Yoink!
Photo: Maffo/Flickr
Following the recent saga surrounding wine mountebank Rudy Kurniawan, Southern California has a new cork-sniffing huckster on its hands. Newport Beach’s George Osumi, owner of Legend Cellars Inc., is looking at six felonies over charges that he stole $2.7 million of prized wine. The alleged scheme suggests Osumi was breaking into the storage units he offered his oenophile clientele over the last few years and pulling a switcheroo, replacing valuable vintages with less esteemed wines, then auctioning off the bottles through a friend to score $600,000 in the process. Osumi is being arraigned today, currently facing sixteen years in prison if convicted of the crimes while he’s already in hot water over a completely separate fraud case. [LAT]
