The wannabe food influencer who’s wanted by the FBI – The Guardian

When a man calling himself Gavin Ambani contacted Pl Hansen out of the blue one day in 2018, the highly regarded portrait photographer wasnt sure what to make of him. Hansen has built his reputation on photographing the likes of Nicole Kidman, Tilda Swinton and Sir Lewis Hamilton, as well as some of the worlds best known chefs for Observer Food Monthly. But Ambani, a loquacious character with a high-pitched voice, wanted him to do some work for his Instagram account.

I said it doesnt sound like something Im interested in, recalls Hansen.

But Ambani was nothing if not persistent. He told Hansen that Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, the chef-owners of the restaurant Honey & Co, had personally recommended the photographer. Theyre amazing chefs, says Hansen of the Israeli couple. Very well known and lovely people.

This is the process by which Ambani, who is awaiting an extradition hearing relating to fraud charges in the United States, gained peoples attention: affecting friendships with influential people.

He was just a regular customer, says Srulovich. We knew him for coming once or twice a week. He was always name-dropping, not celebrities but people in the food world. We got to talking about Karam Sethi I love his work. And he said: Oh yeah, hes a good friend. Ill introduce you.

Sethi is one of the people behind the Michelin-starred Gymkhana in Mayfair, part of the JKS group of restaurants, which he set up with his brother Jyotin and sister Sunaina.

Ive probably met [Ambani] four or five times in our restaurants, he says. He was a regular at Trishna. One day emails started arriving because a staff member didnt give him the attention he desired. He threatened to call Michelin, and threatened us with attorneys. I called him and said if there was an issue he should come to me. He then completely flipped and became a superfan of our group, and the threats stopped. That was it.

Hansen didnt know any of that. So he agreed to meet Ambani for a coffee, during which, Hansen says, the aspiring influencer informed him that he was from an extremely wealthy Indian family and worked for Netflix in the UK. He said he wanted to become a major player in the food world and to develop the TV side of Instagram with a kind of gastronomy channel. He wanted promotional shots of himself taken in restaurant settings and asked Hansen to name his price. The photographer did just that and Ambani readily agreed.

Meanwhile, according to numerous American media reports, private investigators K2 Intelligence and the FBI, 6,000 miles away in Hollywood a con artist was busy luring behind-the-scenes workers makeup artists, personal trainers, stuntmen to Indonesia with promises of wealth and stardom, largely made through phone calls. Impersonating female film executives such as Amy Pascal, the former head of Sony Pictures, the producer Wendi Deng Murdoch, and Sherry Lansing, the former CEO of Paramount Pictures, the grifter allegedly managed to persuade hundreds of workers to fly to Indonesia on their own expense, where they were then charged excessive daily costs for driving fees or photo permits, all the while being told by Pascal or some other fake female executive that a major project was just about to begin. The whole thing, according to the Americans, was a scam, estimated to have realised $1.5-2m over several years.

Listeners to last years podcast serial Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen, presented by investigative journalists Josh Dean and Vanessa Grigoriadis, heard that the main suspect in the case was someone who had used a falsified passport under the name of Gobind Lal Tahil. Further digging suggested this persons real name is Hargobind Punjabi Tahilramani, a 41-year-old Indonesian from a privileged background who had served time for fraud back home. He had also been a student in America, where under the name of Harvey he had taken part in competitive debating, specialising in persuasive speaking, until he was accused of using another competitors speech. Dean and Grigoriadis also discovered that Tahilramani was living in England, in Manchester.

Hansen did two photo shoots, the first at the Xu Teahouse in Chinatown, run by Erchen Chang and sister and brother Wai Ting Chung and Shing Tat Chung. Ambani arranged the location, claiming the owners were close friends (the owners say this was not the case and the shoot was arranged with their marketing department). The second was at Honey & Smoke, another Packer and Srulovich restaurant.

The photographs were done in Hansens signature style, filled with grandeur and drama but also intimately conveying the personality of their subject. So in one shot, for example, the waiters framed Ambani as they poured out a rainbow spectrum of colours from teapots to represent the fact that Ambani was gay. At Honey & Smoke he sat breaking bread between Packer and Srulovich, whom he saw as breaking down social barriers with their Israeli-Middle Eastern cooking. Thats what he stood for, he said, breaking down barriers.

The shoots went very well. Everyone had fun and the photographs were bold and striking. The only problem came with the payment, which was more than 4,000. A trail of emails and texts Hansen has shown Observer Food Monthly tells the story. There was some kind of technical hitch, Ambani explained after several weeks, with transferring the money from his aunts account in America, where his cash was tied up. It would soon be sorted out, he said.

Hansen wasnt too concerned. There was something a little odd about Ambani, that was true, but he didnt expect any trouble.

If someone is a fraudster, he reasoned, the last thing they want is to be recognised and seen in a physical document that proves who they are. So you think, he cant be a fraud.

Nonetheless, Hansen says, and the email exchange supports him, the payment continued not to arrive and in its place was a stream of ever more implausible excuses. Sometimes Ambani would say he would deliver the money by hand later that day, and then not show up. Oh my God, he wrote to Hansen afterwards, you wrote 10pm tonight when I meant 10am in the morning. On other occasions he would ask for more time.

Finally Hansen got in touch with Srulovich and asked whether he could check his bank statement to see if this Ambani was who he said he was. Srulovich wasnt able to, but the next day Ambani sent a furious message to Hansen accusing him of a criminal act of defamation in contacting Srulovich.

He said Itamar had given him a hard time for not paying and he ended the text message saying that what I had done [by informing Srulovich] made him feel like he was going to commit suicide.

Its perhaps worth noting that when Harvey was caught allegedly using another students debating speech, he also threatened suicide.

In neither case was the threat carried out, but nor did Ambani pay Hansen. Not even the prospect of court action seems to have bothered him. In the emails he claims to have beaten cancer and, he told Hansen, he would prevail in court too. In the meantime he kept Hansens photographs up on his Pure Bytes Instagram account, taking them down only after repeated reminders that he had not paid for them.

While this conflict was unfolding, a man named Lal Gobind walked into a West End restaurant and, without a reservation, asked for a table. When he was told the restaurant was full, he accused the staff of racism. Oh my God, this was really serious, recalls Gemma Bell, of well-known food PR agency Gemma Bell & Co, who represented the restaurant in question.

She knew she would have to conduct an inquiry to establish exactly what happened. After interviewing all of the staff involved, she says she realised that there was no basis to the claim. She called Gobind to smooth things over and, she says, he was sweetness and light. He was no longer concerned about the accusation that he had made so vehemently. Instead Bell says he asked her to become his PR for some supper club events he said he wanted to set up.

The food influencer known as Clerkenwell Boy had hosted a series of successful supper clubs that highlighted well-known chefs. He would hold them at a private members club once a month and Ambani managed to get into one of them.

All the evidence suggests that Gavin Ambani is the same person as Lal Gobind, who is in turn the same person as Gobind Lal Tahil and Harvey. There are many other aliases, too, but all of them, it is alleged, belong to one Hargobind Punjabi Tahilramani.

Many people in Londons restaurant scene have speculated that Ambani was looking to model himself on Clerkenwell Boy but with one big difference. Whereas the food influencer with a quarter of a million followers on Instagram maintains his anonymity, Ambani aimed to put himself squarely in the picture.

He wanted adulation, says Frances Cottrell-Duffield, owner of the PR agency Tonic Communications. He just wanted people to think that he was wonderful.

Ambani also approached Cottrell-Duffield, in December 2019, to be his personal PR. She says he introduced himself by walking up to where she was dining in a restaurant. Aware of her professional profile, he immediately began fawning.

If you said something completely straightforward, recalls Cottrell-Duffield, he would say: That is the most brilliant thing Ive ever heard. You are the most brilliant woman. I cant believe Im in the same room as you. I thought, youre weird, actually.

He told her, among other things, that he had suffered a difficult childhood and that he was best friends with Karam Sethi. She says that she has encountered name-dropping before in the restaurant world but his was on a scale Id never seen. Despite finding him unsettling, she was also rather fascinated, and agreed to a couple of meetings at her office.

It struck her that Ambani was preoccupied by the fact that she was a woman. He kept bringing attention to this fact. She wonders now if he was perhaps studying her ways, mimicking women at work. She says that when he realised that she wasnt going to work for him, he stopped calling, but she still saw his movements on Instagram.

He put up a post when he moved to Manchester, she remembers, saying something like I had a great night of sex last night. I remember thinking that was the strangest thing. He was walking along the street filming himself, on his own, and it just felt like a complete lie.

Yet another PR whose path Ambani crossed is Dominique Fraser of Fraser Communications. He approached her because he wanted to be on the invitation list to restaurant openings. As Fraser explains, that list is made up of journalists from newspapers and magazines but also, increasingly, social media influencers. I think we always have to be aware of new talent coming through the ranks and new influencers appearing, says Fraser.

Fraser says Ambani gave her the familiar spiel about Netflix there does not appear to be any evidence of a working relationship between Ambani and the streaming giant and the new TV show he was busy creating. He also told her about his Instagram account Pure Bytes, which was the one established reality in his story. Unfortunately he appeared to have forgotten an earlier encounter with Fraser, when she was hosting a dinner and he took her for a minor functionary.

Frustrated that she wouldnt admit him into the event, he told her, she says: As soon as your boss finds out that youre not letting me into this dinner, your careers over. Youre ruined. Youre going to be sacked tomorrow.

Nevertheless she checked out his Pure Bytes account but came to a firm conclusion. I made the decision with Marcus my partner that he wasnt a press contact that we wanted to entertain. Our clients are of such calibre that we are looking for the very best press contacts. He just didnt really factor into that. It wasnt personal at all. We run a business.

That wasnt how Tahilramani saw things. Apparently infuriated by being excluded from a world he was desperate to enter, Fraser says, he continued to turn up at events and openings of restaurants that Fraser Communications represented, forcefully demanding entrance. According to Fraser, he took particular exception to one of her colleagues, whom he began threatening.

For a few months, he would call the office every day, Fraser recalls. Hed say to her: Youre a dirty slut. I know where you live. Things arent going to end well for you. Im going to end your career.

His target was sufficiently intimidated that the company arranged for her to go home by taxi until the threats stopped. Fraser says they considered reporting Ambani to the police but the woman did not want to inflame the situation. The company also instituted a policy in which all communications with Ambani had to be directed to Fraser or her husband, because he was so awful to the team. Yet, she says, when he wasnt being horrendously abusive, he was very charming.

In the early hours of 26 November last year, Tahilramani was arrested by Manchester police in relation to a US extradition request. The net had been tightening around him for some time. There was the podcast Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen, whose penultimate episode predicted his arrest. But more importantly the FBI were interested in Tahilramani, led there by private investigators at K2, a company hired by some of the senior film executives Tahilramani had allegedly impersonated.

Although his alleged marks in Los Angeles were the little people, and the sums of money extracted from them too individually small to trouble the FBI, Tahilramani seems to have made the mistake of upsetting the wrong people with his impersonations. There are many ironies in this story, one of them being that, even as his alleged activities were being exposed, Tahilramani apparently carried on pretending to be the blockbuster director and producer Doug Liman. The Chameleon podcast played a secretly recorded conversation in which an actor approached by the fake Liman questioned his identity. The fake Liman launched into a tirade of threats, saying that he would have the actor mutilated. In other words, he acted like an angry Hollywood big shot, yet it was the real angry Hollywood big shots who didnt just issue empty threats but set the law on him.

According to the podcast, while still pretending to be Liman, Tahilramani also accused the actor of racism. That didnt make any sense, whichever way you look at it, and probably showed that the stress he was under was beginning to tell.

But why the fascination with London restaurants? As every chef, restaurant owner and PR I spoke to was at pains to point out, its a tight-knit and mutually supportive scene, in which the margins are small and the work is hard. Its not an environment in which to make easy money. Whats more Srulovich and Sethi confirm that he always paid his bills, which makes it even more mystifying as to why he damaged his reputation by failing to pay Hansen in such a conspicuous manner.

In an Instagram interview, Tahilramani told his friend, the Indonesian lifestyle influencer Haseena Narains Bharata, that he was a survivor of conversion therapy, placed in a mental hospital to cure him of being gay. He also told her he was not gay, though he seems to have told pretty much everyone else he was. Embracing the language of self-empowerment, he declared in the interview that: Believing in yourself is first. Thats the hardest thing.

Bharata said that he was lucky to be living in London, a city where he could trust people. In fact he was living in Manchester, and the trust problems were all the other way round. Believing in him would prove to be the hardest thing for too many people.

It seems likely that Ambani or Tahilramani had no financial ploy to play on Londons restaurants. He just wanted to be part of a world that he found glamorous, and the only means of entry he knew were lying, manipulation, exaggeration and threats.

Its weird, says Sethi. I dont know what the end game was. He wasnt well informed about food at all. Digital is now the main way you promote a restaurant, mostly on social media channels. I guess it was an easy way for him to get attention?

According to the extradition request, Tahilramani is wanted on eight charges, including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Observer Food Monthly put a whole range of questions to Tahilramani, via his lawyer, about his alleged behaviour in London and the accusations against him in America. His lawyer replied that Tahilramani had no comment to make, save a few lines from The Rape of Lucrece:Times glory is to calm contending kings,To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light

Shakespeares poem tells of a Roman soldier, Tarquin, who rapes Lucrece, the wife of a fellow soldier, threatening her with death and ignominy unless she complies. It ends with Tarquins banishment an odd literary choice for someone in prison awaiting extradition.

The word in Londons restaurant community is that there are plans to make a drama or documentary series out of the Hollywood Con Queen story. Perhaps the final irony is that its said that it will be screened on Netflix, the streaming service for which Tahilramani claimed to work. Extraditions are never foregone conclusions but what does seem certain is that he has at last found the fame or at least infamy that appears always to have been his dream.

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The wannabe food influencer who's wanted by the FBI - The Guardian