It was a warm June evening in Monaco.

Outside, yachts were plying the azure sea. Inside, flashbulbs were popping. Anthony Ritossa was in his element.

Charming and cherubic, Ritossa was glad-handing in front of a step-and-repeat backdrop at the Fairmont Monte Carlo. His perma-tan, sun-kissed hair, and tailored suit suggested a man of refined wealth and taste. An outsider might easily have mistaken the scene for a movie premiere in nearby Cannes. But that would have undersold the pomp and pomposity of the moment.

Sir Anthony, as he likes to be called, was holding court, welcoming guests to his 19th Ritossa Family Office Investment Summit—a confab of royals, sheiks, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals that he bills as “the most highly acclaimed gathering of global wealth of all time.” By his count, people “representing over $4.5 trillion in investor wealth” have shown up at his conferences in Dubai, Miami, Monaco, and Riyadh, events where start-ups and entrepreneurs come to pitch the rich, and have walked away, in Ritossa’s estimate, with more than “$2.8 billion in new funding.”

The gathering this past summer was held “Under the High Patronage of His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco.” Though the prince was not on hand, his endorsement loomed large. His name topped the invitations. His foundation’s logo was splashed across a banner along the red carpet.

Ritossa’s regal affiliations, however, extend beyond this microstate on the Côte d’Azur. Members of some of the most powerful families in the Gulf—al Khalifa (Bahrain), al Maktoum (UAE), al Nahyan (UAE), al Saud (Saudi Arabia), and al Thani (Qatar)—have had their names and pictures emblazoned on promotional materials for Ritossa’s soirees. Other dynasties have graced the publicity announcements—von Bismarck, Bonaparte, Kennedy, Rockefeller—along with people purportedly affiliated with such heavyweight brands as Amazon (Audible), Facebook (Meta), and Rothschild & Co. One of the Monaco affair’s platinum sponsors was the crypto newcomer Unicoin, represented on the agenda by Rosie Rios (43rd US treasurer and Joe Biden’s choice to lead America’s 250th anniversary commission), who had given a keynote at the previous Ritossa meeting, in Riyadh.

In short, Sir Anthony’s summits are so chockablock with luminaries that many associated with the event may have failed to ask one fundamental question: Who the hell is Anthony Ritossa? After a yearlong investigation, including interviews with sources from a dozen countries, Vanity Fair uncovered the truth. It turns out he is a Wall Street washout, a world-class con man and an inveterate fabulist with a bogus CV and persona—a 53-year-old Australian who fancifully purports to be an heir to a 600-year-old European olive oil fortune. What’s more, he entices people to attend his summits under often-dubious pretenses, not infrequently requesting a cut of the action from presenters. And finally, this self-proclaimed maestro of “family wealth” is actually a thrice-married deadbeat dad who has been repeatedly jailed in Europe and is wanted in the US after threatening to harm his own wife and family; a man about whom Lieutenant Greg Sancho of the Pelham Manor, New York, Police Department told Vanity Fair: “We have an active warrant for Anthony Ritossa’s arrest for criminal contempt in the first degree. That’s a felony.”

I had heard complaints about Ritossa’s summits from a circle of entrepreneurs who felt hoodwinked. So, to get a better handle on the guy, I first stopped in London in June to attend the Family Office Forum, held a week before Sir Anthony’s. Put on by Prestel & Partner, it is one of the best-regarded gatherings of its kind and took place at the posh Corinthia hotel, a stone’s throw from 10 Downing Street.

In the often-alien patois of finance, family offices are easy to understand. They are privately held companies the superrich use to manage their fortunes. Genuine family offices, in the eyes of finance professionals, are those with at least $100 million in investable assets. Such entities, often overseen by professionals working with a cadre of relatives, tend to have fewer institutional controls and a high risk tolerance, allowing them to funnel a portion of their wealth into ventures with less predictable returns. As a result, family offices can be prime targets for financial predators.

The London conference—organized by Tobias Prestel, a German entrepreneur, and the banking veteran Katja Mülheim—was attended by an array of industrialists, aristocrats, ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and family offices from around the world. Prestel sat down with me and took me back to 2014. At that year’s event, held in Zurich, Ritossa sent a representative. “What played in Anthony’s favor…when we looked to see if he qualified as a ‘family office,’ ” said Prestel, “was that there was almost no negative information about him online.”

Around that time, in bios submitted to similar conferences in Miami, Ritossa presented himself as having “an MBA with Distinction in Finance from Harvard University.” His personal narrative would later appear on his website, on LinkedIn, and in publications targeting the mega-rich. He boasted of a “distinguished Wall Street career” and more than “30 years of international financial markets and investment experience.”

Ritossa also claimed to be an heir to an olive oil fortune dating back to the 15th century. The story is colorful: “The gnarled roots of the Ritossa olive groves have persevered through war and natural disaster…and under the rule of warrior princes, wealthy merchant kings and modern despots.” The company’s fields, he noted, have long been in Istria—a peninsula that was once part of Italy but now largely straddles Croatia and Slovenia.

“He talked about his olive oil fortune all the time,” explained Jason Cavanagh, an Australian who runs his own Monaco-based family office. “He presents very well.… I ran across Anthony at conferences in Monaco, London, and Geneva around 2014 to 2015. He introduced himself as a fellow Australian running a family office, looking to get involved in the family office community.… He absolutely was not a ‘sir’ then.”

Matthias Knab was strolling the beach in Miami in early 2016 when he ran into his old acquaintance Anthony Ritossa. He had not seen him in years. Cerebral and solemn, Knab runs the alternative investment media firm Opalesque and serves as a senior adviser to Castle Hall, an international due diligence company. “We chatted,” Knab recalled over tea at a mosaicked garden in London’s Westminster, “and he said he’d been doing stuff with his family office, which was weird because he was a typical salesman—selling structured notes to hedge funds—when I knew him…. I didn’t think of Anthony as a high-net-worth individual.”

At first, Ritossa attended family-office-focused conferences. But in 2016, he cohosted his own: a joint venture between a Kuwaiti conglomerate and his newly minted Ritossa Family Office—representing his “family business dating back 600 years to the Venetian Empire.” Together, they put on two summits in Dubai. But according to Knab, who helped advertise the latter, Ritossa was eager to go solo.

“Anthony rang me in March 2017 and said he wanted to do a family-office conference in Monaco in June,” recalled Cavanagh. “I thought he meant 2018, but he wanted it three months later.… I told him it couldn’t be done [but] Anthony went ahead and put my name on the program as chairman of the conference.” Cavanagh, peeved but not dissuaded, was sufficiently well-placed in Monaco to attract the principality’s high and mighty. “Even though I never agreed to it, it was too late to pull out or I would have looked like a clown.” Knab moderated panels and Opalesque served as a media partner, helping telegraph the event’s importance to the financial world.

“That first summit in Monaco was very low-profile,” Giuseppe Ambrosio remembered as we had coffee at the Hôtel Hermitage Monte-Carlo, an architectural gem with a glass cupola designed by Gustave Eiffel. Back then, Ambrosio was an audit partner for Deloitte and president of the Monaco Single and Multi-Family Office International Association. As his relationship with Ritossa blossomed, he began opening some very important doors. “I vouched for him with the prince and the palace,” Ambrosio said regretfully. And in 2018, following the usual vetting, Ambrosio recalled, Ritossa’s patronage request was granted.

Yet as Ritossa’s ambitions and audacity grew, his conferences changed their tenor, and his origin story, as revealed here for the first time, began to disintegrate.

Sir Anthony’s only US summit took place in Miami in late 2017 at the St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort. “It was a two-day thing,” said Cavanagh, who chaired the affair. “Some good families, some good topics, but a little crypto started creeping in.” Knab was there as well, and recalled, “Initially, these conferences were really sweet.”

Planning, however, was hampered when Ritossa went off the grid two months before the kickoff, a time when Knab was scheduled to visit him in Slovenia, where Ritossa sometimes stays when he is not at his penthouse in Dubai’s luxurious Bulgari Residences. As the trip grew near, Knab recounted, the Australian was simply unreachable: “This was actually the first red flag.” Upon reemerging, Ritossa explained his absence via Whats-App: “I just got back from Sydney this evening. It’s been a rough 2 weeks with my mum. She had a st[r]oke and is now stable thankfully. I’m back…and can now focus 100% on Miami.”

The summit proceeded. But by the following March, at the next conclave in Dubai, the atmosphere had changed. “It was nothing like what Ritossa was advertising,” Knab maintained. “It became a massive circus with lots of [sellers hawking] offerings and crypto. It became a huge machine for Ritossa.” Knab had seen enough. In June, he announced that he and Cavanagh were terminating their relationship with Ritossa’s summits, citing “differences over the direction of these conferences and other reasons.” Cavanagh also pulled out of the fast-approaching 2018 gathering in Monaco, which he says he was slated to chair, prompting a key Monaco minister to bail. The one-two punch riled Ritossa, who pleaded with his fellow Aussie over WhatsApp, “Can you please stop arranging for other people to resign[?] That’s not appropriate, mate.” Meanwhile, Ritossa’s Slovenian lawyer sent a letter to Knab ordering him to remove his post and threatening litigation. Knab did not budge; Ritossa backed off.

Still, the summit—with Prince Albert as patron—went on anyway. “Little by little, I learned,” Ambrosio confided. “The biggest mistake I made was to take him to the palace and [help] get him the patronage so that the conference looks like it’s blessed by Prince Albert.” Ambrosio, like Cavanagh, Knab, and others, asserted he has cut all ties with Ritossa. “Then when he started calling himself ‘sir,’ I couldn’t stand it.”

Indeed, Ritossa’s image—and his enterprise—were about to get even stranger.

It was at the 2019 Monaco summit that Ritossa received his own lofty title when the Knights Society of Elviña inducted him into their ranks, thereby catapulting a man born Anthony Ronny Ritossa to Sir Anthony. The new knight would later receive the Grand Cross from the Royal Order of Banu Assaf. Behind these accolades stood two enigmatic men—both of whom have served as key figures in Ritossa’s orbit.

The first was His Excellency Professor Sir Manuel Freire-Garabal y Núñez, who describes himself as “a Spanish lawyer, diplomat and jounalist [sic]” and founder and chairman of Al-Khalifa Business School (AKBS). Though grammar and spelling are not his strong suits, the young Spaniard, in his online profile, claims to hold an MBA and to have completed “more than 300 courses and specialisations in different areas from IVY league and Elite Business Schools.” He states that he has served as a “contributor of Higher Education” to UC Berkeley, USC, and Yale, and as a “professor, collaborator and advisor to many universities across the globe, including the Harvard Medical School.” All at age 27.

But there’s more. Freire-Garabal says he founded the Knights Society of Elviña in 2016 as a “hobby” and now serves as its grand chancellor. Over the years, he purports to have racked up high civil honors from “the States of Arkansas and Kentucky and the local governments of Machu Picchu, Medley and North Miami Beach.” What’s more, Sir Manuel’s website (a must-read) notes that the Russian Federation presented him with the Grand Cross of Ruby Ars Longa, an honor, he claims, that has previously gone to Cuba’s Fidel Castro as well as “second and third-class personalities of art and culture such as Alek [sic] Baldwin.”

Also central to Sir Anthony’s knight’s tale is His Highness Mahmoud Salah-Al-Din Assaf, a “hereditary Royal Prince of the 7th century Assaf Dynasty…of the Mamluk Sultanate of the Persian Keserwan of Mount Lebanon.” Judging from the glamour shot that accompanies his online résumés, the man is a passionate falconer. At 36, he claims to have received some extraordinary honors, including the “Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award” and “the highest title of honor bestowed by the governor of Kentucky.” Still, these seem like small ball compared with what he cites as his 2015 appointment as “Ambassador at Large of the UN-registered Brotherhood of Dragons.”

More on His Excellency and His Highness shortly. (Neither would talk for this story. Moreover, Ritossa, after replying to an initial email, did not respond to numerous requests to participate. Nor did he agree to answer questions submitted by Vanity Fair.)

Ritossa’s 13th summit was in full swing at Dubai’s Waldorf Astoria Palm Jumeirah on December 8, 2020, when, 3,500 miles away in Germany, Matthias Knab received an unexpected message. It included a link to a website called FakeFamilyOffice.com that began: “I need to warn you about a nefarious operator, Anthony Ritossa, who is a pretender in the world of Family Offices and should not be trusted with your time and, essentially, your money.” What followed was a takedown that questioned and mocked Sir Anthony’s title, educational credentials, career milestones, and claims about an olive oil fortune and a family office.

Denny Chared, a one-time financial journalist who now runs his own private wealth meetings, also passed info from the link around. Word filtered back to Ritossa. And Chared, like Knab, soon received a cease-and-desist letter from Ritossa’s Slovenian attorney. Chared was amused by the suggestion that he had defamed Ritossa merely by sharing the contents of a public domain URL. “This is so ridiculous I will not even bring it to my lawyers’ attention,” he wrote back, adding, “I believe most of [the website’s] claims.”

In time, Ritossa’s lawyers would send a similarly toothless warning to Graham David Bell, a Dubai-based corporate finance adviser whose clients include some very real and very wealthy sheiks. As a Brit and the son of a man knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his service in World War II, Bell took special umbrage with Ritossa’s regal shtick. Upon receiving an unsolicited invitation from “Sir Anthony” to come as a VIP guest to his 18th conference in Riyadh—to be held “Under the High Patronage of His Royal Highness Prince Abdullah bin Musad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud”—Bell balked. He doubted the royal stamp of approval and reached out to the supposed patron’s close associates, only to be told, he said, that the prince had neither agreed to be a sponsor nor allowed his name and likeness to be used. (The prince’s representatives declined to comment.) At that point, Bell advised several Saudis not to attend. Ritossa caught wind and, to hear Bell tell it, went full aggro, issuing cease-and-desist orders through counsel along with heavy-handed warnings that the Brit could be imprisoned—and forced to pay millions—under the UAE’s defamation laws. “We told them, ‘Sue me, I dare you,’ ” Bell explained. “Silence ever since. That’s what Ritossa does—threats, bluster, and then beating a sheepish retreat.”

I spoke with some 20 past attendees of summits in Dubai, Miami, Monaco, and Riyadh—many of whom shared stories of how they or their colleagues were persuaded to attend and pay significant fees, based on Ritossa’s pledge to offer access to a raft of high-net-worth investors. Instead, what they tended to find was a smattering of people with money—but little evident interest in deploying it—and a contingent of conference “regulars,” some of whom came to resemble role players: listening to pitches from hopeful entrepreneurs but not coughing up the capital Ritossa claims is there for the taking. In the opinion of these conferencegoers, it is a far cry from what Sir Anthony aggressively promises: that those seeking investment can expect to find many deeply pocketed people ready, willing, and able to stroke a check.

An American participant broke it down this way, “For a basic pass, it’s [around] $5,000. If you want meetings, it’s [a minimum of] $18,000. I paid that twice, and they put me in front of bullshit people who didn’t have money.” Said a European businessman who shelled out a pretty penny, “There’s nothing wrong with charging $200,000 if you’re delivering. But we were sitting inside a summit [with hardly] anybody with money. Only people looking for money.”

“It’s souk behavior,” said Dana al Salem, who has been a panelist and moderator at several summits. She has founded tech, media, and entertainment companies and runs in important social circles in Dubai. “If the prices weren’t so unreasonable and conference organizers weren’t taking a cut, then it’s a networking event,” she said. “I speak at a lot of conferences. Never once have I heard of a host saying, ‘Any money you make from any investor you meet, you need to give me a cut.’ ” Some, like al Salem, were willing to speak on the record. Others were embarrassed that, as fiduciaries, they had paid five to six figures and, in return, received the Potemkin village version of the festivities that appear in slick videos posted on the Ritossa Family Office website.

Still, there are others, like Kerry Adler, who remain bullish about the gatherings. “I’ve met so many quality people from so many walks of life,” he explained. “It’s almost like it’s become a family, a get-together for people where they talk about what they’re investing in.” Adler is the Canadian CEO of a solar energy concern, SkyPower Global, who has spoken at nine symposia. “There’s a lot of potential investors there. Now, are they writing checks? I honestly don’t know. No one’s opened a checkbook and given me a check.… I’m not personally aware of any groups that raise large amounts of capital at these events.”

The more I probed, the more apparent it became: Anthony Ronny Ritossa’s shiny story is not only a fable but a very dark one. And as I got to know some of his old friends, others with close knowledge of the Ritossa family, and a whistleblower who came out of the woodwork, I discovered that Ritossa’s slippery demise—and reincarnation—really began 10 years ago, as his personal and professional lives started to spiral and he began to reinvent himself in an effort to erase his past.

First, some background. Ritossa was born in Sydney in 1969 to working-class parents. The family would occasionally visit the Istrian Peninsula, in present-day Croatia, where the Ritossas had Italian roots. After attending a tony private school in Sydney, The Scots College, he graduated from the University of Newcastle, a fact he has edited out of his narrative. There are other discrepancies as well.

“We don’t have any record of this person as an MBA graduate,” a senior official at Harvard Business School insisted after I inquired about Ritossa’s claim to have “an MBA with Distinction in Finance from Harvard University.” The source continued, “[He] did complete an HBS Online course in negotiation mastery, but that certainly is not an MBA. And we only offer a general management MBA, we don’t have specialized ones, like in finance.”

Finally, I would be remiss not to add what Harvard Medical School said when asked about Sir Manuel’s contention that he has been a “professor, collaborator [and/or] advisor” there: “We are unable to find any records of this individual being or having ever been on our faculty, working as a researcher, instructor or a student at HMS.”

Résumé padding is the least of it.

There is no olive oil fortune. Or as one former Ritossa associate put it, “Maybe there were olives in his family’s garden.” Another close colleague explained, “He wants to be seen to have that profile of a high-net-worth family office chairman.… I have not seen proof that qualifies him as being a family office.”

Sources close to the Ritossa family are withering about the man and the myth. “[Anthony’s] the kind of guy that always takes a shortcut,” said one. “If there’s a convenient shortcut, which may or may not be legitimate or ethical or the right thing to do, but it’s a shortcut, he will take it.” Another commented, “He is a highly intelligent and manipulative man with great persuasive powers and [the] ability to gain confidence—a classic trait all con men have.”

In the September 15, 2002, New York Times announcement of Ritossa’s first marriage—to the former Jocelyn Ring—there is no mention of olive oil, a family office, or a fortune. Instead, Ritossa, then 33, was described as “a broker at Morgan Stanley in New York who develops trading strategies for hedge funds,” and whose father had “retired as a residential property developer in Sydney.” As for Ritossa’s studies, the Times noted that he “graduated from the University of Newcastle in Australia and received an M.B.A. from the University of Technology in Sydney.”

The origins of Ritossa Olive Oil are far more recent and pedestrian. The firm was registered in New York in 2010, with Ritossa’s second wife, Sandra, listed as a cofounder. Trying to find the company or buy its products online, however, is a maddening and ultimately futile exercise. Search results redirect to the Ritossa Family Office or to websites touting tasting competitions the company has supposedly won, but which all end up at the same phone number. The shell game, I learned, is all about putting on airs for a man who most certainly is not an heir.

And as for the oil itself? On February 9, 2013, Croatian police arrested a 44-year-old Australian for allegedly stealing 24 bottles of olive oil from a warehouse in the town of Poreč. Coverage in local papers at the time did not name the suspect. But Darko Kadum did. “It was Anthony Ritossa,” the former director of MIH, the enterprise that controlled the warehouse, told me when I visited him and his wife, Luana, at their villa in the hills above Poreč. At the mention of Sir Anthony’s six-century-old fortune, the couple laughed. “There are maybe a few olive trees in front of his family home,” Kadum posited, “but the olive oil is not produced from those olives.” A close family source concurred, “There is no 600-year-old family fortune. There are no ties to the Venetian empire.”

As it turns out, Ritossa, according to the Kadums, had a deal to import MIH’s olive oil to the US with Ritossa’s own label affixed to the kegs—not an uncommon practice. “When we met, he was a very sweet-talking man, and I’m sure many people would wish to have him as a friend,” Kadum explained. “We had an intense friendship.” Darko visited Ritossa in New York and, along with Luana, got to know Sir Anthony’s family when they came to Istria. But, he said, “Over time, Anthony changed who he was.” By 2012, by Kadum’s accounting, Ritossa had accrued $40,000 in unpaid invoices and MIH stopped the shipments. His friend’s increasingly bizarre actions, including the caper at the warehouse, were the final straw, Kadum recalled: “The police actually caught him somewhere in the city. They took the oil and brought it back to us and that was it.”

Thus, the man whose family office narrative is literally rooted in the roots of Istrian olive trees appears to have been more of an olive oil robber than robber baron.

It all traces back to the summer of 2012. Ritossa was on holiday in Istria with Sandra and their two young daughters when, intimates tell me, he seemed to become unglued. (Sandra did not respond to requests for comment.) “We saw a lot of oscillation in his behavior,” recalled Kadum, citing incidents of physical and verbal violence. Sandra reported her husband to Croatian authorities and took her kids to a town where her father and stepmother had a house. But physical separation did not moderate Ritossa’s behavior. “He was a violent personality—and he’s a big guy, six-two, six-three, a strong build,” said another person who knew him well back then.

Multiple sources close to the family allege that Ritossa was abusing drugs and alcohol. He was also involved with a Slovenian woman named Stasa Bibic, whom these sources say worked at a local nightclub called Saint & Sinner. (The club refused to comment.) The pair began traveling and Anthony racked up massive bills on his and Sandra’s credit cards. Bibic, according to the sources, became pregnant and would give birth to a child who now features prominently in promos for Ritossa’s summits as a sort of living embodiment that Anthony is the consummate family man. As for Anthony’s other family—Sandra (whom he married in 2005) and their two girls—they have been conspicuously left out of his online fairy tale. There is a reason for that.

Documents reviewed by Vanity Fair as well as sources familiar with the matter confirm that even after his family returned to New York, Ritossa continued bombarding Sandra and others with disturbing and sometimes vicious calls, emails, messages, and voicemails. As she had done in Poreč, Sandra sought protection from law enforcement and on September 12, 2012, Westchester County Family Court Judge Nilda Morales Horowitz directed Ritossa to: “[R]efrain from assault, stalking, harassment,…menacing, reckless endangerment, strangulation,…disorderly conduct, criminal mischief, sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, forcible touching, intimidation, threats or any criminal offense against Sandra Ritossa.”

In the wake of the order, however, Ritossa continued leaving what court records and sources described as disturbing messages for his wife, her employer, family, and friends, insisting “he [was] coming to take the girls and harm [Sandra].” Ritossa was summoned to appear two weeks later. But he was a no-show and kept up the threats, including this voicemail on his mother-in-law’s phone (edited here for clarity and to remove identifiable information):

“It’s your favorite son-in-law.…I love your daughter sooo much that I can calmly tell you that she stole money from the Croatian government and as a result of that, I have no other option but to take your granddaughters away from you…. Please come and visit your granddaughters (grunt) while your daughter, I don’t want her to go to jail, but she deserves to go to jail (grunting). These words are like a bullet in your head, too, not just your daughter’s head—yep, yep (roar noise/grunt)—these words, calm words of love—they’re like bullets that kill your brain and your daughter’s brain (roar). Calm down…calm down.”

On Saturday night, October 13, Sandra Ritossa entered the Pelham Manor police station to report aggravated harassment and “fearing for her personal and children’s safety,” according to official records. She gave a statement and told officers about Judge Horowitz’s order, which had yet to be served because her husband remained abroad. By Monday, Ritossa had sent Sandra a photo of himself and Bibic on a plane with their tongues sticking out, railing about coming for the kids, and dispatched a racist, expletive-laden screed saying he wanted to have “his angels” back.

That same day, from his perch in Poreč, Ritossa placed a call to Zdenka Raguž Zupičić, a judge whom Sandra’s father, Bruno, had married. Vanity Fair, after petitioning courts in Croatia, obtained records of what transpired next: Ritossa, said to be seeking revenge for Bruno and Zdenka’s role in helping Sandra and the girls to safety, declared he was coming to kidnap the couple’s young son. Zdenka “thought it was a credible threat,” recalled a knowledgeable source. “As did the police.” (Judge Zupičić declined Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)

Back in New York, Judge Horowitz gave temporary custody of the girls to Sandra and ordered Ritossa to appear at an October 30 hearing. Once again he failed to show, possibly because he had been jailed a week earlier by Croatian authorities. Once released—while prosecutors were preparing their indictment—he split town. But if he was on the run, he was running toward the flames. Within days, he turned up in the UK, where he menaced other members of his extended family. According to four sources and official files obtained by Vanity Fair, he was arrested in London and held for 13 days in a “domestic violence case” necessitating an “urgent result.” On November 15, he pleaded guilty to harassment.

Sandra filed for divorce. But that did not end the rancor. The impresario of family office wealth, according to a variety of sources as well as government and corporate records, stopped making payments on his family’s mortgage, resulting in a foreclosure. He ran up nearly $500,000 in unpaid child support. And he apparently failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in credit card bills.

As for the American warrant for Ritossa’s arrest, the Pelham Manor Police Department confirmed to Vanity Fair that it “was first issued 10 years ago for violating the order of protection and remains in place today.”

His daughters were losing their home. Their mother was drowning in debt. But Ritossa was busy building a new life with a manufactured persona.

He began calling himself the chairman of the Ritossa Family Office and boasting about his “30 years” of investment experience. Never mind that he was born in 1969, which would have meant he started work in his early teens. In truth, his professional life had cratered. He had not held “senior executive positions at Nomura, Barclays Capital, Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas, and Bankers Trust,” as he claims online. Instead, sources familiar with his work at each institution confirmed that he held junior to midlevel jobs. And at Barclays, he was allegedly terminated for “compliance issues” that involved improperly disseminating proprietary bank information, sources told me. (Barclays declined to elaborate.)

Records held by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees US broker-dealers, show Ritossa’s Wall Street tenure to have been more peripatetic than “distinguished.” For 12 years he worked at eight firms, making it difficult to build a book of business, much less amass a fortune from it. His middling run in Manhattan finance—along with his last gig, at AlphaSource Capital Securities—went out with a whimper after he refused to attend FINRA-mandated compliance training and left the company. “While at AlphaSource, he was clearly not living in the lap of luxury,” a former coworker recalled when I asked if Ritossa came from money. “He was trying to eke out a living. I think he couldn’t cover his expenses, and at some point he accepted defeat and changed strategies.”

Part of that new strategy was to completely recast his presence on the internet.

At a time when digital fingerprints are harder than ever to erase, Ritossa has done the impossible: His online profile contains nary a blemish. He is instead a “family office influencer, impact investor…mentor, philanthropist, author and highly sought-after speaker.” Not to mention “a 2021 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.” His internet persona, in fact, is a constellation of pristine bios, astroturfed articles, and laudatory websites that link back to and reinforce one another.

This is no accident. Cyber experts I consulted scanned the dark web, deep web, proprietary databases, and myriad open-source intelligence platforms and found evidence of “data hydrology,” a systematic effort to water down or expunge unfavorable information and replace it with a shimmering new narrative. This was not some run-of-the-mill search engine optimization that people and companies use to boost their profile and bury their foibles. In the view of these experts, this was next-level shit—because as far as the internet is concerned, Anthony Ritossa arrived on planet Earth a decade ago and has been doing extraordinary things ever since.

This image overhaul may or may not have been possible, however, without His Highness Mahmoud Salah-Al-Din Assaf, a man whom Middle Eastern royal watchers refer to as a “milk sheikh,” someone who may have exaggerated or even created his honorific. In 2015, Assaf, by his own admission, certified his status with the Heraldrys Institute of Rome, which sells documents online depicting a family history, blazon, crest, coat of arms, and references to nobility—for $200 to $300, depending on whether the customer wants a PDF or a version on handmade paper.

Prince Assaf, in fact, used to be a US defense contractor. But before long, he started some remarkable businesses that are ultimately associated with a California strip mall. One of them disinfects car interiors. Another washes, waxes, rehabs, and rebuilds the public image of “high profile clients.” Zeus & Nova International, registered in Assaf’s name, offers to arrange “royal titles bestowed by the world’s premier noble families” as well as honorary doctorates and professorships, religious recognitions, and memberships at chivalry clubs. The company also provides clients “access to the world’s renowned events, from the Oscar Award [sic] ceremonies to the Royal Imperial Balls across Europe.”

Zeus & Nova is registered to the same Orange County complex as a Mexican restaurant and a head lice removal service called Lizzie’s Lice Pickers. When I went to eyeball the place, however, I discovered that Assaf had moved out last year, though the business is still active online. I ran into “Lizzie” and showed her pictures of Assaf; she confirmed his identity, saying she remembered him working late hours “dealing with stuff overseas,” adding, “I never heard he was a prince.”

On a Venn diagram of Ritossa World, Assaf has served as “royal patron” for the Knights Society of Elviña and AKBS, which is apropos given that Zeus & Nova is selling people honorary titles and degrees. Meanwhile, Assaf’s cohort Freire-Garabal, the knighthood’s grand chancellor, acts as chairman of AKBS and sits on Sir Anthony’s advisory board for the summits. As for Ritossa, he became a “sir” courtesy of the knights and is a senior adviser to Prince Assaf—who awarded Ritossa the Grand Cross from the Royal Order of Banu Assaf at Monaco’s 2021 gathering. (Sir Anthony has also received an honorary doctorate from AKBS, where he is supposedly a professor and a member of the advisory board.)

The school, which ostensibly offers executive MBAs and professional certifications, is registered to an address on Old Gloucester Street in London. I made a point of visiting while in town for the Prestel conference. Upon arriving at the unassuming four-story building, it took a beat to get my bearings. Apple Maps listed 25 businesses—including a tantric massage service—at the location. A foreman, however, was kind enough to point me toward the shuttered door of a company that provides virtual office and postal-forwarding services. Sure enough, the central address for AKBS appears to be a mail stop.

The Ritossa summits—according to a well-wired American intelligence veteran who took a hard look—have the hallmarks of what is known as a “stargaze” con. As my source explained, apropos of the Ritossa model: Potential marks are wooed by the swank settings and glittering names on the invite list. They suspend disbelief and shell out hefty sums to mingle with, and pitch, an audience of several hundred “from 55+ countries representing more than $4.5 trillion in wealth.”

As with Ritossa himself, truth in advertising strains credulity. Despite what his websites say, his “ultra elite” investors include a hodgepodge of conference junkies, crypto bros, minor Euro and Gulf royals, and, yes, some family offices and high-net-worth individuals. And, no, the hordes did not materialize in Monaco. If the two days I spent at the Fairmont were any indication, there appeared to be around 100 individuals going in and out of the designated summit areas. (Canadian CEO Kerry Adler heard it was 300.)

So what do participants pony up—beyond the cost of travel and accommodations? Documents obtained by VF show that Sir Anthony charges people between $18,000 and $200,000 to pitch an audience that his marketing materials tout as regal and rich. Those that splurge on a Platinum Presence, for example, make their sales pitch onstage and in various other forums. They enjoy a “private exclusive dinner” with 25-plus high-net-worth “top investors.” Also included: fireside chats, discussion panels, and interviews with a handful of business press outlets. Smaller packages dangle the prospect of 8 to 15 one-on-ones with “like-minded investors and family offices.”

The payments do not end there. Participants are informed in writing that these “packages are tied with a success fee agreement.” Insiders maintain that a number of individuals have been asked to sign away 2.5 percent to 8 percent “[of] any successful business partnership/agreement derived from Sir Anthony Ritossa’s Family Office Investment Conference.” Some complied, some did not; still others worked out a hybrid agreement, giving Ritossa’s operation cash as well as an equity stake in their business.

Such arrangements, according to attorneys and wealth managers, are the sort that might raise eyebrows among regulators since they may constitute broker-dealer activity—which requires a license in some, if not all, of the countries where Ritossa has held his summits. There are other rules and regulations too. “In Monaco…you cannot sell or promote a company or give financial advice without a license from Monaco’s version of the SEC,” explained Giuseppe Ambrosio. “Ritossa sells pitches. People are paying him thousands of euros to sell securities in front of an audience.” One local counselor suggested Sir Anthony may have pushed another boundary. Monaco, at least on paper, takes a dim view of those who publicly profess to have titles and educational degrees that have not been legitimately conferred.

A more prevalent complaint is that the conference has evolved into a fraud: one in which Ritossa lures and then profits off of attendees, some of whom say they were misled about the size and constitution of the audience. “We had basically zero investors at these events,” one longtime Ritossa team member admitted to me before clarifying, “Let me rephrase. The difference between the numbers of investors we would announce—and reality—was significant.… Look at his pattern. It’s all about the numbers. Saying that you’ve got 500 people at a conference when you really have just 200. Saying that you have 500 investors when you really have just five. [He] is constantly creating what is not there. Like his titles and his education.”

“These guys are predators.… They’re bilking people out of money who are trying to build real businesses,” alleged a prominent money manager in the Gulf who has advised clients to steer clear. “Ritossa puts on fake family office events where a lot of people turn up who don’t have capital to invest—but very much want people to think they do—while genuine entrepreneurs and fund managers are being hustled into giving Ritossa and his company fees, and so on.”

“The scale of what he’s done is staggering,” explained Ari Mello, an American entrepreneur who attended three summits in Dubai. “Ritossa has bullshitted thousands of people.… In my case, I lost a lot of money.” (His estimate: well over $50,000.) By April, he began comparing notes with other conferencegoers, complaining to an acquaintance in a private LinkedIn message that “Many of the people attending are veterans of the Ritossa circuit, which has proven to be a giant fraud.…” When Ritossa heard about the exchange, his Dubai lawyer—the one who had tried to intimidate Graham David Bell—threatened Mello with civil and criminal action. Like Bell, Mello was uncowed. “Almost every investor I met at Ritossa’s events was looking for money,” he said, “and [many of] the people I met there were trying to access my network.… I’ve also never spoken to someone who raised a dollar or met an investor who had a dollar to give.”

Not all participants are naysayers—far from it. A spokesperson for Unicoin praised the conclaves as “professionally organized and well-attended, including by VIPs,” remarking on the Ritossa team’s “excellent reputation” and “his position as a member of the Forbes Business Council.” Adler lauded the summits too, telling me they attract “a lot of high-quality people.” In virtually the same breath, however, he said he understands the criticism: “If I paid $100,000 or $200,000 and thought I was going to sit in a room and meet a bunch of willing investors, you know what? I’d be upset if I didn’t meet anyone.” I asked about his company’s return on investment, given all the Ritossa events he and his team have attended. His answer: “Have we ever received investment from any of them? No.” As for his take on the summits’ organizer, “He’s either just a simple guy that has found a way to pull together a lot of people or is one of the greatest scam artists in the world.”

The splashiest deal to ever come out of the Ritossa event? That would involve a blockchain company called Chainstarter. Its CEO is a crypto gadfly named Nick Ayton who told an interviewer, “Chainstarter is proud to be a sponsor for our good friend and host Anthony Ritossa. His summits are the best of the best in a perfect setting. During his recent summit we achieved $360 million of investments.”

But when I reached out to confirm the quote and the funding—which would account for nearly 13 percent of the $2.8 billion Ritossa says has been raised at his events—Ayton ghosted (and repeated approaches went unanswered). A former Chainstarter insider told me, jokingly: “I would be very surprised if he raised $360.” In fact, the source insisted, Ayton’s company shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to showcase the firm at Ritossa’s events in Dubai and Monaco. After I raised Ayton’s claim with Adler, he told me he confronted Ritossa about it. “Anthony told me he took the guy at his word,” he said.

I returned from Europe in late June and began writing this story in earnest when a call came in from an unknown number. The woman on the other end described herself as a whistleblower and asked if she could email me about Anthony Ritossa. By that point, I had already sifted through thousands of pages of material about the man and his enablers. I figured one more email was not a heavy lift. The next day, the first salvo arrived. “In terms of Anthony,” she wrote, “I wondered how long it would take for his web of lies and fraud to unravel.” Later, she added, “He’s made up so much: knight, professor, Nobel nominee. What’s next, astronaut?” We spoke several times before she felt comfortable enough to share a record of his misdeeds that included court filings and police reports—a paper trail Sir Anthony could not erase.

Anthony Ritossa, I would soon find out, is a scofflaw who has been convicted in two countries and is wanted in a third. The whistleblower’s tips prompted me, in early September, to go back to Europe, this time retracing the would-be heir’s footprints across the Istrian Peninsula.

I stopped outside the Ritossa family’s homestead in Poreč and indeed saw a few olive trees. But the boughs of those four or five specimens, on a rocky outcropping by the Adriatic, were scarcely the stuff on which fortunes are made.

I traveled to Rijeka to visit with an attorney to review Ritossa’s brushes with the law. I discovered that in 2017—only weeks before his Miami summit—Croatian police arrested Ritossa near the Slovenian border. After spending 11 days in jail, he was found guilty of threatening to kidnap the son of his ex-wife’s father and stepmother. He faced a year in prison, but the court, perhaps unaware of his brushes with the law in the US and the UK, gave him probation. As for his explanation to his one-time compatriot Knab for why he had gone dark back then? According to a source with knowledge of the family dynamics, Ritossa’s mother, Maria, never had a stroke and Ritossa had not visited Australia around that time.

I went to see Ritossa’s former friend and olive oil supplier, Darko Kadum. “You want to hear the craziest story?” he asked as we sat under a pergola, sipping a Malvazija from his family’s winery. The September sun was setting and he looked at his wife, as if seeking permission, before letting loose. “He stole his dead father’s body on its way from Australia to Croatia.” Giovanni Ritossa, the family patriarch, passed away in May 2015 and, per his wishes, was supposed to be interred in a plot in Istria.

But according to the Kadums, as well as others with knowledge of what the family endured, Ritossa diverted Giovanni’s remains to Slovenia where, I am told, he stored them in a morgue while his family frantically tried to determine what was happening. After a time, his relatives would later learn, Ritossa quietly laid his father to rest in a cemetery in the town of Piran. “Keeping a body from being buried for months is just off-the-charts macabre,” said a person with close ties to the Ritossas. “And then not inviting any family to a funeral in another country is soul-crushing.” According to several sources, Ritossa had been trying to hide his erratic behavior for some time. “It was all about control,” they said. “It was a message to the broader family, a giant ‘Fuck you all.’ ”

As I looked out over Kadum’s 19th-century estate, thinking about the mystery of Anthony Ritossa, something the whistleblower said came back to me. “The most extraordinary thing,” she explained, “is that so many people close to him have already been alerted to the fraud and chose to ignore it.… To my mind, they’re willing accomplices.” In the run-up to the 2019 Monaco summit—one of six he has held there—she had even sent emails, putting some of the monarch’s closest advisers on notice: “His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco is being courted by a conman…[with] a falsified CV and a history of morphing into a different person when he is caught.” The communications—which I have reviewed—outlined Ritossa’s legal entanglements, threats of violence, financial problems, and serial deception, and included detailed attachments. “When this becomes public, as everything does in time,” she warned, “it will be a massive blot on Monaco.”

My earlier efforts to engage with the palace had been rebuffed. But I reached out again in September and, this time, courtiers acknowledged that back in 2019 they had indeed received the whistleblower’s emails. But a top Monaco official confided, “There were no red flags other than this particular email…and it was hard to tell if it was real or [an act of] vengeance.” That was then. On September 20, prompted by Vanity Fair’s request that responsible palace authorities have another look at the allegations first presented three years ago, I was sent a surprisingly frank statement from HSH Prince Albert II:

“I have recently been alerted to the fact that the organizer of the events named ‘Sir Anthony Ritossa’s Global Family Office Investment Summit’, which take place in Monaco, may not meet the Principality’s necessary requirements in terms of transparency, ethics and professional conduct.

“Under these circumstances and as a precautionary measure, it has been decided that my patronage will no longer be granted for all the organizer’s future events to be held in Monaco, thus disallowing any direct or indirect support from the Principality of Monaco.

“It is to be noted that I never personally attended any of these events.”

The statement was a fitting coda to Ritossa’s regal posturing: a real prince kicking a wannabe knight out of his realm.

Nevertheless, the show must go on. Sir Anthony is hosting his 20th summit, in Dubai, in late October.