worry about Rudy in the collective consciousness of the wine community, a creeping concern about whether he and his wines were, strictly speaking, on the other up and up. But for the moment, it went no further than that. I mean, Rudy was genuinely well-liked. He was kind and generous and fun to be around. People didn't want to think that this friend of

theirs who shared their, you know, passion for wine could be duping him. And nobody wanted to be the one asshole to raise the question when everybody else seemed to be having a great time. You know, you don't want to be the first one to speak up. There's so much psychology involved in this. It just fascinates me. The unwillingness of victims of scams to recognize what's going on is really common phenomenon and one of the most valuable tools, of course, in the scammer's toolbox because they know this shit perfectly well and are happy to capitalize on it. Anybody knows this who's ever watched one of those like Dr. Phil episodes or whatever about romance scammers and just your jaws on the floor and you're like, of course he's not real. He's 25 and you're 80. He's not a stranded military

doctor, how are you falling for this? But they do. And they do because a romance scammer sells a fantasy. In that case, it's a fantasy of love and attention, and that can be really intoxicating for somebody on the receiving end, especially if they've been lonely or widowed or whatever. Now, very similarly to that, a charming friend who's keeping you well supplied with rare wine might be a lower grade fantasy than that, but it's still a relationship that you're invested in and one that would hurt if it turned out to be a big old stinky lie. And these wine collectors are a community where the opinions of your peers carry weight. So admitting you got taken for a sucker comes with a whole world of embarrassment. And if you were one of the people that was just raving over the quality

of all that great wine that you bought from him in this crowd, not only would that mean that you're a sucker, it didn't mean you don't know your shit. Ugh. Too psychologically threatening. No thank you. and the other thing is this wine doesn't taste right really isn't proof of anything because any number of little variables in the way a wine is stored so stuff like temperature and humidity can change the taste and the older the wine is the more it can change over time so two bottles that were exactly the same when they were first put out might actually taste really different a couple decades later So while there might be a growing undercurrent of suspicion about the fabulous wines Rudy Cernayowan was selling, there was nothing solid, no proof. At least there was no proof until we circle back around to where we started the story. April 2008, when winemaker Laurent Ponceau learned that Rudy was selling bottles of his family's croissant-denie that could not exist. Because they were dated from decades before.

that particular wine was even a glimmer in the Ponceau family's eye. About this, there was no question, no subtle gradation of doubt. These wines were absolutely unequivocally fake. Le Réin Ponceau has said that his very first reaction on learning about these high-value fakes was to be kind of flattered. Like, someone went to all this trouble to make up a fantastic copy of a fine wine, and they chose us as their source? That's cool. That's kind of adorable. He was flattered at first. But in just a little while, his attitude changed and for reasons that are pretty easy to understand.

He and his family had put generations of hard work and hard-won knowledge into making their wine world-renowned. These are wines that will cost you hundreds of dollars off the shelf and thousands if you're buying one of the special vintages at auction. You get yourself a Domain-Penso wine, and you are anticipating something special. So what if you crack open a bottle of this very special wine bought from your buddy Rudy Cernaya wine, and it's not good? What if hundreds of people are having the same experience

because we should make it clear that Rudy was not small time? He was selling thousands of bottles. In a market where a winemaker's name and prestige are of vital importance and where the buyers at auction are a community of people who communicate a lot amongst themselves, it wouldn't necessarily take too many bad bottles of wine to knock a serious dent in a family's name. And not only that one family's name, the value and mystique of burgundy wines depends on them being known as the best of the best. Thousands of cheap knockoffs flooding the scene could do real damage to that reputation. So, the more he thought about it, the more pissed off Ponceau got.

He had a whole hive of bees in his bonnet, or possibly beret. Do you think the bees had little cigarettes, too? I sure hope so. Anyway. And little berets, too. Oh, my God, can you imagine how cute? And little moustaches. Little French bees.

With little berets. That's a terrible... Sorry. I can't do a French accent. Anyway, he called up John Capon, Rudy's auctioneer buddy, who was selling the wines and asked him who was determining whether these wines were real. Capon said, well, me, and went on to offer all kinds of assurances that these wines were absolutely 100% genuine wine. Ponson listened to all this bullshit, and then he said, do you know who I am? Which normally I would want to smack you if you said, do you know who I am?

but this is one of the rare instances where it was fully justified. So I love it. Yeah, this is like the only instance. If you are from a renowned wine-making family and you are talking to an auctioneer selling fake bottles of your wine, that's the only time that you're allowed to say, do you know who I am? After a little more back and forth, Ponceau finally convinced Kpan to withdraw the fraudulent Clauseau-Saint-Denie bottles from the auction. but Ponson still wasn't comfortable. Capon hadn't convinced him he was on the up and up.

So the next day, Ponson flew to New York and arrived at Capeon's auction house, ten minutes after bidding had started. As usual at these events, the atmosphere was somewhere between upbeat and raucous, a bunch of rich white dudes hanging out with their pals and feeling themselves. The kind of crowd where Emerson, Lake, and Palmer are first names, and everybody's blood alcohol is three times the legal limit. Laurent Ponce was not feeling upbeat. He sat in the back, just kind of glaring in the way that only a Frenchman can.

When he got his copy of the catalog, he started going through the pages. Then he took out his pen, and on listing after listing, he wrote, fake. For all its worldwide prestige, winemaking in Burgundy still happens in little villages and small towns. And as anybody who grew up in a small town knows, that means people know your bit more. this. Laurent Ponceau knew which winemakers made which wines, and when they made them. These were his neighbors, and for a multitude of these Rudy wines, things didn't add up. At the auction, Ponsot was sitting next to a famous collector, a millionaire wine enthusiast. When he'd get ready to bid, Ponsot would keep telling him, don't buy that, it's not real, it's fake, don't buy it, but the guy went right ahead and bought him anyway.

That was how alluring these rare wines that Rudy offered were to collectors. You could have an actual burgundy winemaker sitting right next to you, somebody whose whole life has revolved around these wines, telling you that what's in front of you is too good to be true, and you just go right ahead and spend your money anyway. It's the power of the collector's impulse. You know, got to catch them all. When the time came for John Capon to sell the impossible close-on-deni wines,

Capeon did indeed announce that the wines had been withdrawn from auction at the request of the winery, causing a whole bunch of umbrage among the prospective buyers, people not used to being told that they don't get the toys they wanted. Oh, puppies, I'm so sad for them. After the auction, when people learned why the wines had been withdrawn, Rudy was asked about the fakes. His response, shit happens. Really?

He went on to say that he'd bought the wines from someone else, but he wouldn't, of course, say who. Rudy's wines, remember, had always been lacking records of sale. This had always been a big red flag, but now that some fakes had actually been brought to light publicly, it was a big red banner hanging up over the street, the kind of thing you could no longer ignore

even if you wanted to. Laurent Ponceau arranged a face-to-face meeting with Rudy and John Capon and asked the same question, where did you get these wines? When Rudy stumbled over the answer, as if kind of embarrassed, he decided his suspicions were exactly right.

This guy is not the victim of fraud. He's behind it. After some pressing, Rudy did actually finally divulge the name of his seller, a pack hendra in Jakar. But it only took some really basic investigation for Ponceau to discover that in Indonesia, PAC means Mr. And Hendra is just a really common last name, kind of like if we said Mr. Smith. So, saying he bought wine from Pack Hendra in Jakarta is exactly like saying he bought them

from like Mr. Jones in London. Pretty much useless in terms of actually identifying a specific person. And later, Rudy supplied two phone numbers for Packhendra, one of which was for an Indonesian airline, and the other of which connected straight to the fax machine of a grocery store. So, wow, this Pachendra guy has his fingers in a lot of pies, right? Fine wine, air travel, grocery chains.

You think you'd be a little bit easier to find? Or it would be better at, you know, actually existing. So, Laurent Ponceau determined that of the 81 ruddy wines sold at the same auction as the fake croissant-denie, only one, one of those wines, was real. And he

wasn't quiet about it, because why should he be. High-end wine collectors are pretty tight with each other, and it didn't take long for word to spread among the chatty-cathies of the Where Do You Somerset? John Capon started having to refund purchases, and more ominously, the Department of Justice started getting numerous complaints from unhappy collectors. We're talking millions of dollars of potential fraud here, and complaints coming from the kind of people, aka millionaires and billionaires, that are not easy to ignore. Now, obviously, that's nauseating and infuriating because the income of a complainant should have zero to do with whether they get justice, but that's the way it is. Unfortunately,

we should all work to change that. So anyway, the FBI started an investigation, and I don't care how cocky you are or how successful a scam artist you've been so far. The phrase, the FBI has started investigating you, that's going to pucker your asshole. I don't care who you are. One billionaire who got taken for $4.5 million worth of definitely fake wine, filed suits against both Capon's auction house and Rudy himself seeking millions and damages. The auction houses dropped Rudy like a hot brick. He went in an eye blink from everyone's buddy to persona non grata, and he could no longer sell wine. Well, not publicly at least. Then in 2012, one of the collectors who got taken in by Rudy was looking through the online catalog for the London-based

auction house Vanquish, who were about to sell some rare wines, and he barely had to glance through the list before thinking, these are Rudy wines, super rare vintages, everything extraordinary rather than the more normal mix of the great and the meh, labels that look too new for the supposed ages of the wines. Rudy was added again, this time selling his wines under a friend's name. But those who had been burned by him in the past had gotten wise to his tricks, and this eagle-eyed collector went public on the wine community's social media. In the ensuing hubbub, vanquished with three the wines, score one for the outraged mark, but who knew how many similar sales Rudy had been getting away with in the meantime? Rudy had bigger problems than getting his bottles

booted out of auction houses. The FBI had gathered enough evidence to get a search warrant on his house. Now, Rudy had spent years and millions of dollars renovating a Ritzie mansion in Bel Air, but he actually lived with his mama in a townhouse in the quiet suburban city of Arcadia. And it was on this home that the FBI descended. That's why he could spend his whole allowance on line because he's living with his mom. It's a great deal, to be honest, I can't fault him for that. That's just a smart decision. What they found in Rudy's home was like the nest of a wealthy drunk hoarder. There were wine crates and bottles everywhere. On every surface in the kitchen were bottles without labels. Elsewhere, the feds found thousands of labels

ready and waiting to be fixed onto this naked glass. In the kitchen sink, wine bottles were soaking in water, ready for Rudy to peel off the labels. This was practical. a one-man wine-faking factory. Early on, Rudy's technique was pretty basic. Remember those wine bottles he'd insisted on keeping after every extravagant meal? He'd just refill and recork the bottle using techniques we'll get to in a minute, and then resell the bottle as an untouched original. Because of the booming wine market, he could turn a profit on these after just a couple of years,

but not at a whole lot of profit. To make bigger bucks, he needed to work on a bigger scale, and that meant more or less building bottles of valuable old wine from scratch. Rudy would start by getting hold of suitable glass bottles. These had to look like what buyers would expect from old burgundy's, so Rudy used an obvious source. He bought old burgundy's, but cheap ones, wines of far lower quality and cost than what he was planning to sell. These, he would soak in the kitchen sink to get the labels off. So where did he get the replacement labels,

which would identify his freshly made fakes as desirable rarities? Well, he would get an actual bottle of high-end wine, remove the label, and scan an image of it into his computer. There, using our old friend Photoshop, he would alter the year printed on the label to match one of the highly sought-after vintages. Add some careful printing and careful printing, cutting, some aging if required via soaking in tea, glue that sucker on, and you had a decent

copy of a very nice bottle of wine. Wow, the tea is a neat trick. But the core of Rudy's operation, and I suspect the part he really liked, was faking the wine itself, and he was good at it, able to turn $100 worth of ingredients into a $10,000 bottle of wine. In his kitchen, the FBI found dozens of open bottles of wine, some that most of us would consider. considered to be high end at several hundred dollars worth, but many worth maybe just 20 bucks. There was a mixing station where Rudy would experiment, blending different wines and different quantities to produce really convincing fakes. And this was where Rudy's great palate and blind tasting skills really came into play. He was able to tell when the concoction he was mixing up

tasted close enough to his target wine to pass. When he hit on a formula that worked, he'd write notes on the successful bottles, like in Sharpie, like one-third so-and-so wine, one-third this other wine and so on as the way to reproduce a particular fine wine from like the 40s or whatever. One effective trick he used was to mix old cheap wine from France, which he already had from getting the burgundy bottles, with young American wine from the same kind of grape. So the Franken wine that he'd end up with would have the distinctive taste of old wine, but the younger element would add all these new little lively taste that mask the low quality of the original. With wine and bottle already, Rudy would brand a cork using an ink,

pad in a stamp, corked the bottle, and add the foil, and the results were impressive. If you stood them up side by side, it would really take meticulous inspection to be able to tell a ruddy wine from the original. Of course, that raises an interesting question, doesn't it? Namely, why was an inspection like that not actually performed on the thousands and thousands of bottles that this dude put on sale at auction? Like, it actually wouldn't have necessarily necessarily had to be that hard to identify the fakes because, so for example, paper made in the 60s and later usually has a bleach in it that fluoresces under a black light. So genuine wine labels from before that period wouldn't shine if you put a black light on them. If you're selling 10,000

bottles of wine plus in a lot that's worth millions, is it really too much to ask to do a little check in with a black light? I mean, it would take two seconds. You know, obviously they didn't do that. So John Capon's auction house cut ties with Rudy soon after the close-on-de-knie debacle, but the whole business left a dark cloud over them, obviously. There's no indication that Capon was in on Rudy's wine forgery, but he definitely seems to have displayed a noticeable lack of curiosity about where all of this stuff was coming from. As one wine expert told New York magazine, quote, the notion that John Capon did any due diligence is patently laughable. I think that's very clear, when literally all it would take was a black light.

In March 2012, it was habeas gravis time. Rudy Kurnayawan was arrested and charged with five counts of fraud. The trial revealed that Lamborghini or no Lamborghini, Rudy's finances were not pretty. In 2007, at the same time he was splashing out $6 million on wine and luxury this and luxury that, he was emailing friends and acquaintances basically just begging. for million-dollar loans because he was, quote, in real deep, deep shit. In real deep, deep, deep shit. How deep?

Well, at the time of his trial, it would turn out he owed over $11 million, which is indeed a massive pile of doo-doo. This is not long after he racked up 34-mill in auction sales, okay? So what happened to the money? Like, where did it go? One basic answer is Indonesia. At trial, the feds presented evidence showing. that Rudy transferred $17 million to his brothers in Asia, and put a pin in that because we're

going to circle back to Rudy's very private family in just a little bit. And even the spectacular sales of the seller and the seller to the revenge did not net Rudy as much as might be imagined. Not only did John Capon's auction house take their cut, they had previously advanced Rudy millions of dollars. And when the auction house took a hit on buyers sending back the wines, when they realized they were fake, then they would seek and ultimately get a judgment against Rudy, and that added up to about $10 million in the end. So you add to that the sports cars and the luxury suits and the watches and most of all the snowballing money pit of this Bel Air Mansion that he was renovating, and where did the money go becomes a little bit less of a mystery.

The combination of financial records and expert testimony and the mountain of physical evidence from Rudy's house made the trial a steep-ass climb for his defense attorneys. Unless, of course, they could convince the jury that Rudy had printed out thousands of labels for valuable wines because he was

just so crazy about wine that he was going to make wallpaper out of them. Yes, they tried this. No, it did not work. They really did. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. He just loves wine. He was getting wallpaper

paper's house. In October 2013, Rudy was found guilty on two counts of fraud and given a 10-year sentence. But that does not quite wrap up his story. About Rudy, there are still some, dare we say it, unsolved mysteries. For one thing, was he acting alone? Remember, we're talking about tens of thousands of fake bottles here. Did Rudy really make all these himself in his kitchen while also jetting from coast to coast and glad-handing at every wine event in sight, it's a stretch if you ask me. Yeah, I agree. Laurent Ponceau, for one, believes Rudy was just one piece of a larger counterfeiting ring,

the frontman for a widespread criminal enterprise. Another question is how Rudy kick-started the whole venture in the first place. Remember, he started off by splurging massive amounts of money on wine, money, that supposedly came from his million-dollar-a-month allowance from his wealthy, but very private Indonesian family. According to Rudy's entourage, remember, the fam made their fortune with a distribution license from Heineken, or possibly Guinness, for all of China. One of the rich boys swindled out of millions by Rudy actually hired private investigators to check out Rudy's family in Indonesia. These investigators found no evidence of great family

wealth, certainly nowhere near the level where they could send a million every month to a layabout sun in California. But what did come out was that in the 1990s, two of Rudy's uncles were convicted of embezzling nearly $1 billion in bank frauds across Asia, money that was never recovered. Now, there is no evidence that these ill-gotten gains provided Rudy's seed money, but I don't think you have to be Hercule Poirot to be curious about a potential connection between a nephew's mysterious millions and the missing billion dollars stolen by his family. Yeah.

It's something that adds a potentially darker shade to Rudy's fraud, moving the story from that of a charming scam artist into the altogether murkier world of organized crime. But it's a question we may never be able to answer. Rudy's always been super tight-lipped about his family. Rudy Conea 1 was released from prison in November 2020, and shortly afterward was deported to Indonesia.

As is usually the case, the airplane seat the U.S. government bought him for his deportation was in coach. That, of course, would not do for Rudy, who paid for an upgrade to first class. Oh, for God's sake, I'm going to get deported in style. I want that warm cookie. He's already had inquiries about employment as a tasting consultant. His skills and knowledge in that area are real and impressive. There's even been talk of delusory.

deliberately marketing Rudy wines, his blended recipes that mimic the grates. So one way or another, Rudy's probably going to be just fine. I'm sure the $17 million he wired to his brothers won't hurt either. He should have done the duping thing to start with. That's what he should have done in the first place, because I could see easily getting investors on board with an idea like that. I can duplicate almost any famous wine, and you could sell it for 25 bucks or whatever. Like, that would be so cool. You know, there's perfumers that do that with really expensive perfumes. So I think that's what he should have done in the first place instead of risking his ass like this. But anyway, at the end of the day, a lot of people fell for Rudy's wine fraud, and most of them really should

have known better. There were red flags right for minute one, from his lack of purchase records to the extreme unlikelyhood of this nouveau racial wine nerd having apparently unlimited access to like the greatest treasures in the wine world. with no real explanation of how the hell he got his hands on him. And his fakes, while they were good, they didn't stand up to really intense professional scrutiny. And to me, that's bananas, like a simple blacklight test would have revealed because of the paper.

If you're taking in that kind of money, you can't invest in some custom-made paper that won't fluoresce under a black light. Like, come on, man, come correct already. You could still be doing this shit. You'd just been a little smarter. But, uh, anyway, there was a whole lot of see. no evil going on. And this really gets to the crux of the con game. If you think about it, you have to

offer the marks something they want, whether it's love or buckets of money or an obscure wine from Burgundy that your friends don't have. People are often more than willing to drive full speed ahead through a whole field of red flags just for the sake of whatever unfulfilled fantasy that they're obsessed with. So just remember, campers, as we have said many times before, if it seems too good to be true, for God's sake, bless your heart. It is, okay? You're not the exception. It's too good to be true. Move on. Move on. Put the nice wine in your rearview mirror. It's fake. So that I think we'll all agree was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Nicholas, Sarah, Becca, Lori, Poppy, Marcella, and Nikki. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back.

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