Photography by Sergio Corvacho
Above, Anna Delvey.
It
started with money, as it so often does in New York. A crisp $100 bill
slipped across the smooth surface of the mid-century-inspired concierge
desk at 11 Howard, the sleek new boutique hotel in Soho. Looking up,
Neffatari Davis, the 25-year-old concierge, who goes by “Neff,” was
surprised to see the cash had come from a young woman who seemed to be
around her age. She had a heart-shaped face and pouty lips surrounded by
a wild tangle of red hair, her eyes framed by incongruously chunky
black glasses that Neff, an aspiring cinematographer with an eye for
detail, identified as Céline. She was looking, she said in an accent
that sounded European, for “the best food in Soho.”
“What’s your name?” Neff asked, after the girl waved off her suggestions of Carbone and the Mercer Kitchen and settled on the Butcher’s Daughter.
“Anna
Delvey,” said the young woman. She’d be staying at the hotel for a
month, she went on, which Neff also found surprising: Usually it was
only celebrities who came for such long stretches. But Neff checked the
system, and there it was. Delvey was booked into a Howard Deluxe, one of
the hotel’s midrange options, about $400 a night, with ceramic
sculptures on the walls and oversize windows looking onto the bustling
streets of Soho. It was February 18, 2017.
“Thanks,” said Delvey. “See you around.”
That
turned out to be a promise. Over the next few weeks, Delvey stopped by
often to ask Neff’s advice, slipping her $100 each time. Neff would wax
on about how Mr. Purple was totally washed and Vandal was for hipsters, while Delvey’s eyes would flit around behind her glasses. Eventually, Neff realized: Delvey already knew
all the cool places to go — not only that, she knew the names of the
bartenders and waiters and owners. “This is not a guest that needs my help,” it dawned on her. “This is a guest that wants my time.”
This
was not out of the ordinary. Since she’d started working there, Neff, a
Washington, D.C., native with a wedge of natural hair, giant Margaret
Keane eyes, and a gap-toothed smile, had found herself playing therapist
to all manner of hotel guests: husbands cheating on their wives, wives
getting away from their husbands. “You just sit there and listen,
because that’s your concierge life,” she recalled recently, at a coffee
shop near her apartment in Crown Heights.
Usually,
these guests went back to their own lives, leaving Neff to hers. But
February became March, and Delvey kept showing up. She’d bring food
down, or a glass of extra-dry white wine, and settle near Neff’s desk to
chat. Some of the other hotel employees found Anna deeply annoying. She
could be oddly ill-mannered for a rich person: Please and thank you were not in her vocabulary, and she would sometimes say things that were “Not racist,” Neff said, “but classist.”
(“What are you bitches, broke?” Anna asked her and another hotel
employee.) But to Neff, it didn’t come across as mean-spirited. More
like she was some kind of old-fashioned princess who’d been plucked from
an ancient European castle and deposited in the modern world, although
according to Anna she came from modern-day Germany and her father ran a
business producing solar panels. And despite her unassuming figure — “a
sort of Sound of Music Fräulein,” one acquaintance later put it
— Anna quickly established herself as one of 11 Howard’s most generous
guests. “People would fight to take her packages upstairs,” said Neff. “Fight,
because you knew you were getting $100.” Over time, Delvey got more and
more comfortable in the hotel, swanning around in sheer Alexander Wang
leggings or, occasionally, a hotel robe. “She ran that place,” said Neff. “You know how Rihanna walks out with wineglasses? That was Anna. And they let her. Bye, Ms. Delvey …”
Anna
was preparing to launch a business, a Soho House–ish type club, she
told Neff, focused on art, with locations in L.A., London, Hong Kong,
and Dubai, and Neff became her de facto secretary, organizing business
lunches and dinners at restaurants like Seamore’s and the hotel’s own Le
Coucou. (“That’s what they do in the rich culture, is meals,” said
Neff.) On occasion, when Delvey showed up while the concierge desk was
busy, she would stand at the counter, coolly counting out bills until
she got Neff’s attention. “I’d be like, ‘Anna, there’s a line of eight
people.’ But she’d keep putting money down.” And even though Neff had
begun to think of Anna as not just a hotel guest but a friend, a real friend, she didn’t hesitate to take it. “A little selfish of me,” she admitted later. “But … yeah.”
Who
can blame her? This was Manhattan in the 21st century, and money is
more powerful than ever. Rare is the city dweller who, when presented
with an opportunity for a sudden and unexpected influx of cash, doesn’t
grasp for it. Of course, this money almost always comes with strings
attached. Sometimes you can barely see them, like that vaudeville bit in
which the pawn dives for a loose bill only to find it pulled just
ahead. Still, everyone makes the reach. Because here, money is the one
thing that no one can ever have enough of.
For a stretch
of time in New York, no small amount of the cash in circulation was
coming from Anna Delvey. “She gave to everyone,” said Neff. “Uber
drivers, $100 cash. Meals — listen. You know how you reach for your
credit card? She wouldn’t let me.”
The
way Anna spent money, it was like she couldn’t get rid of it fast
enough. Her room was overflowing with shopping bags from Acne and
Supreme, and in between meetings, she’d invite Neff to foot massages,
cryotherapy, manicures (Anna favored “a light Wes Anderson pink,”
according to Neff). One day, she brought Neff to a session with a
personal trainer–slash–life coach she’d found online, a svelte, ageless
Oprah-esque figure who works with celebrities like Dakota Johnson.
“Stop
sinking into your body,” the trainer commanded Anna. “Shoulders back,
navel to spine. You are a bright woman; you want to be a businesswoman.
You gotta be staying strong on your own power.”
Afterward, as Neff panted on the sidelines, Anna bought a package of sessions. “It was, I’m not lying, $4,500,” said Neff.
Anna paid cash.
Neff’s
boyfriend didn’t understand why she was spending so much time with this
weird girl from work. Anna didn’t understand why Neff had a boyfriend.
But he was rich, Neff protested. He’d promised to finance her first
movie. “Dump him,” Anna advised. “I have more money.” She would finance the movie.
Neff
did dump the guy. Not because of what Anna had said, although she had
no reason to doubt it. Her new friend, she discovered, belonged to a
vast and glittering social circle. “Anna knew everyone,” said Neff. At night, she’d taken to hosting large dinners at Le Coucou,
attended by CEOs, artists, athletes, even celebrities. One night, Neff
found herself seated next to her childhood idol, Macaulay Culkin. “Which
was awkward,” she said. “Because I had so many questions. And he was right there.
But they were talking about, like, friend stuff. So I never got the
chance to be like, ‘So, you the godfather to Michael Jackson’s kids?’ ”
Despite
her seemingly nomadic living situation, Anna had long been a figure on
the New York social scene. “She was at all the best parties,” said
marketing director Tommy Saleh, who met her in 2013 at Le Baron in Paris
during Fashion Week. Delvey had been an intern at European scenester
magazine Purple and appeared to be tight with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Olivier Zahm, and its man-about-town, André Saraiva, an owner of Le Baron
— two of “the 200 or so people you see everywhere,” as Saleh put it:
Chilterns and Loulou’s in London; the Crow’s Nest in Montauk; Paul’s
Baby Grand and the Bowery Hotel; Frieze, Coachella, Art Basel.
“She introduced herself, and she was a sweet girl, very polite,” said
Saleh. “Then we’re just hanging with my friends all of a sudden.”
Soon,
Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right
places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party
thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy
clothing” — Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa — “and someone mentioned that she
flew in on a private jet.” It was unclear where exactly Anna came from —
she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good —
or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. “There
are so many trust-fund kids running around,” said Saleh. “Everyone is
your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”
After
a gallerist at Pace introduced her to Michael Xufu Huang, the extremely
young, extremely dapper collector and founder of Beijing’s M Woods
museum, Anna proposed they go together to the Venice Biennale. Huang
thought it was “a little weird” when Anna asked him to book the plane
tickets and hotel on his credit card. “But I was like, Okay, whatever,”
he said. It was also strange, he noticed during their time there, that
Anna only ever paid with cash, and after they got back, she seemed to
forget she’d said she’d pay him back. “It was not a lot of money,” he
said. “Like two or three thousand dollars.” After a while, Huang kind of
forgot about it too.
When
you’re superrich, you can be forgetful in this way. Which is maybe why
no one thought much of the instances in which Anna did things that
seemed odd for a wealthy person: calling a friend to have her put a taxi
from the airport on her credit card, or asking to sleep on someone’s
couch, or moving into someone’s apartment with the tacit agreement to
pay rent, and then … not doing it. Maybe she had so much money she just
lost track of it.
The following January, Anna hired a PR firm to put together a birthday party at one of her favorite restaurants, Sadelle’s
in Soho. “It was a lot of very cool, very successful people,” said
Huang, who, while aware Anna owed him money for their Venice trip,
remained mostly unconcerned about it, at least until the restaurant,
having seen Polaroids of Huang and Anna at the party on Instagram,
messaged him a few days later. “They were like, ‘Do you have her contact
info?’ ” he says now. “ ‘Because she didn’t pay her bill.’ Then I
realized, Oh my God, she is not legit.”
As
Anna bounced around the globe, there was some speculation as to where
her means to do this came from, though no one seemed to care that much
so long as the bills got paid.
“I
thought she had family money,” said Jayma Cardoso, one of the owners of
the Surf Lodge in Montauk. Delvey’s father was a diplomat to Russia,
one friend was sure. No, another insisted, he was an oil-industry titan.
“As far as I knew, her family was the Delvey family that is big in
antiques in Germany,” said another acquaintance, a millionaire tech CEO.
(It is unclear what family he was referring to.) The CEO met Anna
through the boyfriend she was running around with for a while, a
futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.
For about two years, they’d been kind of like a team, showing up in
places frequented by the itinerant wealthy, living out of fancy hotels
and hosting sceney dinners where the Futurist talked up his app and
Delvey spoke of the private club she wanted to open once she turned 25
and came into her trust fund.
Then
it was 2016. The Futurist, whose app never materialized, moved to the
Emirates, and Anna came to New York on her own, determined to make her
arts club a reality, although she worried to Marc Kremers, the London
creative director helping her with branding, that the name she’d come up
with — the Anna Delvey Foundation, or ADF — was “too narcissistic.”
Early on, Anna and architect Ron Castellano, a friend of her Purple
cohort, had scouted a building on the Lower East Side, but it turned
out to be too close to a school to get a liquor license, and soon Anna
had shifted her aspirations uptown. Through her connections, she’d
befriended Gabriel Calatrava, one of the sons of famed architect
Santiago. His family’s real-estate advisory company, Calatrava Grace,
had helped her “secure the lease,” she informed people, on the perfect
space: 45,000 square feet occupying six floors of the historic Church
Missions House, a landmarked building on the corner of Park Avenue and
22nd. The heart of the club would be, she said, a “dynamic visual-arts
center,” with a rotating array of pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel
Arsham, whom she knew from her Purple days, and exhibitions and
installations from blue-chip artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst,
Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. For the inaugural event, Anna told people,
the artist Christo had agreed to wrap the building. Some people raised
their eyebrows at the grandiosity of this plan, but to others it made
sense, in a New York kind of way. The building’s owner, developer Aby
Rosen, was no stranger to the private-club genre; a few years earlier,
he’d bought a midtown building and opened the Core Club, which housed an
art collection. He also happened to own 11 Howard.
With
the help of Calatrava executive Michael Jaffe, a former employee of
Rosen’s RFR realty firm, Anna soon began meeting with big names in the
food-and-beverage world to discuss possibilities in the space. One was
André Balazs, who, according to Anna, suggested they add two floors of
hotel rooms. Another was Richie Notar, one of the founders of Nobu,
who did a walk-through of the building with Anna as she described her
vision, which included three restaurants, a juice bar, and a German
bakery. “Apparently her family was prominent in Germany,” Notar said,
“and funding this big project for her.”
But
a project of this size required more capital than even someone of
Anna’s apparently considerable resources could manage: approximately $25
million, “in addition to $25m existing,” Anna wrote in an email to a
prominent Silicon Valley publicist in 2016. “If you think this is
something you could help us with and have anyone in mind who would be a
good cultural fit for this project.” But by fall, Anna had turned on the
idea of private investors, in part because she didn’t want anyone
telling her what to do. “If we were to bring in investors, they would
say, ‘Oh, she’s 25; she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ ” Anna explained
later. “I wanted to build the first one myself.”
To
help secure a loan, one of Anna’s “finance friends” had told her to get
in touch with Joel Cohen, best known as the prosecutor of Jordan
Belfort, a.k.a. the Wolf of Wall Street. Cohen now worked at Gibson
Dunn, a large firm known for its real-estate practice. He put her in
touch with Andy Lance, a partner who happened to have the exact kind of
expertise that Anna was looking for. In the past, she’d complained to
friends about feeling condescended to by older male lawyers because of
her age and gender. But Lance was different. “He knows how to talk to
women,” she said. “And he would explain to me the right amount, without
being patronizing.” According to Anna, she and Lance spoke every day.
“He was there all the time. He would answer in the middle of the night,
or when he was in Turks and Caicos for Christmas.”
After
filling out Gibson Dunn’s new-client-intake form, which included
checking boxes that confirmed the client had the resources to pay and
would not embarrass the firm, Lance put Anna in touch with several large
financial institutions, including Los Angeles–based City National Bank
and Fortress Investment Group. “Our client Anna Delvey is undertaking a
very exciting redevelopment of 281 Park Avenue South, backed by a
marquee team for this type of venue and space,” Lance wrote in one
email, in which he explained that Anna needed the loan because “her
personal assets, which are quite substantial, are located outside the
US, some of them in trust with UBS outside the US.” The monies she
received, he added, would be “fully secured” by a letter of credit from
the Swiss bank. (Lance did not respond to requests for comment.)
When
the banker at City National asked to see the UBS statements, he
received a list of figures from a man named Peter W. Hennecke. “Please
use these for your projections for now,” Hennecke wrote in an email.
“I’ll send the physical statements on Monday.”
“Question: Are you from UBS?” the banker replied, puzzled by Hennecke’s AOL address.
No, Anna explained. “Peter is head of my family office.”
With
Anna in fund-raising mode, the artists and celebrity friends at her
dinners were gradually supplanted by men with “Goyard briefcases and
Rolexes, and Hublot, like that Jay-Z lyric,” according to Neff, who at
one point looked across the table at Le Coucou and recognized the face
of infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who would later be convicted of
securities fraud. Anna introduced Shkreli as a “dear friend,” although
it was really the only time they’d met, Shkreli told New York
in a letter from the penitentiary; Anna was close with one of his
executives. “Anna did seem to be a popular ‘woman about town’ who knew
everyone,” he wrote. “Even though I was nationally known, I felt like a
computer geek next to her.”
As
for Neff, she was not as discreet as she had been with Macaulay Culkin,
tweeting after the fact that Shkreli had played her and Anna the leaked
tracks from Tha Carter V, the delayed Lil Wayne album he’d
acquired. Anna was furious, but Neff refused to delete the tweet. “I
wanted everybody to know that I heard this album that the world is
waiting on! But Anna was pretty mad. She didn’t come down to my desk for
maybe three days.”
In
the meantime, though, Neff said she had another visitor: Charlie Rosen.
Aby Rosen’s sons were generally regarded as pretty-boy trust-fund kids —
a few years back, they made headlines
for reportedly racing ATVs over piping-plover nests in the Hamptons —
but Neff liked them, and when Charlie stopped by one evening, she
dropped that she’d recently been to visit the Park Avenue building that
one of the guests, a young woman, was leasing from their father for an
arts club.
Rosen
looked confused. He didn’t appear to have ever heard of Anna or her
project. “What room is she staying in?” he asked. When Neff told him, he
looked skeptical. “If my dad has someone buying property from him
staying here,” he said, “would she be in a Deluxe or would she be in a
suite?”
He
had a point. A few days later, Neff broached the subject. “Why did you
tell me you’re buying property from Aby but you’re not staying in a
suite?” she asked.
Anna
looked surprised but answered immediately. “She said, ‘You ever have
someone do so many favors for you, you kind of just want to pay them
back in silence?’ ”
“Genius,” Neff said.
Soon it was April.
Spring was poking its head through the gray New York City sidewalks,
and the weather was getting warm enough to sip rosé on rooftops, one of
Anna’s favorite activities, although the circle she was doing this with,
Neff noticed, was smaller than it had been in the past and mainly
consisted of herself; Rachel Williams, a photo editor at Vanity Fair;
and the trainer, who, although she was notably older, had taken a
motherly interest in her client. “I know a lot of trust-fund babies, and
I was impressed that Anna had something that she wanted to do, instead
of, you know, living like a Kardashian,” said the trainer. Plus, she
said, Anna seemed lonely. Neff noticed the same thing. “What happened to
your friends?” she asked Anna after one night out. “Oh,” Anna said
vaguely. “They’re all mad I left Purple.”
She was too busy for parties, anyway, she said, what with building her business.
It
was true that Anna was spending a lot of time working, frowning at her
in-box and huffing into the phone. “She was always on the phone with
lawyers,” said Neff, who would sort of listen in from the concierge
desk. “They were always toning her down. Like, ‘Anna, you’re trying to
make something that’s worth this much be worth that much, and that’s
just not how it works.’ ”
Back
in December, City National had turned down her loan request — a
management decision is how Anna framed it — and while the ever-loyal
Andy Lance was reaching out to hedge funds and banks for alternate
financing, executives at RFR were pressuring her to come up with the
money fast, Anna said. If she didn’t, they were going to give it to
another party, rumored to be the Swedish museum Fotografiska. “How do
they even pay for that?” Anna fumed. “It’s like two old guys.”
In the meantime, Anna was having cash-flow issues of her own. One night, Anna asked Neff to dinner at Sant Ambroeus
in Soho. They were by themselves, which was unusual. Even more
unusually, at the end of the meal, Anna’s card was declined. “Here,” she
told the waiter, handing him a list of credit-card numbers. In Neff’s
admittedly foggy memory, they were in a small book, though it may have
been the Notes app on her phone. But she’s clear on what happened next.
“The waiter went back to his station and began entering the numbers.
There were like 12, and I know the guy tried them all,” she said. “He
was trying it and then shaking his head. And then I started to sweat,
because I knew the bill was mine.” While the amount — $286 — was a
fraction of what Anna usually spent, it was a lot for Neff, who quietly
transferred money from her savings to cover the bill. Doing so made her
feel sick, but after all the money Anna had spent on her, she understood
it was her turn.
Not
long after, Neff’s manager called and asked her to address a delicate
issue: It seemed 11 Howard didn’t have a credit card on file for Anna
Delvey. Because the hotel had been so new when she arrived, and because
she was staying for such an unusually long time, and because she was a
client of Aby Rosen’s and a very valued guest, it had agreed to accept a
wire transfer. But a month and a half later, no such transfer had
arrived, and now Delvey owed the hotel some $30,000, including charges
from Le Coucou that she’d been billing to her room.
Neff
wasn’t sure what to think. She was sure Anna was good for the money.
The day after the Sant Ambroeus debacle, she’d paid her back triple. In
cash.
When
Anna came by her desk the next day, Neff took her aside and told her
that management had said Anna needed to pay her bill. Anna nodded, her
eyes inscrutable behind her sunglasses. There was a wire transfer on the
way, she said. It should arrive soon. Then, about midway into her
shift, Anna came by the desk again and, with a mischievous smile on her
face, told Neff to expect a package. When it arrived, Neff opened it to
find a case of 1975 Dom Pérignon, with Anna’s instructions to distribute
it among the staff. Neff hesitated. Gifts, especially of the liquid
variety, needed to be approved by management. “They were like, ‘How do
we look approving this if she hasn’t paid us?’ So they went after her.
‘We need the money or we’re locking you out.’ ”
One
morning, Anna showed up to her morning session with the trainer looking
visibly upset. “Can we do a life-coaching session?” she pleaded. She
was trying to build something, to do something, she went on, and no one
was taking her seriously. “They think because I am young, they think I
have all this money,” she sobbed. “I told them the money would be there
soon. I’m having it transferred.”
The trainer told her to breathe. “I feel like you are in a little over your head,” she offered. “Maybe you just need a break.”
Then
something miraculous happened. Citibank sent 11 Howard a wire transfer
on behalf of Ms. Anna Delvey for $30,000. Neff called Anna on her cell
phone. “Where you at?” she asked. Across the street at Rick Owens, Anna
replied. Neff checked the clock: It was her lunch break. When she came
through the door of the store, Anna was holding up a T-shirt. “Look what
I found,” she said, beaming. “It’s perfect for you.” She was right: The
shirt was the exact orangey red of the creepy bathroom scene in The Shining,
one of Neff’s favorite movies, and the signature color of the brand
Neff was trying to launch, FilmColours. It was also $400. “I’d love to
buy it for you,” Anna said.
A
few weeks later, Anna told Neff she was going to Omaha. “I’m going to
see Warren Buffett,” she announced, grandly. One of her bankers had
gotten her on the list to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investment
conference, and she’d decided to bring the executive from Martin
Shkreli’s hedge fund, who was fun and a friend of his, on the private
jet she’d rented to take them there. “I’ll be back,” she promised Neff.
But
there was still a problem with her account at 11 Howard. Despite being
repeatedly asked by hotel management, she still hadn’t given the hotel a
working credit card, and her charges continued to mount. Following
through on their warning, hotel employees changed the code on the lock
of Anna’s room and put her things in storage. Neff texted Anna in Omaha
to deliver the bad news.
“How
can they do that?” Anna asked indignantly, although if she was truly
shocked, it didn’t last long. The conference had been great, she said.
The best part had happened the very last day, when, having exhausted all
the opportunities for luxury Omaha had to offer, Anna and her party had
taken a cab driver’s suggestion to check out the zoo. They hadn’t
expected much, but then, while they were riding around on their golf
carts, they’d stumbled on a private dinner hosted by Buffett for a slew
of VIPs. “Everyone was there,” she said. “Like, Bill Gates was there.”
For a little while, they’d watched through the glass, then they’d slipped in and mingled among them.
When Anna got back
to 11 Howard, she made her fury known. She was going to purchase web
domains in all of the managers’ names, she told Neff, a trick she’d
learned from Shkreli: “They’re going to pay me one day.” Also, she was
moving out — as soon as she got back from Morocco. Inspired by Khloé
Kardashian, she’d reserved a $7,000-a-night riad with a private butler
at La Mamounia, an opulent resort in Marrakech, and asked Neff if she
wanted to join herself, the trainer, Rachel Williams, and a
videographer, who she was hoping would make “a behind-the-scenes
documentary” about the process of creating her arts foundation on a
vacation. They’d wake up to massages, she said, and spend their days
exploring the souk, lounging by the pool. Neff wanted to go, badly. But
there was no way the hotel would let her take off eight days. “Just
quit,” Anna said airily.
For
a day or two, Neff considered it. But her mom told her she had a bad
feeling about it. “Nothing in life is free,” she said. So Neff stayed
behind, morosely following her friend’s journey on Instagram. “I was
pretty jealous,” she said.
As
she would find out, the pictures didn’t exactly tell the whole story.
Two days in, after coming down with a nasty case of food poisoning, the
trainer had gone back to New York early.
About
a week later, the trainer got a call from Anna, who was alone at the
Four Seasons in Casablanca and hysterical. There was, she sobbed, a
problem with her bank. Her credit cards weren’t going through, and the
hotel was threatening to call the police. After calming Anna down, the
trainer asked to speak to management. “They were like, ‘She is going to
be arrested,’ ” she said.
The
trainer was torn: On the one hand, this was not her problem. On the
other, Anna was her client, her friend, and someone’s daughter. Offering
a prayer to the universe, the trainer gave the hotel her credit-card
number and, when it failed to go through, made the requisite calls to
her bank. When it still failed to go through, she went the extra mile:
She called a friend and had her give her credit-card information. When
that failed to work, the hotel conceded the problem might be on their
end.
Later,
the trainer would recognize this as a substantial gift from the
Universe. At the time, she promised the hotel in Casablanca that Anna
would make them whole. “Trust me,” she told them. “I know she’s good for
it. I just spent two days with her in Marrakech.” When Anna came back
on the phone, the trainer told her she was booking her a ticket back to
New York. Anna snuffled her thanks. Then she asked for one last favor:
“Can you get me first class?” she asked.
A
few days later, a silvery Tesla pulled up in front of 11 Howard. Neff,
at the concierge desk, felt her cell phone buzz. “Look out the window,”
said a familiar German accent. The car’s futuristic doors slowly raised
up to reveal Anna. “I’m here to get my stuff,” she said.
Anna was making good on her promise to leave 11 Howard. She was moving downtown to the Beekman Hotel,
she told Neff, who watched her drive away in a car that she only later
realized someone must have rented to her. Moving didn’t stem Anna’s
mounting troubles. Not only did she owe the hotel, but, over in London,
Marc Kremers, the designer she’d hired to do her branding work, was
getting antsy: The £16,800 fee Anna had promised would arrive by wire
almost a year before had yet to materialize, and now emails to Anna’s
financial adviser, Peter W. Hennecke, were bouncing back. “Peter passed
away last month,” Anna replied. “Please refrain from contacting or
mentioning any communication with him going forward.”
In
retrospect, her terseness was understandable. Things were rapidly
deteriorating for Anna Delvey in New York. Twenty days into her stay,
the Beekman Hotel, having realized it did not have a working credit card
on file and having not received the promised wire transfer for her
balance of $11,518.59, locked Anna out of her room and confiscated her
belongings. A subsequent two-day stay at the W Hotel
downtown ended in a similar fashion, and by July 5, Anna was
effectively homeless, wandering the streets in threadbare Alexander Wang
sportswear.
Late
one night, she made her way to the trainer’s apartment and dialed her
from outside. “I’m right near your building,” she said. “Do you think we
could talk?”
The
trainer hesitated: She was in the middle of a date. But there was a
desperate note in Anna’s voice. She made her way to her lobby, where she
found Anna with tears streaming down her face. “I’m trying to do this
thing,” she sobbed. “And it’s so hard.”
Maybe
she should call her family, the trainer suggested. She would, Anna
replied, but her parents were in Africa. “Do you mind if I crash at your
place tonight?” No, the trainer said, she had a date.
“I really just don’t want be alone,” Anna sniffled. “I might do something.”
The date hid in the bedroom while the trainer made a bed for her unexpected houseguest and offered her a glass of water.
“Do
you have any Pellegrino?” Anna asked. There was one large bottle left.
Anna ignored the two glasses placed on the counter and began swilling
from the bottle. “I’m so tired,” she yawned.
As
Anna slept, the trainer’s spidey sense began to tingle. “I mean, I’m
born and raised in New York,” she told me later. “I’m not stupid.” She
texted Rachel Williams, who told her about what had happened at La
Mamounia: Apparently, after the trainer returned to New York, the credit
card Anna had used to book the hotel was found to be nonfunctional, and
when Anna was unable to produce a new form of payment and a pair of
threatening goons appeared in the doorway, the photo editor was forced
to put the balance — $62,000, more than she was paid in a year — on the
Amex she sometimes used for work expenses. Anna had promised her a wire
transfer, but a month later, all Rachel received was $5,000, and her
excuses had turned “Kafkaesque.”
The
following morning, the trainer resolved to draw a clear boundary. After
lending Anna a clean (and flattering) dress, she sent her on her way
with a gratis motivational speech. But when Anna walked out the door,
she left her laptop behind. The trainer was having none of it. She
deposited the computer at the front desk and texted Anna that she could
pick it up there.
That
evening, the trainer got a call from her doorman. Anna was in the
lobby. He’d told her that the trainer was out, at which point she’d
asked for access to her suite. When he refused, Anna had resolved to
wait for the trainer to return home.
“Let me know when she goes,” the trainer told the doorman.
But hours passed and Anna didn’t budge. “They were like, She’s still here. She’s texting,” the trainer recalls. “I was like, Oh my God, I’m a prisoner of my own house.” It wasn’t until after midnight that Anna finally left the building.
The
relief the trainer felt soon turned into worry. “I started calling the
hotels to see where she was staying, and each hotel was like, ‘This girl,’ she said.
She
found out why later that month, when both the Beekman and the W Hotel
filed charges against Anna for theft of services. WANNABE SOCIALITE
BUSTED FOR SKIPPING OUT ON PRICEY HOTEL BILLS, blared the headline in
the Post, which referenced an incident in which Anna attempted to leave the restaurant at Le Parker
without paying. “Why are you making a big deal about this?” she’d
protested to police. “Give me five minutes and I can get a friend to
pay.”
But
no friends arrived. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding, as Anna told
Todd Spodek, the criminal attorney she hired to fight the misdemeanor
charges. Maybe the poised young woman in the Audrey Hepburn dress who’d
cold-called him on his cell phone repeatedly, insisting it was an
emergency until he’d agreed to come into his office on a Saturday,
really was a wealthy German heiress, he thought, as his 4-year-old
pasted Paw Patrol stickers up one of Anna’s bare arms, and her
credit cards had gotten jammed up, or someone had taken away her trust
fund. Just in case, Spodek, whose everyday clientele includes grifters,
dog-murderers, femme fatales, rapists, and cybercriminals, among other
miscreants, had her sign a lien on all of her assets, one that would
ensure he got paid. On her way out, Anna asked a favor. “I kind of need a
place to stay,” she said. Spodek demurred. The last thing his wife
wanted was for him to bring his work home with him.
Anna
again got in touch with the trainer, who did not invite her to stay but
instead organized an intervention at a nearby restaurant, during which
she and Rachel Williams attempted to get answers: about why Anna had
done what she’d done, who she really was, if she’d ever planned on
paying anyone back. Anna hemmed and hawed and dissembled and
prevaricated and, as the women got increasingly angry, allowed two fat
tears to roll down her cheeks. “I’ll have enough to pay everyone,” she
sniffled. “Once I get the lease signed …”
“Anna,” the trainer said, summoning her last shred of patience. “The building has been rented.”
She held up her iPhone and showed her the headline: FOTOGRAFISKA SIGNS A LEASE FOR ENTIRE 45K SF AT ABY ROSEN’S BUILDING.
“That’s fake news,” Anna said.
“Fotografiska
really get the building?” sighed the tiny, accented voice after the
recording identifying the call as coming from Rikers Island, where Anna
Delvey, a.k.a. Anna Sorokin, has been remanded without bail since
October 2017.
As
it turned out, Anna’s hotel bills were merely the first loose threads
in a web of fraudulent activity, one that began to unravel in November
2016, after she submitted documents claiming a net worth of €60 million
in Swiss accounts to City National Bank in pursuit of a $22 million
dollar loan. The following month, she submitted the same documents to
Fortress in an attempt to secure a $25 million to $35 million loan.
After that bank asked her for $100,000 to perform due diligence, she
convinced a representative at City National to extend her a $100,000
line of credit, which she then wired to Fortress. Then, apparently
spooked by Fortress’s decision to send representatives to Switzerland to
personally check her assets, she withdrew herself from the process
halfway through, wiring the remaining $55,000 to a Citibank account that
she used for “personal expenses … shopping at Forward by Elyse Walker,
Apple, and Net-a-Porter,” according to the New York District Attorney’s
office. Then, in April, she deposited $160,000 worth of bad checks into
the same account, managing to withdraw $70,000 before they were
returned, which is how she managed to pay off 11 Howard and, ostensibly,
buy Neff’s T-shirt and the domain names of the managers of the hotel.
(“They called me down to the office. They said, ‘Neff, did you know
about this?’ And I started dying laughing. I thought it was a boss
move.”) In May, Anna convinced the company Blade to charter her a
$35,000 jet to Omaha by sending them a forged receipt for a wire
transfer from Deutsche Bank. It might have helped that she had the
business card of the CEO, whom she’d met in passing at Soho House but
who says he didn’t actually know her at all. Not wanting to leave Anna
homeless after their intervention last summer, the trainer and a friend
agreed to put Anna up at a hotel for one night, after having the hotel
remove the mini-bar and giving strict instructions not to allow her any
room service. She subsequently checked in to the Bowery Hotel for
two nights, sending the hotel a receipt for a wire transfer from
Deutsche Bank that never came. Rachel Williams, City National, and
others also received phony wire-transfer receipts, which a
representative of the bank identified as forged. Anna’s “family
adviser,” the late Peter W. Hennecke, seems to have been a fictional
character; his cell-phone number belonged to a now-defunct burner phone
from a supermarket, New York found. (A living Peter Hennecke
did not return calls for comment.) Later in the summer, with her
misdemeanor charges pending, Anna deposited two bad checks into an
account at Signature Bank, netting her $8,200, which is how she managed
to take what she said was a “planned trip” to California, where she was
arrested outside of Passages in Malibu and brought back to New York to
face six counts of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny, in
addition to theft of services, according to the indictment. “I like
L.A.,” she giggled when I visited her at Rikers this past March. “L.A.
in the winter, New York in spring and autumn, and Europe in summer.”
People
looked over curiously. “She’s like a unicorn in there,” Todd Spodek,
Anna’s lawyer, had told me. “Everyone else is in there for like,
stabbing their baby daddy.” He had mentioned that his client was taking
incarceration unusually in stride, and indeed, this appeared to be the
case.
“This
place is not that bad at all actually,” Anna told me, eyes sparkling
behind her Céline glasses. “People seem to think it’s horrible, but I
see it as like, this sociological experiment.”
She’d
made friends, of course. The murderers were the most interesting to
her. “There are couple of girls who are here for financial crimes as
well,” she told me. “This one girl, she’s been stealing other people’s
identities. I didn’t realize it was so easy.”
Over
the course of three months, I spoke to Anna over the phone and visited
her several times, occasionally bringing her copies of Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal
at her request. Clad in a beige jumpsuit, her $800 highlights faded and
her $400 eyelash extensions long fallen away, she looked like a normal
27-year-old girl, which is what she is.
Anna
Sorokin was born in Russia in 1991, and moved to Germany in 2007, when
she was 16, with her younger brother and her parents, who, after being
independently tracked down by and speaking with New York, asked to remain anonymous, as news of their daughters arrest has not yet reached the small rural community where they live.
Anna
attended high school in Eschweiler, a small working-class town 60
kilometers outside Cologne, near the Belgian and Dutch border. Her
classmates remember her as quiet, with an unwieldy command of German.
Her father had worked as a truck driver and later as an executive at a
transport company until it became insolvent in 2013, whereupon he opened
a heating-and-cooling business specializing in energy-efficient
devices. Anna’s father was circumspect about the family’s finances,
possibly out of a not-unreasonable fear of being held responsible for
his daughter’s debts, which it was suggested to New York
multiple times are larger and more wide-ranging than officially
documented. “She screwed basically everyone,” said the acquaintance in
Berlin, who passed on the names of several individuals who were said to
have had amounts large and small borrowed or stolen but were too
embarrassed to come forward. (Also paranoid: “I heard she commissions
these stories,” I was told more than once, after I reached out to
alleged victims. “They’re strategic leaks.”)
In any case, according to Anna’s father: “Until now, we have never heard of any trust fund.”
That
said, he went on, the family did support her to an extent after Anna
graduated from high school in 2011. She moved first to London, where she
attended Central Saint Martins College, then she dropped out and
returned to Berlin, where she interned in the fashion department of a
public-relations firm before relocating to Paris, where she landed a
coveted internship at Purple magazine and became Anna Delvey. Her parents, who say they do not recognize the surname, told New York:
“We always paid for her accommodations, her rent, and other matters.
She assured us these costs were the best investment. If ever she needed
something more at one point or another, it didn’t matter. The future was
always bright.”
Anna,
in jail, told me: “My parents had high expectations. They always
trusted me with my decision-making. I guess they regret it now.”
Over
the course of our conversations, Anna never admitted any guilt,
although she did say she felt bad about what happened with Rachel
Williams. “I am very upset that things went that way and I didn’t mean
for it to happen,” she said. “But I really can’t do anything about it,
being in here.”
She
expressed frustration about not being able to bail herself out. “If
they were doubting — ‘Oh, she can’t pay for anything’— why not give me
bail and see?” she challenged. “If I was such a fraud, it would be such
an easy resolution. Will she bail herself out?”
She was frustrated with the New York Post’s characterization of her as a “wannabe socialite” — “I was never trying to be a socialite,” she pointed out. “I had dinners, but they were work
dinners. I wanted to be taken seriously” — and the District Attorney’s
portrayal of her as, as Anna put it, “a greedy idiot” who had committed a
kind of harebrained Ponzi scheme in order to go shopping. “If I really
wanted the money, I would have better and faster ways to get some,” she
groused. “Resilience is hard to come by, but not capital.”
She
seemed most interested in expressing that her plans to create the Anna
Delvey Foundation were real. She’d had all of those conversations and
meetings and sent all of those emails and commissioned those materials
because she thought it was actually going to happen. “I had
what I thought was a great team around me, and I was having fun,” she
said. Sure, she said, she might have done a few things wrong. “But that
doesn’t diminish the hundred things I did right.”
Maybe
it could have happened. In this city, where enormous amounts of
invisible money trade hands every day, where glass towers are built on
paperwork promises, why not? If Aby Rosen, the son of Holocaust
survivors, could come to New York and fill skyscrapers full of art, if
the Kardashians could build a billion-dollar empire out of literally
nothing, if a movie star like Dakota Johnson could sculpt her ass so
that it becomes the anchor of a major franchise, why couldn’t Anna
Delvey? During the course of my reporting, people kept asking: Why this
girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she
wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount
of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not?
Watching the Rikers guard shove Fast Company into a manila
envelope, I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been
studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t.
Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract
people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of
wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to
see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.
“Money,
like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know?”
Anna said to me at one point. “But there’s limited amounts of people who
are talented.”
Additional reporting by Austin Davis and Naima Wolfsperger in Germany.
*This article appears in the May 28, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. 
Worse for wear: Serial con artist, 26, and wannabe socialite who posed as a German heiress appears in court looking disheveled after she 'stole $275,000 for personal training sessions and hotel stays'
- While pretending to be a socialite, Anna Sorokin, 26, allegedly scammed banks, friends and hotels out of $275,000
- Sorokin is said to have claimed to be a wealthy German heiress during a quest to con a bank for a $22million loan to open up a private club
- She also allegedly walked out on a $11,500 downtown Manhattan hotel bill
- Sorokin was tracked down to a Malibu rehab facilicity and extradited to New York where she was arrainged on charges including grand larceny on Thursday
A wannabe socialite and actual scam artist was arraigned on charges including grand larceny and theft of services on Thursday.
Anna
Sorokin, 26, who has also used the name Anna Delvey, allegedly
defrauded banks, skipped out on thousands of dollars of hotel bills and
tricked a friend into paying for their $62,000 lavish trip to Morocco,
according to New York City prosecutors.
All
told, Sorokin — who has been photographed at events including a
Sotheby's New York gala and at Paris Fashion Week — is said to have
scammed $275,000 while pretending to be a socialite.
Anna Sorokin, 26, faced charges of grand larceny and theft of services on Thursday
Sorokin, who also used the name
Anna Delvey, allegedly scammed banks, friends and hotels out of goods
and services to the tune of $275,000 while pretending to be a socialite
Manhattan
prosecutors said that her cons included claiming to be a wealthy German
heiress during a quest to get a $22million loan to fund a private club
and managing to keep $55,000 — which she then spent on personal trainers
and hotel stays — from overdrafting an account at City National Bank,
the NY Daily News reported.
Prosecutors
said that Sorokin also deposited $160,000 in phony check at Citibank,
siphoning off $70,000 into another account before the deposits could be
reversed.
In addition to bank fraud, Sorokin is also said to have had a penchant for grifting hotel services.
The New York Post reported
that Sorokin had allegedly skipped out on an $11,500 bill while staying
at the Beekman hotel in downtown Manhattan in July. Shortly after, she
apparently neglected to pay a $500 bill for two nights at the W New York
Downtown.
After failing to appear at a
previous court date, authorities track Sorokin down to a rehab facility
in Malibu on Tuesday, before extraditing her back to New York City
While pretending to be a
socialite, Sorokin was photographed at lavish events including a
Sotheby's New York gala and Paris Fashion Week
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In Morocco, Sorokin allegedly cheated the Kasbah Tamadot resort out of a $20,000 bill, the Post reported.
After
failing to show up for her New York City court date in September,
authorities tracked Sorokin down at a Malibu rehab facility and brought
her back to Manhattan on Tuesday.
'At
this juncture, not a single allegation against Ms. Sorokin has been
proven,' Sorokin's defense lawyer, Todd Spodek, told The Post, adding
that there has not been evidence presented that she purposely intended
not to pay for the services or goods she received.
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