The Pizza Schemer

Ishmael Osekre, the man behind the “Fyre Festival of Pizza,” has a history of alleged Facebook-fueled fraud

- By Austin Carr

The problems with the New York City Pizza Festival began with the pizza. Slices were cut into comically miniature triangles, nowhere close to what Ishmael Osekre, the organizer, had promised. In Facebook ads he’d hyped stuff-your-face quantities of thin crust, served outdoors on a late- summer weekend in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. He’d set prices high, charging as much as $69 per person for VIP access, and recruited more than 1,100 ticket buyers for the pizza fest, as well as a simultaneous event, the New York City Burger Festival, which promised “mountains of french fries, oceans of ketchup, and waterfalls of beer.”

Ticket holder Timothy Seitz arrived at the venue with his wife and found a mostly empty lot where hundreds of hipsters were SMH-ing in a line along a barbed-wire fence, waiting to grab a slice. As state investigators would later allege, Osekre had obtained only eight pies and a few boxes of sliders. Witnesses confirm that there was little, if any, beer, and that the pizza was gross, if still technically pizza. “Like what you’d serve elementary schoolers,” Seitz says. He wondered aloud, “Did we just get scammed?”

Osekre tried to calm the hangry crowd, telling attendees he’d ordered more pies. Too few arrived. Well into the afternoon, ticket holders, waiting and baking in the heat, demanded refunds, but Osekre was noncommittal. Then, suddenly, he disappeared. He’d taken in $63,680, according to state investigators.