Mark Megahan
Rob Adams thought he could make a fortune on the illegal arbitrage of rare “unicorn” bourbon. “Right now my group members know exactly where Weller 107 is going to be dropping Monday and Tuesday. No one else knows this but me.” Adams advertised on Facebook. If he wasn’t so greedy, he might have gotten away with it. The big downfall was his belief that he stumbled on a loophole to make it legal, so exploited it with wild abandon. Authorities say he was mistaken but his lawyers are still fighting over it.
The quest for bourbon
It’s become a joke in the industry that nobody actually drinks the stuff anymore, its all for collecting. Experts explain that the “bourbon boom” began with the rise of a craft food and drink culture. When chef Anthony Bourdain referred to Pappy Van Winkle saying “if God made bourbon, this is what he’d make,” the price skyrocketed.
Because premium bourbons “take years or even decades to age,” producers “can’t simply pump out more to meet the rocketing demand.” As one collector observes, “quite simply, the world is nearly out of old whiskey.”
The market is so hot that empty bottles get recycled and counterfeits are everywhere. What Adams tried to cash in on was a scheme to get authentic rare bourbon through capitalizing on inside information. He didn’t care where it came from, Adams just sold it and still swears it was legal.
Still, he has been charged with embezzlement and other felonies. You had to pay to join his Facebook group. Once you were in you could buy in to a club that shared his secret treasure map to the unicorns. “I have inside sources…I’m offering 100% moneyback guarantee.”
A “former employee of the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority has admitted to working with Adams to sell distribution information that would allow bourbon fans to scoop up the limited supply of choice bottles.”
Because the unicorns are in such high demand, they get passed around to local liquor stores at random. The employee knew what was scheduled to go where when. “Edgar Garcia, 28, pleaded guilty Monday to illegally copying government data.” He said he was “deeply sorry” and the judge let him off with a suspended sentence.
Ten times the shelf price
Because black market prices “can reach three, five or 10 times the shelf price,” in one case, distillery employees “filched more than $100,000 of the most famous name in rare bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle, to resell.” Insiders called the 2013 caper “Pappygate.”
One unicorn hunter “described camping out for nearly 24 hours outside a liquor store for a shot at a bottle of George T. Stagg bourbon last November. The man and his friends set up tents and chairs and wrapped the entire camp with plastic to ward off a 15-degree chill.”
Garcia “had access to the internal list guiding the distribution of Angel’s Envy Cask Strength, Old Fitzgerald 17-year Bottled in Bond, WhistlePig 18-year Double Malt Rye and other sought-after bottles.” He and Adams decided to cash in with the information, using it as a rare bourbon treasure map.
Somewhere between 25 and 100 members were paying $400 each for access to the list. Things started to snowball. “people were walking into stores and telling employees exactly which bottles their location was getting.” That tipped them off that something was wrong.
Adams bourbon group was quickly infiltrated and they gained more than enough evidence to take him down. His lawyers say they’ll get him out yet. In the meantime, he’s not alone. There are several groups on Facebook which trade unicorns.
“I had a guy message me to tell me he needed to have his wife kicked out of the group because he was getting ready to get a divorce and wanted to unload his bottles for cash,” One online trader said. “He didn’t want his wife to know how much his collection was worth.“
