Rare wine scammer gets 6 years in multimillion-dollar Brooklyn fraud case

John Annese, New York Daily News on Sep 3, 2026

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NEW YORK — 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 who were putting up their rare bottles as collateral.

The wine didn’t exist, but the hangover was real — Stephen Burton’s scheme siphoned more than $83 million from 141 victims from 2017 to 2019. Burton’s accomplice, James Wellesley, has already been sentenced to 10 years behind bars.

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.

“The MDC is a high-end Marriott in comparison,” his defense lawyer, John Wallenstein, said in Brooklyn Federal Court Thursday.

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 — though he’ll be deported to the United Kingdom to serve the final two years of a four-year sentence there for a gun case.

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

Wellesley, who will also be deported to the U.K., didn’t help the feds at all, Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Pamela Chen said.

Burton and Wellesley ran a company called Bordeaux Cellars and claimed they they could connect investors with “high-net worth individuals” who owned pricey wine collections but needed a quick loan of cash.

They promised their targets repayment with interest over 12 months, but thousands of the pricey bottles of wine identified as collateral simply didn’t exist. Instead, they used money from new investors to pay initial investors the interest they were expecting, and filled their own pockets.

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

“That safety net is now gone,” the victim wrote. “I live in daily fear of what’s going to happen to him.”

The judge said financial fraud often thoroughly wrecks the lives and futures of victims. “These financial crimes are more severe, in a way, than physical violence,” she said.

Burton has a criminal history overseas dating back to 1982. But that didn’t prevent him from getting an interview with CNBC in 2013 — 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.

“I’m not a pawnbroker, I’m a wine dealer,” he said.

He’s 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.

Burton was released mid-sentence during the COVID-19 pandemic, then high-tailed it to Spain, and then Ireland, before being captured in Morocco.