The 38-year-old heir ?who can trace his family roots back to Founding Father Robert Livingston and his family fortune back to Andrew Carnegie's partner, Henry Phipps ?has just been tried for video piracy and will soon learn the court's verdict.

He was arrested last July in what U.S. Customs officials called their "first-ever joint law-enforcement investigation" with Chinese authorities. It targeted a network that distributed counterfeit motion pictures worldwide.

Guthrie, who lived in China since 1995, is charged with selling 180,000 pirated DVDs over the Internet to customers in 25 countries ?earning him more than $1 million.

He is said to have bought the DVDs from copyright pirates for half a buck each.

The investigation that snared the alleged blueblood bootlegger also led to the seizure of 210,000 counterfeit movies and about $100,000 in cash. The Chinese government also destroyed three warehouses where the DVDs were stored.

Guthrie's parents ?his socialite mother, Beatrice Holden Guthrie, 63, and prominent retired plastic-surgeon dad, Randolph Hobson Guthrie Jr. ?were unavailable for comment yesterday, their assistant said.

But friends wondered how the son who had everything could have strayed so far.

His mother has the Social Register ties and family wealth, which is managed by the Phipps family-owned bank, Bessemer Trust. His father is the source of Guthrie's intellect, a pal said.

"Randy may be the brightest person I ever met ?mentally a genius," said the friend. "But he has very little common sense."

He described Guthrie as a "loner" who "could never hold a job for long."

Enraged acquaintances say the parents seem more interested in their socially prestigious pet charity, Save Venice ?headquartered in their Upper East Side townhouse ?than in saving their oldest son, whose Shanghai surprise could prove socially embarrassing to them.

Just why Guthrie chose to go to China is not clear.

In an online profile, Guthrie ?who earned a master's degree in business administration at Columbia ?said he "thought that it would be an interesting place to live with many business opportunities."

But an acquaintance said he had another reason: "His family trust didn't pay unless he was away from New York. If he stayed in the city, he had to live at home ?broke.

"I suppose you could call him a trust-fund kid because he didn't work," said the pal. "But trust-fund kids are supposed to be stupid and lazy, and he was neither. It really was his personality."

A few years after moving to China, friends say, Guthrie married a Chinese woman whom he brought to the United States during one of his occasional visits home. The two later divorced and she's now believed to be living in America.

Guthrie's acquaintances are also furious with the feds.

"He's a scapegoat ?the U.S. was demanding that China crack down on intellectual-property theft, and they nailed poor Randy," said one.

from New York Post