Rudy Kurniawan has been Arrested

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I first read this story minutes ago – and given that it’s 1am, I really can’t be bothered to artfully craft the words to simply say that Rudy Kurniawan has been arrested by the FBI

Below is a portion of the story from The Wall Street Journal’s Site

NEW YORK — An Indonesian millionaire who was once known as one of the world’s up-and-coming collectors and dealers of rare wines was arrested in Los Angeles on Thursday and accused of trying to bamboozle other wealthy buyers with more than $1.3 million worth of counterfeit bottles.

Rudy Kurniawan, 35, of Arcadia, Calif., was arrested in Los Angeles, where he has lived in luxury for years despite a longstanding deportation order expelling him from the country, federal prosecutors said. He is charged in New York with repeatedly trying to sell sophisticated fakes of vintages that can trade for thousands of dollars per bottle.

The criminal charges follow years of increasing suspicions about Kurniawan among top wine connoisseurs. Some of his wines were pulled from a sale in 2007 after an auction house declared them to be fakes. The billionaire yachtsman, entrepreneur and wine investor William Koch sued Kurniawan in 2009, claiming that several bottles he’d purchased from him were phony.

Federal prosecutors in New York accused Kurniawan of engaging in “multiple fraudulent schemes” related to his wine business, including trying to sell 84 bottles of counterfeit Domaine Ponsot wine at an auction in 2008, and 78 bottles of bogus Burgundy wine from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti at an auction just last February.

For the rest of this article, please go to The Wall Street Journal’s Site