Twenty-four years after William Koch paid $311,804 for four bottles of wine that had been falsely represented as coming from the cellars of Thomas Jefferson, the billionaire wine aficionado is trying to convince a federal appeals court to let him pursue damages for fraud against Christie’s auction house.
Koch attorney Edward Spiro argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit yesterday that Southern District Judge Barbara Jones (See Profile) applied the wrong legal standard in 2011 when she dismissed Koch’s racketeering and civil fraud claims against the auction house because the statute of limitations had run.
