In October 2022, at the very moment that Yoshino, one of downtown New York’s hottest sushi spots, was being awarded its first Michelin star, the restaurant’s founder, Alberto Fis, was allegedly in the middle of orchestrating a complex web of fraud.
Across the ocean, the doors of the Grand Palais Éphémère were opening for Paris+ par Art Basel, where dealers and collectors from around the world flock to buy the latest in contemporary and modern art. Amid the flurry of activity, a prominent Parisian gallerist, François Ghebaly, was busy setting up shop at the fair. He was exhibiting work by several artists, among them a $135,000 painting by Sayre Gomez, an up-and-coming multi-media artist from California.
This particular piece was earmarked for Alfonso de Angoitia Noriega, the co-C.E.O. of Grupo Televisa, Mexico’s largest television network. Ghebaly had never sold work to the mogul before, but de Angoitia’s postwar and contemporary collection is well regarded in the art world. So when Ghebaly received an e-mail from him out of the blue, he agreed to the sale.
What Ghebaly failed to realize at the time is that de Angoitia had never actually written to him—it was Fis on the other end of the line.
Alberto Dreams of Sushi
Ever since he graduated from Boston’s Suffolk University with a major in business administration, in 2014, art and the high life have seemingly been twin passions for Alberto Fis, a short, inconspicuous-looking 30-year-old with brown hair and a slight beard.
One of his first Instagram selfies, taken during the fall of his senior year, sees him at the Museum of Modern Art posing next to Fulang-Chang and I, a 1937 painting by Frida Kahlo. From later that year, there are shots of him visiting the ritzy Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, in Antibes, skiing in Lake Tahoe, and diving in French Polynesia. Between travels, Fis would post photos of work by artists he admired—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sterling Ruby, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince.
“He was someone who you didn’t know what he was doing, what his family did, what he did, how he knew the people he knew,” an acquaintance of his tells me. “He was a bit of an opaque person.”
Yet, by the end of 2014, Fis, who grew up in Mexico, was dealing art and making friends in high places. The Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos has commented on his Instagram posts, as have Caspar Jopling, the renowned art dealer, and Charles Rosen, the son of real-estate magnate Aby Rosen. Fis even filmed a music video, “Magnolia,” with rappers A$AP Rocky and Playboi Carti, in 2017.
“I never understood what he was doing,” one person who met Fis a few years ago tells me, “but he was always dealing with art before the restaurant world.”
Fis also began traveling to Tokyo regularly, attending the storied tuna auctions at Tsukiji Outer Market and sampling omakase spots. By 2017, he’d eaten at Japan’s most exclusive restaurants, including Sushi Sugita, in Chuo City, and Sawada, in Ginza.
“His passion for art and sushi sort of went hand in hand,” another acquaintance tells me. “I think it started with art and then became about sushi.”
In 2018, Fis was back in New York organizing exclusive omakase dinners at pop-up locations around the city, with chefs he recruited from Japan. He invited friends and people from the art world and priced the dinners at around $300 per person.
“His real skill,” the acquaintance says, “is that he was able to go [to Japan] and convince these chefs to move to New York and completely change their lives for him.”
Later that year, Fis got in touch with Andrew Gyonkundari, a former sushi chef and restaurateur in Japan. Gyonkundari helped Fis recruit Tadashi Yoshida, a renowned chef from Nagoya who ran Sushi no Yoshino, widely considered the third-best sushi restaurant in the country. (Gyonkundari and Yoshida did not respond to requests for comment.)
By the time Fis announced the opening of Yoshino, in February 2020, there was a lot of buzz surrounding Fis. “Everyone had faith it was going to be good,” the acquaintance says.
On Instagram, meanwhile, Fis posted a photo of a Sayre Gomez work and captioned it “Tired of being a loser? Learn to flip houses.” The painting is titled Stop Being Poor: Learn to Flip Houses.
“His passion for art and sushi sort of went hand in hand.”
In March, as the pandemic delayed Yoshino’s opening indefinitely, Fis reached out to François Ghebaly gallery for the first time, to purchase a Gomez painting as well as works by other young, in-demand artists. But when Fis didn’t pay, the gallery canceled the sale and decided not to do business with him again.
Over the following year, presumably in an effort to cement his art-collecting status, Fis pooled friends’ money to buy new artwork and donate it to prominent museums around the world, according to one person who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. “If you are on a museum donor list,” an art curator explains, “it’s more likely we’d believe in you as a collector.”
In June 2021, Fis donated Friday Night—a large-scale painting by Gomez that he bought from Brussels’s Xavier Hufkens gallery just one month earlier for $80,000—to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney. He followed that up with an end-of-year donation—Moth, a painting by the acclaimed Scottish artist and Peter Doig protégé Andrew Cranston that he’d bought in September. A few months later, he donated Cosmic Dancer—a painting by the self-taught Puerto Rican artist Jonny Negron he bought from Château Shatto gallery—to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
In September 2021, Fis and his restaurant partners, Jean and Paul Dupuy (the duo behind Le Petit Parisien sandwich shop in New York’s East Village), along with other, smaller stakeholders, including Gyokudari and the art dealer Andre Sakhai (who is godfather to the notorious art fraudster Inigo Philbrick’s daughter, and whose own father served jail time for forging Gauguins and Chagalls), finally opened Yoshino on the corner of Bowery and Great Jones Street.
The restaurant’s $400 omakase fell in line with the city’s most expensive sushi spots, such as Sushi Noz and Kappo Masa, on the Upper East Side, and Icca, in Tribeca. The New York Times quickly included Yoshino on its list of fall’s “most intriguing and high-profile openings.” Getting a reservation became close to impossible, and the renowned artist Takashi Murakami made an appearance for dinner one night.
Fis would invite investors and people he wanted to impress to dine at Yoshino. His art dealings, meanwhile, were becoming increasingly extravagant.
That year, Fis commissioned six works by Jordy Kerwick, an in-demand, self-taught Australian artist, from Vigo, a London-based gallery, through the art consultant Rebecca Ryba. Despite the gallery’s strict no-resale policy, according to a text-message exchange between Fis and Ryba obtained by AIR MAIL, Fis resold two of the paintings for $60,000 each before he’d even paid for them.
After Vigo found out about this and the sale was canceled, Fis never paid his customers back, according to the text exchange. “You can’t sell something until you actually have possession of it … no one does that,” a spokesman for the gallery said.
According to the text exchange, when Ryba was informed of Fis’s wrongdoings, she cut ties with him definitively and threatened to get a lawyer involved. (Ryba did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.)
“You can’t sell something until you actually have possession of it … no one does that.”
In November 2021, Fis contacted Paris’s Almine Rech, a prestigious modern- and contemporary-art gallery with outposts in five cities around the world. “He wanted all the hot stuff,” a spokesman for the gallery says. “He was interested in purchasing multiple works of art over a short period of time.” But, in what by this point was becoming a trend, “when we heard one of the works was being offered back to us, we canceled all pending deals.”
That same month, Fis earmarked a series of artworks by up-and-coming artists from Night Gallery, in Los Angeles: a painting by Cynthia Daignault for $58,500, an Anne Libby for $10,500, a Grant Levy-Lucero for $18,000, a Paul Heyer for $14,000, a Wanda Koop for $37,500, and a Robert Nava for $65,000. One of Fis’s clients wired $96,000 to the gallery, while Fis pledged to pay for the rest.
According to one person with knowledge of the deal who requested anonymity for this story, Fis then sold the Nava painting, Castle Clown, to two different people.
When one of the customers complained that Castle Clown wasn’t arriving, Fis forwarded him an e-mail exchange he was allegedly having with the artwork’s shipping handler, Antonio Flores of Sede Arte (a Mexican transportation service), as proof that the painting was on its way. But when AIR MAIL contacted Sede Arte to verify the exchange, the e-mail address it shared for Flores did not match the e-mail address in Fis’s correspondence—the domain name in the thread between Fis and Flores doesn’t actually exist.
Ultimately, both buyers said they never received the Nava work, and, according to a source, it was eventually sold to a collector in Korea. (Night Gallery declined to comment for this story.)
Fis was also allegedly in touch with Clearing Gallery, in Los Angeles; Massimo de Carlo, in Milan; and Karma Gallery, in New York. (None of them responded to requests for comment.)
Where Fis was obtaining the cash to support these types of transactions is unclear. According to a person familiar with his business dealings who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, at one point Fis used his restaurant’s funds to purchase an artwork, though the money was ultimately restored to the Yoshino account. Throughout his time as manager, he also allegedly paid himself exorbitant consulting fees without the restaurant’s permission—hundreds of thousands over several months, which he ultimately returned—in order to keep up his lavish lifestyle.
“He used company funds, sometimes also for personal trips to Japan, which he gave back every time,” this person tells me. Fis also allegedly owes one of his business partners north of $400,000.
Financial woes aside, Fis was, allegedly, an erratic restaurant manager. He came into Yoshino when he felt like it, this person says, worked diligently, then disappeared: “Sometimes he didn’t come in for two or three months in a row.”
A Case of Identity
By October 2022, Fis’s burned bridges with prominent dealers and galleries were making it harder for him to buy and sell artwork. It was around this time that he wrote the e-mail to François Ghebaly posing as Alfonso de Angoitia Noriega. (A copy of the e-mail was obtained by AIR MAIL.)
As proof of identity, Fis allegedly sent Ghebaly photographs of de Angoitia’s art collection and of his house, which he’d obtained through his friendship with de Angoitia’s son, Miguel.
When the e-mail first landed in his inbox, Ghebaly was chuffed. “He told us that he’s built this incredible postwar art collection and now wanted to focus more on top emerging artists such as Sayre Gomez. We decided to give him a try,” Ghebaly told Artnet at the time, for a story that reported the de Angoitia impersonation but did not reveal the imposter’s identity. The gallery and the purchaser signed a contract guaranteeing that the latter was the “end purchaser,” and no one else.
After Paris+ par Art Basel, the gallery received the agreed-upon $135,000 payment, and the artwork was shipped to Los Angeles, to be deposited in de Angoitia’s storage. But the next month, Ghebaly received a call from a European gallery that also represents Gomez, which had received a similar commission from de Angoitia. “They raised the alarm,” Ghebaly said to Artnet. “They’ve been very cautious about impersonators. The e-mail looked odd.” When de Angoitia canceled a scheduled Zoom appointment to discuss the sale, Ghebaly’s suspicions mounted.
Then, on November 29, the real Alfonso de Angoitia Noriega came by Ghebaly’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. “He confirmed he never bought that painting and that someone was going around pretending to be him,” Ghebaly said to Artnet.
A source close to the de Angoitias said: “The family is saddened by what has reportedly occurred. The family has known [Fis] since he was a child and had considered him a friend. The family is deeply disappointed that the person broke the family’s trust and sought to take advantage of the arts community—a community that the family is proud to support.”
Sayre Gomez did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment; his studio manager, Brendan Jaks, said in an e-mail that “Sayre isn’t directly involved with the sales of [Fis’s] work,” though he did acknowledge that “we are aware of the situation that occurred with Alberto.”
In an e-mail obtained by AIR MAIL, Fis used an Asperger’s diagnosis as an excuse for the impersonation, citing ongoing mental issues.
According to a person familiar with the situation, Fis has also allegedly used de Angoitia’s name to purchase art with Jeffrey Deitch and Matthew Brown galleries, in New York; L.A.’s Night Gallery; and Project Native Informant, in London.
“He wanted all the hot stuff.”
Though de Angoitia never pressed charges, rumors of the impersonation swirled among the Yoshino restaurant partners, who resolved to kick Fis out of the business. In January of this year, to cover a $120,000 art-related debt with a Yoshino partner, Fis offered up his interest in the restaurant and relinquished his role as manager to Jean Dupuy.
Despite his departure, tensions are still running high. According to a frequent restaurant-goer, a man stormed into Yoshino during a recent dinner service, screaming hysterically about getting a painting returned that Fis hadn’t paid for. And, as of last week, Fis is allegedly no longer allowed on the restaurant’s premises.
All this tumult has not stopped Yoshino from maintaining its clout. In a rare four-star review, the New York Times food critic Pete Wells described eating there as an almost mythical experience. “A meal at Mr. Yoshida’s counter,” he wrote, “is more like a helicopter: it goes straight up.” The price has gone up, too—an omakase is now priced at $646 per person.
None of the people I spoke to for this story knew where Fis is currently living or how he is supporting himself, and he did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Yet over the past three months, he’s gone back to posting Instagram photos of uni and toro nigiri at Tokyo’s best restaurants. A link to the Yoshino Web site still lives on his Instagram bio. There are rumors of a planned new business venture.
And despite the large financial holes Fis has left behind, none of the people he has slighted so far have pressed charges, seemingly preferring anonymity over refunds of, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars. The galleries Fis did business with, too, have for the most part chosen to stay quiet. It’s a tale as old as the art world.
A recent photo on Fis’s Instagram featured a flawless nigiri. It was captioned, simply, “mythmaker.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL