Billionaire Bill Koch took the stand Friday against an allegedly fraudulent winemaker who duped him out of $25 million — saying it's now his "personal crusade" to rid the world of vino counterfeiters.
"I want to shine a bright light on the false wine business. There's a code of silence around it," the 73-year-old Florida-based fossil-fuel tycoon told reporters on Friday after testifying in Manhattan federal court as the government's star witness against Rudy Kurniawan.
"The big auction houses don't want to know about," he added. "The collectors don't want to hear about."
Koch told the jury that Kurniawan — the first person ever prosecuted by the feds for wine counterfeiting — produced 219 allegedly fake bottles of Burgundy that he was duped into purchasing at auction for more than $2 million.
"He's a clever counterfeiter," Koch said of the once-renowned wine collector and connoisseur, whom he later called "stupid" for not copping a plea and letting his "debts bring him down."
Koch is the latest in a who's who of wine aficionados whom the government has rolled out in the trial that began Monday — including French wine titans Laurent Ponsot and Aubert de Villaine — while also dazzling jurors with dozens of bottles of fake wine and hundreds of wine labels, corks and other items associated with the alleged fraud.
Koch, whose worth is estimated at $4 billion by Forbes magazine, described how Kurniawan's four-bedroom home in Acadia, Calif., was once a virtual "wine factory" where temperatures were strategically set to a chilly 55 degrees — adding that Kurniawan even had to stash a space heater in his and his mother's bedrooms because it got too cold.
The feds say the 37-year-old alleged fraudster used his home computer and printer to cunningly create the fake labels while mixing cheap French wines and California blends to pass off as rare reds and whites.
Koch's crusade to rid the world of wine fraudsters is already paying off.
Earlier this year, he won $12 million in damages from Internet entrepreneur Eric Greenberg after buying counterfeit wine from Greenberg's cellar, some of which came from Kurniawan.
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