“According to the New York Post, worried that he’d be given “the worst seat on the plane”, Kurniawan had been trying to secure the right to buy his own First Class seat on the flight out of the US.”
Rudy seems to have a bit of money in his pocket left.
BTW: The judge sentenced him to pay Millions beside going into jail. Did he pay a penny back to his victims?
Honestly, in this criminal family, does anyone really believe that Rudy is going to be broke when he gets back to Indonesia/HK/wherever? He has uncles who stole zillions of $$$ and he probably planned for just such a contingency (getting busted) long before the Feds came knocking at his door. Narcisstic yes, completely stupid, no. He has become a minor celebrity in the gangs he runs with, and is likely already planning his next grifter operation in the far east where he can probably bribe his way out of any further criminal charges. I really don’t care much about his future activities, but I sure as hell would be suspicious of any auction wines coming out of Hong Kong in the near future that seem a little…unusual. (Like rare bottlings from DRC suddenly appearing out of thin air). Does not affect my life, the targets are likely to be wine speculators and hapless billionaires who should know better by now.
The American Greed episode about the Rudy fraud (I may be to only one who hasn’t seen it) is streaming on Peacock. Is anyone following up on the Ponsot allegation about more people being involved?
He likely hired Nigerian banks to do so.
Moved the Acker Bourbon bit to Beer and Spirits
1972 DRC.pdf (43.4 KB)
Was offered this bottle and noticed that Leroy sticker on a bottle of 1972. Does anyone see anything wrong with this or does it look kosher?
1972 DRC.pdf (43.4 KB)
The skewed label looks disconcerting.
Any acccompanying Burghound tasting notes? ![[stirthepothal.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f40faec63ca1018898a40805efbf9f0066a3d205.gif "[stirthepothal.gif]"){kind=small}
If nothing else, use it to chase down shots of Acker-sold rare whisky. Rare indeed.
Glenn:
Laurent never shared with anyone the alleged factual basis for his claims that others were involved, so no one could follow up on his allegations. Laurent also claimed that the Rudy’s uncles and family members were not “real” family members. Again, Laurent never shared any details about his allegations.
As you may recall, there were several known unindicted co-conspirators and aiders and abettors. The first and most obvious is John Kapon of Acker Merrall. But there were others. For example, Rudy’s brother, Teddy Susilo Tan, was known to be assisting Rudy from Indonesia. He provided printed labels, which were sourced from Concorde in Indonesia, as discussed at the trial. Rudy’s brother Darmawan Saputra (also an alias for a famous Indonesian badminton player), who resided in Hong Kong, may have played a role as well. It is known that he received a $12 million wire payment from Rudy in 2006 from the Acker Merrall auctoin proceeds. Brother Teddy Susilo Tan received $5 million. Rudy had another brother named Andy Suryanto, who lived with Rudy and mother until 2005, when he committed suicide. After the Ponsot auction in April of 2008, Rudy had lots of assistance – including the auction houses that either dealt directly with Rudy (i.e., Christies) or dealt with Rudy via strawmen that they knew to be acting on behalf of Rudy (i.e., Spectrum, Vanquish, Acker and, for a while, Zachys). Rudy also had the distributors and strawmen who were helping to distribute his wines – in the US, it was Antonio Castanos and his son Brian Castanos through their company Bacchus Wines) and Marc Lazar (Domaine). Richard Brierley and Jimmy Metta (Vanquish) and others sold and distributed Rudy’s wines in Europe.
Several of the people who aided and abetted Rudy, such as his brothers, were outside of the US government’s jurisdiction. The government chose to make a deal with Antonio Castanos to testify against Rudy rather than charging him with a crime. Marc Lazar was not charged by the Federal government, but the City of St. Louis did later go after him for selling wine without a license and consumer fraud. These charges were later dropped by the City of St. Louis. The reason the charges were dropped was that the two undercover officers who worked on the Lazar case were also working undercover during street protests following the acquittal of a white police officer named Jason Stockley, who was accused of killing a black suspect. The two officers were among the protestors when Detective Luther Harris, who is black, was severely beaten by fellow police officers resulting in two fractured vertebrae in his neck. Five of those police officers were charged with Federal felonies. Two plead guilty and three others went to trial recently, which resulted in an acquittal of one officer and a hung jury as to the other two. Detective Harris has been unable to work since the night of the beating. The fortuitous circumstances benefited Marc Lazar greatly. The City of St. Louis dropped the criminal charges in every outstanding criminal case that the two officers (Detectives Luther Harris and Louis Naes) were responsible for, including the criminal charges against Marc Lazar.
The photograph is of such low resolution that it is essentially useless. Leroy did distribute 1972 DRC in Europe, but there were no vineyard designated capsules at the time the wines were released in 1972. The vineyard designated capsules first appeared on the 1976 vintage. It could theoretically be a late release by Leroy. This was one of the vintages in wide distribution when I first started collecting burgundy back in 1978. You could buy La Tache and Richebourg for $30 to $35 a bottle. It was floor stacked and the retailers couldn’t give the stuff away. Romanee Conti was typically about $50 a bottle. I was given bottles to try of the various 1972, 1973 and 1974 DRCs by retailers who hoped I would come back and buy more. I didn’t like a single one of them enough to buy them at that price. It took years for the 1972 to 1977 vintages of DRC to clear the market. I laugh my behind off now when I see the insane prices that these vintages are selling for now.
Save your money and buy something better with it.
Thanks Don.
Saw this article today…seems Rudy is looking for a come back.
A free man, Kurniawan is now looking to get back in the game.
According to Mooney, who is still his lawyer, the counterfeiter is still settling in back home and has received many inquiries about working as a wine tasting consultant.
A comeback is in order — and this time, he claims, it’ll be above the table.
“The world,” said Mooney, “will hear from Rudy again.”
“The world,” said Mooney, “will hear from Rudy again.”
That is a sad statement indeed.
This is kind of sad on two counts.
First, the wine world will continue to “hear from Rudy” every time someone sells some bottles that were probably sourced from one of Rudy’s accomplices in the wine selling world.
Second, does anyone actually know if Rudy knows how to taste legitimate wine? It seems that the vast majority of wines Rudy tasted were wines that Rudy created, which have no similarity to the real stuff.
He fooled Meadows, and he apparently bought legit bottles early in his scheme, so he tasted those, I imagine, to get a sense of what would work to fool the posers he drank with. So, yeah, he probably tasted the real stuff.
That said, we still don’t need to hear from him. Ever.
Barnum was right
Not entirely sure the last para applies only to Rudy.
My concern is probable corruption of the corpus of tasting notes of fine wines.
I think Meadows proved in this saga that his palate is suspect at best. You end up in a catch-22 if you start with the premise that Rudy first tasted legit wines and then started copying them. That can’t be true because Rudy created some wines that never existed, which is how much of this started blowing up. The fact that Meadows “authenticated” wines that never existed again makes his palate suspect.
The fact that he “created wines that never existed” does not prove the point that he NEVER tasted legit wines. He also copied wines that did exist. Which also does not prove that he tasted them, admittedly, but he started off as a buyer, big time, and he ordered many bottles from Cru as well, so those were almost certainly legit. Getting in the tasting groups with others built his reputation, but it probably also gave him access to a few real bottles.
Could “Dr. Conti” fool someone with a good palate? I don’t know. At least a few people were suspicious, but there were many reasons, not just the taste. It wasn’t getting the flavor profile wrong that got him caught, it was being just plain sloppy about vintages. Only Rudy K knows why he did something so stupid.
Who knows… Some serial criminals get off on dropping hints to police to prove to themselves how much smarter they are. Arsonists will come back to the scene with the crowd of gawkers and role play the part of some clueless person who happened on the scene. We’ve seen footage of “Rudy” joking about counterfeiting. It seems he was playing a game, in a field he loved, getting away with one thing after another after another. He got away with a lot of things “stupid”. He persevered getting caught doing things stupid, with all his charmed defenders, and all his self-interested co-conspirators and useful idiots running interference, and kept on going. It’s addictive behavior. If he already felt himself a fraud making his way into the who’s who of elite wine culture, and was addicted to the environment and the trill of pulling one over on these people, adding counterfeiting to his fraud would not be a big step. So, it would just be a continuum that that one particular “stupid” was a part of.
I think what Wes is partially pointing out is point that has probably already been made more than once up thread. What makes con artists successful is not necessarily the skills that have about whatever products they are pushing. It’s that people WANT to believe and the con artist provides the avenue for that belief. People give the con artist their confidence. Once that’s established the technical details are rarely going to be given much scrutiny. Especially on items that people have only heard of previously or only even seen once before.