Welcome back to bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today, in honor of the holiday season, we're going to talk about wine. But this is still a financial crime podcast, so we're going to talk about counterfeit wine.

Within the realm of financial crime, wine fraud is about as festive as things get.

My guest is a journalist, an author, based in New York.

He's been a regular contributor to wine spectator for more than a decade,

and he's the author of Inveno Duplicitus, the rise and fall of a wine forger extraordinaire.

His book tells the almost unbelievable story of how an unlikely 30-something wine-officianado from Indonesia,

Rudy Kurniawan, became the single greatest source of rare and very expensive wines to the American wine collecting elite.

Except, of course, they weren't what they seemed.

Peter Hellman, thanks so much for joining me.

My pleasure, Alexandra.

Well, let's dive right in.

One commentator on this story referred to Rudy as a Generation X Great Gatsby.

Tell us a little bit about him and how he first inveigled or charmed his way

onto the high-end wine scene. The first thing I would say is, as with all great conmen, it's very

difficult to nail down facts about Rudy Cornelan. It is a fact that he was born in Jakarta,

Indonesia, in 1976. It is a fact that he was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1976.

It is a fact that he came to the U.S. on a student visa in about 1995. He attended Cal State Northridge.

He claimed that he attended on a golf scholarship, but when FBI agents queried the golf coach at that school, he had not heard of Rudy Kernelon.

Rudy did work in a pro shop at a golf course part-time, and one day a very expensive Japanese-made driver disappeared from the inventory. And when the proprietors queried Rudy about what he might know about what happened to that

driver, Rudy said he had no idea. He walked out the door, did not return for his next shift,

and never returned again.

So we have here a ethnically Chinese Indonesian national.

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