Sometimes, you meet someone in New York who gives you a good feeling and a bad feeling at the same time. Maybe you’re introduced at a bar, through a friend of a friend. This person is charming and full of ideas, ideas that resonate with you. He seems to know everyone you know, and some other people you follow only on social media. You like him, even though you wonder whether he’s for real. He has a story about the city and his place in it, a story in which he may invite you to play a role. This is tempting. You get the sense that he has a momentum unlike other people’s, toward a destination that could be glamorous—or maybe catastrophic. One such person is Ashwin Deshmukh, the 38-year-old managing partner of Superiority Burger, one of the most acclaimed restaurants in New York.
…Mr. Thypin’s first reaction to losing the money was shame. He was a rich guy who had gotten taken for a ride by a charismatic hustler—a New York cliché. Later, he said, he resigned himself to the fact that if Mr. Deshmukh was “that hard up he would steal from his friend, he must be in dire straits.” Mr. Thypin decided to move on. But he kept hearing stories about other people who had been tricked in the exact same way…And there was Jonathan Kule, who said he gave Mr. Deshmukh $10,000 to invest in a luxury subscription box business, after which Mr. Deshmukh stopped responding to him.
…The good feelings didn’t last. Mr. Deshmukh hired a few people for the project, including an old colleague from Hungry named Mark Lewis, who is unrelated to the Oatly spokesman. But Mr. Deshmukh went dark for days at a time, and Mr. Lewis began receiving emails from Oatly asking why they hadn’t produced anything. He felt awkward—Mr. Deshmukh wasn’t responding to the messages, and Mr. Lewis didn’t know where he was. Not to mention, Mr. Deshmukh still hadn’t fully compensated him for the trip to Malmo, which Mr. Lewis had paid for out of pocket. “Everyone was very uncomfortable”, Mr. Lewis said…the Oatly employee who led Mr. Deshmukh into the company was devastated. How could he put her in such a terrible position? She said she made plans with him several times so she could confront him, but he kept canceling at the last minute. She had a feeling she would never see him again…she saw Mr. Deshmukh outside Short Stories. She said he pulled down his face mask and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
…Had Ms. Kwan gone looking for him, the businessman and promoter was likely to be found somewhere in a small rectangle of Manhattan where he had spent the previous decade dragging himself ever closer to the heart of downtown clout. This rectangle was formed in the northeast, at Avenue A and St. Marks Place, by Superiority Burger; in the southwest, at Mercer Street and Prince Street, by Fanelli Cafe, above which he has lived; in the southeast, at Broome Street and Allen Street, by Williamsburg Pizza, which he has told many people, including reporters at The Washington Post, that he owns; and finally, in the northwest, at Lafayette Street & East 4th Street by Jean’s, a popular nightclub and restaurant where he is a partner.
…Most people who meet Mr. Deshmukh say he is intelligent, informed, funny, kind and slightly elusive, in a quirky way. But among the many New Yorkers who know Mr. Deshmukh only a bit, there is a subgroup of people who know him a bit more. These people, who are numerous, embarrassed and still finding one another, will say that Ashwin Deshmukh is a thief…Mr. Kule also felt personally wounded. He had thought Mr. Deshmukh was slightly odd—he told Mr. Kule that he worked on behalf of a family office in Paris, but he sometimes smelled like he hadn’t showered in days. But they had become tight, and had made plans to make further investments together.
…The partners told The Times that for several years Mr. Deshmukh had worked diligently as a promoter. He had gotten Diplo to come to the bar, and Kaia Gerber, and ASAP Rocky, along with a parade of the internet’s semifamous, all of whom he captured on social media. The bar was a success, they said, in part because of how well Mr. Deshmukh had marketed it. He built up trust. In 2021, they gave Mr. Deshmukh access to one of the company’s bank accounts so he could handle business expenses…For years, Mr. Deshmukh spearheaded efforts to send pizzas to brands and micro-celebrities; encouraged influencers and prominent friends who bought the pizzas to tag the shop; and featured others on Williamsburg Pizza’s Instagram page, all in an effort to make it the coolest pizza in the city.
…They were left with an enormous number of questions, but one above all: What kind of person would do all of this? Almost all of them described Mr. Deshmukh as intelligent, charismatic, capable and hardworking. Surely this was a man who could have found success in any domain.
Mr. Deshmukh, the son of a cardiologist, arrived at N.Y.U. in the fall of 2003 from Sayre, Pa. a 5,000-person town on the New York border. One of his first friends in college was Roberto A. Felipe, a New Yorker who had grown up working class in Corona, Queens. Mr. Felipe said that Mr. Deshmukh had confided in him about his hangups with his weight and how to meet women…By the time Mr. Deshmukh was a senior, he had cultivated a campus mystique…One day a process server came to the door, but she had no idea where Mr. Deshmukh was: She was unsure of where he stayed when he wasn’t there. (Ms. Nobematsu-Le Gassic obtained a court order this year to force Mr. Deshmukh to pay her $7,250 for a security deposit he never returned—a somewhat more prosaic New York scenario. “I screwed you over”, Mr. Deshmukh wrote in a text to her that she shared with The Times, about the outstanding money.)
…Mr. Thypin, who has spent a lot of time thinking about Mr. Deshmukh, believes Mr. Deshmukh is a chameleon, driven by insecurity, who has changed colors again and again in pursuit of status. At first he worked for a hedge fund, or at least he said he did. Then, in the early 2010s, he became a venture capitalist. Then he became a creative director—the ultimate cool-guy millennial pursuit—or tried to. And finally, as cultural energy in New York shifted back to the city’s downtown, he reinvented himself as a nightlife impresario, a scene-maker…A popular theory among the aggrieved is that Mr. Deshmukh’s manipulations are all leverage plays, similar to the efforts of Adam Sandler’s character in Uncut Gems—every dollar he takes goes toward his next move, with no safety net.