LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
best: “This is not a good thing to
do, use a waste dump site to build
a ball field for kids to play on… I
don’t care how much the levels are
or what could have happened: it’s
playing with a time bomb and you
don’t know. You don’t know what
you could be doing to these kids.”
Katherine’s story is part small
town mystery, part bureaucratic
nightmare and part cautionary
tale about the consequences of not
taking every possible measure to
protect our children.
Elsewhere in this week’s issue,
HuffPost’s New York editor-at-large
Dan Collins reports on a very different kind of mystery: the glamorous,
lucrative and shamelessly corrupt
world of wine counterfeiting. It’s a
winding tale of intrigue and deception, and in Dan’s telling it takes on
the quality of a Hollywood screenplay. There’s Rudy Kurniawan, the
brash young wine collector who
treats his friends to rare Burgundys
and vintage Bordeauxs—and then
asks the restaurant to ship the
empty bottles to his home. There’s
Don Cornwell, “winedom’s No. 1
detective,” who trails the slippery
Kurniawan in “an elaborate game of
cat and mouse.” There are the wine
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
industry professionals who look
the other way while Kurniawan and
his friends bankroll lavish lifestyles
with dubious—and easily disprovable—claims at wine auction sales.
Then there are the
connoisseurs, enthusiasts and industry
Will the
insiders who perpetunefarious
ate the deception— to
Kurniawan
salve their egos, and
continue
their bank accounts.
to swindle
As Collins writes,
his way into
“Rather than blowing
high society?”
the whistle on a counterfeiter, many duped
buyers prefer to recoup their losses
by reselling the phony wine to other
unsuspecting buyers.” A high-end
twist on pay-it-forward.
Will the nefarious Kurniawan
continue to dupe and swindle his
way into high society? Will Cornwell get his man? Read on to find
out. It’s a true crime story that
mystifies and delights, best enjoyed over a rare Roumier, a ‘47
Lafleur—or perhaps a $12 California cabernet, just
to be on the safe side.
ARIANNA