In Frankfort, Kentuky, everyone knows each other, 25,000 people who live in the seat of Franklin County and state’s capital. Despite what you may think, the name doesn’t come from the most famous German city. The town founded in 1786 and had its name from a pioneer killed by Native Americans. The young man, Stephen Frank, was fatally shot as he crossed the ford of the Kentucky River so to the pioneer settlement was given the name of Frank’s ford, which later became Frankfort.
Kentucky is famous for its production of Bourbon; Kentucky bourbon is said to be the best of all thanks to the properties of its water from the near river.
In Frankfort there is the oldest whisky’s (or whiskey?, better: bourbon) distillery in the United States, what is now known as Buffalo Trace Distillery, born in the first half of the 1800s, although over the years it had changed its name several times. The original distillery was built by Julian Pappy Van Winkle.
Quality of the air: Bourbon-style
I don’t know how the life in Frankfurt is, but I imagine it like a classic provincial town, there’s a library and a university. A calm city, where the Bluegrass is the main music, as whole Kentucky is.
One of the most popular game is softball, a good local league team that whole population cheers on; at that time, early 2000’s, most of the team worked at one of the two distilleries in the city, Buffalo Trace or Wild Turkey.
Among the most famous players was Toby Curtsinger, and of course he also worked at Buffalo Trace.
Before 2008 a Pappy Van Winkle bourbon were sold for around $130 for 20-year-old and 250 for 23-year. Then that year, the Beverage Tasting Institute gave Pappy Van Winkle a 99/100, and prices skyrocketed. The bourbon was still the same, of course, but the premium received pushed the cost of the 2008 bottles to over $1,000 until the actual $4,000–5,000. It was, and is again now, the most famous bourbon brand.
Working at the distillery, Toby occasionally got away a bottle or two to celebrate a win with the rest of the softball team, all childhood friends, having known each other since they were just kids in shorts. Nothing wrong, let’s say, a bottle on a Sunday, another bottle a couple of Sundays later, in short, nothing to worry about. Sometimes the others guys did the same, too.
But the news that someone had bottles of fine bourbon available had been beginning to circulate in Bourbon’s enthusiasts circles, and among them were public officials, county judges, mayors. People with a good availability of money, sure. A friend of Toby had been playing poker with some influential people, and the usual word of mouth did the rest.
Bourbon is strange, a bit like all spirits. In a 55-gallon barrel, almost 210 litres, after twenty years of aging you‘ll find in only 5, two 70 cl bottles and if in the meantime some bottles disappear, no one noticed this.
Many bottles disappeared between 2008 and 2013, and it must also be said that the warehouse, production and sales control systems weren’t exactly up to date.
But at some point even the most inattentive administration notices if you’re missing $100,000 of bourbon. And so in 2013 the Frankfort’s sheriff was interested, and immediately began questioning the employees of Buffalo Trace, the distillery that produced Pappy, and the local and national pressimmediately coined the term Pappygate.
The investigations went on without any result, bottles of bourbon kept disappearing and nobody seemed to know how it could happen. Even collectors continued to buy them under the table; as a strange thing, empty bottles of Pappy Van Winkle were sold off on eBay for $100 apiece.
Turning Point
Then, in 2015 there was a turning point.
One of the sheriff’s deputies received an anonymous message on his phone, where a guy wrote that they could find bourbon at a house along the road from Franklin to Frankfort. When he and another sheriff looked at behind the house, they found a large blue waterproof tarp that hid something rather large.
The smell that came out of that towel was unmistakably bourbon. It was the Toby’s Curtsinger’s home and the local cops returned to the house with a warrant: under that tarp they found four barrels nearly full of bourbon. Into the house they found weapons, money, steroids but no bottle of bourbon. This is an important detail. But there was still enough to declare Pappygate closed, and so they arrested him as he left the distillery.
Toby pleaded guilty to the thefts at the distillery, little more than a couple of hundred bottles of Pappy Van Winkle, which he, along with a few other friends on the team, had been selling to collectors for between $800 and $1,500.
Not my Bourbon
Toby told the sheriff that those barrels found at his house weren’t his ones, he hadn’t stolen them. He was not, he said, the author of the theft of 100 thousand dollars of bourbon contained in the four barrels. Sure, they’d been found behind his house, but he claimed he was keeping them for a friend, a driver who made deliveries between distillery locations in his van, and who had asked him to keep those barrels there until returned to pick them up, after doing maintenance on the van.
Analyzes confirmed that the bourbon in the barrels wasn‘t ’Pappy Van Winkle but Wild Turkey, another county distillery that had never reported any whiskey thefts.
In 2018 Toby Curtsinger was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but thanks to some legal loopholes and the fact that he had never engaged in violent behavior, and that the thefts had not occurred with burglary tools or with the help of weapons, he got out of jail just 30 days later. The 10 others charged with the Buffalo Trade burglaries were not prosecuted.
Now there, it remained the mystery of the theft of Wild Turkey bourbon, or rather the Wild Turkey barrels that the distillery didn’t even know were stolen. So even though they’d found bourbon behind Curtsinger’s house, that whiskey hadn’t been stolen. He was just there. Small-town American justice feels weird sometimes, don’t?
A couple of episodes of the television series Heist were made of this story, which you can find on Netflix.
Towards the end of the second episode, the name of Greg Antrim comes out, who had voluntarily surrendered to the sheriff of Franklin saying that he was the receiver of Curt’s bottles, basically the one who placed the bourbon to the best buyers. This is where things get complicated, because in reality several messages were found on the phones of Curtsinger and some members of the softball team where anonymous collectors asked for a few bottles of bourbon. So actually Toby Curtsinger didn’t need a fence, he sold directly to the guys who called him and who had gotten his number from other collectors.
Toby of course no longer works at the Buffalo Trace Distillery, he paints houses to support himself and his family, but he continues to live in Frankfort. He no longer plays softball, and has lost contact with his friends, he leads a more private life than before but is still well regarded by his fellow citizens.
As Kenutcky’s law the whisky found in the barrels had to be burned, but the certificate of destruction was never recorded.
But, what about bottle sold on e-Bay? At the beginning of 2022, a New York TV producer saw a $1,000 bottle of Colonel Taylor Four Grains on the shelf of a wine shop. The band around the cap was turned upside down, so he bought it and then got it at the distillery in Kentucky to be analyzed. The bourbon in the bottle turned out to be cheap whisky, and looking for the serial number on the label he found that the bottle was for sale on Facebook a few months earlier for $100.
Now the hunt for scammers of precious bottles takes place by following the digital threads of online purchases of empty bottles. There are websites that specialize in this.
No bottles of Pappy Van Winkle have ever been found.
Update: The New York State Liquor Authority ordered Acker Merrill Condit, an ancient and famous auction’s house, to pay $100,000 fine to settle charges for selling counterfeiting bourbon bottles of Colonel E.H. Taylor Four Grain at $1,000 each one. In the charges, there’re no connection with Pappygate or with the bottle found in the wine shop. There’re only coincidences.