An accused wine counterfeiter duped his deep-pocketed clientele into thinking he had uncovered a “magic wine cellar” in Europe — but in reality mixed a “witches’ brew” of cheap French wines and California blends at home, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.
“The ‘magic cellar’ — that is where Rudy Kurniawan said he found a seemingly endless stash of rare wines,” Assistant US Attorney Joseph Facciponti told jurors in Manhattan federal court during closing arguments of what is the feds’ first-ever wine-counterfeiting prosecution.
“For awhile, the defendant’s magic show worked . . . There was just one problem: there was no magic in the ‘magic cellar’ — only lies. The bottles did not come from a secret magic cellar. They came from the defendant’s [Arcadia, Calif.] home”
Facciponti didn’t hold back, displaying a mountain of evidence that included dozens of bottles of fake wines seized from Kurniawan and photos of hundreds of wine labels, corks and other items associated with the alleged fraud — along with photos of Kurniawan’s kitchen sink in which they say he soaked wine labels he printed to make them look vintage.
The prosecutor also showed off $4,650 in bills that Kurniawan racked up buying wax, saying either he’s “a very prolific letter writer who likes to stamp letters with wax or is making counterfeit wine.”
He also displayed legal papers Kurniawan signed six years ago to get a $3 million bank loan he wound up defaulting on that claimed his expenses were roughly $150,000 a year.
Jurors were shown his American Express bills for 2007 and 2008 in which he ran up $8.4 million in expenses — including more than $566,000 on fancy clothing.
Kurniawan’s lawyer Jerome Mooney, in his summation, claimed his client needed all the wine paraphernalia to decorate a new home that he planned to build and also used it to spruce up a vast wine collection. He told the jury that Kurniawan was a “victim” who was himself duped into buying fake wine.