A Crown a $12k cocktail and a $32 million Kiwi hustle

In 2013, the Club 23 bar at Crow casino in Melbourne entered the Guinness World Record books for selling the most expensive cocktail ever.

The cocktail was called The Winston, made from among other things a shot of 1858-vintage Croizet Cuvee Leonie cognac which sells for around $150,000 a bottle!

The purchase and consumption of this ridiculously expensive beverage was quite the media event as you could imagine with reporters and onlookers gathered in swanky bar waiting to get a look at the high roller willing to part with a small fortune for a few sips of booze. To everyone’s surprise that high roller, who turned out to be Crown regular Giang Nguyen took one sip of the drink without a lot of fuss, fanfare or apparent interest in the drink at all and then left the room. He didn’t even get dressed up for the occasion, wearing  track pants and hotel slippers!

Unusual right? But at the time this was just written off as the quirky behavior of a ridiculously wealthy individual happy to throw away cash in ways the rest of us would never understand.

But now a more complete picture of this event has emerged. It’s an interesting tale. In fact the purchase of a $12,500 cocktail is actually the least interesting part of the story.

The interesting parts are that:

1. the cocktail was never purchased. In the end the event was a media sham, and
2. the main event for that week was the almost successful $32 million hustle of Crown Casino by a Kiwi gambler

The real story has come out in unrelated legal proceedings between individuals involved in the Wintston Affair. Here’s how it goes.

Crown, always on the lookout for a PR opportunity, managed to convince one of their regular VIP players, New Zealand millionaire James Manning to visit the casino and purchase The Winston. Manning agreed but his real motivation for coming to Crown was a very different opportunity. In cahoots with casino staff he had managed to arrange a hustle that resulted in him winning $32 million playing in their high roller suites. The win included an 8 hand winning streak that had security smelling a rat.

A review of video footage later revealed what police subsequently described as, ‘an Oceans 11-style scam’. Crown withheld Manning’s winnings, had he and his family evicted from the premises and banned him from ever returning. They didn’t press charges however, hoping so keep the incident out of the news.

But a problem did exist. Manning was suppose to purchase and drink the Winston in coming days. The bottle of Croizet Cuvee Leonie had been flown in and the world had been told of the up coming record breaking cocktail purchase.

Crown had to find someone at very short notice who was either rich enough or stupid enough to take Manning’s place. They couldn’t . So what they ended up doing was a deal with long time VIP Giang Nguyen; he purchases and drinks the cocktail for the cameras, and then gets fully reimbursed at a later date.  That sip never cost him a cent.

The folks at Guinness would be very interested in this story.