On August 7, 2014, eight months after that review, Grant forwarded a newly published sentencing release with a short message asking me to read it before we spoke. I recognized Kurniawan's name in the subject line. I had not followed the trial outcome, and for a moment the old charging announcement was still the document I expected to find.
This was different. The release reported that a jury had found him guilty in December 2013. It described the sentence imposed that day in a Manhattan federal court: ten years in prison. I read the dates again, separating the earlier verdict from the present sentencing rather than letting the two events collapse into a single piece of news.
Grant came to my desk while I was still reading. He asked whether I had known about the verdict. I said no. He stood beside the spare chair until I moved the catalogue off it, then sat down.
"It puts an end to that uncertainty," he said.
"About the result of the prosecution," I said.
He nodded, accepting the distinction without argument. The release's retrospective account described counterfeit production from 2004 through 2012 at Kurniawan's home in Arcadia, California, and sales through auctions and to collectors. I kept the account attached to its source. It did not give me knowledge of every person who had handled a bottle.
Grant pointed to the financial orders. Forfeiture and restitution had been ordered in addition to imprisonment. Neither of us needed to repeat the old estimate to remember why those words mattered. Money could be named in an official outcome without becoming money available in a household account.
"People will want to know what this means for their own property," he said.
"We'll have to ask which property and what records. This doesn't answer that for them."
He left the release with me and returned to his office. I saved it with its publication date and source information, separate from Nolan's file. Our past review had been prompted by the atmosphere surrounding the charges, but that did not make his collection part of this case.
Nolan called shortly afterward. He had seen an account of the sentence and wanted to know whether I had read the release. When I said I had, he asked the question I had just been considering.
"If restitution has been ordered, does that mean the people who lost money have got it back?"
"The release establishes the order," I said. "It doesn't establish that the full amounts have been collected or paid to victims."
"But surely they wouldn't order money that couldn't be recovered."
I pulled the document back onto my screen. I could have offered him a general explanation of how recovery sometimes worked, but he was asking what had happened here. I said an obligation imposed by a court and a completed payment were different facts. This release did not supply a complete payment history.
He was quiet long enough that I could hear paper shifting at his end. Then he asked whether the sentence showed that the auction trade had known all along.
"It doesn't establish every employee's or collector's knowledge," I said. "I can't turn the description of sales through auctions and to collectors into that conclusion."
"And mine?"
"It establishes nothing new about your bottles. We still have the records we have, and the missing history is still missing. There's no established connection between your property and this prosecution."
I could hear how unsatisfying that was, even without seeing him. Two years earlier I might have filled the silence with an encouraging prediction. Instead I asked whether he wanted a copy of the release so he could see the boundaries himself. He did.
Before ending the call, he asked me to include a brief note identifying where the verdict, sentence and financial orders appeared. I agreed, provided the note remained a guide to the document rather than advice about a claim he had not made. He said that was all he wanted.
I prepared the note and checked it against the release. The December 2013 verdict appeared as a prior event. The August 7, 2014 sentence appeared as that day's outcome. The financial orders remained orders. I included no present-custody claim, no prediction of recovery and no suggestion that Nolan's papers had helped establish the public facts.
When I sent it, I copied the message into our correspondence record. Then I returned to the catalogue on my desk. The public case had reached a documented outcome I now knew. My own unfinished question was smaller and closer: whether the role Grant had described would let me keep making distinctions when a smoother account would be easier to sell.