The problems with the New York City Pizza Festival began with the pizza. Slices were cut into comically miniature triangles, nowhere close to what Ishmael Osekre, the organizer, had promised. In Facebook ads he’d hyped stuff-your-face quantities of thin crust, served outdoors on a late-summer weekend in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. He’d set prices high, charging as much as $69 per person for VIP access, and recruited more than 1,100 ticket buyers for the pizza fest, as well as a simultaneous event, the New York City Burger Festival, which promised “mountains of french fries, oceans of ketchup, and waterfalls of beer.”
Ticket holder Timothy Seitz arrived at the venue with his wife and found a mostly empty lot where hundreds of hipsters were SMH-ing in a line along a barbed-wire fence, waiting to grab a slice. As state investigators would later allege, Osekre had obtained only eight pies and a few boxes of sliders. Witnesses confirm that there was little, if any, beer, and that the pizza was gross, if still technically pizza. “Like what you’d serve elementary schoolers,” Seitz says. He wondered aloud, “Did we just get scammed?”
Osekre tried to calm the hangry crowd, telling attendees he’d ordered more pies. Too few arrived. Well into the afternoon, ticket holders, waiting and baking in the heat, demanded refunds, but Osekre was noncommittal. Then, suddenly, he disappeared. He’d taken in $63,680, according to state investigators.
In the following days, complaints and ridicule for the Hobbit-size slices raged on social media. Internet sleuths soon discovered that Osekre had apparently promoted the same food festivals the prior year—without any location or ticket sales information—before postponing them. They guessed it had all been part of a scheme allowing him to bolster the events’ Facebook following and legitimacy.
“Osekre had me check out his Facebook page, and remarkably, there were like 30,000 people interested in going,” says Jeremy Asgari, whom Osekre contracted to supply party furniture, only to stiff him on a $3,000 bill. “The guy is a genius marketer.”
Media outlets around the world dubbed the September 2017 event the Fyre Festival of Pizza, a nod to the fraudulent music extravaganza in the Bahamas four months earlier. In the years that followed, there were civil charges brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who accuses Osekre of having performed Facebook-fueled grifts repeatedly, “causing hardship to virtually everyone who is unlucky enough to become involved.” The hardship included the bad pizza but also potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to victims, across a series of alleged scams. Osekre denies any wrongdoing, beyond occasionally falling short of customer expectations. The case is ongoing. Through a spokesperson, James declined to comment.
The week that the pizza festival blew up online, a former classmate emailed me a news article, asking whether I remembered Osekre from college. “Holy shit!” I replied minutes later. I did recognize his name. It occurred to me that I might have been involved in one of his earliest schemes.
A few months ago I started exploring this history—digging through old emails and court documents, spending hours talking to Osekre (pronounced o-SEK-rey), and interviewing former collaborators. He was keen to help, but when he called me the first time in mid-May, he said he had no recollection of our overlapping time at Columbia in the late Aughts—even after I reminded him that we’d planned an event together.
The big story on campus in the mid-2000s was Vampire Weekend, who were blowing up on MySpace. The group’s overnight success inspired me, and I got more involved in a student-run “record label,” believing I could sign the band’s frontman, Ezra Koenig. Osekre got inspired, too. He’s a creative type and a social butterfly who ran for student body president one year and was constantly performing concerts and spoken-word readings. He hosted a college radio show and, after teaching himself guitar, formed his own band, Osekre and the Lucky Bastards.
We shared similar interests but entered Columbia from drastically different places. I was a legacy—my older brother had graduated a year earlier—whereas Osekre says he could barely afford the flight from Ghana. He says he landed during a January blizzard wearing a spring jacket with $30 in his pocket and paid his tuition with the help of wealthy friends he met after arriving, including Judith Aidoo, a Ghanaian-American Harvard Law School grad who runs Caswell Capital Partners Ltd., an investment firm. “He was riding a bicycle with a guitar on his back, because he didn’t have enough money for the subway,” says Aidoo, who stands by Osekre despite the allegations. “He’s not a thief in my estimation, even though he owes me $10,000 right now,” she says. (Osekre says it’s less than $5,000.)
In 2007, I was oblivious to his financial hardships, as were many of his college friends. “I was under the impression he came from money, because he never seemed to be employed, and I never saw him hurting,” says Diane Wah-Zuercher, now a conceptual artist and podcaster. “Maybe it was a fake-it-until-you-make-it thing.”
What stood out to Zuercher was that Osekre was “always trying to do big, overly ambitious things and biting off more than he could chew,” a hard truth our record label learned that December. We were planning an end-of-the-semester concert when we got word from a hooked-up classmate who said he could book the Roots (“a huge act, internationally known,” as I woodenly explained in an email to university officials asking permission to hold the event). The classmate was Osekre. We joined forces.
As the concert got closer, he said the Roots weren’t going to play music but, rather, would be presented as “motivational speakers.” Then it was only Questlove, the band’s drummer; then that promise was downgraded to an affiliated act, vocalist Martin Luther McCoy, but that still seemed very cool.
I had forgotten about this until the pizza festival, but the outcome of our event was similar. Osekre was a fireball, wheeling and dealing with agents over contracts and riders. But college administrators were skeptical. Why would the Roots, who’d played Giants Stadium, want to perform in a stageless classroom that could fit only 150? How much would the band cost? In early December, Osekre emailed that he needed $5,000 to hire McCoy, plus an opening act, the spoken-word performer Black Ice. He swore he had the money covered through an assortment of student council sponsorships, so we went for it.
No money materialized. “No need to panic,” he wrote, not long before the sound check, telling us he’d recently persuaded campus clubs to pay $13,000 for another major artist. (When I ask about the debacle in June, nearly 13 years after the concert, Osekre gives almost the same explanation verbatim, down to the $13,000 figure.) He could square things away once he finished his French test and “a demo” for a movie he’d produced that “was just bought by BET.” He said he’d happily cut the check himself if it came to it.
Black Ice and McCoy performed to a small, subdued audience, earning us $450 in gross ticket sales, which we turned over to Black Ice as an embarrassing down payment on what we owed. The following month, in January 2008, Keith Hightower, the student who served as vice president of finance for Osekre’s class council, emailed to demand how we’d exposed Columbia to $4,550 in unpaid liabilities. As it turned out, Osekre didn’t represent an official student organization, which meant that the debt for the artist fees would belong to the label and a Latino fraternity he’d roped into financing the event (to its surprise). Columbia administrators forced our label and the frat to begin a “debt repayment plan.”
To this day I don’t know how Osekre pulled it off, or if he even benefited. “I still don’t think it’s fair, but the system always prevails,” he wrote in a rambling email following the administration’s judgment. He promised to repay the losses personally, writing that his “plan is to organize a few cheap concerts.”
I never heard from him again. That is, until he invited me to his professional network on LinkedIn six years later. “Working on a prototype for my new start-up,” the invite read.
In the years after graduating, Osekre grew more ambitious with tech endeavors and his band. To friends he seemed both insanely busy yet completely free of obligations. He was, by all accounts, an Olympic-level couch surfer, but he’d occasionally hop a train to New Haven to crash at his mom’s house—which confused some of his buddies, who thought he’d said she lived in Ghana.
He was impressive whenever he had an audience. Drummer Jesse Chevan, who joined the Lucky Bastards’ ever-evolving lineup in 2013, says Osekre was an “incredible party starter” and great at booking gigs. He was a nonstop self-promoter, tweeting about minor shows—a stairwell performance at TEDxIndianapolis 2014, for example—as if they were headliners at Madison Square Garden. Concert posters often featured closeups of his face alongside epic quotes. “This band is unlike anything that has come before it and might just be the start of a musical revolution,” read one attributed to something called “Detroit Metro.” The name of the paper was slightly off, but the editor of the Detroit Metro Times confirms that the quote was real.
He may have been a kinetic frontman, but Osekre was a sloppy manager, former bandmates say. He identified himself as the founder and chief executive officer of a live-events business, Aputumpu, and at one point boasted he’d booked Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck for an event at Brooklyn Brewery. (Inspectah didn’t show.) His bookings for the Lucky Bastards never translated to much cash, and he ginned up excuses to avoid paying even trivial debts, such as the $50 he still owes to the winner of the band’s yearly fantasy soccer league. He’d habitually reserve pricey studio space, only to flake out at the last minute. Osekre hung up on me when I asked about these allegations.
The band, at least as then-constituted, fell apart after what band members Michael Benham and Micah-Daniel Lewis describe as a nightmare tour with shows in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Things started badly: Osekre arrived late to the pickup location for the rental van and then insisted everyone grab a meal before departing. The Lucky Bastards didn’t get to their D.C. gig until around midnight Friday. As they raced 700 miles west to make their Saturday shows in Chicago, Osekre was supposed to do some driving. But when it was his turn at the wheel, he confessed that he didn’t have a license. Further infuriating the band, Osekre casually mentioned that he planned to leave the tour after Chicago to stay at a family friend’s farm in Indiana and asked them to return the vehicle. “I have a very different recollection,” Osekre says, declining to share specifics.
After dropping Osekre off at the farm, some bandmates never spoke to him again, Benham says. “That whole tour was about him transferring liability to us while f---ing over our livelihoods, just so he could get to Indiana,” he says. “Osekre embodies that phrase, ‘It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.’ ”
In 2014 he told friends he’d been accepted into a fellowship at Harvard Innovation Labs, a startup incubator near the university’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., and talked about raising “seed-funding” for his live events business. It’s unclear if any money materialized, and the Harvard “fellowship” seems to have been embellished. A spokesman says the school doesn’t confer fellowships and that Osekre was never accepted to the program. Osekre says he joined a venture with two Harvard students that was affiliated with the incubator. The company, he says, planned to build a “Google Drive” for hospitals in Africa. (Team mentor Matthew Blumberg says that because of a lack of skill and resources, “I could tell from the first day they were never going to do this.”)
Even so, his status as a tech mogul in the making impressed new business partners. One was Brenda Mureithi, who met Osekre at a networking event for African professionals in New York on April 1, where he pitched her on an August festival spotlighting food of the modern-day African diaspora. He offered to pay her a modest weekly fee, and she agreed.
Over ensuing brainstorming sessions, though, she grew concerned that Osekre was overly ambitious. He imagined celebrity guests and thousands of attendees, which would require tons of capital and an army of staffers. Osekre, she recalls, told her not to panic, because he had an investor “bankrolling” his plan, as well as a “whole team behind” him stemming from a similar event he’d just thrown in Boston.
She didn’t know it, but that event had been a fiasco. The 2015 AfrikCan Festival was supposed to be “the Bonnaroo or Coachella of African events,” as marketing materials touted. Planned in collaboration with Marie-Claude Mendy, a chef from Senegal who’d opened a buzzy restaurant in the South End, the five-day celebration was supposed to feature Nigerian pop star Wizkid and Grammy Award-winning singer Oumou Sangaré. The AfrikCan Festival was postponed and then canceled. On Facebook, Osekre blamed “ridiculous corruption levels” in Boston City Hall. (Officials maintained that the necessary paperwork wasn’t filed in time.)
The investor for the new festival, it turned out, was supposedly Mendy, although Mureithi got the impression that Mendy was unaware of this. In fact, according to court testimony, Mendy had no interest in collaborating with Osekre after Boston. Still, as a favor, she shared advice and business contacts and agreed to participate as a food vendor. “Even though I was not willing to be an actual partner with Osekre, I am of African descent and am an African chef,” Mendy later testified. “I hoped he would put on a good event.”
As spring slipped into summer, Mureithi started freaking out. On social media, Osekre was hawking celebrity chef demos, VIP eight-course dinners, bottomless vegan brunches, fashion showcases, and a “Casablanca”-esque hookah lounge. In his promotions, Osekre highlighted private food tastings aboard a water taxi ferrying guests to the venue near Brooklyn’s Navy Yard off the East River. Mureithi was certain they didn’t have the budget for such indulgences, given that tickets ranged from $20 to $150, but Osekre waved her off. After all, the promos were attracting the right attention: More than 82,000 users on the festival’s Facebook page clicked that they were “interested” in the event—and almost 20,000 signaled they’d be attending.
When she and others warned Osekre that the festival, now only weeks away, was in danger of flopping, he would show screenshots of an Eventbrite account, which eventually surpassed $111,000 in gross sales. Osekre said he’d pay everyone after the event. In the meantime, Mureithi put expenses such as port-a-potty rentals on her personal credit card, racking up $9,714 in charges.
The plan had been to hold the festival at the Duggal Greenhouse, a 34,000-square-foot space where yachts can dock. Osekre had agreed to pay the $88,000 rental in several installments, but he missed his first payment, and then his second. To buy time, he’d send Mary Lovci, then the waterfront hall’s vice president of events, the Eventbrite screenshots. “Our ticket sales, please see attached, is officially past 60k so we know this event is fully paid for,” Osekre emailed on Aug. 9.
Several days before the festival, according to court testimony, Osekre called Mendy sounding alarmed. He claimed Duggal Greenhouse would accept only a business check, which he didn’t have, and implored her to float him the $88,000 from her restaurant’s account to prevent the festival from being canceled. He promised to reimburse the money immediately after the festival. “I never wanted to be officially involved,” Mendy later testified. “However, I still wanted the festival to be a success.” She wrote the check, and the venue’s managers let Osekre go forward as scheduled.
The first day of the festival was chaos. Many attendees’ tickets listed the wrong address, and those who found their way to the hall were greeted with indoor temperatures close to 100F. (Osekre didn’t pay for air conditioning.) There were only a few food vendors—not the dozens advertised—and lines snaked for an hour. The color-coded wristbands that staffers distributed corresponding to ticket prices had no bearing on what service guests received. No ice appeared to be available for drinks; periodically, a staffer would roll out a palette of water, charging $5 a bottle.
Mureithi and the other event workers tried to save the situation, but it was hopeless. Worse, there was still another day of the festival. That night, the team gathered for a debrief, but Osekre had disappeared. Mureithi found him on the waterfront, frantically tapping at his phone. She begged him to come inside to strategize about how to salvage Day 2. “No, I’ve got to handle this,” Osekre mumbled. She says that he sat near the dock for an hour, logged into the festival’s Facebook page, deleting negative comments.
In the end, according to the New York attorney general, almost everyone got stiffed—including grocery purveyors, alcohol distributors, and the New York City Fire Department—and the $111,198 of gross ticket sales disappeared. A subpoena of Osekre’s financial records shows multiple five-figure withdrawals to an LLC in his name and his personal checking account. “Little by little I took care of all the payments” to vendors, Osekre says. “Well, let me not use the word ‘all.’ ”
Mureithi says she lost $17,000 for her efforts and that she suffered PTSD-like symptoms. Osekre never reimbursed Mendy for the $88,000, and her check bounced. Emails reveal he told Duggal Greenhouse it should “hold Ms. Marie-Claude accountable to her obligations.” Mendy has filed for bankruptcy and shuttered her Boston eatery. “This ruined my reputation,” Mendy tells me. “I was able to build my restaurant from nothing, and I will do it again.”
In the years ahead, Osekre did help organize several successful events. An event planner who worked with Osekre on a few of his fashion-centric Ankara Bazaar events remembers him as a charismatic organizer who was only a tad disorganized. Like many of Osekre’s friends and colleagues, this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says she was unaware of his troubles. She wonders, jokingly, if perhaps he has a doppelgänger.
Then came the 2017 pizza fest, and the investigation, which resulted in charges of fraud and false advertising. Eventbrite banned him from using the ticketing service and, along with another ticket seller Osekre used, managed to claw back the $63,000 or so in ticket sales from his accounts to refund customers. Osekre moved his operation to Washington, D.C., where, in March of last year, the Washington City Paper reported on the “disastrous” Blagden Alley African Food Tasting, which he’d been tied to. As an attendee told the paper, “Oh my God, this is a shit show.”
Osekre acknowledges being involved in planning early on, but says he urged the organizers, who couldn’t be reached for comment, to cancel the tasting in January 2019 because of their lack of preparedness. He recalls phoning his two partners after the event failed and yelling at them to “call that lady journalist [from the Washington City Paper] right now and freaking withdraw my name from this shit.”
When the New York attorney general’s case heated up in mid-2019, Osekre initially emailed the prosecuting lawyer that he was “crafting a response.” Instead he ghosted. Repeated attempts to serve him papers at various home addresses proved unsuccessful. In March 2020, when a process server visited his mother’s house in New Haven, she would talk only from behind the door, according to a court affidavit. “As far as I know,” Mureithi says, “Osekre pretty much disappeared from the face of the Earth.”
In fact, as he was happy to tell me, he’s currently at the same farm in rural Indiana where band members say he got a lift to years earlier. The farm’s husband-and-wife owners, Tom and Anne Pigman, met Osekre many years ago on a mission to Ghana. Anne calls Osekre “my heart-adopted son.” Tom says they haven’t been able to bring themselves to open the court documents. Their farm has served as a convenient retreat from the pandemic and, perhaps, the attorney general’s investigation. “The AG’s office was like, ‘What is your address?’ ” Osekre tells me. “I said, ‘I know this will sound ridiculous, but I do not live anywhere.’ ”
This was perplexing, but no more so than much of what Osekre told me. He shared a list of names of past friends and colleagues, but many either spoke critically of Osekre or wanted nothing to do with him. (In the end, I interviewed 45 of Osekre’s associates.) Even so there were facts that I couldn’t quite pin down. Osekre, for instance, declined to divulge his age. In a 2017 media interview, he said his age was “plus or minus 29,” though it appears he was then 34, according to public records. Sometimes, in his telling, his early life was one of poverty in Ghana’s capital, Accra, and at other times, he described his childhood as comfortable. Former classmate Ama Agumeh says Osekre’s family was not well off and recalls his mother selling food at their middle school during lunch.
Since getting into trouble, associates say, Osekre has sometimes adopted his mother’s persona on social media. According to a sworn affidavit from SimpleTix.com Inc. founder Aron Kansal, he’s used “Grace Nanor,” his mom’s name, to register accounts with the ticket seller. “Ishmael used to work with us but doesn’t anymore,” a user claiming to be Nanor emailed a support representative for SimpleTix. com in June 2019, coincidentally providing contact info that included Osekre’s phone number. When I ask whether Osekre, who previously told me Nanor cannot read English, has been masquerading as his mother online, he replies, “I’m not going to say anything about my mom.” Then he adds, “Austin, don’t give up on me.” (Attempts to reach Nanor through multiple channels, including her Facebook page, were unsuccessful.)
As my reporting continued, Osekre’s communications became erratic. At one point he ignored me for several weeks, then left me a voicemail implying I was ignoring him. Amid protests against police brutality, he suggested I was a racist. He referenced my privilege and said that my attempts to fact-check his claims were akin to “Birthers questioning Obama about his birth certificate.”
Aidoo, the Caswell Capital CEO who’s stuck by him through it all, complains that prosecutors are punching down while disgraced, tech bros such as Adam Neumann, the ousted founder of WeWork Cos., are rewarded for their antics. “This guy got billions of dollars for basically blowing through cash on a dubious model, and we’re talking about Osekre?” she says. “To hold him to a higher standard than we do corporations or any of these guys is not fair.” It’s not clear that this is true. The New York attorney general is investigating WeWork and Neumann, Reuters reported.
Osekre tells me he’ll eventually go to court and win over his critics. He has no plans to retire from event planning, and he parries my suggestion about that possibility by citing what may be the ultimate fake-it-till-you-make-it story. “Have you heard of Elon Musk?” he asks. Read next: Elon Musk Speaks Frankly on Coronavirus, SpaceX, and Rage Tweets
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