BOGUS
WINE
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
cording to government documents.
He battled the problem by stepping up his alleged counterfeiting
activities and obtaining large loans
that he failed to repay in most cases. “can u send a mil?” Kurniawan
e-mailed a wealthy collector. He
got the money. He borrowed about
$11.5 million in 2007 alone. In
apparent desperation, he used his
art collection as collateral on one
loan, then used the same art as
collateral on a second loan.
In addition to the demands of
his lavish lifestyle, Kurniawan
faced another serious financial
problem. Angry collectors who
came to realize they’d purchased
fake wine from him were demanding their money back. This included collectors who purchased
his wine at Acker auctions. They
claimed he owed them millions.
A TOTAL
BULLDOG
To many in the wine world, Kurniawan seemed to disappear after
the Domaine Ponsot disaster. In
fact, he had only moved his operation underground, where he was
being tracked by a small group of
wine lovers, including Cornwell,
New York wine retailer Geoff Troy
and New York lawyer and Burgundy-lover Doug Barzelay.
Cornwell discovered that Kurniawan had used at least two
aliases to sell bogus wine to unsuspecting collectors. A civil
lawsuit filed against Kurniawan
by one, billionaire collector William Koch, said Kurniawan’s real
name was Zhen Wang Huang. The
real Rudy Kurniawan, it turned
out, was an Indonesian badminton great in the 1960s and 1970s.
(Another Huang alias, Darmawan
Saputra, is the name of another
Indonesian badminton star.)
Cornwell’s friends and contacts
in the wine industry began to provide him with the identities of
people who had dealings with Kurniawan. He found several collectors
who had been ripped off. He also
learned that Kurniawan was using
a front man to pose as the owner
of rare wine he wanted sold at auction. Frequently, auction houses release very little information about
a wine’s history — its provenance
— or the identities of sellers. It’s a
perfect recipe for fraud.
Cornwell says he twice warned
Christie’s about consignments of
wines that originated from Kurniawan, as did Geoff Troy. But the
auction house ignored them and
sold the suspect wines anyway.
Christie’s declined to comment,