Jurgen:
While Hardy did sell counterfeit 1947 Lafleur, I believe you have your counterfeiters mixed up here. The magnums of 1947 Lafleur that David Molyneux-Berry referred to in his Taste 3 presentation were all sold by Rudy Kurniawan – not by Hardy Rodenstock – and all but six were sold through Acker Merrall . As you likely recall, I was a big part of the thread on the Squires Board that you are referring to.
David Berry made his presentation about Rodenstock at the Taste 3 Conference in Napa in May of 2007. At the time he was working for Bill Koch as an expert and consultant. At the end of his presentation, near the 18 minute mark on the video, David Berry told the audience that despite Hardy Rodenstock being virtually out of business in the US and Europe he was continuing to sell counterfeits in Hong Kong, China and other parts of Asia. But David warned that counterfeit wine was still being sold in the US by an importer, retailers, and “maybe an auction house.” David then gave the example of the magnums of 1947 Lafleur and said that despite only 5 being produced according to the former owners, 18 magnums had been sold in the last three years and that 8 of them were sold in the same auction. People gasped.
After David’s presentation, news spread fast through the industry about the alleged ongoing sale of more counterfeit wines. As you recall, a thread was started on the Squires Board concerning Mr. Molyneux-Berry’s presentation, with people asking many questions and trying to guess which entities were involved in the ongoing sales of counterfeit wines and who the source of the counterfeit magnums of 1947 Lafleur was. The answer to the last question was well known to many of us and the details could be confirmed from the auction data available at the time. The seller of the 8 magnums in one sale took place in October of 2006 at the Cellar II sale, and the seller was was Rudy Kurniawan. Moreover, Acker-Merrall was the auction house which had sold 11 of the 17 magnums sold (and it was only 17 magnums sold, not 18. One was opened at a pre-auction dinner as I recall). As it turned out, all of those magnums came from Rudy Kurniawan, and the other six magnums that were sold by Christie’s also were from Rudy.
On August 15, 2007, with no one having revealed the source or the auction house, I posted the information about Rudy and Acker Merrall being the collector and the auction house who had sold the 47 Lafleur magnums in a very carefully drafted post. It provoked a proverbial shitstorm of controversy. Although I didn’t think that much of it at that time, that post turned out to be a watershed event in my life.
I was roundly criticized and in some cases, absolutely stoned, for my comments, by Rudy, by his former “partner” Paul Wasserman, John Kapon, Gil Lempert-Schwarz, and the who’s who of former Rudy supporters who droned on about how Rudy and John Kapon were “above suspicion.” Some of that invective took place publicly in the thread (some was later withdrawn) and some was privately conveyed. Paul Wasserman wouldn’t even speak to me for the next six years. For better or for worse, at that time I didn’t know about the “authentication tasting” that Doug Barzelay had put together with Don Stott, Christophe Roumier, Allen Meadows and several other serious collectors at Don Stott’s home in January of 2007, where the attendees found approximately two-thirds of the old Roumier wines they tasted from the Cellar I and II auctions were clearly counterfeit.
Then in April of 2008 Rudy made the huge mistake of trying to sell the obviously counterfeit Ponsot wines that were never made. (And as Geoff Troy and I figured out a few weeks after the auction, the Roumier and Rousseau wines Rudy offered in that auction were every bit a much counterfeits.) In June of 2008, with no criminal investigations of any kind under way, I contacted James Wynne of the FBI’s collectible fraud squad in New York. (Thus began my new pro bono career…)
Many people believe that after the Bill Koch lawsuit against Hardy Rodenstock was filed in New York, and the details about the fake Thomas Jefferson bottles came out, Hardy Rodenstock just quietly slipped away and stopped selling counterfeits. No so. David Berry, who was working as an expert for Bill Koch at that time in 2007, stated in the video (at 18:53): “Now Rodenstock’s virtually out of action in America because of the publicity – and Europe. He’s now operating in Hong Kong and China – a growing market, and a little bit in Japan. We’re watching him very closely but we’ll get him and we’ll get all of the other people that have been defrauding people.” I spoke with the personnel that were participating in Bill Koch’s counterfeiting investigations many times over the subsequent years. I know that they claimed that Rodenstock continued to ship containers of wine to Hong Kong, China and the rest of Asia for many years thereafter. But obtaining viable proof that the containers apparently shipped to Asia included counterfeits was apparently more difficult than Mr. Berry had initially believed.
Sadly, Hardy Rodenstock and Rudy Kurniawan showed the criminal element how lucrative wine counterfeiting could be and how easy it was to fool many collectors of high end wines at least some of the time. Hardy’s legacy is an awful one. I have to admit that I’m glad to know he’s finally out of business.