We tried to contact Sutopo, and failed. But we did find the soap opera actor, who agreed to talk to us as long as we didn’t report her name. Sutopo was now her ex-husband and, she said, he was a fraud. Gobind, the nickname of Tahilramani, was his protégé. She said they’d met at Cipinang prison, where Sutopo took the younger man under his wing, offering him protection. A prison official told us that the two men would meet often and that Sutopo was, in his estimation, “a naughty man.”
This actor told us that Tahilramani—as far as she knew—was now on the up-and-up. Living in London, she said, working for HBO. He was also a food blogger. And she heard from him all the time. Almost every day—but always by DM, from one of his many social media accounts. She called Tahilramani a good friend but didn’t know his last name. She also didn’t have a phone number or email for him. They talked often, yes, but he was the instigator. And for whatever reason, this caginess on his part never struck her as odd—until we told her about the scam.
Why would Tahilramani be allegedly involved in a con in Hollywood, though, a place where he had few ties? Obviously it’s easy to pull the wool over people’s eyes here, because everyone’s so fixated on opportunity that they are often unable to see anything else. According to victims, the Con Queen was always saying things like, “when you come to New York, I will put you up in the best hotel” and “you can come to my private island”—things that sounded like fun, things they wanted. And executives’ patter isn’t hard to ape; people do it every day on the phone in Hollywood, one of the last industries where calling is the gold standard instead of doing deals via computer. And by the way, only a small fraction of the deals that are done in Hollywood day in and day out end up in things you can actually watch on TV and in films—though making a deal when there’s no actual, imagined television or film project in the works is another thing entirely.
But Tahilramani apparently also has a background that draws him close to film. According to a source, he has ties to the Punjabi family, an influential family in Indonesian film. The Punjabis run Multivision Plus, a prominent production company founded by Raam Punjabi, whom sources identified as Tahilramani’s uncle (Punjabi denied this, but also told us that his wife had been subjected to some of Tahilramani’s alleged scams). A source said Tahilramani also has two sisters, though the siblings had a falling-out over property disputes. (One sister did not respond to attempts for comment, and the other could not be located.) A prison official in Jakarta told us that Tahilramani’s family pressed the charges that got him imprisoned in Jakarta in the late 2000s, and several sources in London said that he talked often about how he’d been cast out of the family. One photographer who was hired to take portraits of “Gavin Ambani”—in the London restaurant world, he posed as the relative of one of India’s richest men—and then never paid, said, “This Instagram food thing was supposed to be a way for him to gain acceptance from his family.”
Tahilramani attended the elite Gandhi Memorial Intercontinental School in Jakarta, where instruction is in English, before moving to the United States for college. According to sources, he started his education at L.A. City College and was active on the competitive speech team, before transferring to Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, in 2000. In 2000 he reached the quarterfinals of the National Forensic Association competition in “persuasive speaking,” while calling himself “Harvey,” an alias he would come back to often in later life. He left Bradley in 2000, enrolled at Cal State University Long Beach, and, per a source, continued to compete in speech until, at an event that fall, he was caught plagiarizing a speech and disqualified from the tournament.
This was a low-level prank, but he graduated. When he was imprisoned, he did something he might have imagined as merely naughty, but which had serious implications: He called in a bomb threat to the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta from a mobile phone he had hidden in his cell. To make this threat, Tahilramani put on the voice of an American, then an Iranian, and then a Russian, in different phone calls. He said, “There’s a bomb and it’s going to explode in 72 hours.” He had also allegedly threatened to blow up the Pentagon while living in the U.S.
“My fun is to vent my frustration on my family,” he told a local newspaper. The reporter wrote, “Gobind was nonchalant about making the bomb scare. He even laughed when retelling the incident that caused his prison sentence to be extended. Covering his face with his hands, he chuckled and said, ‘It was only a joke.’” (When cell phones throughout the prison were confiscated because of the bomb threat, a source said prisoners beat Tahilramani severely.)
True to this trickster spirit, some of the chaos Tahilramani sowed was of the lighter sort. After prison he held a premiere bash for the second Sex and the City movie in Jakarta, but according to a contractor who worked the event, the coordinators were never paid. According to sources, in 2011 he claimed to be organizing a Miss Teen Indonesia pageant, and even booked Enrique Iglesias to play the show. Iglesias reportedly flew to Jakarta but, upon landing, realized it too was a scam. His team posted about what had happened on his Facebook, writing: “Sorry to inform you, but the Miss Teen Indonesia 2011 event in Jakarta is a big fraud which was set up by crooks that have unfortunately done this before.” The post then identified one of the “crooks” as “Harvey Taheal,” a combination of two aliases Tahilramani had been known to use.
In his life as a London food influencer, Tahilramani was often a man with a plan, telling people that he had great things in store for them if they did what he wanted. He even coaxed famous Bahraini chef Roaya Saleh into participating in what, according to Saleh’s Instagram post, he seemingly said was a Netflix project about restaurants. (Saleh later posted a faux trailer shot in her restaurant on her Instagram feed.) According to sources, he often introduced himself as an HBO executive, or more often as a Netflix employee, as he did when he registered for the 2017 Lululemon Sweatlife Festival. He was a bon vivant, Instagramming photos of enjoyable meals; in one post he showed off his own spaghetti with lemon, which he called a “simple interpretation” of a dish from one of his favorite restaurants, Ruthie Rogers’s River Café. This dinner, he wrote, took him back to pre-COVID times, when he would sit in the restaurant looking at “the gorgeous river views of Hammersmith as I drifted away with friends and family about a glorifying future with daring conquests and endless laughter.”
But Tahilramani also created bonds in the restaurant world by telling others that he was bullied for being perceived as gay in Indonesia. He even claimed in the September video chat that he had been sent to conversion therapy at a mental institution because of it. “To be a soldier and a warrior doesn’t mean you have to fight a war—you didn’t have to go to battle and take out your firearms and shoot some weapons and things like that,” he said in the September video chat. “I went through a war of my own, a struggle of my own, as a child, because maybe I was a little bit more expressive than other boys. Maybe I enjoyed watching films that other boys wouldn’t watch. Maybe I didn’t like soccer so much, and I appreciated literature over, over soccer.” He added, “People would laugh at me and call me bunchi and faggot.”
This doesn’t seem like enough of a reason to have allegedly pulled such a wide-ranging scam. There is something else here, something about envying women, particularly powerful ones, and feeling unimportant. Something deep and misogynistic. The Con Queen often told the people he was allegedly conning that he wanted them to feel safe, and that he wanted them to make him feel safe too. This made some sense when the fake Amy Pascal, or whichever woman he was impersonating at the moment, was talking to ex-military men looking for jobs as Hollywood bodyguards and security consultants, but it was still creepy, and it was something that he allegedly said to other victims too, who had no background in security. He might have wanted coziness, love, warmth—but only if he could remain in total control of the relationship. We don’t know all the reasons behind the con yet, but the FBI has had a case open for some time now, and we have heard that it is working with Scotland Yard. (The FBI’s policy is to not comment on any possible active cases, but it has opened a web portal for victims of the scam.) We may hear the explanation from the authorities, or even Tahliramani himself, very soon.
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