{"id":337357,"date":"2026-09-03T22:10:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T22:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/337357\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T22:10:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T22:10:51","slug":"rare-wine-scammer-gets-6-years-in-multimillion-dollar-brooklyn-fraud-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/337357\/","title":{"rendered":"Rare wine scammer gets 6 years in multimillion-dollar Brooklyn fraud case"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Ponzi schemer got a six-year prison sentence Thursday for his boozy bamboozle to trick investors into thinking they were giving loans to wine collectors<\/a> who were putting up their rare bottles as collateral.<\/p>\n

The wine didn\u2019t exist, but the hangover was real \u2014 Stephen Burton\u2019s scheme siphoned more than $83 million from 141 victims from 2017 to 2019. Burton\u2019s accomplice, James Wellesley,<\/a> has already been sentenced to 10 years behind bars.<\/p>\n

Burton, 62, got the lighter sentence, in part, because he cooperated against his partner in crime and helped locate some of the stolen assets, and partly because he spent 13 months awaiting extradition to the U.S. in a brutal Moroccan prison.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe MDC is a high-end Marriott in comparison,\u201d his defense lawyer, John Wallenstein, said in Brooklyn Federal Court Thursday.<\/p>\n

Between his time in Morocco and the roughly 33 months he spent in the MDC Brooklyn federal jail awaiting prosecution, Burton will likely get out of prison in less than two years with good time \u2014 though he\u2019ll be deported to the United Kingdom to serve the final two years of a four-year sentence there for a gun case.<\/p>\n

He must also forfeit $26 million in ill-gotten funds, and will also be required to pay a to-be-determined amount of restitution.<\/p>\n

\"AA Ponzi schemer got a six-year prison sentence Thursday for his boozy bamboozle to trick investors into thinking they were giving loans to wine collectors who were putting up their rare bottles as collateral. (Shutterstock)<\/p>\n

Wellesley, who will also be deported to the U.K., didn\u2019t help the feds at all, Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Pamela Chen said.<\/p>\n

Burton and Wellesley ran a company called Bordeaux Cellars<\/a> and claimed they they could connect investors with \u201chigh-net worth individuals\u201d who owned pricey wine collections but needed a quick loan of cash.<\/p>\n

They promised their targets repayment with interest over 12 months, but thousands of the pricey bottles of wine identified as collateral simply didn\u2019t exist. Instead, they used money from new investors to pay initial investors the interest they were expecting, and filled their own pockets.<\/p>\n

Chen read a letter from one of those victims, a 58-year-old woman who lost her $200,000 in retirement savings \u2014 money she had hoped to use to take care of her severely disabled 23-year-old son.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat safety net is now gone,\u201d the victim wrote. \u201cI live in daily fear of what\u2019s going to happen to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

The judge said financial fraud often thoroughly wrecks the lives and futures of victims. \u201cThese financial crimes are more severe, in a way, than physical violence,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Burton has a criminal history overseas dating back to 1982. But that didn\u2019t prevent him from getting an interview with CNBC in 2013<\/a> \u2014 when he pitched his wine-as-collateral scheme, claiming investors would be giving loans to people with bad credit or other financial problems who were wine rich and cash poor.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a pawnbroker, I\u2019m a wine dealer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s been convicted of theft and fraud in New Zealand, Australia and Switzerland, and was locked up for impersonating a cop in the United Kingdom in 1999. In 2019, he was sentenced to four years for conspiracy to acquire firearms.<\/p>\n

Burton was released mid-sentence during the COVID pandemic, then high-tailed it to Spain, and then Ireland, before being captured in Morocco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Ponzi schemer got a six-year prison sentence Thursday for his boozy bamboozle to trick investors into thinking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,11827,100,99,15780,9,24,63,126699,76550,126700,126701,7577],"class_list":["post-337357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-federal-court","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-money-laundering","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-ponzi-scam","tag-prison-sentence","tag-rare-wine","tag-stephen-burton","tag-wire-fraud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}