Richie Rich's name is the most subtle thing about him. He's the go-to jeweller for a generation of celebrities who want to show off just how minted they are. Will Pavia meets the new king of bling.
It's a balmy night in Miami. Kanye West is about to go on stage when he notices a diamond-studded necklace. It's chunky but sparkly, like something Mr T might don with eveningwear, and it hangs around the neck of a man who has recently arrived in West's trailer.
"All right," West says. "Let's go! Watch me perform!"
Afterwards, as he comes off stage, West sidles towards the diamond man. He doesn't know his name. "Hey! You! Come here!" he says. "Can I see that chain?"
The young man hands it over. It's called a "Cuban": it resembles two plaited ropes of gold, dipped in an icing of diamonds.
"All right!" West says. "How do I get it? Who'd you buy it from?"
The man replies that he made it himself, for he is Richie Rich, jeweller to the stars.
"We ended up exchanging numbers," says Rich. "And the next day he had it on his neck, one of my pieces."
I have this story only from the jeweller himself, although I've no particular reason to doubt it. Richie Rich, real name Richie Nektalov, is a scion of a New York jewellery dynasty who is busy turning himself into a celebrity, via the celebrity service economy - the network of designers, counsellors and courtiers who dress and water our idols.
He's done rings and necklaces for musicians such as Adam Levine and Rita Ora; tooth grills for Cara Delevingne, Hailey Baldwin and Bella Hadid, and "ice" - which is to say diamonds - for the Ultimate Fighter Conor McGregor and the actor Ansel Elgort.
He met Kanye West at Art Basel Miami Beach, an art fair that has steadily developed its own gravitational field of rock stars, around which orbit "influencers", reality TV people and useful guys like Rich.
How much was it, the Cuban?
"I don't talk about numbers," Rich replies, before getting into the numbers. "$10,000 are the real small ones; they range up to like $100,000-$200,000."
He's wearing three Cubans when I meet him at a Manhattan hotel. He had suggested that we hire a private jet for his photoshoot, which was a little puzzling. He didn't have anywhere that he needed to be, he explained. He just likes doing shoots on private jets. He even offered to split the cost.
If we could have provided a supercar I expect that would have been quite satisfactory, too. On his Instagram page there's a shot of Rich lying on his back in a sunny driveway surrounded by three supercars. "Turned my DREAMS into a reality," says his caption. It made me think he owned them.
"Oh, those were not my cars," Rich says. They belonged to a guy he met in Florida. "When I saw those cars, I was starstruck. I was like, wow, these cars do exist. Real people have those cars, you know?"
The RichRichNY Instagram page is full of borrowed cars and private jets. In one video post we see Rich driving across a palm-fringed runway in a silver Rolls-Royce, clambering out holding something that looks like a washbag but is presumably stuffed with jewels, and bounding up a jet's stairway.
You've left the car door open, I thought. You can't just leave a Rolls lying about with the door open.
The point, of course, was that Rich Rich could. This was l'esprit de l'homme. It reminds me of a line I heard during a surreal night, years ago, at Cipriani's in downtown Manhattan. I was dining with a modelling mogul, his model wife and various other courtiers and as we talked a hip-hop tycoon stopped at our table to chat and showed us his enormous, jewel-encrusted watch. He caught me staring at it and smiled. "It's all about the lifestyle," he said. "And I'm livin' it."
After that everyone treated this man as if he were Oscar Wilde incarnate. "That is a quote!" said one of the courtiers. "Write that down."
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But a jewelled watch is not really a lifestyle, I thought. It's just proof of a lifestyle. On the other hand, if you are attempting to prove a certain type of lifestyle on Instagram, then jewellery is just the thing. No wonder Richie Rich is doing so well.
He sometimes mentions that certain shots of himself on private jets are genuine images, taken mid-flight - which, for me at least, raises doubts about the others.
"I will answer the question for you," he writes on Instagram, beside a photograph of himself sitting in an otherwise empty cabin, staring at his phone, beside a table on which there's a bottle of champagne. The window blinds are up; it's night outside. "No it's not on the ground," Rich writes. "It's 30,000 feet in the air, just me & the two pilots LA-NY - my clients take good care of me thank you."
When we meet for the sadly private jet-free photoshoot, Rich, 27, is wearing a Valentino camouflage tracksuit he bought in Hong Kong. Older members of his family chide him for failing to dress in a suit. "Till this day I get shade for it," he says. "I like to dress comfortably. Because I could get a call saying, 'Hey, I need something in California tomorrow. I need you to fly in and I need to catch that next flight out ...' I'm ready to go today."
He has large blue eyes and the soulful expression of a chap in a boy band - the one who writes the songs and is desperately committed to the project but stands at the back for posters. His brown hair, shaved at the sides and combed diagonally over the top, is in perfect order and although he has a scratchy sort of beard, the stubble halts halfway down his neck in a crisp line. "I get a haircut once a week," says Rich. He suggests I mention the barber. "He'll be happy. His name is Mike, out in Queens," he says. "He knows he needs one hour with me to make me perfect, because you never know when the next interview is with a client, or who I'm bumping into."
We're in a courtyard of the hotel, which has steps at one end, carpeted with plastic grass. The photographer asks Rich if he'd mind leaping off the steps and kicking out his legs.
"I'm fat," Rich says. "I can't do that stuff."
It must be quite hard to jump in all those diamonds, I say. On each pinkie finger there's a white gold gem-studded ring. He's also wearing a huge, jewel-encrusted watch, plus those Cuban necklaces. Even Mr T would struggle to get about under that lot.
"Yeah," Rich says. "It weighs you down."
When the shoot is done we duck into an adjacent hotel room and Rich takes off his jewels and lays them carefully on the bed.
What are they all worth? "About $3,000,000," he says. "Two and a half?"
Yikes. I wonder if we ought to be armed.
"I had my guard here before, but I sent him home," Rich says. "It's fine."
He packs them into small bags, rather like bumbags. "I don't wear my jewellery out on the street unless I have my security team with me," he says.
It's a two-man team, he says. One guy is full-time. They became necessary "when I started going out more, socialising".
He books an Uber on his phone and we step outside onto the pavement, just the two of us and $3,000,000 of jewellery, to ride back to Richie Rich's office in the diamond district, a street two blocks south of the Rockefeller Center. So many precious stones change hands there that in the summer of 2011 a man from Queens, equipped with some tweezers and a butter knife, scraped $819-worth of gold from the cracks in the pavement.
Still, if you are thinking that it is a glamorous place, you are wrong. It's a crowded hodge-podge of jewellers and shopping malls, overhung with seemingly permanent stretches of scaffolding. Why are jewellery stores so dowdy-looking? Perhaps they don't want to distract you from the diamonds. There are one or two marbled grottoes, but most of the shops have scratchy carpets and chipped brown wood panelling, like a working men's club.
Outside there are neon signs and flashing lights and undercover police officers and uniformed police officers and Jewish orthodox men in furry hats and hawkers calling to people who linger too long and all kinds of wheelerdealers doing business on the pavement.
Rich's grandfather, Roman, his father, Leon, and his uncle, Eduard, were Bukharan Jewish immigrants from Uzbekistan who arrived in the diamond district in the early Seventies. "They came here with just a suitcase," Rich says. "They started off just flipping stuff - jewellery, because back home they were also doing jewellery."
They got a booth in one of the jewellery shopping malls, he says. "They expanded to two, then three." Eventually, they were able to buy a five-storey building at the western end of the street, in which they installed a store named Leon Diamond, after Rich's father.
Leon's older brother, Eduard, "passed away in 2004", says Rich.
Um, I say, wondering how to put it. Wasn't he murdered? "Yeah," says Rich.
"Yeah, he was."
The Uber turns on to Sixth Avenue and pulls up against the pavement near the spot where Eduard Nektalov was killed. He'd left work and headed for his Bentley, talking on his phone, when a black-clad assassin shot him in the back of the head and then twice in the back with a Colt .45 semi-automatic.
Rich was only 12 at the time. He remembers they closed off the streets around the family home. "I think he had 5,000 people at his funeral," he says. "My uncle was very well known in the community. He helped a lot of the immigrants coming to the United States."
At the time that he was killed, however, Rich's uncle Eduard and his grandfather were also facing trial, accused of laundering money for Colombian drug dealers. There was speculation that Eduard, who was 46, had been assassinated by the Colombians, lest he snitch.
"It was bullshit," says Rich. His grandfather "was found not guilty, after all", he says.
Um, I think he was found guilty on a single charge, I say. "Zero convictions," Rich insists. "He was found not guilty for everything."
It's true that he was acquitted of the most serious charges. But he was convicted of one count of money laundering. In 2006 an appeals court upheld the conviction, ruling that there was "voluminous evidence" showing Roman and Eduard Nektalov had exchanged 793 diamonds for $500,000 in cash "that they believed to be drug money, with a man who was in actuality an undercover agent".
But the murder of Rich's uncle turned out to have nothing to do with any of this. It turned out a mobster named Hector Rivera, furious at a perceived slight against his gang, had paid $30,000 to have Rich's uncle killed. Convicted in 2017, Rivera is now serving life plus 25 years.
It all sounds rather terrifying. "News people always exaggerate," Rich says.
We step into Leon Diamond and he leads me through the shop and down a staircase. I'd seen photographs of Rich in his office, with a large painting of a platinum American Express card, belonging to "Richie Rich", hanging on the wall behind him, and imagined it was an expansive space overlooking Sixth Avenue. In fact, it is more of a cubby hole in the basement.
On the desk there's a crystal-studded Bentley, a model of a car he had coated in gems for a rapper called the Game. "It's old news," Rich says, with a wave of his hand. "No one even cares about that any more."
He's very dismissive about nearly everything on his desk - the liquor bottle that says "Rich" on the label; the strange plastic dolls arranged around it. "Everybody collects them," he says. "I don't know what the meaning is. It just looks cool."
In the middle of the desk there are a calculator, two $1 bills, wax jewellery moulds, two scented candles. There's no computer, but his smartphone is forever buzzing and chiming.
Growing up, his parents would beg him to put it away. "I was glued to my phone, and to this day I'm still glued to my phone," he says. "I'm tapping away, writing comments and answering questions nonstop. It's a bad drug, but a good drug at the same time."
His older brother, David, steps in to confirm this. "All day long, playing with his thumbs on his phone," he says. "I used to scream and yell at him all the time." Now, "We kind of direct him, continue what you're doing," he says.
David, 37, is slim and handsome. He's dressed in an immaculate grey tweed suit and a white shirt. "I play the role, as if I'm smart," he tells me. "He's the smart one."
He admires his brother's dedication to Instagram. "Me, after six o'clock, I want to go home and lie on my couch. Rich wants to go and mingle with people."
They have three sisters, who are not involved in the business. "Girls get married and they're on their own with their husbands," David says, before he steps out.
I'd read that the family home had marble floors, with gilded N's on the staircase.
Rich shrugs. "Many people say, 'Oh, Rich doesn't need to work; his father's done everything; he's born with a silver spoon in his mouth,'" he says. "The way I look at it, even if a person's born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he's got to take that silver spoon and turn it into gold, if not gold and diamonds."
It was actually his older brother who first began cultivating celebrities, scoring Paris and Nicky Hilton as clients. "I saw all these famous people coming in and I would be starstruck," Rich says. This persuaded him to join the family business. "I wanted a picture with them."
View this post on InstagramLove Her Ora 💎 @ritaora #RichieRichNy #RitaOra
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He began tagging celebrities on Instagram."Many people blocked me; many people didn't like what I was doing and asked me to stop," he says. He is not a great prose stylist and quite a few people mistook him for a robot. "They thought I was like some hacking program," he says. "With my gut feeling, I just continued. I didn't care who liked it, who didn't."
Gutsy move. "I guess it's freedom of speech, right? It's my page. I get to do whatever I want."
Among the many people who blocked him was Jonathan Cheban, a publicist and friend of Kim Kardashian who has become Instagramfamous as "FoodGod". You might call him a food critic; essentially, he posts manic videos of himself trying camera-friendly food - giant ice creams or gold-coated lobster tails - and saying, "Oh my God, you guys! Amaaaazing!"
One day Rich was waiting for a client in a hotel lobby when he saw the FoodGod passing through. Rich was held back by a security guard. Then the deity said, "It's fine. Let him through," according to Rich, who handed Cheban his card. A week or so later, Cheban's representative called with a commission.
After that they met for lunch and Cheban gave him advice. Rich was using an Instagram handle with an underscore separating his first name from his surname. "He was like, 'Listen, I want to give you credit for this piece on Instagram, but I can't tag you with an underscore name. It looks weird.' He was like, 'Why don't you change your name to Rich?'"
Rich tried to register as Rich, which was taken, and then as Rich R. "Then he was like, 'Why don't you try RichieRich?'" Well, that was taken too, but RichieRichNY was still free. "That just stuck," says Rich.
It sounds like that moment in The Social Network, I say, when Sean Parker advises the young Mark Zuckerberg to drop the "The" from "thefacebook.com".
Rich nods, and says it was just like that.
For Cheban, he made a gold caviar spoon and a diamond-studded FoodGod nameplate. "He was looking for a logo," says Rich. "So I said, 'Why don't you take the name, as if you're dipping it into a bowl of cheese?' When you pull it out, it's dripping."
The FoodGod agreed. "I gave it to my design person. And we created that drip effect," Rich says. It's gold, with "blue, green, yellow and purple and white diamonds in it".
The FoodGod now wears it around his neck. He became a great friend and patron; it was he who brought Rich into the trailer of Kanye West on that night in Miami.
Richie Rich's other big break came after he answered the phone on a rainy Monday. A voice from London said, "'Listen to me. You have 30 minutes to say yes or no to my deal, if you have this diamond available,'" Rich says. "I was in competition with like, four other jewellers. Tiffany, Graff - high-end jewellers."
The man's wife wanted a particular seven-carat diamond ring and he had seen something similar on Rich's Instagram page. Rich's brother thought the caller a crank, but he was willingto pay about $300,000, Rich says. Rich called him back and said he'd need to send someone to pick it up. "He said, 'How about this? I give you $5,000 extra, buy yourself a ticket and deliver it to me ... But it has to be here by Saturday night.' "
When a money transfer arrived the next day, they saw the name Stephen Belafonte and realised, after some googling, that this was the husband of the pop star Mel B.
"I had two guys working on the ring for, like, two days straight, no sleep," he says. Then he flew to England in a state of high anxiety.
Well, they liked it, and word that he had a Spice Girl for a client helped Rich land other celebrities. Last month, Rich's jewellery appeared during the Super Bowl half-time show, around the neck of the shirtless Maroon 5 front man Adam Levine. "Billions of people are watching it live; almost 75,000 people are watching it in the stadium," Rich says.
He was watching from a hotel in Las Vegas "with a bunch of my clients", he says. "Everybody starts screaming as if their team that they're rooting for won the Super Bowl, but it was actually for Adam Levine wearing my necklace. I was just praying to God that it wouldn't fall off. My heart was beating until he got off stage and texted me."
He texted you? Rich nods. "Adam himself called me a goat."
I must look rather confused, because he then elaborates. Levine was using the acronym typically applied to rappers and sports superstars: Greatest Of All Time.
"When he says I am the greatest jeweller he has ever worked with, that motivates me," says Rich.
Now his page is full of celebrities with Rich at their side, staring mournfully up at the camera like a faithful labrador. "But it is hard," Rich says, looking like a serious labrador. "Definitely mention that."
I say I will. "People think, 'Oh, he's flying private jets ... He's with a celebrity,'" he says, sighing. He was just at the Grammys, for instance. In a good seat. But people don't see him "waiting for a client until 4 or 5am", he says. There have been times, he says, when in two full days he had only eaten an apple and a banana. "If I'm not on the beach," he says, "I'm working."
Aha. And what do you do on the beach? "I'm still working on the beach."
What is the point of it all? Why, for instance, does a man like the Ultimate Fighter Conor McGregor buy himself diamonds?
"Success," Rich replies. "Knowing that he can afford a piece."
One of his clients, whom he is sadly not at liberty to name, told him, "Listen, you're Richie Rich, but it's very important to live rich," says Rich. "It's very important to live rich with happiness, health, success."
Rich took this in. "I put that onto a hoodie. It says 'Live Rich' on the back and 'Richie Rich' on the front," he says. It's part of his new clothing range. "I love that slogan. Live rich."
He took the message that money isn't everything and monetised it.
"I'm trying to create a niche where living rich is not just with wealth and not just with fancy things, but also with happiness, because there's a lot of bullies out there," he says.
As we discuss his platform to do good in the world, and his charity work and the deep wellsprings of his activities, I mention that strange photograph of Rich lying on the ground between the noses of parked supercars, happy as a new bridegroom in his marital bed.
It's motivational, he says. "Even though money is not important in life, and health and happiness is all important, that pushes me to motivate myself. To become more and more."
He pauses and looks intently at me.
"There's a word I'm looking for," he says. "To succeed more, I guess."
To be more fulfilled? "Fulfilled. Yeah," he says, thoughtfully. "And to work harder ..."
He breaks off and I think he is about to say something very profound.
"To provide myself with one of those cars one day," he says.
Because it's all about the lifestyle. And he's living it.
Written by: Mike McGregor
© The Times of London
