THE TELEGRAPH
A giant, gleaming palace of luxury overlooking the Dubai Creek, the Palazzo Versace is fighting hard to be one of the world’s most glamorous hotels – a place where every meal is snapped for Instagram, and the rubbernecking for celebrity guests never stops.
An entry-level room here costs a few hundred pounds a night. Or you can rent an entire suite for a thousand or so. But for those with stratospheric budgets there’s an even more opulent option: a year-long tenancy. The uber-wealthy can make the Palazzo their permanent home.
In June 2020, one such resident was Ramon Olorunwa Abbas. As the 37-year-old Nigerian sat on his Versace sofa and gazed at his wardrobes full of Fendi clothes and Gucci shoes, Abbas probably felt the warm glow of a man who’d climbed the mountain of wealth and now sat at its peak, gazing down.
Then the door burst open. A team of armed Dubai police officers wearing ski masks and body armour rushed inside, grabbing laptops and phones, photographing and bagging everything they found. Abbas stood in the middle of it all, his arms pinned by a black-clad police officer. On his face was the look of a man suddenly remembering all the bodies he’d climbed over to get to the top.
It was the dramatic denouement of a rags-to-riches tale that had taken Abbas on a wild journey, from the depths of poverty to a powerful role as a criminal mastermind working with one of the world’s most dangerous regimes. Then it all came crashing down.
Abbas was born on 11 October 1982 in Bariga, a poor area of Lagos. Like many smart youngsters in Nigeria at the time, he struggled to gain steady employment. He joined the ‘Yahoo boys’ – the small but increasingly powerful minority of Nigerians who’d turned to online scamming to make ends meet. Abbas’s future lay far beyond the country, however, and his fate would be intertwined with that of a man living thousands of miles away.
Ghaleb Alaumary was born two years after Abbas into a world which could not have been more different to the Nigerian’s.
Alaumary lived with his family in Montreal, Canada, where they owned the eight-bedroom property Château Olivier. From its back garden (complete with hot tub), a private entrance led directly into a lush public park. As Abbas was dodging Lagos’s grinding traffic, Alaumary could simply open his back gate and disappear into the greenery.
By 2009, however, Alaumary’s privileged life had started to go off the rails. After a string of relatively low-level fraud and credit-card crimes he moved online and discovered the dark web, a hidden corner of the internet, where he offered his financial crime services to other cybercriminals. The underworld nickname he chose for himself demonstrates his hubris: Alaumary became ‘Big Boss’.
He wasn’t the only one reinventing himself. Ramon Abbas was also forging an online persona. In Abbas’s case, however, his emergence into a new identity would take place under the full glare of social media. In 2012 he created the Instagram account through which millions would come to know him – like Madonna or Prince – by just one name: ‘Hushpuppi’.
He would go on to ascend the ranks of the social media influencers – amassing hordes of online followers by constantly posting photos of his increasingly glamorous lifestyle, hanging out with Premier League footballers and splurging cash on luxury goods. But behind the scenes, in tandem with his public persona, Abbas’s secret fraud career was growing to become a multimillion-dollar enterprise.
By 2017, Abbas had moved to the location that would become not only the perfect canvas for the ever-increasing promotion of his wealth, but also the scene of his greatest crimes: Dubai, and the glitz of the Palazzo Versace.
From the outside, he looked like the ultimate social media influencer success story. In reality, his extravagant lifestyle was funded by crime. He hadn’t left behind his roots as a scam artist – he’d just got better at hiding them.
Meanwhile, Alaumary’s criminal aspirations were growing.
