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This may be a fiction in India where such a trial might have taken years but the 12-person jury had taken only 2 hours in December last year, in a trial that began 20 months after the arrest, and returned the verdict of guilty. Handcuffed and arrested from his home in Los Angeles at that time, Kurniawan now faces up to 40 years in prison for making, selling and attempting to sell more than $1m worth of counterfeit wines and fraudulently securing a $3m loan. Last week, he had his sentencing delayed till July 17 after a federal judge said he wants to know more about the wealthy victims of the fraud and how much they lost.
U.S. District Judge Richard Berman said he’d heard from only a handful of victims who might be entitled to restitution, such as billionaire William Koch, who bought millions of dollars of fake wines of rare vintages from Rudy. While postponing the sentencing till July 17, he asked the U.S. probation officials to investigate the net worth of Kurniawan, questioning if it’s still more than $8 million as previously calculated by U.S. Probation officials.
Koch was one of the few wine collectors to publicly declare he was swindled by Kurniawan, testifying during the trial that he lost about $2.1 million on purchases of about 219 bottles of wines such as Chateau Petrus of Bordeaux and Domaine de la Romanee Conti of Burgundy, that turned out to be fakes.
“Collectors who know they have purchased counterfeit wine frequently refuse to assist in uncovering the fraud because they are either embarrassed or because they simply want to get their money back,” Koch said in a letter to Judge Berman.
In his later plea filed by Kurniawan on the same date his sentencing was postponed, he admitted that his own obsession with fine wines led him to actions that were wrong, both morally and socially, and he would like to return to Indonesia after he served his sentence.
"Wine became my life and I lost myself in it," he wrote. "What originally started out as buying a few bottles of wine at a local store over the course of years turned into buying millions of dollars worth of wine. I now realize that all this was false and pretentious and that my priorities were completely out of order. The things I did to maintain this illusion were so foolish. The end was inevitable.”
A jury convicted Kurniawan in December of mail and wire fraud charges that could bring up to 40 years in prison. Prosecutors say federal sentencing guidelines call for him to serve at least 11 years in prison while defense lawyers say the two years he has spent in prison already is sufficient punishment.
The Kurniawan case is the first case of wine fraud that has seen conviction and deserves the strictest punishment to deter others from indulging in similar activity. As the value of rare vintages has been shooting up in recent times, the cases of frauds reported has also gone up and the menace needs to be curbed with strictest punishment when prosecuted.
Meanwhile, in true Bollywood style, a documentary film named Sour Grapes, depicting the rise and fall of the convicted scammer is already on the floor and set to be complete by the end of 2014, according to producers- a team of UK and France, who have joined forces for the film. The script follows the footsteps of Rudy throughout the wine world.
Source: Media Reports including Decanter.com
For previous articles covering the Trial, please visit:
Movie: Sour Grapes for Dr. Conti
Historical Conviction of Indonesian for Selling Fake Wines
Days of Wine and Wealth over for Indonesian
Tags: USA, Rudy Kurniawan, William Koch |