Fake Wine Is A Real Thing

We all know the story of Willie Sutton being asked why he robbed banks, and answering “that’s where the money is.” Today, any thief or con man usually goes where they think they can find the easy dollars or the easy mark.

One of the last places of opportunity for crime might seem like the world of fine wine. Often seen as its own cloistered, rarefied world, you’d think it might be hard for an outsider to penetrate and gain the trust and confidence necessary to pull off a world class con.

Stealing wine, loosing bottles in a fire, insurance fraud, we’ve heard all that. But for Rudy Kurniawan the con was far riskier. Especially when dealing with deep pockets of one of the Koch brothers. That the story that author and journalist Peter Hellman tells in In Vino Duplicitas: The Rise and Fall of a Wine Forger Extraordinaire

My conversation with Peter Hellman:

Are the Koch Brothers really as bad as they seem?

If I said we were going to talk about a story that involved grand homes, yachts, priceless painting, messy romances, private investigators and armored limousines, you probably wouldn’t think it was the story of a family and a group of men who have been painted as the greatest political villains of the 21st Century.

In fact it is. It is the story of the Koch brothers. Fred and Bill and David and Charles and their father Fred, who was one of the founders of the John Birch Society.


The question is not just how this political and economic dynasty has become so powerful, its how they have created such fear in their opponents, out of all proportion to their relatively limited political success.

Also the membrane between the Koch’s libertarian ideas and the GOP’s and Tea Party's social agenda may be a sometime marriage of convenience, but one that may not be destined for the long haul. Like so many businessmen who think politics will bend to their will and money, they are often surprised.

The first full scale look at the elusive Koch family is Daniel Schulman's  Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.

My conversation with Daniel Schulman:  (We apologize for some static in the first five minutes)