♪♪
Goldberg: There's something kind of universal about a con.
Troy: Too much of a good thing
usually is too much of a good thing.
Goldberg: You want rich people's money,
you got to figure out what rich people want.
♪ The world is mine, baby, I own it ♪
Hernandez: We're talking about bottles of wine
that are equivalent sometimes to a person's annual salary.
Goldberg: Even if the closest you've gotten to wine
is a box of Chardonnay from Costco,
you're about to get a real look inside
a multi‐million dollar scam.
Mosley: If you've never tasted a wine that is 80 years old,
then how do you know what an 80‐year‐old wine tastes like?
Goldberg: Hey, just watch this billionaire, a wine detective,
and the FBI all get together to put a cork in it.
[ Cork pops ]
It's kind of nuts.
Goldberg: How do Thomas Jefferson
and Donald Trump figure in?
Well, take a seat, top off your glass of 2‐buck Chuck,
because you're gonna like this one.
♪♪
Auctioneer: $16,000 way back, $16,000. $18,000 in front.
At $18,000, the bid's near me at $18,000.
$20,000 if you want to go on.
Mosley: Imagine getting dressed up,
going into a room full of people,
and holding up a little paddle to buy some old alcohol.
It's wild.
$4,000 is bid in the room. $4,200 is next.
Goldberg: Welcome to wine's Mount Olympus,
the nectar of the gods,
where the cost of a single bottle
can set you back six figures.
Auctioneer #2: Paddle 9. $85,000 now. An $85,000 bid.
Goldberg: These folks aren't just drinkers,
they're collectors,
and they're willing to fork it over.
Auctioneer #2: It's going here at $100,000.
[ Cheers and applause ]
McInerney: There's a whole lot of [bleep] and competition
and pretentiousness that goes along with this world.
Photographer: Hey, Jay, over here, one more.
Goldberg: Jay McInerney's novels,
like "Bright Lights, Big City,"
are all about the world of privilege.
Auctioneer #3: At $30,000, $35,000 right here now.
McInerney: People become desperate to have a rare bottle
that their neighbor can't find or can't afford.
Sold! $45,000. Paddle 15, thank you.
It's a bit of an addiction.
♪♪
Goldberg: In the early 2000s,
a young upstart starts showing up at the auctions,
an upstart with a big wallet.
I brought some wines for us to drink.
Can you help?
Goldberg: Wine's new wonder boy, Rudy Kurniawan.
♪♪
Downey: So the first time that I remember meeting Rudy,
he was just a geeky, you know, interested kid,
but very quickly, he started showing up at dinners
and at events and having these really expensive wines.
♪♪
Hellman: By the time he's in his mid 20s,
he's already become known among collectors
in the Los Angeles wine world.
♪♪
Goldberg: He's looking for old wine,
even though he looks young enough to be carded.
♪♪
Rudy was spending up to a million dollars a month
at wine auctions.
♪♪
Rudy would simply raise his paddle
and turn his back to the auctioneer,
signifying that he was gonna keep bidding no matter what.
The market was going up by leaps and bounds.
Goldberg: Rudy was spending so much money at auction,
he was actually reshaping the price of wine
on the global market.
I believe that Rudy single‐handedly
pushed the market higher.
[ Laughs ]
Goldberg: And he doesn't hoard
all of his expensive wine in a cellar.
He is the life of the party and willing to share.
♪♪
Arthur Sarkissian produces movies,
like the "Rush Hour" series.
What are we doing here?
It's called a shakedown.
Very serious police work.
Sarkissian: I first met Rudy at a luncheon,
maybe 2005 or 2006.
It was a friendship certainly that developed.
♪♪
Rudy was a one‐off and everyone wanted to be around him.
Rudy had this wonderful reputation
because Rudy really was generous with his wine.
♪♪
Not just financially or inviting people to dinners,
but it was his generosity in people
who were just the help.
[ Conversing in Italian ]
A waiter, a maître d' in a restaurant, a busboy.
He was really nice and friendly and...warm to them.
Troy: He was very charismatic,
and everyone was drinking the Kool‐Aid
and they were enjoying the Kool‐Aid.
Goldberg: Or in this case, a 1990 Chateau Margaux.
♪♪
So Rudy was a bon vivant but also a mystery.
Hellman: Nobody could quite figure out
how did this very young guy have so much money
to buy so much great wine?
Barzelay: With Rudy at that time came a story
that he was a wealthy trust‐fund baby,
that his family had the exclusivity
to Heineken beer in Indonesia.
It was all rumors, and he would never verify any of it.
♪♪
But you wanted to be close to him
because that was a very fun place to be.
[ Laughter ]
♪♪
Hellman: He began to develop his palate,
his ability to distinguish between wines.
Rudy Kurniawan turned out
to have the equivalent of perfect pitch
that a musician would have for wine.
♪♪
Goldberg: Think of his mouth as the equivalent of Mozart's ear.
He had developed a reputation of being sort of
like the Rain Man of old wine.
♪♪
He discovers he can become
the center of attention and adulation
in tastings with very wealthy Americans.
And suddenly he's vaulted into this world
of millionaires and billionaires.
Goldberg: And Rudy is about to vault
into the world of one billionaire in particular.
♪♪
Brown: I had never gone to a wine auction before,
so I just went to the one at Christie's
on a Saturday afternoon.
And I noticed this young Asian man
and a guy that sat in the back near me,
and they were furiously bidding against each other.
The gentleman in the back bids for various clients,
and one of his clients was Bill Koch.
But what I was watching was Rudy bidding against Bill Koch,
and Bill Koch was losing.
[ Gavel bangs ]
[ Classical music playing ]
Goldberg: If the name sounds familiar,
it's because the Kochs
are one of the richest families in the world.
Maybe you've heard of the Koch brothers,
David and Charles, oil and gas titans
and the ultimate political power players.
Bill is one of the other brothers,
and he prefers a different title.
♪♪
Koch: I would say that I am an extensive collector.
♪♪
And I'm a bit mad about it.
♪♪
Goldberg: Mr. Koch is a man of refined taste.
In his home, there's a Monet "Water Lilies" here,
a Frederic Remington sculpture over there,
and behind Koch during our interview,
a Salvador Dalí.
And the man collects wine, too.
One of the reasons I really love wine
is if you can get some historical wines,
it's wonderful to drink a little bit of the history.
And to me, that's fun.
♪♪
The Boston Museum of Fine Art
said, "We want to show your entire collection,
including the wine."
Goldberg: And that included Bill's most prized wines,
wines owned by founding father Thomas Jefferson.
The bottles, to me as a collector, were very seductive
because it's part of history
and it's one of our greatest presidents that had them.
And I bought 4 bottles at $100,000 each.
♪♪
Goldberg: You heard the man.
What's on the table is almost half a mil!
Wines this old are not here to drink.
They are historical artifacts,
but the museum needed to document their authenticity.
♪♪
Koch: This young bulldog investigator
came to work for us.
The first thing he did was call up Jefferson's museum,
and they said, "They're all fake."
And so I said, "Damn it."
Goldberg: Now you might be thinking
these bottles have something to do with Rudy.
They don't.
Turns out they didn't have anything to do
with Thomas Jefferson either,
but they will end up being Rudy's downfall.
I'm not letting anybody fake something so precious
and dear as that.
Goldberg: The counterfeit Jeffersons
came from a German seller,
and the billionaire took him to court.
So Bill Koch has been burned, and he goes to his wine cellar.
And so I looked at it and said, "I got to look at every bottle."
Goldberg: So Koch brings in authenticators
to vet all 44,000 bottles in his cellar,
looking for any other wines that might not be the real deal.
Koch: What we found through the investigation
surprised the hell out of me.
Goldberg: Bill Koch and Rudy Kurniawan's worlds
began to collide in a spectacular fashion.
Billionaire versus boy wonder.
I got mad as hell and I said, "I'm going after him."
♪♪
[ Operatic music playing ]
♪♪
Goldberg: If you find out
your priceless Thomas Jefferson wines
are your counterfeit Thomas Jefferson wines,
you'd probably do what Bill Koch does.
He hires experts to put every single bottle
in his cellar under a microscope.
♪♪
Goldstein: At the time, I think he had north
of 44,000 bottles in that cellar.
After we had all the experts in ‐‐
chemists, bottle makers, ink experts ‐‐
I thought, "This will take forever."
Goldberg: And while they're rooting around in Bill's cellar,
Rudy Kurniawan is becoming the wine world's new big buyer.
♪♪
Don Cornwell knows wine and knows fraud, too.
His specialty ‐‐ Burgundies.
And Rudy says he's got them.
Cornwell: I was first introduced to Rudy at a pre‐auction event.
He asked me, "What's the oldest Roumier you've ever had?"
And I said, "It was a 1969 Bonnes‐Mares."
Rudy kind of laughed.
And he said, "Well, I recently had the '45, '49,
'55 and '62 Roumier Bonnes‐Mares."
I was just floored.
Those are the four best Burgundy vintages
after World War II.
Those wines do not exist.
I thought instantly
that Rudy was trying to impress me foolishly
or that he was some kind of a con man.
♪♪
Goldberg: People are starting to wonder,
"Where is this money coming from?
Who is this guy?
Where is Rudy acquiring all these rare lost treasures?"
It almost seems as if he's pulling them out of thin air.
♪♪
Downey: In a very short period of time,
Rudy Kurniawan goes from buying $40 California wine
to now all of a sudden millions of dollars of the rarest wine
that's ever been seen.
There is nothing logical about that.
♪♪
There were rumors that there was something amiss with Rudy.
♪♪
Sarkissian: Did I ever hear of the rumors?
Never did, ever.
I mean, look, the guy drank wine like I drink water.
♪♪
Goldberg: But now Rudy isn't
just buying rare wines at auction.
He's selling them, too.
$8,500, I'm out. $9,000 in the room.
And nobody is complaining.
Mosley: If you've never tasted a wine that is 80 years old,
then how do you know what an 80‐year‐old wine tastes like?
And you don't want to be the odd man out
who tastes the wine and you're like...
[ Smacking lips ] "This is awful."
And then everyone looks at you like you're lower class,
so you'll participate in the charade.
Hellman: Rudy was beloved by many top collectors.
He was teamed up with John Kapon.
John Kapon owned the auction house
known as Acker Merrall & Condit.
♪♪
In 2006, Rudy decides to sell thousands of bottles
through Acker.
Goldberg: Two auctions are set,
featuring some of Rudy's rarest vintages.
They are going to be premier events in the wine world.
McInerney: There had never been auctions on this scale,
with so many rare, hard‐to‐find wines.
This caused a lot of talk,
a particularly since this guy was virtually unknown
just a couple of years before.
Full cases of, you know, rarest wines in the world
in huge quantities.
So rare that these quantities should be virtually nonexistent.
The rooms for both auctions, as I recall, were full,
and there was a lot of spirited bidding.
Together, the two auctions grossed $35 million.
Goldberg: $35 million.
These wine auctions shatter
every previous record for wine to date.
‐Nice to meet everyone. ‐Yeah.
‐Very nice. ‐Beautiful.
Goldberg: One of the auction's biggest buyers ‐‐
you guessed it, Bill Koch.
But remember, Koch's investigators are still
ferreting out fakes in his cellar.
Goldstein: I received a phone call from a reporter
who said that Bill Koch
just purchased a couple of lots at an Acker Merrall auction
and said that the consigner
was a gentleman by the name of Rudy Kurniawan
and these bottles were counterfeit.
♪♪
Bill wanted to bring a legal case against Rudy.
Generally, I hate to be cheated.
And if you're cheating me, I'm coming after you.
Goldberg: Boom.
You will not believe how Rudy is doing it
and why this has anything to do
with an Indonesian badminton player.
You heard me ‐‐ an Indonesian badminton player.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Koch: These are five bottles that are fake.
This first bottle is La Tâche.
The label ‐‐ it's copied.
Here's another bottle of Romanee‐Conti.
The label is photocopied.
I purchased it for $7,750.
Goldberg: Bill Koch has been duped...
and props to Bill Koch.
Not many billionaire collectors like to admit
they've been taken in by a multimillion‐dollar con.
The main thing I wanted was to shine a bright light
on the corruption in the wine industry,
to expose all the villains of it.
‐Salud! ‐To Rudy! ‐To Rudy!
Goldberg: Rudy Kurniawan, the wine emperor,
has barely a stitch of clothes.
Some of his one‐of‐a‐kind wines are 100% fake.
I said, "We got to really investigate him,
find out everything about him, dig into it."
Goldstein: And then it became,
like, this international chess game.
You know, it was like one false front
after another after another.
And finally, it's really dawning on us that,
"Wait a second.
This guy is just making it up
out of whole cloth."
♪♪
Goldberg: Actually, some people are experts, Rudy,
and that billionaire you conned
is about to hire a whole bunch of them.
Hellman: And only Bill was willing to spend
millions and millions of dollars
to send out investigators all over Asia,
all over America to try and find out the real story
about Rudy Kurniawan's origins.
♪♪
Koch: Rudy's name wasn't what he claimed to be.
There was a real Rudy Kurniawan,
the badminton player in Indonesia.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
Scammers will change their last names
or their first names or both,
so that no one can easily trace anything that they had to hide.
Goldberg: Bill Koch's sleuths
were beginning to uncork the truth
about the wine world's newest connoisseur,
beginning with his real name ‐‐
Zhen Wang Huang ‐‐ Mm‐hmm ‐‐
and his immigration status.
Rudy was not here legally.
Hellman: He came to the U.S. to go to college
at Cal State Northridge.
Goldstein: He overstayed his student visa.
In 2003, they had issued a warrant out for his arrest,
so he had run out of options.
♪♪
At this point, people thought Rudy could walk on water.
♪♪
No. [ Laughing ]
Cornwell: And at some point,
it got all too uncontrollable for Rudy.
Goldberg: And he may be drunk with his own success
because Rudy is gearing up to sell wine at another auction.
But this time, he and his paddle may be in way over his head.
Downey: In this auction,
there were several hundred thousand dollars' worth
of Ponsot wines.
Domaine Ponsot is a very famous producer in Burgundy,
and Laurent Ponsot is a pretty sharp man.
Rudy was selling old bottles going back to the 1940s.
My first reaction was, "That's interesting.
I've never seen bottles of Clos St. Denis that old.
And didn't Laurent Ponsot only start making this wine
in the early 1980s?"
Doug Barzelay contacted Laurent Ponsot
to ask him about the various wines
that were in the catalog.
Goldberg: Laurent, the winemaker, was dumbfounded.
His family didn't even make Clos St. Denis before 1982.
Barzelay: And he said, "You've got to get them
pulled from the auction."
At the end of the day, he was very persistent.
I put in a call to John Kapon, told him what I had learned.
Goldberg: John Kapon is the auctioneer.
So Laurent jumped on an airplane,
literally, flew to New York.
♪♪
[ Horns honking ]
♪♪
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Auctioneer #4: $30,000, still looking for $30,000.
$32,000, I'm out.
McInerney: I saw him walk into the room early on,
and I was quite surprised.
He sat at the back of the room, and he certainly
didn't look like he was there to have fun.
[ Chuckles ]
Auctioneer #4: $9,000.
Downey: It was a rather boisterous mood.
And somebody walked up to the podium
and let John Kapon know
that Laurent Ponsot was in the room.
Hellman: Midway through this auction,
the auctioneer, John Kapon, said,
"At the request of the Domaine and with the consent
of the consigner, Rudy Kurniawan,
I'm withdrawing the next 22 lots of Domaine Ponsot wines."
[ Indistinct conversations ]
♪♪
And the room went wild.
They were upset that the wines weren't being sold.
♪♪
Hellman: Rudy Kurniawan was kind of hovering
like a scared squirrel in the corner,
and I said, "So, Rudy, what happened
with those 22 lots of Domaine Ponsot wines?"
Finally, he said,
"Well, we try our best,
but it's Burgundy and [bleep] happens."
That is all that Rudy ever said about what happened that night.
Goldberg: All that supposedly pricey wine evaporated.
♪♪
Hellman: Of those wines that were being withdrawn,
some were estimated to sell for $60,000 per case.
That's $5,000 per bottle, but he muffed it
because he couldn't sell wines that didn't exist.
The Ponsot sale was the beginning of the floor
coming out from underneath Rudy.
♪♪
We said, "He's a con artist, a very clever con artist."
Goldstein: You know, like a classic con artist,
Rudy's story had kernels of truth to it,
but that's all.
They were like breadcrumbs.
The real truth was a lot darker.
♪♪
[ Laughing ]
♪♪
Goldberg: No, Rudy, you can't.
The cork is out of the bottle
and wait till you see what he did with it.
♪♪
Cornwell: After April 25, 2008, I mean,
Rudy has been caught red‐handed selling wines that don't exist.
So he had some explaining to do.
♪♪
Goldberg: Enter Jim Wynne, FBI.
Wynne: The wine‐fraud investigation into Rudy
actually started with Bill Koch, who had determined
that Rudy was selling fake wines into the marketplace.
We said, "Well, you know, we both have the same ends,
so we ought to be cooperative."
He was able to provide us names of individuals
who they had identified
as being victimized in these auction sales,
physical evidence ‐‐ bottles that he had purchased
at these sales that were counterfeit.
Goldberg: Jim's investigation
also led him to the man you met earlier,
Don Cornwell,
the Burgundy expert and self‐appointed wine detective.
Wynne: He follows the market like you wouldn't believe.
He's on top of everything.
Cornwell: I decided enough was enough.
I knew Rudy had been selling counterfeits.
And Mr. Wynne asked me to basically start
sending him information.
Hellman: I would say Don Cornwell
is more of a Sherlock Holmes
when it comes to examining labels.
He's a great defender of authenticity.
And I decided we would do
whatever it took to dig into this.
Look at those other wines Rudy was selling,
try to prove they're fake.
We were scrutinizing the daylights out of all of them
to find every labeling discrepancy that we could find.
♪♪
Goldberg: Jason Hernandez is the man who gets the case.
It seemed pretty clear that he was selling counterfeit wine,
but the question was, "Is he making it
or is he obtaining counterfeit wine and then selling them?"
♪♪
Wynne: We made an effort
to collect as much documentary evidence
with respect to wines and financial transactions.
Hernandez: It meant reviewing hundreds and hundreds of pages
of bank documents,
reviewing thousands of e‐mails that he sent, looking for clues.
Wynne: We subpoenaed his e‐mails.
He was buying wax for capsules.
He was buying antique paper to make labels.
We knew that he was central to the creation of the fakes.
What you ask for in a wine, you know,
power, elegance, structure, everything, man.
This is it.
Goldberg: And while the FBI is closing in on Rudy on one side,
Bill Koch is working the other.
The investigation for me was fun
because it involved a lot of trying to figure out
what the reality is.
♪♪
Goldstein: We get a tip from the banking industry in Indonesia,
and it started to explain at least some of the reasons
why this man was trying to conceal
who he really was.
In the 1960s,
Rudy's grandfather, Harry Tansil, gets in trouble
because he's a bank executive
and he embezzles a lot of their money.
And then he goes to prison.
Harry's got 12 kids.
Two of those kids,
Rudy's Uncle Eddy and Uncle Hendra,
are then implicated by the Indonesian government
in the biggest bank scandal
in the history of the country at the time.
♪♪
Goldberg: In the mid '90s, Eddy Tansil and Hendra Rahardja
were convicted of embezzling money
from government‐owned banks.
Goldstein: So between the two uncles,
I think it's safe to say
that both of them stole about a billion U. S. dollars.
Goldberg: And Koch's investigators
did find that some of that billion
was transferred into Rudy's dad's bank account.
♪♪
A billion dollars is a lot of money.
Where did that money go?
[ Auctioneer speaking indistinctly ]
♪♪
I think some of that money ended up
buying a lot of wine in America.
Everything he was saying was a lie.
There was no Heineken exclusivity
for any part of Asia.
His family businesses turned out to be
pretty much an illusion.
[ Auctioneer speaking indistinctly ]
[ Gavel bangs ]
Goldberg: So perhaps the money
that got Rudy into the wine business
was illegal, but by this point,
his money seems to be gone and he's still living large.
Hellman: As it turns out, Rudy was deeply in debt.
Hernandez: He was living a really high‐flying lifestyle.
He bought millions of dollars of wine.
Hellman: He's buying his Hermès suits,
custom lined with Hermès scarves.
He buys a new $8 million house,
and he's getting in deeper and deeper.
Goldberg: So deep.
There's no way Rudy's gonna be able
to dig himself out of this one.
♪♪
Goldberg: It's time to bring down the con.
Wynne: We had been building a case for some time
to request an arrest warrant.
Goldberg: And the FBI agent
isn't talking about a case of wine.
The best way to do this is catch Rudy in the act.
There was an auction where Rudy was offering
some clearly fake wines,
and he was using a straw, a third person, to do it.
I got the catalog, and I'm looking at the photos
and it took me 30 seconds ‐‐ no more ‐‐ to say,
"Those are absolutely Rudy wines,
because these are wines
that basically you would never see anywhere else."
The same kind of stuff we'd seen from Rudy over and over again.
♪♪
Wynne: Don started posting on an online site
called Wine Berserkers that this collection was Rudy's.
These were fakes, beware, don't buy, et cetera.
That generated an incredible, incredible response online.
Cornwell: It was the definition of a viral post.
Wynne: I thought, "This is good evidence.
Let's use this and move forward with an arrest."
Goldberg: Thanks to Don's post,
the auction house decided to withdraw
almost $1 million worth of fake wine from the sale.
♪♪
Hernandez: The morning of Rudy's arrest was March 8, 2012.
FBI knocked on the door.
♪♪
Hellman: Finally, Rudy appears
just as they're about to ram down the door.
He's handcuffed.
[ Handcuffs click ]
I walked up to the door, and I looked in.
Goldberg: If they were looking for evidence,
this was the mother lode.
You could see that the kitchen was something else.
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
Wynne: There was a window
over the kitchen sink that was completely covered.
There was a drain board there
that had a cork‐extracting device.
There was a device to recork, and there was a funnel.
In the sink, there were two or three bottles soaking
so that the labels would come off.
Hernandez: It looked like the whole house
was dedicated to storing and making wine.
Goldberg: Rudy is running
a "Breaking Bad" laboratory for vino.
♪♪
Wynne: There was probably 15 or 20 different wines
that he was using to create new product.
♪♪
Thousands and thousands of all sorts of labels
branded like currency.
Hernandez: We found a wax and we found stamps.
Rudy's town home was kept really cold.
It was 60‐something degrees.
Wynne: It was a glorified wine refrigerator.
He used space heaters in the bedrooms.
It was the ultimate wine‐counterfeiting facility.
♪♪
Mosley: He made it so easy for the FBI.
Just like, "Here's the crime. Here's the crime that I did."
♪♪
Rudy was taking low‐end wines,
mixing them into some kind of Franken‐wine,
and then placing them in these older bottles,
these vintage bottles.
You know, I thought, you know,
"Why would you do it in your own house?"
It's kind of nuts.
Goldberg: It turns out the clues were there all along.
As they say, let's rewind the tape.
[ Tape rewinding ]
Rudy seemed to have a sentimental quirk
at those wine dinners where he so generously poured.
He liked to bring home souvenirs.
In fact, he demanded that all of his empties be returned.
♪♪
I believe almost all the time, he would say,
"Don't throw the bottle."
♪♪
We all know that once a bottle is empty, you dispose of it
because there's actual laws
that prohibit you from filling a bottle with something else.
♪♪
Goldberg: But Rudy, in many cases,
he'd refill a bottle of wine
that already costs thousands and sell it again
for three or four times the price.
I just was absolutely stunned.
We had this really good friendship that was beyond wine,
and I just felt like somebody had cut my right arm off.
I started asking, "How long was this going on?
Who knew?"
♪♪
Goldberg: You heard that.
Rudy has such a good con going,
he even told people what he was doing
and they thought it was a joke.
[ Laughter ]
He was even seeking out publicity.
All this video you've been seeing
is from a never‐aired television pilot
that Bill Koch actually tracked down and bought the rights to
while he was investigating Rudy.
Hernandez: Rudy is ultimately charged
with mail and wire fraud.
Wynne: Rudy pled not guilty to the indictment.
♪♪
Hellman: So Rudy went to trial in December of 2013.
Goldberg: During the trial, both Bill Koch
and the winery owner, Laurent Ponsot,
testified against Rudy.
Laurent Ponsot detests
that Rudy Kurniawan made fake Domaine Ponsot wines.
He was able to testify
that the wines were unquestionably fake.
Wynne: Bill Koch had testified under oath in the trial.
That's very, very critical.
Goldberg: Most of the other rich guys who were duped
weren't even willing to show up in court.
It was gonna be a too‐embarrassing situation,
I think, for them to get on the stand
and be examined and cross‐examined
about being defrauded
by this 35‐year‐old illegal alien
with an invented background and history.
But Bill Koch was there from day one.
Goldberg: Rudy was sentenced to 10 years in prison
and ordered to pay $28 million in restitution.
As of 2020, he still owed $18 million of that.
Wynne: In addition,
Rudy's presence in this country was illegal.
And so upon the conclusion of his incarceration,
he's supposed to be deported.
Goldberg: And believe it or not,
this is where Donald Trump comes in.
We'll tell you how.
♪♪
Goldberg: After Rudy went to prison,
the U. S. Marshals seized his collection of counterfeit wine.
[ Glass bottles shattering ]
[ Operatic music playing ]
♪♪
But that doesn't mean
that all of the bottles have been destroyed.
Downey: I think it's impossible to know
when Rudy's fake bottles will be completely eradicated.
♪♪
I'm still finding Rudy's wine in wine collections all the time.
♪♪
I think that they're gonna be out there
for a very long time.
♪♪
McInerney: Rudy Kurniawan loved wine.
It's sort of a tragedy
that he befouled the thing that he loved.
Mosley: I think that Rudy was just high on the con
and on the excitement of how far he could take it.
Goldberg: In fact, the feds found 5,000 authentic bottles
in Rudy's collection
and auctioned them off to the highest bidder.
$12,000. Any more? $14,000.
$14,000? 6.
Hernandez: He did buy millions of dollars of legitimate wine,
and he never only sold fake wine.
He would mix in the real with the fake.
♪♪
Hellman: You know, "Tonight, I'm pouring the real stuff.
You get a bottle of that.
Tomorrow you're gonna buy 12 bottles,
but I made it in my kitchen."
It's the old bait and switch.
Goldberg: You know, the centerpiece of a con
is that the victim needs to want something very badly
and the con man is there to supply it.
Barzelay: They wanted to believe
that their money got them things that no one else could have.
Goldberg: Billionaire Bill Koch ‐‐
he sued Rudy, who settled with him for $3 million.
Who would like to guess whether Rudy will ever pay that back?
Goldstein: Nope.
I would argue that he did that,
knowing that he was never going to live up to it.
Mosley: Rudy created his own market.
He inflated the prices of wine,
and then he created his own product
to sell to these same rich people for a higher price.
♪♪
Sarkissian: He thought he was so good
that he could get away with anything.
I think what he felt is, "I can remake this wine
and nobody would know the difference,"
but I don't think he did it maliciously.
A lot of people think that wine fraud is a victimless crime.
But the result of Rudy Kurniawan's fraud
raised wine prices globally.
♪♪
Cornwell: Rudy was a very intelligent guy.
He could have made something out of his life
and instead he chose to cheat.
♪♪
Goldberg: November of 2020, Rudy was released from prison
and transferred to custody
of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE.
Now, there's still no word
on when he'll be deported to Indonesia.
And this is where the former president comes in.
Goldstein: Several months ago,
Rudy's lawyer asked me if I would go to my boss
and petition the United States government,
specifically President Trump, to keep Rudy in the country.
Goldberg: Angling for a pardon.
And who were they asking to call the White House?
Bill Koch.
And of course, I looked at it and said, "That's crazy."
And I said, "Hell no."
Bill's never called the President
and asked for favors on anything.
And why would he do it for somebody who swindled him?
I mean, that's ‐‐ It was ludicrous.
Goldberg: So we would like to end with crime doesn't pay,
but Rudy's lawyer says he's fielding job offers for him
after he's released to work as a wine‐tasting consultant.
[ Chuckling ]
Wynne: Once Rudy would be released and deported,
there is no constraints or limits
that the U. S. government will be able to put on him.
Goldberg: Who knows?
Maybe this isn't the last we'll hear from Rudy Kurniawan.
After all, Indonesia is only a short hop from Hong Kong.
Wealthy people, fine wine.
And I hear the market is booming.
Rudy Kurniawan is a con artist, just plain and simple.
Goldberg: Hey, I'll drink to that.
‐‐ Captions by VITAC ‐‐