DECEPTION: The Wine Scammer Who Fooled Billionaires

Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, we want to tell you about What the Fact. It's a new show from Conor Tomlinson, you know, from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum, and Carter Roy from Murder, true crime stories. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Conor's infectious energy will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod. This is Crime House. They thought it was the perfect crime. A plan so clever it couldn't possibly fail. Until it did spectacularly. Welcome to Crimes of Deception, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. We're your hosts, Sabrina Deanna Roga and Corinne Vienne. Every Tuesday, we're here to help you. We're exploring a different corner of the true crime universe, examining cases that left a permanent impact on society. This season, we're stepping into some of the boldest and most unbelievable crimes ever committed, the kind of crimes where reality is stranger than fiction. If you are loving Crimes Of, please follow, rate, and review us wherever you listen. It helps us build this community, and we love hearing from you. To get early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to the Crime House Plus community on Apple Podcasts. You can also catch us on YouTube. We include visuals that bring every case to life. Today, we are diving into the world of fine wine to look at how Rudy Kurniawin conned some of the world's richest collectors out of millions of dollars, and how he would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for one meddling billionaire. Before we get into the story, I have to talk about something that has been keeping me up at night. Do you know what I'm going to talk about? No. Calling everyone mommies. Oh, yes. I should have known. You texted me about it yesterday. You were like, I can't sleep. I can't. I can't. And I, so I have a proposal for all of you. I'm going to get down on my knee, metaphorically, picture me on my knee proposing to all of you, that we change the name. Yeah. Because mommies was appropriate for the first season. Yeah. And it was like silly. It was funny. And then it felt disingenuous. Yeah. It didn't feel right. And that's why I'm here. That's why I present to the, all of the, those who do we listening, that we change the name of our community to the jury. I like the jury a lot because we, we are very vocal about our opinions on these cases. We're acting kind of like a jury, but very biased. And then also I feel like our listeners sometimes have different opinions than what the outcome actually ended up being decided on by a jury. So now. We're going to take matters into our own hands. We're going to be the jury. We're the jury. We also get more information sometimes than the jury did, you know, because we find out things after the fact. So it's, we're the second jury coming in. So. I like that. What's up jury? Jurors. Jurors. This is our new community. Cool. Hope you like it. I can sleep again. Unless someone makes one mean comment and Sabrina's never sleeping again. I already have insomnia. A beautifully designed Squarespace website is the difference between thinking about photography school and selling your portraits online. It's the difference between giving away those cookies you just made for free and running your cookie empire. A beautifully designed Squarespace website is the difference between having a movie reviewing hobby and a movie reviewing career. Squarespace, because no matter what you're into, a website makes it real. Use offer code difference for 50% off select plans. Terms and conditions apply. It's a Friday night in New York City and freelance wine journalist Peter Hellman has somewhere to be. He's supposed to cover an auction at a prominent wine house called Acker, Merrill and Condit, but he's running a bit late. Peter doesn't usually report on events like this, but he got a tip that something unusual is supposed to happen tonight. He just doesn't know what. When he steps through the doors, Peter briefly wonders if something's going on. Peter doesn't know how he got the wrong date for the event, because this looks less like a fancy auction and definitely more like a frat party. There are a bunch of finance guys raising their paddles while also just truly wasted on glass after glass of extremely high-end wine. One of them is so drunk, he actually is falling out of his chair. And at one point, someone even slices a giant bottle open with a sword. It's April 25th, 2008, just a few months before the global financial crisis will really hit. But at least for now, the people in this room have plenty of money to burn. It's an all-out war for every bottle, and the mood only gets more intense when the auctioneer tells the crowd that they're withdrawing 97 bottles of Burgundy from sale tonight at the producer's request. He says it's due to some, quote, inconsistencies. And now Peter's eyebrows shoot up. He knows pulling items like this is rare, and people start booing, and someone even starts cussing out the auctioneer. And after the auction ends, Peter searches the room for the seller of the withdrawn wine. And he's a guy in his early 30s with big black glasses named Rudy Kerneowin. He seems withdrawn, not really in a party mood like many of the other people here. And so Peter asks Rudy where he got the bottles that were being pulled from auction, and Rudy just says, sometimes shit happens. Peter knows that there's a story here. But he has no idea just how much this moment is going to blow up the world of big money wine. This case is wild. And something we can't relate to. I don't know that we'll ever be in big money. No. In big money or big money wine. Big money, no. Two things we cannot relate to. But also that auction sounds like debauchery. Oh, yes. Sounds kind of fun to witness, not fun to work at. Or be responsible for any of the parties. I guess it does make it easier to understand why Rudy was able to get away with things for so long. Because if people are just like drinking wine constantly and getting a little drunk. Right. And there's like a new era of people coming into the wine world. So it did make it a little less stuffy like we thought it would be. Yeah. And we'll just say at the top of this episode, Rudy Kerneowin orchestrated such a massive fraudulent scheme that it's estimated he sold almost $30 million worth of wine. Worth of counterfeit wine. So wild. We can't ever really know the exact amount. Because there's probably bottles that he had sold that are counterfeit still in people's private collections today. But isn't that kind of like make it more of a prized bottle of wine? That like now you have, it's almost like a collector's item. You have the rare counterfeit. Yeah, you have the rare counterfeit. You know, like he got caught. Yeah. You have Rudy's bottle. Yeah. Well, we'll talk more about the specifics of this. But I kind of do, in some regard, respect this con. But not in the way that it actually happened. More in the theory of it. Because I'm like, ha ha, conning these rich people who are a little bit entitled with their uppity attitude towards wines. Yeah, just a little like ultra obsessive about wine. I was actually shocked because I feel like I don't know anything about like the art world. But I feel like people who are collectors, like art collectors, there's a lot of vetting. Yeah. And it seems like there was very little vetting happening. But we're going to see why. Because sometimes the wine. Let's start with Rudy himself and rewind, talk about his upbringing and what brought him along this journey. Okay, so shout out to our main source for today's episode. It was a book called In Vino Duplicitas. The Rise and Fall of a Wine Forger Extraordinaire by Peter Hellman, who is the same. Journalist in the narrative you just talked about. So Rudy is of Chinese descent, but was born in Indonesia. And he immigrated to the United States in the mid 90s on a student visa when he got accepted into Cal State Northridge. Go Matadors. I did look up their mascot to say that. So mid 90s, Rudy moves to LA for college. He majored in accounting and lived in Pasadena with one of his brothers who had also come to attend college in the US before. Before Rudy did. Overall, he's a good student. He got good grades, had friends, all of the normal college things. But he had one really bad habit. He lied a lot. For instance, he told people he got a scholarship to play on the college golf team. But that wasn't true. That's so random. It's like, why lie about things that people could easily find out about? It's just like little white lies that start to add up. Yeah. That are just unnecessary. He did work part time at a golf pro shop. But then an expensive golf club in the store went missing. And when people at work asked him about it, Rudy just like walked out and never came back to the job. So, yes. After he graduated, Rudy applied for asylum to stay in the US because in the late 90s, there was a massive wave of anti-Chinese rioting and violence in Indonesia. So it was very unsafe for him to go back. And by the early 2000s, he was living in a suburb of LA called Arcadia with his mom, also moved to the US after her son started college, also asylum because of the violence. Rudy had just finished college, but he couldn't work legally, and as far as we know, he didn't have a job. So instead, he just had a lot of time for some hobbies and extracurriculars. And this is where, in the early 2000s, he started getting into fine wine. You know, you have no job. What do you decide to do? Get into fine wine. Oh, drink expensive wine. Naturally. He said he became interested in it after drinking a really good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley at his dad's birthday dinner in 1999 or 2000. So he started learning everything he could about wine. He was going to fancy wine shops. He was going to tastings. And he started specifically getting really into Burgundies from France. He started hanging out with a wine club in Southern California that held tasting parties, and they would drink really expensive bottles of Burgundy, and they called themselves the Burg Whores. I love it so much. He also drank. I like the Burg Whores better than this next group, even though I don't know anything about either of them. But he also drank with a group called 12 Angry Men, and it got its name because I guess every member had a habit of bringing high-end wine to normal dinner parties, and other guests would bring what they would say like crappy wine, you know, like a cheaper wine, and this really made them angry, pissed them off. Well, 12 Angry Men is about. It's a movie about a jury of 12 angry. Three men, which also applies to you, the jurors. The jurors. The jurors. Rudy and his friends would drink tons of crazy expensive wine at these lavish tasting dinners, which sometimes went into the wee hours of the morning, so they were like truly partying. And these wine nerds, they were very quick to welcome Rudy into their group. He was inducted. And Rudy did have a few things going on for him, because it wasn't exactly easy to get into these wine groups. Right. But for Rudy, it seemed to be. First, he was very generous. So he always brought. Really great bottles of wine to these parties. He gave everyone really healthy pours. He was very quick to pick up dinner tabs, despite how expensive they may be. And he also had this rare superpower in the wine world, where he had this extraordinary palate, and he could identify wines with an amazing level of detail in blind taste tests. Which I feel like we need to talk about, because I have a deep appreciation for people like this and sommeliers, but I also feel like it's a little bit of BS. And there is a study, I wrote this down. There was an article found, it might not be a study, there was an article in The Guardian that said that wine judging is pretty much random, and judges are only consistent about 10% of the time. What I think is very unique is the ability to taste a wine and be like, based on what I'm tasting, I can tell where this is from in the world. That I think is. Well, that's what I was going to say about Rudy. Does this apply to Rudy, or is that just a general fact about sommeliers? Right. Right. There's plenty of people that work with sommeliers, but there's always the few people that stand above the crowd and actually have something going on. The ability to. It's like people who can smell different diseases on other people, you know? It's also wild, yes. Most people can't. You might have a strange odor when you're sick, but most people can't be like, oh my gosh, I smell Parkinson's on you or something. I smell garlic a lot when I'm getting sick. Garlic becomes. Garlic? You smell garlic? Oh, interesting. Yeah. Maybe it's because I'm craving it. I don't know. I don't know. But anyway, it is a talent that I do envy, but I also have like. I'm dubious of. Well, it's also hard because it's like, is Rudy reporting this on him? Well, no. No, but if he's like consistently correct. Yeah. So this is why he buys his way in, or like people buy him. But I do feel like when I'm at dinner parties with my own friends, all three of them that I can count on my hand, and people are like, ooh, I taste the notes of raspberry. I'm like, no, you freaking don't. Shut up. Drink your wine. It's a twist off. This is two buck Chuck. Yeah. What are we talking about here? But Rudy, I understand that because like Rudy was a liar. But it's crazy. Like this is the one thing he wasn't lying about. And it's one of the most impressive. It is. Yes. For most people. So whatever your opinion on wine notes and tastings may be, Rudy, this is an apartment he really excelled in. And so this gave him some street cred in the wine community. And he was getting a lot more into wine. And at this time, he was also going to more high-end auctions. So we're in the early 2000s at this point. And rare wine is becoming a big business. And it's also becoming a younger business. Which is kind of what you were saying earlier. Yeah. All those like drunk rowdy where they're like, what are these frat bros from Wall Street doing here? Like finance guys. Like this is crazy. A new wave of young Wall Street guys were joining to find these like rare finds in these bottles. So it totally changed the dynamic. The dynamic of the auctions and the spaces. And Rudy himself was young. So I think like that also helped him kind of fit in. Because they could probably see themselves in him. So Rudy started out by bidding on wine that cost around 50 bucks a bottle. And then a few hundred dollars a bottle. But his budget quickly increased. And by a lot. So in 2002, he bid $25,000 for a single barrel of red from California's Central Coast. And he won. So he had to pay that. Right. Well, I'm going to say something. And I don't know if this is a hot take. I have gotten to taste a few expensive wines. And when I say like expensive, I mean like, you know, the bottle was like 150 bucks or 200 bucks or whatever. Sometimes I'm like, oh, wow, this is a great wine. Other times I'm like, I think my $30 bottle is better. Yes. So again, like what you're saying with the judging of wine, it's like, what are we judging here? I think sometimes it's more about the price tag that people care about than the taste sometimes. Yeah. The point here being is Rudy is spending so much more money. And like the big question that we have is where is he getting all this money? Keep in mind, he doesn't have a job. Right. And also he's bidding and winning on some wineries that are so incredibly exclusive that there's a years long wait list to even get a bottle of the wine. And he's just coming in and like dropping big bucks and winning and getting all this wine. Like what has happened? And where is he getting the money? Apparently, Rudy would tell people that he was from a wealthy family in Indonesia. That had a contract to distribute Heineken in Asia. But then other times he told people it was Guinness. So his story was not always consistent. And also none of it was true. The truth was that several of Rudy's family members were actually involved in some shady business because clearly it ran in the family. In 1996, a few years before Rudy started collecting wine, a man believed to be one of his uncles was actually convicted of embezzling $565 million from Indonesia's national. And then this uncle, supposed uncle, went on the run. In 2002, another one of Rudy's uncles was also convicted of embezzling more than $390 million from the Indonesian government. According to news reports, most of that money is suspected to be held in offshore accounts. So there's some people who believe, and it's not confirmed, that Rudy had access to these accounts and might have even been helping launder it by buying and selling wine. Yeah, which makes sense. And also it makes sense as to why he went for, I guess, like the wine industry and the people that he did. Because in my mind, I was like, if he's just trying to be like kind of like a hustler, I guess, and he's in the L.A. area, my first thought went to like streetwear and like shoes and stuff. That's like, you know, it started in the 90s and all the sneaker heads. I feel like he could easily have slipped in there. But there's not the crowd that's going to drop. And I think it's also the combination of. $30,000. I think he really did like this. In the world. Well, yeah. And he was actually skilled in it. Yes. Wherever he was getting his money, his friends in the wine world didn't really seem to question it because he was rolling with them. He was showing up and putting up as far as they knew. Oh, yeah. I would like Rudy's giving me expensive wine and paying my dinner tab. Whatever. I'm going to. Exactly. And he looked young, but like people would joke that he barely looked old enough to drink. But he also wore custom Hermes suits and drove a Ferrari. And a Bentley, like two cars. And he told people that he got a million-dollar allowance from his family every month. And he said in that some months, he spent even more than that on wine. Can you imagine getting a million dollars as your allowance? Allowance. Crazy. Like, oh, let me do my chores. I can't imagine. Let me do my million dollars. I can't imagine. This is like what you said in the beginning, like things that we could never relate to. Yeah, I know. This is a totally different world. Yeah. Yeah. At some point, though, he couldn't find the rare wines. It had been his ticket into the wine community, even at a high price point. And he was also probably running out of funds and needed to change up his game a little bit. So this is when he decided to start his scam. It's believed that it started maybe as early as 2003. Rudy started making fake wines and passing them off as rare ones. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Prime House 24. I realize like, oh, it is hard to find rare wines and stuff because so many of them are so aged. It's not like you can keep making bottles from like 1960 or in some cases there are ones from like the 1700s. Right. They're rare and fine wines because they're rare. Yeah. Truly. Rudy did have a reputation for being very passionate about authenticity, which is ironic. Very. To the point of knowing all the nitty gritty details about the labels, the corks, everything to do with how rare wines come to be and how they're presented. So he told people that he would actually have restaurants destroy all the bottles that he drank so that they couldn't refill them and pass them off as fakes. It's just a strange detail for him to provide. It's almost like him trying to tell on himself in a way. 100%. 100%. Because he did the opposite. He actually would ask the restaurants to send him, mail him the bottles so that he could keep them as like a memento. Right. Like it's a souvenir from this wonderful wine he had. Yeah. But instead, he used them as part of his cons. So he would mix up fake wines in his kitchen and then package them to look exactly like these rare bottles. He used his highly sensitive palate to come up with the formulas that replicated famous, expensive wines. Which I think is incredible. Like, why didn't he just start his own? That company. That is what I was thinking. I was like, dude, get a freaking winery or something. Or like partner with a bunch of different ones. Mix them together. Make some bomb ass wines. Yeah. Like the amount of effort that he's putting into creating these fake wines. He could have applied it to creating his own winery. Right. So he would start with very old commercial grade red burgundy wine, which is basically old wine that's meant to be drunk very soon. First, he would soak the label off of the bottle and then he would pour some wine out. And then he would mix it with some of the younger wines. So like some high end California bottles or even sometimes just like a regular bottle. You would just like go into your local grocery store and grab. Just like bagged wine. Yeah. Slap the bag. Franzia. Really bringing that frat energy in. He would tweak the mixture until he was convinced it could pass as expensive burgundy wine. It's so interesting, too, because it's like he's zeroed in on burgundies. So it's not like he can just like sling any wine. He's pigeonholed. He's pigeonholed himself in this like very specific. Because he's good at it. Yeah. And when he was satisfied with the recipe, he would write it down so that he could recreate it. Then he would recork the bottle with one that he'd gotten from the restaurant. He would add a wax seal and then he would slap on a new label that he had printed from a shop back in Indonesia. When I was reading about this, it's interesting because a lot of the questions were like, well, if he had to like recork them because a cork can give away the age of a wine. But with a lot of these really, really old wines. It was common for them to have to recork them because like the corks in the really old bottles sometimes were like starting to get disintegrated and they would replace them with new ones. Oh. So it did kind of help him with his con. Right. And also wax seals, I feel like cover enough. Yeah. And we'll learn in a minute about the label specifically because I was like, can't you just tell if someone Amazon some. You would think. Wine labels? You would think. So now he's armed with this collection of fake bottles. Rudy. Rudy quickly became a major player in the wine auction market. And I think because he had already established himself as a big buyer, it was an easy transition for him. There are two really big auctions in 2006 and he sold $35 million worth of rare wine. And a lot of the wines he sold there were pricey, but that's relatively normal. They were old French wines, not cheap, but it's stuff that was not too hard to find in the collecting world. So he started smart. Yes. And they are wines that he actually bought from dealers at an auction. So within his offerings that he sold at these auctions, there were also some Easter eggs, like stuff that collectors hadn't seen in decades or ever. And people were wondering and asking where those wines came from because they were so rare. And even if you're rich, it's really, really expensive. And here's Rudy, this young guy who's still fairly new. So people were like, yeah, where did you find that? More of an interest than a questioning. Interrogation of Rudy. Yeah. But he had an explanation. When Rudy first started selling wine, he told people that he had bought a rich family's entire wine cellar in Florida. And then later he told people he bought a huge collection of old French wines in Europe. So people in the wine collecting space, they believed him. And they start calling Rudy's wine collection the magic cellar. Ah. Because he's like got all these really exciting, surprising things. Like all of this magic. And he was producing rare wines. And he was the guy to go to. Right. And I feel like I would believe him too because it's like, okay, well, he's not giving an obvious answer. He's seeking out like private individual collections and grabbing stuff that way. It's almost like going to like a storage unit and like finding something rare from the storage unit. It's just like if you go enough. And also this guy is like clearly from or presenting himself as being from an ultra rich family. So it's like. Okay, well, what are his connections? You know, we see him, but how many, how many people in the background are helping him? He also must seem or be really charming. Oh, yeah. Or he just is exuding money and confidence and like a certain degree of wealth. The people overlook everything else. So with all this money coming in, Rudy starts to really live it up. Like he's spending a shit ton of money on wine, but he's also spending some money on himself. So in 2005. He bought an $8 million mansion in a gated community called the Bel Air Crest. Which if you don't know, that's a fancy community. That's a very fancy community. I mean, $8 million indicates pretty fancy. Yeah. You try to, you try to drive by it and it's just a bunch of trees. You can't see anyone's properties. Oh, that's what bugged me so much when I first moved to LA. So I want to see what the rich people have. And I'd like drive up into the hills and into these neighborhoods. And you'd catch like a corner of a tennis court. Yeah. And that was it. But you do Google satellite. Yeah. Yeah. Screw. Privacy. Right. So despite it being an $8 million mansion, there was also like a ready to move in mansion. He shouldn't have needed to do anything. Rudy was like, oh, I'm going to spend way more money on this house and I'm going to renovate the entire thing. So he wanted three of the bedrooms upstairs to be one bedroom, his bedroom. So he had the walls knocked down and converted into a single room. It also came with a 12 car garage. What does it even look like? What does a 12 car garage look like? Like, I don't know. But he turned it into a bougie temperature controlled wine cell. Which does make sense for who he is. Totally. Was. Yeah. Which that indicates to me that he also didn't buy a shit ton of flashy cars because because I think he did. Where is he going to put them? I don't know. I don't think he has 12, but he has nice cars. There was just a lot of kind of like it feels like nonsense decisions. Like he had an in-ground pool that he had ripped up and moved just a little. A little bit further back on his property because he had a feng shui consultant named Master Dragon who told him to do it. So it was then like moved back to like the steep hillside in California earthquake territory. Anyway, did some strange things there. He had his mom live with him, which is like, oh, so sweet. How nice, right? And she needed floor to ceiling shelves for her collection of hundreds of Birkin bags. Which like already goes to show that like this family's name is Birkin. Like his mom going into a Birkin store, like they recognize her. Like she's known as someone who can take whatever, grab whatever. Because they're snobby over at Birkin. It's Hermes, but yeah. I thought Birkin was too. That's like the Birkin is the type, the name of the bag. Oh, God. See, I don't know anything. See, I'm so snobby. I literally know nothing. No, you just know more about like fashion and stuff. He also went to town on the interior decor. He dropped 30K on tableware. Which, okay. Like hearing that, I'm like, oh, that's crazy. That's disgusting. But I have to say, there is this woman on TikTok that I follow who is from like an ultra rich family to the point where like you can't relate to a single thing she posts. But she is so lovely. And I'm obsessed with her content. Her name is Becca. Her silverware comes in this like giant like egg. Hold on. Becca Egg Silverware. I have to tell you about this. Becca Bloom is her name. Just her like silverware that she uses to just have like breakfast, which is always, she uses a little bit of caviar for seasoning. Like there's always something she says. It's a $3,000 set of like a couple spoons and forks. Bizarre. Right? But anyway, when I read it on a page, I'm like, that's disgusting. And then when I see Becca Bloom live like, like. Life like that, I think she should. And I'm glad she does. And I hope she never stops sharing it with us. I'd love to see it. The point being, Rudy is now spending so much money. Yeah. But here is where trouble starts to come in. Because Rudy is basically infiltrating a community of people who really pride themselves on wine. They're connoisseurs. They're experts. They know their wine. Wouldn't you think that they would be able to taste a difference? And the answer is yes. There are. some people don't who did have suspicions about Rudy's wines that he was selling that were actually his homemade wines. For example, in December of 2005, Rudy got invited to a tasting event with a renowned winemaker from Burgundy, who was the co-owner of Domaine de la Romanée Conti. Terrible accent. But Rudy loved the wine so much, and he even got the nickname Dr. Conti, which high praise coming from like the winery themselves, right? It was like meeting one of his heroes, except for he's been ripping this hero off for years. This was an exclusive gathering where guests had to pay almost $3,000 each for a whole weekend of food and wine. It was at Carmel by the Sea near Monterey, California, a beautiful, also very wealthy town. And Rudy arrived on a private jet, and one of the other people there was an editor for Wine Spectator named Bruce Sanderson. When Bruce is writing up this story, he's like, he says two of the vintages from 1934 and 1962 were a letdown. It's not clear if these were bottles that Rudy had sold, but Rudy did often sell the 1962 vintage, and it was almost impossible to find anywhere else. Bruce later said that there was some discussion about whether the wines on the table had been topped off with a different vintage. So there is this discussion of like, this tastes different, but no one's really pointing fingers yet. Right. Because also, like, you know, he's young, he's collecting all this wine. Is he getting ripped off? Exactly. And he doesn't know, and he's selling this wine? Yes. And also, I feel like this stuff, so much of it is so old, and like you were saying, with like, some of the vintage wines having to be recorked, there's always a risk that something has just gone bad. I'm making some excuses for him. No, it's true. Yeah. I mean, it was hard to definitively prove if the wine was fake. So some collectors who thought Rudy's wines tasted wrong chalked it up to being storage issues. A lot of people just didn't feel like they were in the position to rock the boat or say anything at all. And even if something seemed off, they just felt really uncomfortable saying anything because everyone at the table generally paid a ton of money to be there. Even the winemaker, you would think that the winemaker might say something because it's their own wine, but it's also a big risk for a winemaker to come out. And one of the biggest, most respected wine dealers now, you as a winemaker, is going to, you're going to accuse them of, duping your wine. No, you're not. Right. So there's like, you know, there's politics within this too, right? And since Rudy also sold real wine bottles, that definitely probably helped because there were plenty of authentic bottles that Rudy sold as well. So it's hard to say just how many real wines versus fakes he sold. Yeah. But there were both. So at this point, he's getting away with it for years. And he is riding that major wine buzz, making huge sales, becoming, buddies with all the rich people in this high-end wine world. And in my mind, I'm like, why not quit while you're ahead? Or now that you are making all this money, why not just pivot? Only sell real wines. Right. Yeah. Or like create your own winery or your own wine brand or something. But Rudy couldn't stop. And I do think there is a lot of psychology behind this, where these types of people maybe get carried away. They like the thrill or, or maybe. Like an addictive personality. I mean, he was lying all the time. Like there's something probably like addictive too, in terms of how he was operating. I also feel like he probably was starting to believe his lies himself in a way. I am so curious because we don't have full answers here about his relationship with his personal family and relatives, because I do wonder if there was any pressure from them. I don't know. Or if this truly was just all Rudy. I don't know. Either way, he didn't stop. Rudy was spending like he was made of money. And also, I think this is a big reason why he didn't stop is the truth was he was racking up a huge debt. Like he needed to keep selling his fake wines in order to stay afloat. But then when he sold his fake Burgundy to a vengeful billionaire, that deal ultimately led to Rudy's downfall. the household intercom he finds his brother christopher standing over his mother's body his brother says i've killed mom and dad but christopher also dies in the same manner as his parents and suspicion falls on jeffrey did he kill christopher in a fit of rage or did jeffrey murder all three of them who killed stephen and helen gillum christopher or jeffrey join us as we go over all of the evidence from multiple trials and even statements from family members perhaps you can determine who killed the gillums and why listen to the gillum family murders episode right now from generation y where we look into the why of true crime wherever you listen to podcasts in 2005 bill coke a billionaire in his 60s and a huge wine lover got a call from the museum of fine arts in boston and this museum wanted to put on an exhibition of items from his collection of art and objects which part of that included some of his bottles of rare wine that dated all the way back to the 1780s which i do think is cool historic like the history of that love yeah but with that has to come a lot of receipts right so i guess like some of these bottles were said to be from thomas jefferson's personal collection yes which is that's i love that that's wild yeah supposedly these bottles were found sealed behind the wall of a wine cellar in an old house in paris and bill brought them back in the 1980s but like you're saying there has to be some kind of receipt as a part of authentication for the exhibit the boston museum curators wanted proof that this wine actually belonged to thomas jefferson and what the auction houses provided to bill at the time of the sale wasn't enough for them so then bill's team contacted the thomas jefferson foundation at monticello which said that there was zero mention of these particular bottles in jefferson's records which is weird because it's thomas jefferson they had a lot of records from that time right thomas jefferson certainly wasn't a good guy well right say that up front but he is credited with bringing macaroni and cheese from the united states fun fact fun fact mac and cheese yes that we like but they had records of letters bank statements and french custom forms from that time and these wines were not on any of the records then a glass expert confirmed that the etchings on the bottles which say th.j were actually made with an electric drill and tools that were not around in the 1780s oh okay so as you can imagine bill coke is pissed off because he spent four hundred thousand dollars on what he is now discovering is fake wine and he's not just a person who gets mad and like stirs in this anger no he's got money so he's like i'm gonna get even in 2006 he sued the guy who sold the fake jefferson bottles to christie's a german dealer named hardy roddenstock and to be clear rudy corneoan was not involved in the selling of these bottles but this is like the origin story to bill coke becoming this man on a vendetta yeah like he's on a mission to find all of fakes exactly and he's like which is wild that like you know rudy was such a huge fake distributor and yet here's another guy right that's just the thing one sentence in this whole episode he probably could have his whole a whole another episode just about him so when bill coke starts doing this investigation to the bottles that were fake he also decides to look at his entire wine collection and determine if there are any other fakes and who had sold them to him so bill assembled a team of investigators including lawyers scientists retired fbi and cia scotland yard and mi6 agents to go through his collection his entire wine collection with a fine tooth comb and he even had old bottles of wine tested with a gamma ray detector to determine if they were bottled before 1945 which at first i was like what like why right right are you gamma raying your wine well add some context here's another interesting fact yeah 1945 is when the first nuclear test went off and that released a radioactive isotope called cesium-137 into the atmosphere and because of this any bottled wine after that date in 1945 would have some traces of this in it so bill's plan was to test all of the wines for this and also like again money was no object which i love like if i did have so much money i would love to spend it on investigations like this right i hope that he also you know it took some money and did some things like donate it to like solve things outside his wine collection for other people right um but to get access to a gamma ray detector well just to be able to like be wronged and be able to have like unlimited resources yes to find to hunt and over the person who wronged you oh people say forgiveness is great i don't know vengeance or something about it it does if you can afford vengeance like this yeah yeah the reason people forgive is they don't have enough money for revenge i want that on a shirt so bill threw some 20 million dollars into this investigation and learned that as many as 400 bottles out of his 40,000-bottle collection were fake, which meant that he spent about $4 million on counterfeit wine. So he spent $4 million on counterfeit wine, but $20 million on the investigation to find out that he spent $4 million on counterfeit wine. But that is like pocket change for him. So, again, like unlimited resources. So he's like, I'm going to fuck everyone over now. Well, is it fucking over if they fucked over him first? It's getting to the bottom of it. So he called a lawyer, his lawyer, and over the next few years, Bill sued people left and right for selling him fake wines. Which goes back to your point of like, this is not just Rudy. There are multiple fake sellers. There's a lot of lawsuits before Rudy even is in the vicinity of Bill. Bill filed lawsuits against wine distributors, auction houses, importing companies, basically anyone he could get his hands on. And this crusade for justice ultimately did lead him to Rudy Corneo, who'd done business with some of the people that Bill had already sued. On April 23rd, 2008, Bill sued Acker, Merrill, and Condit, which was the auction house where we were first introduced to them as like the, you know, Wall Street, Friday finance guys. He accused them of selling him fake wine. And the lawsuit at the time did not name Rudy as the source of the fakes. But Bill, during his investigation, was pretty sure that it was Rudy. Yeah. So all of a sudden, Rudy now is facing a lot of intense scrutiny in the wine world. And Bill is making a lot of noise because he's like, you're not going to sell fakes in this world. Wine is my world. And I will find you. And I will get you, my pretty. My pretty. I like how you went that route. I was thinking Liam Neeson and Tegan. And Tegan. When you were talking about vengeance, I was thinking about Liam Neeson. Okay, so two days after Bill filed his lawsuit against, Acker on April 25th, 2008, Laurent Ponceau, the owner of a wine estate in Burgundy, surprised everyone by showing up at an Acker auction in New York. And this is completely unrelated to Bill Koch's investigation. This is like, people are kind of closing in on Rudy and the selling of fakes. Right. Well, and also it's just like, this is happening so much. It seems like right now that there's probably a lot of gossip and drama. So people are. Yes. Maybe. Where they had suspicions that they were like biting their tongue on. Now they have the room to stop it. Yes. So Laurent had his own reasons. And this is the same event from the very beginning of the episode, the debaucherous one, where Peter Hellman was covering as a journalist. So Laurent, the winemaker, flew all the way from France to personally demand that his wines be withdrawn from the auction. Because he believed the bottles Rudy was trying to sell were fake. So he pulls them all. He goes over his list. And it included several wines that truly simply just did not ever exist. Like they're not real wines that have ever been made. Which is why I made the comment about how like I felt like in the art world, there was a lot more vetting. And like, why wouldn't you know that this never existed? I guess there's so many wines. Yeah. But it's also very daring of him to like attribute it to a specific. Right. Winery that's still operating. I did. And like also go to dinners and like. Right. With the person, like with winery owners and distributors. And like give them fake stuff to their face. That's crazy. This is one example, but I did read a couple other examples where some of the bottles he would date prior to that winery ever existing. So it was like he. That makes no sense. Like things that you could easily look up. He was making mistakes. So Laurent found that there was a high grade Burgundy that Rudy claimed came from 1945 through 1975. And in 1971 called Beaux-Saint-Denis. Denis. Sorry, not the wine connoisseur. Beaux-Saint-Denis. Beaux-Saint-Denis. Could I pass in the wine world? Bonjour. Bonjour. Beaux-Saint-Denis. Sorry to the French. This was Laurent's family's winery. And he knew they didn't make that particular type of wine until the 1980s. So similarly, this wine never existed until the 1980s. Right. So obvious. Meaning Laurent was like, I smell, je smell a rat. Je smell. I took French for 10 years. Can you tell? And it drove him nuts that someone was selling fake wines of his. So like Bill, he's not going to let it go. He didn't know if Rudy had bought these unknowingly though. So which like. Right. You were saying, was he being scammed? And he's also younger. So people are probably giving him. The benefit of the doubt. Like, oh, you didn't know that this was a fake. Right. Or that this winery didn't exist at that time. Yes. You're just collecting people's collections. Either way, Laurent was like, I am not going to let Rudy get away with this. He was going to expose him. The day after the auction, Laurent went to lunch with Rudy and the auctioneer at a fancy French restaurant near Central Park. And Laurent asked Rudy where he got the fake wine. But Rudy would not answer him. He just like. He dodged the question, which is so awkward. You're sitting there at a table. Just you, the guy who just asked you the question, one other person. Yeah. But I feel like that's kind of how he communicated all the time. He said he would have to check his records and he'd get back to him. So Laurent. Which is fair. Because like. Yeah. He also had so many. If Rudy's buying a ton of wine. Yeah. We know he's lying, but I would buy it. Be like, OK, yeah, then get back to me. ASAP. Right. Well, again, it's interesting that like. From the auction house, like they don't ask for. I know. All those receipts. Right. Maybe nowadays they do. Yeah, probably. Well, who knows? Not us. We're not in this world. We're drinking McDonald's Coke. Which is the best of the Diet Cokes. Yeah. So Laurent with this answer or non-answer, I guess, flew back to France, incredibly frustrated. And he was determined to still look into Rudy. The wine world was buzzing with fraud at this point. Like Rudy, but also a lot of other people. And collectors always knew there was a risk of buying fakes. And it's hard to say exactly how much fake wine and fake bottles are out there. But experts say it could be as much as 20% of all of the bottles sold worldwide. That's wild. Yeah. Am I in your thing? No. My mind just went to like, I don't know why, but I just was like, oh, prison wine probably isn't that bad then. Because there's probably people who are spending a shit ton of money on like basically toilet wine. Don't know that I'm going to. I'm going to try it to find out. No. Though a lot of the counterfeiting is concentrated in certain vintages and formats, which makes sense because that's especially where like a lot of money is and where it like can be a little trickier to like track exactly where things are from. Yeah. But seeing 97 of Rudy's bottles get pulled from that auction was a really huge deal in the wine world. Peter Hellman wrote a story about the incident for Wine Spectator trying to get to the bottom of what had just happened. In this article, he included, Rudy's statement that sometimes, quote, shit happens. But the vague explanation was not enough for most people. I mean, this is like a lot of money that people are spending here. So this was a really big turning point for the wine community. And it showed the scale of wine fraud was just undeniable. It truly existed. There are a bunch of people doing it. And it could be the person that you've been buying wine from for years. A lot of the wine collectors and dealers put Rudy on their blacklist. They were like, we can't trust you anymore. And Acre, the auction house, actually stopped selling his wines entirely. So now Rudy's like really getting pushed out. Meanwhile, Laurent kept asking Rudy about the source of the fake Burgundy wines from his estate. So he never let go of those like 97 bottles. He's like, he said, you were going to tell me your sources. You said you were going to look at your receipts. Where is it? How'd you get this? Tell me. Finally, Rudy gave him a name. And he said he got the wines from Pak Hendra, a collector in Asia. And he gave Laurent two phone numbers for Mr. Hendra. This part makes me laugh. Laurent calls the numbers, right? He's not just going to like trust that this is it and let it go. He calls the numbers. One of them is an Indonesian airline. The other one is a shopping mall in Jakarta. So basically, he realized that Pak Hendra wasn't even a real name. And it was like essentially in Indonesia, the equivalent of saying like, oh, I got it from Mr. Smith. So yeah, everyone's closing in on him. And because he's now being forced out a little bit after this 2008 auction, Rudy starts to keep a lower profile in the wine world. But he doesn't just stop selling his wines. No, he continues to try to sell his fake wines. There's this famous auction house called Christie's. And they were happy to take him up on the offer. They kept selling his wines, even after other collectors were warning them that they were fake. After the Acker auction, Laurent asked the French Consumer Protection Agency to look into the fraud, but they wouldn't open a case because they didn't have any definitive proof that it was counterfeit. So he continues to investigate the fraud on his own and even traveled to Indonesia to try to figure out who produced the fake bottles. So meanwhile, back in billionaire land with Bill Koch, he is still determined to get justice. In September of 2009, he filed a lawsuit against Rudy in the Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging that Rudy sold him fake wines. The case was stalled in court until 2012 when discovery was finally allowed to proceed. But Bill and Laurent were not. the only ones who were working to expose Rudy's fraud. the FBI also was working on a case against him. Bill had gotten the ball rolling for them, and as part of his dream team of personal wine fraud investigators, he had hired a former FBI agent to gather evidence about the Jefferson bottles fraud. And the idea was to turn over the information to the Justice Department. So it wasn't just for Bill's personal gain, too. He was also going to go through the legal process as well. So again, Rudy was not the person who sold him the fake Thomas Jefferson wine, but Bill had wanted to prosecute the man who did sell him those bottles. But after an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York read an article about wine fraud in The New Yorker, he then got interested. And then the FBI. He's like, this is like my passion project at work. Yeah. And the FBI's file started with Jefferson bottles, but at that point it was too late to prosecute that case, unfortunately. But there was a lot of information on Rudy in the file. Definitely wasn't too late. Wasn't too late to prosecute Rudy. Which it does seem like wrong place, wrong time for Rudy a bit, because it's like there are other people selling fraudulent wines, but they can't pursue a case against them. Right. It's like the origin of their interest in fraud starts with other people and going for others. But all roads lead to Rudy. Yes. Rudy's in the file a bunch. And after all of the drama of the auction where Laurent Poisson pulled his wines. Stop. You know, it was so good. I don't believe you because you laughed at me. It just. It's just. Sorry. It was really good. It doesn't look natural. No. It just doesn't sound natural. Guys, I am like 50% Portuguese, 50% French. In the rest of the day. It seemed like the Justice Department finally had a good shot of proving that the case of wine that was pulled from this auction was fraudulent. So they're looking into Rudy's financial records, into his emails, and they begin to piece all of the puzzle pieces together. Yeah. Now I can't speak English. And now I'm self-conscious. I'm so sorry. They're putting it all together. They're putting it together. And they find the emails where Rudy has been asking restaurants to send him the empty bottles. There were also a bunch of fishy purchases, like huge, like big, big orders for wax seals, old bottles of wine that were in bad shape, and things of that sort. You know, things to create new bottles. So it was only a matter of time before Rudy would be waking up from his serious wine hangover. Around 6 a.m. on March 8, 2012, Rudy woke up to someone pounding very loudly on his front door of his home in Arcadia, where he lived with his mother. He hears someone yelling, FBI! That was a pretty good impersonation. Thank you very much. Pat on my back. I get laughed at, and you pat yourself on the back? Self-confidence. I butchered a lot of names in this episode. Don't worry. He opened the door in his pajamas, and immediately, the agent slapped, handcuffs onto his wrist. He is officially under arrest for fraud. And while they are taking him out of the house, the FBI agents go in the house, and they find boxes and crates of wine stacked high in the hallway, like his house is full of wine. There were also bottles of wine soaking in the kitchen sink to remove their labels, next to a funnel and a re-corker. There was also a locked room at the back of the house, which they asked Rudy for a key, and he gave it to them. Inside, they found a ton of counterfeiting supplies. Fake labels, wax for sealing the bottles, piles of corks, basically all the evidence they needed to prove that he had a fake wine factory in his home. It almost feels fake how perfectly it was all set up, like every bit of evidence. It's just right there. Yeah. In a way, I'm like, why didn't you, in a Walter White world, create another place for this stuff to happen? I think also, unfortunately, he was so in debt, yeah, and also he'd been getting away with it for so long that he probably. False confidence. False confidence. Yeah. So did he not invite anyone over to his house? He had that back room locked. Yeah. True. So at this point, the FBI had been looking at Rudy and building a case against him for several years. Back in late 2009, early 2010, about three months after Bill Koch had filed his lawsuit against Rudy, the FBI contacted Laurent Pinson. You really did say it so well that it was like shocking to me. Laurent Pinson. Yeah. Okay. Well, that one wasn't as good. And they questioned him about the fake wines that Rudy was trying to sell at the Acker auction in New York. They also interviewed wine dealers and collectors to gather evidence. They went through all of Rudy's financial records and they found several flags, several red flags. Despite Rudy's claims that he came from money, they couldn't find any evidence that he was the heir to a beer distributing dynasty or that he was getting a million dollars every single month from his family. Yeah. He was deeply in debt. So he was like the exact opposite of what he was saying he was. He was owing millions of dollars to a wine auction house and to a bank. And the FBI also saw that Rudy had made some pretty suspicious purchases. So we talked about like the wax seals, all that sort of stuff. But he also had purchased at least 18 thousand wine labels that were made of specialty paper with antique finishes and custom made wax stamps. So that kind of like answers my question that I had in the beginning where I was like, wouldn't you know if there's like a new label on something and you're trying to buy like a vintage wine? But he purposefully went and like found people whose specialties were almost like faking vintage things within the wine world. And he also ordered hundreds of bottles of commercial grade Burgundy wine. That was like a lot of money. Yeah. And he also ordered hundreds of bottles of that was a big red flag for the FBI, too, because a collector of Rudy's level would have no business or no interest in such cheap wine. A twist off? My God. Yeah. Blasphemy. Unless it was an ingredient for mixing up fakes. Which they were. Yeah. After he was arrested, it was discovered also that Rudy's visa had expired. So he was considered a flight risk. So therefore denied bail. Before the trial, Rudy's lawyers argued that the FBI had searched his house without a warrant on the day that he was arrested, which is technically true. So they were trying to get all of that evidence that they found at his house that really does kind of like slam the gavel. They were trying to get that right. They were trying to get that removed from the case because the FBI went inside without a warrant. But the FBI argued that the sweep was necessary to make sure nobody else in the house, like Rudy's mom, would destroy evidence. What this makes me think of is the very first episode, like the first scene of Schitt's Creek. Oh. Moyer's like running after banks. R.I.P. Catherine O'Hara. Oh my gosh. Yeah. She said the only celebrity death that I like truly cried. It was so devastating. Yeah. I feel very attached to her. But anyway, the judge refused. So this evidence was allowed in court and it was a major setback for Rudy's defense. In December of 2013, the case finally went to trial in Manhattan. Three winemakers from Burgundy flew in to testify, including Laurent Ponceau. And the prosecution argued that Rudy ran an elaborate fake wine workshop from his house with the intent to deceive buyers. An expert witness broke down the process of how he allegedly scanned the labels of high-end wines and then recreated them to change years and small details. Prosecution showed evidence alleging that he created fake wine labels with help from this print shop in Indonesia. But meanwhile, Rudy's lawyers argued that the wine I found in Rudy's house could have been used for reconditioning wine rather than fabricating it. So reconditioning, as I'm sure most of us were listening, are not deep into the wine world. Reconditioning is a practice for extending the life of very old wines. So the idea is that you open up a bottle, you check that the wine inside is still good, and then if the cork is okay and not cracked, assuming the wine is good, you would top it off with some of the same vintage or something similar, which is so interesting because I was like, that's like, you're already mixing and meddling. But like, that's the allowed version of it, right? So basically, the idea is that when a wine is really old, that by adding a little bit of a younger wine, it actually can extend the shelf life of the old wine. And this used to be a common practice among French wineries, but it kind of fell out of favor after wine counterfeiting became a problem, which I understand because it's like, how do you really tell the difference? Difference, yeah. And that's kind of how Rudy, I mean, like, if we think about how Rudy started out with counterfeiting, it almost seems like he was doing reconditioning. But he was using cheap wines, not the same vintage or younger, yeah. Right. Yeah. So wineries stopped doing it because they didn't want people to think that their reconditioned wines were fake. So let's ask you, the jury, our listeners, if you were on the jury of this trial, would you have believed that argument? I wouldn't. No. And neither did the jury. Less than two hours of deliberating, they found Rudy guilty of fraud, and he became the first person ever to be convicted in federal court for counterfeiting wine. In total, it is believed he sold as many as 10,000 counterfeit bottles of wine, many of which are probably still in people's private collections. Like, that one bottle that this, like, guy bought for his child's 21st birthday to open up might be a counterfeit. Although I would, I'm curious how long it takes to make a counterfeit bottle. Because 10,000 is a really big number if you're doing everything solo. I know. And he had to do a lot of experimenting in the first place right it's wild how much effort he put into it all that being said he made about what is estimated to be around 30 million dollars in these counterfeit wine sales and in 2014 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison rudy did not testify so the trial left a lot of questions unanswered like when did he start making the fake wine why did he do it did someone else help him do it that's a huge question i have yeah laurent said that he believed that it would have been impossible for rudy to produce that many fakes alone like you were saying yeah it's a lot apparently rudy did write a letter to the judge before sentencing and he wrote that he enjoyed the attention he got from the wine community and wanted to be accepted by them he also wrote that the things i did to maintain this illusion were so foolish but he didn't explain like what he meant by the things i did and also he was writing this to the judge kind of as a hope to get a lighter sentencing right you know so we kind of have to take it all super direct either like is it ever because he shouldn't have gotten caught like oh man yeah those things i did i could have gotten away with it yeah hard to say hard to say why rudy did all of this or how but it did seem like there was a big need from rudy to feel accepted and that's kind of why he got into wine in the first place and once he realized that he could make money off of wine he was like well why not yeah i also think there's an element of desperation too like because he did start by selling legit wines and then did he turn to sign the counterfeit to like keep up with the crowd or to help to launder money for his family right or was it for the thrill of it but i feel like we can say confidently that once he started he just couldn't stop this is reminding me a bit of um i can't remember her name off the top of my head right now but that like socialite in new york anna delvey yes anna delvey it's like you want to hate her because of what she did but she's like still kind of like you kind of so like bitchy and like the best way that i love watching interviews and like everything she does and there is also people do con man stuff so well that you like you root for them help but root for them a little bit and if they're not to say conning we don't condone it but like when they're conning the really ultra rich you root for them a little bit and if they're not to say conning the really ultra rich the like middle class me is kind of like go girl girl go yeah that's what i was gonna say earlier when i like cut myself off and i was like oh i shouldn't say this was like when you really go if you were on the jury what would you think and i was like if i were on the jury i'd be like what are we doing here why do we care about this like right come on but then also i was thinking i was like all right well this could lead to other things that i certainly would care about a crime is a crime yeah yes so we may never know exactly why rudy did what he did but what we do know is that he got away with it for a long time and rudy's extraordinary tasting ability and deep knowledge of rare wines made it possible for him to mix up convincing formulas for fake bottles which is super impressive yeah some people in the wine community did raise doubts early on saying that his wines didn't quite taste right but he clearly had a lot of other people fooled yes some people suspect that he served real wines at the tasting parties to win people's trust and then he would sell them the fake wines right wine collectors also wanted to believe that these rare bottles were real because how exciting they wanted that rush and also you spent so much money on it like you want to believe it's real right you want to feel special yeah and like you're a part of this like exclusive group that that rudy has created the taste of prestige and like we've said he was really good at tasting we can't argue with that but at the end of the day he was sloppy with some of the details of his con and that's ultimately how he got caught for instance there were misspelled addresses on some of the labels and then they were the wines he offered that were never made in the first place like that bottle the producers like laurent posso knew simply didn't exist his confidence or false confidence was ultimately his undoing he thought he could pull a fast one on both winemakers and wealthy collectors but instead he will be remembered as one of the sloppiest scammers in the history of fine wine and after several years of drinking only prison wine rudy was released in november of 2020 and deported back to indonesia he is in his early 50s now and he is back in the wine business according to his lawyer but he is not hanging his head in shame he is embracing his history as a convicted con man he's branding himself as a wine outlaw who can mix up bottles that will fool rich collectors and he's not wrong i i actually think there's a business for him in this yeah yeah rudy's lawyers say that he has been hired to forge incredibly expensive wines so now he's just doing things legal is it legal i don't know i don't know things are there copyrights on like the recipes of old wines i don't think so right i guess yeah somehow he's getting away with it and he's not being secretive about it yeah the lawyer frames rudy as a sort of robin hood of fine wine he's helping the little guy by making the good stuff more affordable to the masses right and that's apparently why he's got so many wealthy haters as the saying goes you can't buy happiness but you can buy wine not that we have the money to buy those wines but um but we'll stick with our natural wines and our twist offs and the more orange range of wines yeah because you can get amazing wines at affordable prices so i think that's the other lesson is uh you can't get conned if you don't have money right well and also as someone who's cousin has lived in europe for a decade yeah the wine that she brings back sometimes or even just so good you go to spain or whatever it's like two dollars for a bottle of wine it's the best wine you've ever had so if you have all that money to spend at these auctions just go for like a month to europe i it's gonna be way cheaper was an au pair in a small town in italy and i would take the train to like go visit other places on the weekends right there was this tiny little shop in the town and i was like oh my god i'm gonna go to europe and i'm gonna go to europe and i'm gonna that had this massive vat and you could go in there and they would bottle wine into a bottle for you there they'd cork it there for you for like literally two euros and it was delicious see yeah unreal unreal just go to europe take a european holiday yeah and take us with you please on your ears i'm gonna do this use our credit card points for our flights you don't have to pay for it well i was imagining they just take us like listen to our podcast take us physically too yeah that would be great thank you so much for listening the jury jurors we love you we're so grateful you're here and as a reminder we're your hosts sabrina diana roga and corinne vienne join us next tuesday for another peek inside another crimes of deception and if there are any other cases that you would like us to cover in this season or following seasons please let us know in the comments here at crime house we want to thank each and every one of you for your support if you like what you heard today reach out on all social media at crime house don't forget to rate review and follow crimes of wherever you get your podcasts and also let us know if you approve of being called the jury your feedback truly makes a difference goodbye jury goodbye you did you know penicillin the drug that has saved more lives than any other in history was discovered because a scientist forgot to clean a petri dish before going on vacation i'm connor tomlinson and 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