Prolific wine faker sentenced to 10 years in prison
A counterfeiter of high-end wines who defrauded wine collectors of millions of dollars was sentenced to 10 years in prison at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York yesterday (August 7).
From 2004 to 2012, Rudy Kurniawan, also known as “Dr. Conti”, was engaged in what the Federal Bureau of Investigation called a “systematic scheme” to defraud wine collectors by making and selling fake bottles of purportedly rare and expensive wines.
In addition to his prison sentence, Kurniawan was ordered to forfeit $20 million and pay restitution to his victims, an amount totalling more than $28 million. He was found guilty by a jury after a week-long trial in December 2013.
Once a wine collector himself, Kurniawan used his sophisticated palate to blend cheaper wines to mimic the taste, colour and character of far more expensive vintage and rare wines.
He would pour the wine into genuine bottles, some of which he acquired from a New York restaurant, and cover with faked labels produced with a computer, laser printer and vintage rubber stamps. He kept thousands of fake labels in his counterfeit wine factory, dating as far back as the 1899 vintage.
The indictment said that Kurniawan kept stockpiles of hundreds of used corks that he would insert using a mechanical device. As a final flourish, the bottles were then sealed with foil capsules or hardened wax, and labelled with importer strips and stickers found on genuine bottles.
He would present the bottles in wooden crates that he’d applied stencilled words to, to pass them off as authentic. The bottles were sold, often alongside genuine bottles, at auctions in New York and London or in direct sales to wealthy collectors.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Kurniawan said that one of his victims spent more than $231,000 on a single bottle of his faked wine.
The same report said that suspicions in the industry were raised when it was found that labels on some of the fake bottles that claimed to be produced between 1959 and 1971 included an accent mark that did not appear on genuine bottles until 1976.
Attorney for the court Preet Bharara said: “Rudy Kurniawan planned and executed an intricate counterfeit wine scheme, mixing cheaper, more common wines, bottling the mixture into old bottles with fake labels, and then fraudulently selling those bottles for millions of dollars. Now, Kurniawan will trade his life of luxury for time behind bars.”
