In my personal experiences, being a fool was much better than co-conspirator, regardless if the latter offered financial gain.
Great response, Maureen.
Apart from a minor comment, I have kept out of this thread, but I think this sentence is key.
Three possibilities.
Was Kapon duped?
Did Kapon suspect, but wanted plausible deniability?
Did he know exactly what was going on, but didn’t give a damn?
I know that rumors of Rudy’s activities were common years before the Ponsot sale, and in fact, mention of possible Rudy provenance was a deal killer then. I am absolutely convinced that Kapon was well aware of the rumors, so I think it unlikely that he was duped.
If I were fooled a couple times, I would be outraged and publicly denounce the person/company that used me to perpetrate a fraud.
After the Ponsot scandal, I would CERTAINLY stop working with a company that failed to pull the wines from sale which were definitively never made as Kapon promised to Laurent Ponsot he would do. (Had Kapon pulled them prior to sale, they would have been on the errata/addendum sheet as withdrawn. They were not only not pulled from sale, some bottles were apparently in the room to increase interest from bidders!) As we all know, kapon only withdrew the lots from the podium, once he was informed that Laurent Ponsot was in the sale room. But Allen didn’t stop, he kept working with John and kept taking Kapons money - that is neither being a victim, nor being fooled.
In 2010: I took AM to lunch, just before he left on what I call/called the “Greenberg apology tour.” We were at Le Central in SF, during the ZWA La Paulee auction (which was at Mina). He expressed gratitude for my having steered him correctly about Royal Wine Merchants old DRC being counterfeit years before. I pleaded that as I was correct then, would he please, please listen to me, and trust me, and not go on the eminent tour of Asia with John, to promote the “The Imperial Cellar” which I knew would be chock full of counterfeits.
I was concerned for him, he was a friend. I was sure this was going to be detrimental to him in the long run, as I knew exactly what Greenberg and Kapon were up to - despite the fact that most of the world would not believe me until the verdicts in the Rudy and Greenberg trials came back exactly as I thought they would in 2012 and 2013. Remember, I caught Greenberg & Kapon selling fakes in the Greenberg 2003 Acker sale, as I had vetted Greenberg wines in late 2002 and rejected fakes from his consignment while I was at ZWA. -Quotes, data/info avl on the Kock v Greenberg trial transcript.
At this lunch, AM admitted that he was not totally comfortable with the impending marketing/promotional tour of Greenberg’s collection, but that he had been paid, and he would do this one last thing with Acker/Kapon. This is close to 2 years AFTER the Ponsot scandal… Well, last I checked, Burghound still does events with Acker. And I have never heard, nor seen any kind of public denouncement by Burghound, of the fraud that was perpetrated at Acker, nor acknowledgement of the role he played. Had I been used like that, by Rudy, by Greenberg, AND by Kapon/Aker I would be furious, and I would loudly proclaim my indignation to absolve myself of involvement. The silence is deafening…
If you look at Rudy’s Post Sale Report for THE CELLAR (Acker Sale 061), you see all the loans from third parties, (despite a lawsuit threat I received for calling them loans, when the post-Sale Report for Acker Sale document says “Loan” I am going to call them loans!) and the payments, including Burghound fees. These are Public Documents.
Interestingly - two people left the country just before the RK trial and did not return until testimony was concluded: Kapon & Meadows. I understand Meadows emails to RK are very damning. If he was not involved, why not be pissed off, as Parker has been when he realized that Royal used him to substantiate & ultimately market Rodenstock wines. At least Parker took it head on, and has been brutally honest about it!
*edited to correct that Ponsot’s presence is what caused Kapon to pull the lots from sale. I had erroneously written Allen in lieu of Laurent Ponsot.
wow
Example of loans attached
I have to admit, it baffles me that a guy who owned Cru Restaurant, with Robert Bohr, where Rudy racked up bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per weekend (one weekend the bill was apparently $750k) is loaning Rudy money through Acker. The sales were held at Cru. The restaurant would purchase the consigned wine, paying the buyer’s premium, one would assume. So why not just purchase direct from Rudy? Why go through Acker? And why are these people loaning money through a wine auction house? So weird!
Cru would then sell some of these bottles back to the Rudy/Kapon/Rosania “hevy lumber” idiots at their baller dinners - and then, Bohr would send the empties back to Rudy making sure to preserve the sediment. Why would you need sediment for a photo shoot? I get it once, but with hundreds of bottles? The FBI uncovered shipments of hundreds of bottles. NOTE: Sediment is damn hard to counterfeit!
Lots of people are claiming ignorance, victimization… The evidence in the court docs, and court transcripts - which are all available if you put in a FOIA request - show otherwise.
I stopped being naive about people’s level of knowledge a long time ago. I worked at Zachys with Bohr and others who did know better in 2003 & 2003 and later. So what changed when these people left ZWA? Somehow these same people decided to change their minds and assert Kapon’s innocence, because working with Kapon/Acker and Rudy and Greenberg was lucrative, and fun. I know they knew better, because I was there with them. Not Victims. Not even close.
Kapon as victim is a flat out joke. Here’s an email where Rudy’s telling John to lie about provenance & to sell to people with money who don’t know Acker. Even Rudy knew Acker was untrustworthy. How can anyone explain that away? That and the blatant lies in the Amazing Grace consignment intro, and so many other emails and communications that show his willingness to propagate these frauds are unavoidable proof that Kapon KNEW what he was doing and participated in defrauding people.
Can you upload the e-mails as PDFs to Google Drive, or to Scribd.com, and post links, for readability? Thank you.
Victor - all the docs from the Rudy trial is available on WineFraud.com, so I will not upload to google docs. But here are cropped images of those two emails.
We’ve also painstakingly catalogued and organized all the RK physical, electronic evidence and docs used in court.
Thousands of photos (many professional) of the evidence seized from RKs home at the time of his arrest including photos of all the labels, cork stamps, serial number stamps, tools used to make the fakes, all the bottles used in court, and many that were seized that did not make it to the court room. There’s analysis of what he got wrong and what to look for to spot those labels and corks. The stamp templates from his computers as well as all the stamps seized. RK’s detailed lists of what he made and to whom he sold/through whom he sold those bottles- by size, vtg & serial number. Sale Docs, emails, financial docs… We also have the Greenberg trial transcript with summary commentary on each day… There is a boatload of data there. (still the RK section is less than 8% of the site contents.)
After going through all of this, and sitting in on both the Greenberg and RK trials in their entirety - there is no way Kapon “made a mistake” nor was he “duped.” He is no victim.
Perfect. Thank you.
Wow! Maureen thank you for this. An amazing insight into all these dealings.
Here’s a video of Maureen in 2002:
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Great work Maureen - and thank you for sharing the information with us.
How have people like Kapon, Greenberg, etc., stayed out of jail? Have their ever even been charges against them?
Ugh, sad to hear. I hope the shenanigans didn’t extend to the restaurant’s inventory sold through Wally’s. Such behavior tarnishes the spirit of it all.
This is good. But the version I shared on FB & twitter last month is just a little bit better.
LOL! I did not know you posted that. After reading part of this thread, I saw that clip on FB in regard to a completely different subject and thought of you here.
In the related thread about Allen Meadows, one of the posters criticized me for not laying out similar details about John Kapon’s involvement with the sale of Rudy Kurniawan’s counterfeit wines. I have already done that in the Rudy Kurniawan thread. You will find that post here: _http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1343800#p1343800_ As I also pointed out in the Allen Meadows thread, I have posted the details in the Kurniawan/wine counterfeiting thread about many, many bottles I believe to be counterfeit that were offered and sold by Acker Merrall from 2012 to the present.
We continue to see counterfeit wine offerings from Acker Merrall, both in Hong Kong and sometimes in the US. One of the most recent ones was a purported magnum of 1978 Ramonet Montrachet that was Lot 165 in the Grunewald sale in New York on April 8, 2017. After Noel Ramonet himself confirmed that there were no magnums of 1978 Montrachet produced, Mr. Kapon agreed to withdraw the bottle. So, in this very rare instance, Mr. Kapon actually did the right thing by withdrawing the bottle. But one pauses to ask why Mr. Kapon needed my colleague to provide the information to him since he supposedly has independent experts as well as himself to review the bottles.
Counterfeit 1978 Ramonet Montrachet magnum removed from Wolfgang Grunewald auction at Acker
They serve it at the next AMC testing event…double blind.
Don,
Do you know if this Magnum belonged to the wines that Wolfgang Grünewald wanted to sell or if the bottle was included inside the lots of Günewald’s cellar to give it a certain authenticity?
Don: about 45 years ago, I was involved in an interesting fraud case in which I met with a professor of something like forensic chemistry at the University of Michigan. He told me that if you gave him 100 sheets of paper that had been printed sequentially by the same printing press and you shuffled them up in advance, he could put them in the order that they were printed before he even got to chemical testing. Forged magnums when no mags were produced seem easy to verify with just a bit of serious laboratory testing. Has anyone done that? The prosecutor in the Rudy case certainly should have.