The Talented Mr. K

A t dusk on March 30, 2012, a dining Mi^k room overlooking Hong Kong's -* -_ Victoria Harbor is filling up for an auction of some of the world's most ex­pensive wines. John Kapon, chief execu­tive of Acker Merrall & Condit, a presti­gious wine auction house, holds forth at the podium, gavel in one hand, a half-filled wineglass in the other.

Grissini restaurant has been trans­formed into a multimillion-dollar trad­ing floor. Similar rituals are under way across the city. Auction rooms and ware­houses are brimming with guests eager for the fine wine, art and objects of­fered by such major houses as Sotheby's and Christie's.

In the past decade Kapon has cata­pulted his family's New York-based wine business, the oldest in America, to domi­nate wine sales globally. While the likes of Sotheby's and Christie's have a diversi­fied business, wine is it for Acker Merrall & Condit. And Asia is the place to be.

Hong Kong is now the world's wine capital, outpacing New York, London and Paris as the mecca for oenophiles and auctioneers, fueled largely by the local plutocracy's 2008 decision to elim­inate a tax on wine.

Some 200 guests, most in casual at­tire, stream in—wealthy Hong Kong citizens, investment bankers, wine collectors and their agents. As I look across the bay, huge container ships drift beside tiny skiffs. But I'm not here to buy wine. I'm here to under­stand a tale of provenance—the all-important coin in the auctioneer's realm. Essentially, this is a story of ori­gins of self, of precious lots, of belief and the boundary between art and artifice. I want to know how a slender Indonesian Bacchus, a former friend and trusted advisor of KaDon's. in-

toxicated the rich and powerful, win­ning their trust and their millions— until the FBI showed up at his door.

This is one of Kapon's more sedate wine events—no sabers slic- ¦"-ing through champagne tops and no show-offs dropping half a mil- _

lion in a night. He methodically an­nounces the lots and brings down his gavel. These buyers know what they want. In the next 24 hours, lot by lot, $7 million worth of liquid gold will change hands.

Open before me is the auction cat­alog, a thick volume embossed with gold letters. Wine duties aside, the booming market here has not been hurt by the fact that in the past two years Hong Kong has sprouted more new millionaires than any other city in the world.

I look up as Kapon gets deep into the Burgundies. The rarest of the

rare fetch astronomical prices. The top vintages of Bordeaux i and Burgundy sell for three times what they would sell for in America. Recently, how­ever, the prices of Lafite—one of the great Bordeaux—have dropped here because of ram­pant counterfeiting.

Kapon announces lot number 309, a magnum of 1993 Ponsot Clos de la Roche. A Chinese man across the table begins to raise his paddle, but another bidder beats him (continued on page 100)

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(continued from page 89) to it. The gavel comes down and Kapon moves on to other lots.

Oenophiles and wine merchants have a fascinating but curious literary ritual, in the form of tasting notes. Some of the more colorful notes, my favorites, come from Michael Broadbent, who restarted Christie's wine auction business. Broad-bent once described the taste of a wine as a "farmer with mud on his boots." In Lon­don, the queen's cellar man, Simon Berry, chairman of the legendary Berry Bros. & Rudd on St. James's Street, recently told me of an artist who would sip wines and then draw portraits of them as people.

Kapon has his own entertaining way of describing wines. I turn the catalog page and read such notes as "ridiculous concentration and insane baby fat" and "broad-shouldered and flamboyant." Other notes sound as though they de­scribe a crazy woman.

For the FBI, however, these tasting notes have far more than entertainment value. Lot number 743 is a magnum of 1999 Romanee-Conti, one of the most prized Burgundies. Its note reads, "Dr. Conti recently admired the 99 after tast­ing almost 100 years of Roman6e-Conti."

I'm startled.

Dr. Conti is the nickname of a man the FBI arrested three weeks earlier.

As John Kapon was wielding his gavel in Hong Kong, FBI special agent James Wynne was marveling at the brother­hood that had grown up around Rudy Kurniawan, also known as Dr. Conti and Mr. 47. From the FBI offices at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in down­town Manhattan, the 58-year-old Wynne comes and goes, having received permis­sion to stay on to complete his work on this extraordinary fraud case. (The FBI's normal retirement age is 57.)

As head of the bureau's Major Theft Squad, Wynne first became interested in Kurniawan and his relationship with Kapon and others because of an Acker Merrall & Condit auction that took place in Manhattan in 2008. Over a span of about nine years, Kurniawan had emerged from obscurity to become one of the world's most renowned collectors of fine and rare wines. He was a regular at wine auctions, private dinners in Beverly Hills and lavish tastings at top restaurants on both coasts.

After buying up the rarest wines avail­able at auction and from the cellars of re­fined sources, he won friends, admirers and customers in the most elite circles. Somehow he quickly enlisted the help of top auction houses and wine connois­seurs. During one year he sold $35 mil­lion worth of wine. In a move that won confidence, Kurniawan surprised the wine trade by offering a guarantee against fraud: Customers could get their money back without question if they were

dissatisfied with the wines they'd pur­chased. Few doubted him.

No one seemed to notice when he began to sell rare wines that were fakes he'd allegedly manufactured in a labora­tory set up in his home in Arcadia, Cali­fornia. According to the FBI, Kurniawan expertly blended lower-priced wines to mimic coveted ones that commanded ex­orbitant prices. A $ 100 bottle of Napa Val­ley wine was transformed into an old Bor­deaux that might fetch tens of thousands of dollars. He'd then pour his masterful creations into empty bottles from rare vintages—bottles he acquired from the Manhattan restaurant Cru, among other sources. He also copied wine labels using stencils and rubber stamps and had a spe­cial machine to top off his masterpieces with the right corks. As early as 2004, his trove was being offered at auctions world­wide, through retailers and distributors, as well as directly to collectors.

According to federal charges, a large number of Mr. K's fakes were sold in four major auctions held by Acker Merrall & Condit going back to 2005.

By May 2012 the FBI had spoken with an assortment of characters, including billionaires, real estate magnates, wine importers, auction houses, wealthy oeno-philes, sommeliers and winemakers from Burgundy and Bordeaux.

How much did any of them know? Had they all been hoodwinked? Might some of them be accomplices? Mr. K, like Dionysus, was at first exalted and adored by his followers. He was pouring magic and history, the rarest and finest elixirs many of them had ever imbibed. They thanked him profusely, grateful to sit be­side him and benefit from his generosity. Then came the dismemberment of belief.

Wine counterfeiting is nothing new. It has been going on since ancient Rome and came to a head in the notorious lawsuits brought by billionaire William Koch, which inspired a broader inves­tigation. Stan Los, an investigator who spent 25 years at the FBI, has been help­ing gather evidence on wine counterfeit­ing. He notes the difficulty prosecutors face. "If you pass a phony $20 bill, the Secret Service is all over you," he says. "If you pass a $20,000 counterfeit bottle of wine, no one cares."

Evidence collected by the feds indi­cates Rudy Kurniawan made that sum look like small potatoes. Tens of mil­lions of dollars' worth of his wines were changing hands. Documented in a tor­rent of e-mails, blogs, tasting notes and eyewitness accounts were interactions between Kurniawan and the likes of Goldman Sachs executive Andrew Gor­don, venture capitalist Wilfred Jaeger and many others. Among them were witnesses, some friendly and some hos­tile. The feds face the formidable task of proving not only that the product was counterfeit but also that the person who

sold it knew it was counterfeit. Wynne knew prosecutors will have to show fraud as well as prove that the suspect had assembled the phony goods.

Early Thursday morning, March 8, the talented Mr. K was arrested at his home, where he apparently lived with his 65-year-old mother. He was charged with running a wine-counterfeiting scheme and with multiple counts of mail and wire fraud. The bits and pieces of Dr. Conti's masterworks were discovered in what the feds allege was a makeshift lab in his home. While Wynne and his colleagues confiscated evidence there, the grand­son of a renowned vintner in France was about to fly to Manhattan.

The solidarity of Mr. K and his follow­ers couldn't hold a candle to the ancient brotherhood surrounding Domaine Pon-sot, as Wynne had come to learn.

Let's take a leap across the Atlantic. About three hours south of Paris, a curi­ous group of men in scarlet robes and four-cornered hats can be seen parad­ing through an ancient village. The sil­ver pendants around their necks display a coat of arms with the figure of Noah at the center—a bottle in his left hand, a tastevin in his right. In Genesis, you may recall, Noah plants vineyards after the flood. The grapevine is synonymous with the tree of life. (A tastevin is a silver tasting cup, an artifact wine producers and merchants have used since the 15th century. It is designed with nooks and crannies so the wines' appearance and color can be appreciated.)

These reverent men are members of the Confrerie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, or Brotherhood of the Knights of the Tastevin, an elite society of vignerons, or winemakers, who have vowed to uphold the history and tradition of Burgundy. Heads of state, Nobel Prize winners and royalty have visited its cercles du vin and Cistercian storehouse. Legend has it Saint Vincent stopped at a vineyard in Burgundy, and as he talked with a wine­grower, his donkey nibbled on the new vines. The following year the grapes were plentiful. Saint Vincent is hence the pa­tron saint of Burgundy, and a festival is held each year to honor him, in hopes of another good harvest.

The Archbishop of Dijon is on hand to give his blessings as the red-robed freres of the confrerie again pass through the streets to give thanks to their patron. The brotherhood stands for all that is honor­able in the cultivation of vins sang, the blood of the vine.

Just up the hill, in Morey-Saint-Denis, is Domaine Ponsot, maker of some of the world's most coveted Burgundies. Its fourth-generation proprietor, Laurent Ponsot, is a leader of the Knights of the Tastevin. Ponsot, 58, was readying for a trip to Manhattan, one of many since 2008, which is when he was alerted of a fraud that (continued on page 185)

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(continued from page 100)

defied everything his confrerie stood for. James Wynne awaited his arrival.

Rudy Kurniawan was born in Jakarta of Chinese descent. He first showed up in Los Angeles wine circles in 2002, when he began attending wine tastings and John Kapon's elite private dinners. Kurniawan described himself as a "rebel" in his family and told a tale of how, in his early 20s, when he tasted wine for the first time, he wanted to please his father by buying him a good botde, which inspired him to learn as much as he could.

Mr. K amassed a collection that amazed his new friend Kapon. In 2003, with what he claimed was funds from his wealthy family back in China, Kurniawan began a legendary buying spree, then pouring his finds for his new high-roller friends.

He told those closest to him that he had a substantial allowance. By late 2003, the rapture was full-blown. In September of that year he hosted an elite dinner for 22 guests at Los Angeles's exclusive French restaurant Melisse. Twelve vintages of pre-1970 Petrus were served. He was known to drop $80,000 or more at a single dinner.

It was not long before Dr. Conti began to sell large quantities of his miraculous wine collection through Kapon's Acker Merrall & Condit. "The owner is kind of like an art­ist painting a picture. He has this artistic side to what he's offering," Kapon noted.

Two groups had sprung up around Dr. Conti, thirsty for more from his elite cellar. On the West Coast they called themselves the Burgwhores; on the East Coast, the 12 Angry Men. Kapon, along with Kurniawan, was central to both groups.

Many of the guests at Melisse that night would remain part of Mr. K's inner sanc­tum. Among the 22 diners sat venture capi­talist Wilfred Jaeger. There was, as always, Kapon, as well as Hollywood business man­ager Matt Lichtenberg (whom Kapon called Uncle Matty). Lichtenberg created the idea for Kurniawan's DDB ("deaf, dumb and blind") tastings to dovetail with the activi­ties of his Los Angeles-based Burgwhores.

At that September 2003 dinner, Edouard Moueix, sommelier extraordinaire, did the pouring. Kurniawan did the spending, with chef Josiah Citrin serving dishes per­fectly matched to the wines, including 12 Petrus vintages between 1921 and 1966, one of which wine critic Robert Parker once said he would "kill for." At the time, the wines, courtesy of Kurniawan, were go­ing for up to $13,000 a magnum.

Dr. Conti's relationships with the biggest-spending oenophiles in the highest echelons of Los Angeles society appeared to be well cemented, though he hadn't known them long.

On October 13,2004 a "bacchanalian orgy," as Kapon described such gatherings, was in full swing at Cru. Situated on lower Fifth

Avenue, Cru was a new Manhattan hot spot and would become Dr. Conti's favorite haunt. "The wine list looks like my phone book," he noted. What Kurniawan meant, according to those who know him well, was that the purveyors of the most precious wines were his cronies. Mr. K participated in this four-night-long bacchanalia with his closest friends. It started at an Acker Merrall & Condit white Burgundy event at Manhattan's Warwick hotel and featured Allen Meadows, a Burgundy expert also known as the Burghound. Real estate mag­nate Rob Rosania, one of Kapon's inner circle, afterward invited the group to his house to enjoy more Burgundies.

In his notes, Mr. K shows that his touch­stone of perfection was always Romanee-Conti, the reason Kapon and others be­gan referring to him as Dr. Conti. Later it would become one of the wines Mr. K was said to have faked.

Following the tasting at Rosania's, around midnight Kurniawan and six of his friends showed up at Cru, after Kur­niawan made a call to sommelier Robert Bohr, who "welcomed us though they are closed for the night."

There, the group enjoyed more of the most expensive wines, courtesy of Dr. Conti, as he narrated the experience. One rare 1953 wine they tasted had been "re­conditioned." That is the practice of top­ping off old wines that need freshening. Little did his friends know that their host would be accused of going much further than that, filling old, empty bottles of rare Burgundy with cheaper wine, expertly concocted to fool discriminating palates.

His followers were amazed at the extent of his knowledge. How had he learned so much so quickly? Kurniawan's attention to detail and to the impact of tinkering with original vintages shines forth in his blog postings and in the tasting-note records of Kapon, who seemed to hang on Mr. K's every word.

Mr. K's closing gesture at Cru that night—actually the wee hours of morning— was again for his favorite. "I ordered the 1971 Romanee-Conti—always one of my faves. RC. It was everything I wanted and remembered."

By the following night, Kurniawan would be enjoying numerous bottles from Domaine Dujac, vintages of Clos de la Roche and Clos Saint-Denis.

Two more nights of drinking followed, and on the last night so much had been consumed that Kapon could barely stand. Kapon, Kurniawan said, consid­ered this the weekend he "tried to kill John Kapon." Mr. K seemed to be killing his friends and customers with kindness as much as with vino.

As 2004 came to a close, Dionysus had a full stable of satyrs with whom to prance, and prance they did, from the East Coast to the West Coast and back. It was only Kurniawan's immigration status, one could assume, that prevented him from showing up at wine cellars and festivities overseas.

Reviewing the evidence, James Wynne noted Kurniawan's ingenuity. He'd appar­ently been skillful enough to take a recent California pinot noir, worth $250 a bottle,

and make it appear to be a 1940s or 1950s vintage of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the prized Burgundy. Among the materials confiscated from his home laboratory, fed­eral investigators found a note Kurniawan had made to himself, right on a bottle, of its contents' suitability for "DRC," the ab­breviation for his favorite wine. He wasn't called Dr. Conti for nothing.

Kurniawan had many credit cards and seemed to have many names and nick­names. He was called Mr. 47 for his love of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc.

The year 2005 was a watershed for Dr. Conti, a turning point of sorts. He was now considered Kapon's "trusted advisor," as Kapon stated in one of his tasting notes. It was also when he began ramping up his activities, perfecting his works of art.

In April 2005, Kapon woke up in Kurniawan's bed. He could not remem­ber how he got there. The two were in Las Vegas, and Kurniawan had gener­ously been sharing his 1945 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti with his friends.

"I took a quick look around me to get my bearings, only to find myself sleeping next to Rudy on his bed!" Kapon noted that he must have crawled in from the couch in Kurniawan's hotel suite, where he had crashed. "I was fully dressed on top of the covers, while Rudy was safely underneath," he wrote. "No spooning or cuddling."

At the FBI, Wynne was fascinated by Kurniawan's e-mails from that year. There had been dozens of dinners and tastings at Cru. Every time he had an event there, Kurniawan told the sommelier he wanted the empties sent back to him for a collec­tion in his garage. Later, he said he needed the empties for a "photo shoot." In all, Robert Bohr sent via FedEx 13 packages containing empty bottles to Kurniawan in 2005 and 2006. Kurniawan complained when one of the shipments arrived with some broken bottles.

Still, Kurniawan made a show of his con­cern for counterfeiting. When drinking rare wines with his friends, he would cross out the labels. (The FBI later asked witnesses if

he always used the same pen, thinking he could have used disappearing ink.)

Back in the old days, manipulation of bottles to create fakes would not have been possible, says Simon Berry. Bottles are a relatively recent invention. If you wanted wine from a vineyard, you had to buy it in barrels. If you were wealthy, you'd have the bottling done for you by servants, who were called bottlers. From bottler the term butler evolved. The fraud of Kurniawan is "outrageous," says Berry. "Completely out­rageous. Please shout it from the rooftops."

By 2006 Kurniawan was still king of the hill, but trouble was afoot. The spectacle of the year was about to unfold. The Cellar auc­tion, claimed Kapon, was to be the "auc­tion that changed history," from a collec­tion that represented "the greatest cellar in America." The unnamed owner was Rudy Kurniawan. The auction would comprise two events, the first taking place on Janu­ary 27 and 28 and the second on October 20 and 21. The Cellar I and II auctions to­gether would gross more than $35 million.

By the time these events concluded, billionaire William Koch had purchased what he thought were two bottles of 1934 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti for $25,850. A wealthy New York collector purchased six bottles of 1962 Domaine G. Roumier Bonnes-Mares for $28,955. He also bought 10 bottles of Mr. 47's favorite, 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, for $48,260.

As was customary for Kapon, a presale dinner was held on the Thursday night before the October auction. Guests were abuzz about the investment benefits of buying wine. It would cost $24 million to buy every lot in the Cellar II sale, while a Jasper Johns could cost $80 million, noted Financial Times wine writer Jancis Robin­son, who was also present.

The next day, the "most spirited bidding came from those who knew the owner of the collection personally and have been treat­ed to many wines from his cellar," noted Kapon. In the Cellar II sale, Acker Merrall

& Condit also offered seven magnums of estate-bottled 1947 Chateau Lafleur. It lat­er came to light that the estate had bottled only five magnums that year. The New York collector purchased a Jeroboam of 1962 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti for $48,259. It was later determined to be a fake.

As Wynne pored over the record, he had many questions regarding the dealings of the owners of wine collections, the auction houses and the buyers. Weren't they all try­ing to serve the demands of the market? If a rare lot was auctionable, why not try to sell it? But how much were the auction houses in bed with their precious suppli­ers, the rich collectors?

The issue of provenance was clearly in play regarding not only wine but also Kurniawan. His mother's name is on the title to his Arcadia house. Most of his clos­est friends, who had met some members of his family at private dinner parties, couldn't tell you their names or where they came from. And they knew nothing about his brother who supposedly distributed family money to him. Kurniawan's allow­ance, however, seemed to have dried up. For almost a year he borrowed huge sums from Acker Merrall & Condit and others.

Kurniawan seemed to be spending mon­ey faster than he could make it. Between 2006 and 2011 he racked up more than $16 million on his American Express card. Acker Merrall & Condit was now funding his purchases of rare wine, and Kurniawan was desperately looking for loans. Accord­ing to the federal charges, he gave fraudu­lent financial data to acquire them. He al­legedly pledged artwork to Acker Merrall & Condit as collateral to cover loans, but the art had already been pledged else­where for another loan.

Meanwhile, Wilfred Jaeger had told him Domaine de Montille was looking to expand and that plots were available. Kurniawan would end up investing in one, dropping $1 million on a 25 percent stake in the Burgundy vineyard. He'd also pur­chased a Bel Air mansion to renovate.

In spring 2007 Kurniawan offered Christie's vintages of Le Pin to auction. The sale was canceled after the chateau chal­lenged the wine's authenticity. Kurniawan seemed to be leaving a trail of desperation. That year he would receive $11.5 million in loans. But Kurniawan's followers still be­lieved in him, and when suspicious bottles showed up in his collection, he presented himself as a victim.

This belief in an ideal version of Kurniawan reminds one of something F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope."

One of the shrewdest businessmen in the world became Kurniawan's next customer. Andrew Gordon was among a small group of executives who had been at Goldman Sachs since the firm went public in 1999. He owned 0.2 percent of all shares at that time. Gordon was a wine connoisseur with a fabulous cellar.

Crime victims don't want to appear stupid for being duped. This may account

for the silence from some of those whom Kurniawan allegedly defrauded. So one can imagine the trepidation with which Gordon related his tale to Wynne. In 2007 the talented Mr. K had had a proposition for Gordon: He could purchase spectacu­lar wines directly from Kurniawan's cel­lar. Kurniawan told Gordon the wines had been bought at auctions, private sales and other sources. He provided no receipts but offered to replace any wines that were not to Gordon's satisfaction. In May and No­vember Gordon purchased $2.2 million worth of wine from Kurniawan. Kurniawan signed an agreement with Gordon stating he'd buy back the wines at fair market val­ue if Gordon was unable to sell the wines "due to the lack of traceable provenance." Happy to share his prized wines with good friends, Gordon hosted a dinner party and served some of the wines he'd bought from Kurniawan. Wine profession­als at the dinner took him aside. They sus­pected at least two of the bottles were fake.

By early 2008 wine auction sales had reached a peak. Between 2004 and 2007 the wine world's equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Wine Spec­tator Auction Index, had risen more than 90 percent. With a recession beginning, there were signs of slowing sales. But Kapon still had high hopes for a spectacu­lar auction he was readying.

Reading the catalog for the April 2008 Acker Merrall & Condit auction, New York lawyer and wine collector Doug Barzelay was surprised by the numerous offerings of old Clos Saint-Denis. He'd never seen Clos Saint-Denis that old. The oldest he'd ever tasted was 1985. He discovered that the farming agreement between the Ponsot family and the Mercier family, who owned the Clos Saint-Denis vineyard, started in the early 1980s. Simultaneously he re­ceived an e-mail from Burgundy expert Allen Meadows inquiring about the oldest Clos Saint-Denis.

Barzelay called another friend in New York. None of them had ever tasted or seen anything prior to 1985. It turns out Ponsot had started making the wine in 1982, but the wines before 1985 were not good vin­tages and weren't really in circulation. What mattered, however, were Acker's stu­pendous lots of Clos Saint-Denis, suppos­edly produced between 1945 and 1971.

That's when Barzelay e-mailed Laurent Ponsot, thinking perhaps his grandfather had an earlier arrangement with the vine­yard that no one knew about. Ponsot was puzzled. Why did Barzelay want to know about old Clos Saint-Denis? Barzelay told Ponsot about the Acker Merrall & Condit auction. Ninety-seven bottles of Burgundy from Domaine Ponsot were for sale.

Ponsot looked at the catalog. In addi­tion to the Clos Saint-Denis was a bottle presented as a 1929 Domaine Ponsot Clos de la Roche. His grandfather Hippolyte would have made it, but he didn't start es­tate bottling until 1934.

Ponsot called Kapon. When Kapon was asked to withdraw the wines from auction,

he refused. "He said the wine had been tasted by experts and belonged to someone who is knowledgeable," Ponsot says. That person was Kurniawan. Ponsot says, 'John Kapon insisted the wines had been certi­fied as real. I said there was no way."

That was the end of the conversation. A few days later Ponsot tried again. "I told him the Clos Saint-Denis cannot exist," he says. Finally Kapon agreed to withdraw the wine from the auction. "But it was the kind of yes that makes you understand no," Pon­sot says. So Ponsot got on a plane.

A Christ-like figure made his entrance at Cru after the auction had already begun. Many in the room knew him, but Kapon had never laid eyes on the man before. Someone whispered to him, "Laurent Ponsot is here."

Doug Barzelay sat at a table with collec­tor Don Stott and motioned for Ponsot to sit with them. He did.

The 22 lots Kapon withdrew from the auction would have been worth between $440,500 and $600,000—and perhaps up to $1.3 million, according to Ponsot—had they been sold as the real stuff. Also auc-

tioned off were other wines with labels that implied they'd been sourced by Berry Bros. & Rudd. Berry Bros., however, could find no record of ever having sold those wines.

Ponsot was about to embark on a crusade. On the day after the auction, Kurniawan had lunch with Ponsot, Kapon and Barzelay. Acker Merrall & Condit's customers had been shocked by the withdrawal of their favorite Burgundies. "It was the first time I met Rudy Kurniawan," Ponsot says. "He was embarrassed. I cannot say he was look­ing guilty at all, but he wasn't cooperative when I asked him to tell me who had sold him the wines. I asked both Kapon and Kur­niawan. And the answer was 'I don't know. I buy so many wines, so many bottles, I don't know where these are coming from.'"

Ponsot says that during their lunch he re­ceived no help or information from Kapon or Kurniawan about the provenance of the wine. "Kapon wasn't comfortable," he says. "Both seemed to expect me to say, 'Oh, I'm so sorry.' But that was not the case. After lunch they were both trying to be my best friend." Ponsot laughs. He is not a man without humor.

"Kapon said, 'Anytime you come you are welcome,' and so on. Kurniawan said, 'I will look at my books and tomorrow or

the day after I will send you a note with the names of the providers.' They were kind at the end of the meal," Ponsot says and then laughs again. "I knew it was bullshit."

Kapon escorted him back to his hotel.

Ponsot was in Los Angeles in July 2008 and again invited Kurniawan to dinner. They met at an Italian restaurant, and Kurniawan gave him a name and two phone numbers in Jakarta. The name of the man who supplied him with the fake wine was supposedly "Pak Hendra."

Kurniawan brought bottles of wine from his collection, "as he always does," Ponsot says. "He seemed sure he would be my best friend again. I couldn't let on that I was his enemy." The phone numbers Kurni­awan gave him were for a shopping mall in Jakarta and an Indonesian airline.

In May 2009 Ponsot returned to the U.S. and once again invited Kurniawan to dinner in Los Angeles. By that time Pon­sot was openly showing his frustration and anger. "He no longer was trying to impress me," Ponsot says. "And I wasn't impressed with him. He wasn't that knowledgeable. He had huge culture on names, vintages and big culture on wine, for sure. But not knowledge. He wasn't a good taster. He impressed people because he was always carrying huge bottles and big names, big vintages." Ponsot believes that without the help of a real Burgundy connoisseur, the talented Mr. K was nobody. "This is why I say this guy is not alone," Ponsot says.

Corks, foils, labels and rubber stamps lay about Kurniawan's five-bedroom house when FBI special agent James Wynne and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Hernandez entered on the morning of March 8. They were greeted there by a slender 35-year-old Asian man. It was Dr. Conti himself.

There were also stacks of printed labels for the world's most expensive wines. In a sink, empty bottles were soaking. Kurni­awan had thousands of counterfeit labels for Bordeaux, Burgundies and Rhones, span­ning vintages from 1899 to recent years. Among them were labels for Domaine Ponsot, Domaine de la Romanee-Conti and Chateaux Lafite Rothschild, Mouton Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion, Cheval Blanc, Petrus and Lafleur.

Remarkably—according to the feds— Kurniawan kept notes on how to create fake labels for 1962 Domaine Ponsot Clos de la Roche and for DRC. Credit card statements indicate that Mr. K had pur­chased ink pads and 13 packages of Ingres drawing paper—"because of its antique ap­pearance," according to feds—and then al­legedly used these supplies to create labels on which he stamped fake vintages and bottle numbers. He used foil capsules and hardened wax, which he melted to seal his concoctions. To forge wooden crates of rare wines, he used stencils to imprint names and other identifying characteristics.

He sold one such crate of wine, of a rare 1955 vintage, for tens of thousands of dollars directly to a wealthy Hollywood collector who considered Kurniawan a close friend. That friend had bought the wine for a

birthday party at his Beverly Hills mansion: Author and wine expert Jay Mclnerney was turning 55. Later, Burgundy expert Allen Meadows identified the bottles as fakes. The FBI asked to see the remaining bottles.

In summer 2009, Andrew Gordon gave the fake wines he'd bought from Kurniawan to Christie's for auction. The decision to hold the sale went all the way up to the board level at the auction house, according to those involved, and the sale went ahead despite protests from a chorus of wine afi­cionados. Christie's was given documents showing the wines were suspicious and still proceeded with its auction. In September of that year, Christie's sold 60 lots from Kurni-awan's cellar, including three magnums of his beloved 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc.

Dr. Conti seemed to have slowed down, at least when it came to the most pub­lic sales at auction houses, until February 2012, right before his arrest. That's when he was offering, through a middleman named Antonio Castanos, wines at a Lon­don auction held jointly by auction house Spectrum and wine merchant Vanquish.

Wynne's evidence suggests this middle­man had been selling Kurniawan's wines for years and that others in Kurniawan's inner circle had also been quietly selling wines for him. The Spectrum auction at­tracted attention after wine expert Don Cornwcll began pointing out strange errors on labels and in the foils and bottles.

Many wonder why Dr. Conti did it. Was it his desire to please that went awry? Was it desperation when he ran out of money? Or did the alleged forgery come first? Did he need to show his family his independence, his business smarts? As of May, Kurniawan remained locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. On May 9 a federal grand jury indicted him. In a let­ter asking a California judge not to allow Kurniawan to be released on bond—he was subsequently denied bail—the feds said he could face up to 100 years in jail, though he will more likely face 87 to 108 months, according to sentencing guidelines.

Owners of cellars everywhere were on alert. After all, Mr. K's wines had not been sold only at auction. He had sold them through brokers and retailers and directly to collectors around the world. Kurniawan's wines were also sold through Robb Report, a magazine aimed at the ultra-affluent, for some period of time.

"The markets for older Bordeaux, Bur­gundy and probably even champagne, since Mr. Kurniawan sold a lot of it, are ab­solutely awash in fakes," Don Cornwell says.

Laurent Ponsol, certain that Mr. K had accomplices and that their arrest was immi­nent, was in New York with Wynne hours before Kurniawan's indictment. After that, he was on to a New Orleans gather­ing of his brotherhood, the Knights of the Tastevin. Ponsot needed to make sure his American freres were doing it right.

In his house, Kurniawan had thousands of counter­feit labels for Bordeaux, Burgundies and Rhones, spanning vintages from 1899 to recent years.