Two childhood friends have found themselves at the center of a multimillion-dollar fraud prosecution in New York after what started as a luxury wine lending business promising lucrative returns cost investors nearly $100 million.
James Wellesley, a disbarred British lawyer, and his former business partner, Stephen Burton, established and ran Bordeaux Cellars, the company at the center of the federal inquiry. Wellesley was extradited to the U.S. two weeks ago to face charges of wire fraud and money laundering; Burton, meanwhile, was extradited in 2023.
Both men originally pleaded not guilty to the charges. On Thursday, however, Fortune learned Burton changed his plea to guilty in a Brooklyn courtroom.
Representatives from the U.S. Attorney’s Office told Fortune Burton pleaded guilty Thursday to wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. He faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for both charges, and his sentence will be announced at a January 6 hearing. Burton’s plea also included mandatory restitution and a forfeiture agreement, the dollar amount of which was not stated on the record.
The indictment of Burton and Wellesley, filed in the Eastern District of New York in 2022, alleges the two men raised $99.4 million from over 140 investors, 71 of whom were based in the U.S., and lost a collective $25 million. Prosecutors say Bordeaux Cellars, by and large, never had the wine it claimed to hold as collateral, and many of the specific bottles listed in loan documents were never in its custody.
Charges include one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, three counts of wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. If convicted, each man faces up to 20 years in prison.
“Unlike the fine wine they purported to possess,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said while announcing the charges in 2022, “the defendants’ repeated lies to investors did not age well.”
Burton, who claimed to be a Stanford Business School graduate, was the alleged brainchild behind Bordeaux Cellars and founded the company in 2010. He positioned his business as a unique solution for wealthy wine collectors who needed liquidity. The company, according to prosecutors, purported to broker short-term loans secured by high-end bottles of wine—think Château Lafleur and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti—with promised investor yields of up to 12%.
For a while, the illusion held. Investors, for the most part, received interest payments and quarterly updates. Burton, with his suave wine knowledge and globe-trotting persona, mingled with the elite of wine circles in London, New York, and Hong Kong, according to reporting by The Times. Wellesley, the operational anchor of the company and chief financial officer, ran the books, taking a three-year hiatus from 2013 to 2016 to serve prison time for a separate $7.7 million fraud involving luxury real estate. Wellesley also faced legal troubles in the 1990s, costing him his legal license, after allegedly embezzling more than $100,000 from clients.
By early 2019, Burton and Wellesley’s scheme began to collapse, legal documents stipulate, when interest payments allegedly stopped and calls to Bordeaux Cellars’ London office went unanswered. One investor who had wired $200,000 discovered the “collateral” wines didn’t exist. According to prosecutors, the entire operation was little more than a Ponzi scheme.
Burton was ultimately arrested in England on Valentine’s Day 2019. With him, authorities found two fake passports, gold bars, expensive watches, and around $1 million in various currencies. British courts charged him with money laundering and possession of false documents, for which he was sentenced to four years in prison. But Burton was then released during the summer of 2020, after which he left the U.K. while U.S. authorities began digging into Bordeaux Cellars. In 2022, Burton was detained on an FBI arrest warrant in Morocco after trying to enter the country with a fake Zimbabwean passport.
Wellesley was arrested in 2022 and held in an U.K. prison for several years before being extradited to New York on July 11. Whether or not his codependent’s change of plea will impact the future of Wellesley’s fate in the upcoming train remains unknown. A trial date has yet to be set. Lawyers for both Wellesley and Burton did not immediately respond to a Fortune request for comment.
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