American billionaire Bill Koch will do something tonight that few people of his wealth would ever consider.

He will appear on the ABC News program "20/20" to admit he is a sucker. A sucker for fake wines.

"You’re damn right," he says. "Pigeon, sucker, whatever they call the mark."

Koch says he spent some $5 million buying rare vintages of top French wines, which later turned out to be fakes. Many were actually produced in the kitchen of a master con man in suburban Los Angeles.

"I just had to have them," Koch told "20/20" in an interview conducted in the elaborate wine cellar of his oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. "Then I’d open it up and drink it and it was dish water or moose piss."

Koch admits there will be little sympathy for a wealthy person spending $50,000 to $100,000 for a fake bottle of wine, but he choked up as he described his distress at seeing the debasement of "the art, craftsmanship" of so many fine wines being faked.