If you’re wondering who’s responsible for bringing the FIFA World Cup to Boston, it isn’t Robert Kraft, or the Healey administration, or the mayor’s office, or the loose confederation of pols, boosters, sports fans, glory-hogs, and straight-up opportunists that instinctively forms at the prospect of such events.

No, the credit lies with a man named Jason Waddleton.

Waddleton grew up in Scotland, outside of Aberdeen. Twenty-eight years ago, he attended Scotland’s last World Cup appearance, a 3-0 loss to Morocco. Twenty-five years ago, he immigrated to Boston. Sixteen years ago, he opened a beloved Scottish bar called the Haven in Jamaica Plain. And four years ago, he moved it from its original location in Hyde Square to the redeveloped brewery complex off Armory Street in J.P.

At some point during those years, Waddleton began willing into existence, with his mind, a Boston World Cup, featuring the Scottish national team. Last year, his efforts paid off. Scotland qualified for the Cup in November. And while some may have wondered where the team and its attendant Tartan Army would end up, Waddleton knew it would be Boston. After all, he says, “I had already manifested that to be the case.”

When we spoke in late March, Waddleton was in the middle of preparing a giant World Cup party in the bar, around the bar, and in the parking lot of the bar: “A three-day festival of food, drink, music, and whiskey,” he calls it. Many Scots are expected to turn out, and Waddleton is thrilled at the opportunity to introduce people from his native land to neighbors from his adopted home. In fact, he had already placed an order of Tennent’s beer so large—120 kegs—that the Scottish newspapers covered it. And that’s just the first wave. “We’re going to be swamped, mate,” he says.

It’s a lot, but Waddleton has had decades to prepare. “I’ve been manifesting this for a long time,” he says, laughing.

THIS IS A BIG SUMMER for Boston. The World Cup may be sucking up most of the oxygen, but it’s only one of several high-profile and likely well-attended events the city will be hosting this season. There’s also the return of Sail Boston, featuring a flotilla of tall ships from around the world, and Boston 250, a yearlong, citywide commemoration of Boston’s role in the American Revolution. Combined, these events are expected to attract millions of visitors, on top of the usual throngs who come to attend the Fourth of July festivities, see the Sox, or participate in that time-honored ritual of death-marching clutches of damp, unhappy children down the Freedom Trail in 98 percent humidity.

Boston isn’t great because it’s the best at everything. It’s great because it’s its own thing.

We’re told these events will generate more than a billion dollars in revenue for the city and state, all while showcasing to the world all that is great and good about Boston and Massachusetts. Wildly irrational projections are the oxygen of mass events, so those numbers are to be viewed with skepticism. But, on the whole, these are positive things—potentially enjoyable, edifying, and maybe even an occasion for genuine civic pride. Right? Aren’t they?

Because even as I write those words, an old ambivalence begins to creep in: Is this whole thing going to be a pain in the ass? A money pit? A traffic nightmare? Will the city’s narrow arteries be choked with the plaque of wayward French? Is the T going to crumble like a cracker under the added poundage? “Screw this,” writes a Reddit user. “We’re in no shape to host a global party.”

Many residents are understandably wondering who all of this is actually for. Is it for locals, or is it all just a sop to rich tourists and international travelers? If the latter, what are we even showing them? As Paul Ford, a 69-year-old lifetime Southie resident and small-business owner, put it, “Are they trying to show off the city, or are they showing off the real estate value because they’re looking for tax money?”

These sorts of concerns are, of course, part of Boston’s DNA, rooted in a deep and justified suspicion of overt boosterish activity. Boston never fares well when it tries to compete on the terms set forth by a New York, or a Los Angeles, or a Paris, or a Tokyo, or a petro-state nightmare like Abu Dhabi. There is nothing more third-rate than a second-rate city trying really hard to be a first-rate city

I’m on a group text chain with a handful of prominent former and current Bostonians. Recently, while discussing why Boston even wanted this thing to begin with, an ex-Bostonian argued, “There’s a case to be made that Boston as a people don’t really give a fuck about being seen as a top-tier metropolis. Perhaps only its leadership still longs for that status. It is a great city. It has excellent food, sports, history, architecture, schools, et cetera. And in recent years, it seems to have only improved on a number of those fronts. But it’s always punched above its weight class. Maybe the people of Boston just want to be a great place to live and not have to act like they’re on the same status as NYC and L.A. Maybe they’re done status-chasing.”

Maybe they are. Or should be. A disinclination to participate in these sorts of pageants is understandable. Even honorable. I don’t consider it a failing. Boston isn’t great because it’s the best at everything. It’s great because it’s its own thing. Just like biologists measure animal intelligence by how well animals succeed at being animals, not by how well they act like people, we should judge Boston by how well it succeeds at being Boston. And we should only do things that enhance its Boston-ness, whatever that may be right now.

How will the events of this summer do that? Who are they actually for? What are we actually showing? And what does it all say about what this city has become—and is becoming—in the year 2026?

WITH APOLOGIES to Sail Boston, I’m going to only briefly address the tall ships. They’re coming from July 11 to 16. The city has hosted them multiple times, it always draws a good crowd, it looks cool, kids like it, it gets people outside, it’s not ruinously inconvenient to locals, other neighborhoods like Eastie and Charlestown get a piece of the action, and it’s fun to see Italian sailors getting plastered for free in the North End. Organizers are estimating the event will attract millions of visitors, which—who knows? Probably not? But it doesn’t matter. The tall ships are fine. We probably don’t have to worry about the tall ships. Go see them.

The World Cup, going from June 13 to July 9, is another matter. It’s expected to attract some 2 million visitors and generate more than $1.1 billion. To put it nicely, the preparation for the seven games planned for Gillette Stadium has been uneven. To put it accurately, it has been a goat rodeo. By spring, as most other host cities were hysterically setting whole dumpsters of cash on fire and sewing the last sequins on their pageant gowns and practicing their best smiles, we were still fighting in the mud over who was supposed to be doing what, and who would be responsible for paying the bill, and how any of this stuff was supposed to actually work. For a minute, it wasn’t even clear if the World Cup was going to happen here at all. The Athletic memorably called Boston’s preparations the “most fraught” of all World Cup host cities. But while it remains to be seen whether it’s reasonable to expect millions of foreign tourists to attend your party in the age of ICE, or sane to mount a World Cup whose success relies heavily on a flawless performance by the MBTA, or cruel to inflict the Gillette Stadium fan experience on a legion of unsuspecting foreigners, the World Cup will happen.

And it will probably all be fine. Chris Dempsey is the cofounder of Speck Dempsey, an urban design and city planning firm headquartered in Brookline. In a previous life, he was one of the founders of No Boston Olympics. That was the group that masterfully torpedoed Boston’s bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games a decade ago. While in some quarters that effort was seen as the handiwork of parochial killjoys lacking in vision, the city owes Dempsey and company a great debt for steering Boston away from what he estimated would have been a $10 billion boondoggle, destined to become a permanent feature in the fiscal lives of taxpayers for the next several ice ages.

Dempsey doesn’t buy the estimates that the state will reap $1 billion in revenue from the Cup, and he predicts it’ll end up costing far more than officials believe. He wishes that money and care and time could have gone toward things like schools and public health centers, but on the whole, he’s okay with the World Cup. “I’m pretty confident it’s all going to work out in the end, and there’s not going to be some embarrassment or disaster,” he says.

Okay, so what about the locals? What’s in it for them? Can they go to the games themselves? Or, as Southie’s Paul Ford put it, “How many people have $5,000 to toss away to go see soccer games?” As of April, tickets are mostly spoken for. You could still get a ticket to Haiti-Scotland on StubHub for between $700—for a seat so far from the action it might as well be in a bar in Mansfield—and more than $40,000 for one that allows you to see that the players have faces. You can also get a “hospitality package” for all seven games for $11,150 per person or rent a private suite at Gillette for between $102,000 to $162,800. It’s all just another opportunity for the rich to spend richly, in a city that does not lack for such opportunities. Maybe after the game, everyone can go try the $95 lobster tail at Nine restaurant on Beacon Hill. Maybe grab a spare to feed to the ducks in the park after. Maybe the ducks will give some to the homeless.

So no, the games themselves aren’t really for the locals. Their World Cup experience is likely to take place closer to home. In February, Boston’s host committee announced a fan festival on City Hall Plaza, promising a space in which “Fans will enjoy live match broadcasts, highlights, interactive games, activities, and a food and beverage program that reflects Boston’s local flavor.” As of presstime, no one has been able to give me any specifics about what the festival will actually entail. But the festival is happening. You will be able to go to the festival.

More promising than the prospect of hanging out in the wind-blasted wasteland that is City Hall Plaza, however, are the smaller events. These are also coming together higgledy-piggledy. Only in late March did the state award $10 million in grants to support community gatherings around the region, including viewing parties and neighborhood activations.

“The real question is: Are these events for locals?” says Ruthzee Louijeune, an at-large city councilor and daughter of immigrants who grew up in Hyde Park and Mattapan. Louijeune is pushing the city to include Black-, brown-, and veteran-owned businesses in the festivities, and pressing City Hall to support more events in the neighborhoods, particularly for Boston’s sizable Haitian and Cape Verdean populations (both countries will be playing in this year’s tournament). While Louijeune admits the city’s planning “is happening slower than any of us would have wanted…I do think that there’s still going to be really phenomenal events.”

These sorts of gatherings and the connections they may foster are also what excite Sam Mewis. She’s a women’s soccer legend from Massachusetts who played on the Women’s National Team in the 2019 World Cup, among many other accomplishments, and hosts The Women’s Game podcast. Mewis grew up in Hanson, a blue-collar community that placed a heavy emphasis on family and hard work. “I have a lot of pride in being from Massachusetts,” she says. “The opportunity to have soccer bring more people to the area, or help us stand out, feels like a convergence of my home and the thing that took me away from home,” she says. “For me, it feels like a really special opportunity to have all the people who made me the way I am cross paths with this huge global event celebrating the sport that has taken me to so many places.”

In other words, for Mewis, the World Cup will reunite the place that made her who she is with the person she has become. The past, the present, and the future will meet, and a newer, better, richer story will emerge.

Which brings us to Boston 250.

BACK IN MARCH, I walked the Freedom Trail for the first time in probably 40 years and listened to the National Park Service’s audio tour. At one point, the Northeastern professor Bill Fowler, a guest speaker on the tour, told a story about the Puritans. At the end, Fowler remarked, “It made for an interesting, if somewhat raucous, community, which is what Boston has always been.” I emailed Fowler to ask him what he made of the confluence of big events coming to Boston this summer. “Boston loves to celebrate!” he replied. He loves these parties, he said, “But celebrations should also be cerebrations. After the bands have gone home and the last firework has been sent off—what’s left?”

Boston 250 can be that cerebration. (Which is a word. I checked.)

But before we continue, a couple of caveats. Reporting on Boston 250 was…complicated. No one at City Hall was able to give me a definitive schedule of upcoming events, nor much by way of specific detail on what Boston 250 would entail, beyond a PowerPoint presentation and a couple of press releases. Mayor Wu wouldn’t agree to an interview. Nor would she answer emailed questions on the city’s preparations for the events of the summer in general, or Boston 250 in particular, or take a swing at what she considers singular about the city she governs. The mayor’s office did allow me to take a stroll with some officials working on Boston 250, who were passionate, intelligent, articulate, and a credit to the city and its mayor. But they weren’t authorized to speak on the record, so you’ll have to take my word for it. You can maybe request a transcript from the aide who followed us around recording the whole conversation on their phone. The paranoid ghost of Tom Menino, it seems, still stalks the corridors of City Hall.

Okay. That being said, let’s continue.

The theme of Boston 250 is “everyday revolutionaries.” The idea is to highlight the standard Revolutionary history that everyone learns in school, weave it together with the local histories that haven’t gotten as much attention—Black history, immigrant history, cultural history, scientific history, and oddball history like how the disco ball was invented in Charlestown—and place it all firmly in the context of how Bostonians live now.

There are a few things comprising Boston 250. By the time July Fourth rolls around, City Hall expects to mark a few dozen new historic sites around the city. They’ve established a $300,000 grant program, which community organizations can apply for to research and propose community markers in neighborhoods around the city. The city is working on a new app that will allow people to visit these historic sites, read the plaques, and then scan a QR code and listen to a story, or even enjoy an augmented reality presentation. All cool, and overdue. The city is also preparing a marketing push to introduce visitors to the city to Boston’s layered history.

There are also events. These are aimed at displaying history not as a thing that happened once upon a time, but is still happening, a continuum that modern Bostonians are very much a part of. For instance, in March, Boston 250 re-created part of Henry Knox’s famous march from Fort Ticonderoga to Roxbury with 59 stolen British cannons. The Boston event featured reenactors, horses, drums, fifes, and cannons—all the usual stuff—but they also wove in stories about Roxbury’s history as a cultural hub, showcased work curated by local artists, and brought in a drumline from the Hamilton-Garrett Center for Music & Arts.

I can’t offer much more about Boston 250 by way of specifics, as I don’t really have them as of presstime. But having discussed it with nameless individuals at a nameless City Hall, I have come to believe Boston 250 could actually be quite valuable, though as much as a thought exercise as an event. If the world is indeed coming here to see the best of this place—and not, you know, checking into a hotel, paying a fortune to ride the commuter rail, paying a fortune to attend a game, returning to their hotel, and flying home—what does Boston want them to see? To answer that, we have to ask, What is Boston? And to answer that, we have to ask, Who are Bostonians?

The fact is, I don’t have an answer to that question. I used to. But I haven’t for years, as the city changed so radically. Gentrification is a boon to a city’s finances, and diversity is a godsend for its dynamism, but both—separately or in tandem—can scramble a city’s identity and weaken its social fabric. What is a Bostonian in 2026? On the most basic level, a Bostonian is someone who can afford to live in Boston. But a city needs more than economic means to build its identity on. It needs something people can be proud to be a part of.

Boston 250’s idea of “everyday revolutionaries” is a good starting point. It draws from a past where ordinary Bostonians did extraordinary things, as a way to inspire modern Bostonians to see themselves as part of that lineage—to show them that they’re capable of similar feats of great daring in the face of cruelty, stupidity, and injustice, just by dint of being Bostonians, whether they grew up in Southie in the ’80s or came from Sulawesi a year ago.

“There are stereotypes that exist,” says Louijeune, “but I think that we are curious people, and we are interested in helping out our neighbors. I try to fight for a city that is warm and welcoming to all, and that doesn’t take any bullshit from people who are trying to bring us backward.”

As the world comes to Boston, show them that.

Back at the Haven in J.P., Jason Waddleton is ready. The kegs are ordered. The Tartan Army is coming, and so are the neighbors, and anyone else who wants to join.

He says it doesn’t matter where they come from. All are welcome. After all, that, to him, is the essence of the city. “If you walk into a bar in Boston and start talking,” he says, “you’ll have a conversation.”

And that’s a great place to start.

First published in the print edition of the June 2026 issue, with the headline,“The World Is Coming. Now What?”

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The blue-and-white Chevy Impala was missing. Raymond Scheublin noticed it the moment he pulled up to his home on Pine Hill Road—a quiet street in Bedford—in June 1971. He’d spoken to his wife, Natalie, earlier that afternoon, and the family car should have been parked out front. He walked through the garage door into the basement and glanced toward the stairs.

He froze.

Natalie, in shorts and a blouse, lay face-down on a blood-soaked rug. She had been stabbed twice, part of her skull bludgeoned into fragments. Her mouth had been gagged, her hands and feet bound with clothesline and articles of clothing. A piece of rope lay beneath her body. Raymond, a 52-year-old bank president who had served in World War II, hurried upstairs and called the police.

Bedford police officers arrived within minutes, calling in help from state troopers and homicide investigators. The door to the yard was unlocked—no sign of forced entry. Upstairs, Natalie’s purses had been rifled through, but nothing was taken. The silver and china were in their place. In the bathroom, the sink was streaked with blood, as if the killer had washed his hands before leaving. Police noted they found no murder weapon, but a paring knife and pinch bar were missing from the home.

Natalie was 54. She painted landscapes of the Concord River, kept a vegetable garden, and boated in Essex. She’d survived breast cancer—her daughter-in-law had washed her hair and helped her dress during the recovery. She had one grandchild and was planning to retire early with Raymond.

A police officer called the couple’s son, Kenneth, a Simmons graduate with a social work degree. “Your mother has been the victim of a homicide,” he recalled later, according to court records.

“Is this a sick joke?” Kenneth remembered saying. “I don’t believe you.”

The officer told him to hang up and call his parents’ house. On the other end of the line, Raymond told his son it was true.

Kenneth and his wife didn’t have a car and were out of cash, so they borrowed money from a neighbor and took a cab—17 miles to his childhood home. I just can’t believe this is happening, Kenneth repeated to his wife. When they pulled up, a hearse was backing out of the driveway.

Inside, investigators moved through the rooms, snapping photos and lifting fingerprints. Kenneth approached his father—not typically an emotional man—and offered a rare hug. Later that night, Kenneth recalled, according to court records, Raymond sat in shocked silence. At Natalie’s wake, it was all he could say: That bastard.

The house sat on a knoll at a bend in the road, encircled by woods. Police dispatched search teams, a State Police helicopter, and Air Force personnel. They canvassed neighbors and flagged down motorists. The killer had taken several keys from the home, including a set of bank keys. Raymond’s bank offered $5,000 for information and changed its locks. In this town of 12,500, residents had not been afraid to walk their own streets. Now they were. One neighbor reported seeing a neatly dressed man speed off in what looked like the Impala. The Boston Globe ran a police sketch: a slim man in his forties, fair complexion, and a bald spot.

Police found the Impala abandoned in the Veterans Administration Hospital parking lot, less than a mile away. Blood was inside. The car had been meticulously wiped down, but one clear thumbprint survived on a window. Detectives pulled the files of 750 VA patients, interviewing and fingerprinting many. One confessed—but officers ruled it a hoax. He hadn’t known about the stabbing. A pulp detective magazine later ran a piece titled “Mysterious Murder of the Banker’s Wife,” which made its way to a Kentucky prisoner who promised information in exchange for early parole. Another dead end.

What was the motive? Robbery gone wrong? Ransom? A psychotic attack? “It smelled more of a hit than just a random housebreak,” says Herbert Pike, the Bedford sergeant who responded to the crime scene. He is 87 now, living in Florida, and the only officer from that night who is still alive.

Without a national fingerprint database at the time, detectives couldn’t use the thumbprint on the Impala to identify a suspect. “Police admit they are stymied in their search,” the Globe reported at the time.

The case went cold. Raymond made near-daily trips to the cemetery to sit by Natalie’s grave. He sold the house less than a year after the killing and never remarried. He died in 2011 at 92 years old. The case file went into a box. The box went into storage. Natalie’s murder remained unsolved.

One day in 2020, the pandemic had nearly emptied the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office in Woburn. David Solet, who had spent the past year leading the office’s new Cold Case Homicide Unit—trawling through documents dating to the Civil Rights Era—used his keycard to enter the second-floor archives, accessible only to a handful of prosecutors, and stared at hundreds of boxes of cold-case files stacked 7 feet high, many yellowed and musty, some so caked in mold that he’d had staffers don protective gear and decontaminate them with a toothbrush in the parking lot.

The assistant district attorney glanced up and grabbed a box that felt heavier than most, labeled Scheublin, Bedford, 6/10/71, and peeked inside. Its contents—police reports, photos, sketches, and handwritten notes—had stiffened in the past half-century but were still legible. Flipping through, something caught his eye: a photo of a fingerprint, followed by pages of more recent evidence, a sign the case had already gotten a second look.

Solet could have joined a white-shoe firm after graduating from Harvard Law School, but chose the prosecutor’s office after working with indigent defendants and taking inspiration from a friend who worked with human-trafficking victims. He worked his way up to trying homicides and served as general counsel, the chief legal and ethical adviser to elected District Attorney Marian Ryan. His family eventually stopped asking when he’d get a real job.

After a four-year hiatus as legal counsel for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, during which he joined the Army Reserves, he returned to the DA’s office in 2019 to build the Cold Case Unit from the ground up. Aside from welcoming the challenge, he wanted to fight for families of murder victims he believed were deprioritized by law enforcement because of their race or class—to make good on the promise of equal justice under the law.

During his first year in the document morgue, he used a hand crank to retrieve boxes and leafed through sensational cases: decomposed bodies found in the woods, unidentified corpses buried without eulogy, mafia-style hits that shredded organs. He searched for hints police may have missed, retreading their paths, questioning lazy efforts. The work was demanding. Witnesses, cops, and journalists had died; physical evidence had been lost or destroyed. Many witnesses were originally uncooperative, but Solet wondered if time’s passage had blunted their misgivings. Perhaps they split with bad boyfriends, sobered up, or simply came to Jesus. “There are people who can be put under immense pressure to keep quiet,” he says, “and sometimes that can change.”

After pulling the Scheublin box and zeroing in on the fingerprint evidence, he scanned the entire file into PDFs so he could work on the case from his home attic—a makeshift pandemic office where cold-case boxes formed a semicircle around his desk and lamp.

There, he learned the thumbprint lifted from the Impala was so clear that cops at the time called it a “Helen Keller” print because even a blind person could see it. He also discovered that police reopened the case in 1999, following the FBI’s creation of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which quickly amassed tens of millions of prints of criminals and suspects, past and present.

The print belonged to a Lynn man named Arthur Massei—a career criminal whose specialty was bank fraud, with a history of charges for forging checks. He was 26, with a warrant out for his arrest, when Scheublin was murdered. He was still alive.

Solet’s strategy for building a case is to construct it like a stool. One or two legs are a start but often insufficient. Three legs are solid. Four are nearly unshakable. The fingerprint evidence was circumstantial—prints are fragile and can be damaged; misidentifications occur—but it was leg number one.

Squinting at his laptop through the attic’s dim lights, Solet came upon a trooper’s notes from a 2000 interview with Massei in a New York federal prison. Massei told the trooper he knew nothing about the killing, that he’d never been to Bedford in his life. Physically fit with dark hair, he hardly fit the description of the slim, fair-haired suspect sketched by police in 1971. Maybe the print meant nothing—Massei told the trooper that he could have unwittingly made a drug deal with the killer in Lynn. The trooper let the case go.

It was a plausible story. And deflating. But the next piece of evidence—an audio tape Solet grabbed from the case file—changed things. In 2005, out on bail after allegations of selling pills at a New Hampshire racetrack, Massei contacted police and tried to cut a deal: information on a 1971 murder in exchange for leniency on his pending charges. The trooper who’d visited him five years earlier traveled to Winchendon, a former textile town on the New Hampshire border, and knocked on his door. “God’s country,” the then-59-year-old called it.

Seated at a table, Massei told the trooper that in June of 1971, he’d just gotten out of jail when he was approached by a Lynn publican nicknamed Mr. Paul to do a murder-for-hire on behalf of a bank president with ties to the Winter Hill Gang. For $25,000, Massei would kill the banker’s wife.

“He says he wants his house broken into, and make it look like a breaking-in,” Massei told the trooper. “He wants his sweetheart to go to the angels.”

Massei claimed he’d declined. His cousin George carried it out, assisted by a triggerman named Buddy Leveridge and a Lynn bartender nicknamed Tony Dice, who’d signed on as getaway driver but bungled the pickup, Massei told the trooper. George, Massei said, never forgave himself and drank himself to death in 1996.

The trooper asked why he should believe any of this now.

“I’m giving ya a fuckin’ truth,” he replied, his dog barking somewhere nearby. “I can’t help it if you can’t solve it.”

The trooper looked for Mr. Paul and Tony Dice—both alive, but didn’t interview either one, according to court testimony. There were no records of a Buddy Leveridge and no connection between Raymond Scheublin and Whitey Bulger’s crew. Over time, the trooper got wrapped up in other investigations, and the Scheublin case went cold again.

Arthur Massei’s story was crazy—but maybe so crazy it was true.

Solet listened to the recording of the interview. Massei’s story was crazy—but maybe so crazy it was true. Either way, his intimate knowledge of Scheublin’s murder, combined with his thumbprint at the crime scene, was more than a coincidence. The prosecutor had leg number two.

Juggling a full caseload with only a paralegal and some college interns, Solet revisited the Scheublin files when he could. One day, he walked into the office of a recently deceased senior colleague, looking for documents, and spotted a folder labeled Scheublin. Someone else had been watching this case, too.

Later, Solet asked the Bedford police for a favor: a copy of the department’s 1971 leatherbound logbook with handwritten entries, the kind of relic discontinued in the ’90s. When he received the pages, Solet glossed over the small-town minutiae—someone’s dog escaped; the hardware store’s alarm went off; a stolen bike was found—until he reached the Scheublin entries and stopped. “Bank branch keys were STLN in murder,” a note read. “PLS watch until locks are changed.”

Massei’s main game was bank fraud. Solet kept turning the same question over: Why had he traveled all the way from Essex County to Bedford, passing hundreds of single-family homes, to end up at this one? The bank key was the answer. You only take bank keys if you want to get into a bank.

Solet knew not to get too excited. The killing occurred when Luis Aparicio patrolled the Red Sox infield and Carlton Fisk was still in the minors. No murder that old had ever been successfully prosecuted in Greater Boston. Not even close.

No murder this old had ever been successfully prosecuted in Greater Boston. Not even close.

Solet researched Massei’s records and learned he was living in Salem. To bolster his case, he wanted information on Massei’s associates over the past five decades—friends, roommates, cellmates, criminal accomplices, anyone still alive. For help, he asked the State Police to lend an investigator. The assignment went to an affable trooper named Michael Sullivan, who, Solet soon found out, had grown up not just in Bedford but on Pine Hill Road itself—three doors down from the Scheublin home.

Sullivan graduated from Bedford High in 1998, and after an Army tour, joined the Bedford Police Department in 2001 and the State Police in 2013. His father, one of 15 siblings from town, coached Sullivan’s football and baseball teams. Sullivan was a catcher—“the one commanding the field, which makes sense because he was a natural, quiet leader,” recalls former classmate Mike Korik. When the Scheublin case reopened, Sullivan volunteered to solve it for Natalie’s family—and for Bedford.

Solet convened a meeting at the State Police conference room inside the DA’s office, which had a large table, a flat-screen TV, and Venetian blinds for privacy. Sullivan partnered with a Bedford cop, Richard Vitale, who he knew from his time on the force. Solet briefed them: Massei’s thumbprint, his knowledge of the murder, the missing bank keys. Their assignment was to track down people who might share something incriminating. Maybe they no longer felt threatened.

“I wanted them to help me scour the earth,” Solet says. “We looked for any rock we could turn over.”

Most of the initial legwork fell to Solet, who searched criminal records, pulled police reports, studied news clips, and trolled social media. He mapped out a cast of characters from his office—decorated with his Judge Advocate General’s diploma, a vintage photo of Fenway Park, and a plaque gifted from a murder victim’s mother—like he was blocking out a play. Early mornings, he’d walk his dog, Pax, a rescue mutt from Arkansas, uttering facts aloud and hoping passersby didn’t think he was losing it. He was still juggling other cases, a slog that got harder after his paralegal was reassigned.

Many people he studied were dead, but several were alive. Phoning them wasn’t an option—many had criminal histories and would spook easily. This required shoe leather.

So Sullivan and his partner hit the road, making North Shore day trips to knock on doors. Sullivan was built like a linebacker, but his gift was disarming people with kindness—his natural disposition, Solet says.

After several interviews, the investigators formed a profile of Massei: humorous and often charming, a man who ran a successful bank-fraud hustle. “He was such an original,” former associate Toni Granese says. Several witnesses told investigators they feared him. One texted them from New York, worried that her husband and kids might learn of her past.

Sullivan updated Solet by phone every day about his trips to the North Shore, catching the prosecutor as he grocery shopped or schlepped his daughters to school. He began each morning with a cup of coffee with his father at his childhood home, passing the Scheublins’ old house daily. Some late nights, Sullivan listened to 1971 recordings of witness interviews, which drove his wife, a nurse, crazy. The investigators kept their assignment secret. If details connecting Massei to Scheublin went public, he might flee, or hurt a witness.

One day, Solet turned up 1991 booking photos of a heavily mustachioed Massei and three young women charged with attempting to defraud a Vermont bank. One of the women, Granese, then 23 with dark hair spilling over her shoulders, was apparently living in Lynn.

At Solet’s request, Sullivan and his partner sped along I-95 in an unmarked blue Chevy Malibu. They knocked on the door they believed was hers. No answer. They had a second possible address and zipped over. Another strikeout. Sullivan suggested trying a home listed under Granese’s daughter’s name. They rolled down a quiet block near a cul-de-sac and pulled up to a small home with a gabled roof, white siding, and kids’ toys in the front yard.

Sullivan knocked. A dark-haired woman appeared. Her face was weathered and more wrinkled than the girl in the Vermont booking photo, but matched her updated driver’s license. He knew he’d found his woman.

“Hi, Mike Sullivan with the State Police,” he said. “Are you Toni Granese?”

The 52-year-old said she was.

“No one’s in trouble, everything’s okay, but we want to talk to you about Arthur Massei.”

Her eyes widened—like she was rewinding her mind to a forgotten time, tugging open a wound. “Is he looking for me?”

“No,” Sullivan said, pulling out his notebook. “We just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

Granese—a waitress, three years sober, and soon to be a recovery specialist—stepped outside. Her granddaughter was playing in the house.

For six or seven months in 1991, Granese would later testify in court, she and Massei had been on the road together, hitting banks from Pennsylvania to Maine. They’d dumpster-dive behind banks and surface with account numbers and names. They’d forge checks, deposit them, and ask for half the money back in cash. They’d stay in hotels, chat up bar patrons, and travel up and down New England—a Bonnie and Clyde act that worked until it didn’t. Her cut alone was half a million dollars, but it finally caught up to them in Vermont when they hit the same bank twice after a $26,000 score, Granese says.

Before they got caught, Granese drove while Massei rode shotgun, doing drugs, spinning stories, and bragging that he knew Whitey Bulger, she later testified. She took him for a bullshit artist. Then one day, he told Granese he’d stabbed someone with a knife in the person’s home, carving them up like a piece of meat. She didn’t believe him. But she wondered why he always carried a knife.

Years later, she found herself pondering if the story was true. “And the next thing you know, cops are at my door,” she says now.

Sullivan thanked Granese, keeping his face neutral. Back in the car, he turned to his partner.

“Wow, that was good, huh?”

As they sped off, he called Solet.

“Dave, you won’t believe it.”

Solet’s heart began to pound. The third leg of the stool.

 

With Granese’s story, Solet’s instinct was to indict immediately—justice had been delayed for too long—but there were still steps to take. First, he wanted eyes on Massei; a quick arrest might be needed, and surveillance might also uncover more evidence.Sullivan traveled to Salem and found Massei living in a downtown apartment near the Witch House. Then in his mid-seventies, Massei wore a strong mustache and slicked dark hair and took daily walks through the city’s pedestrian market, popping into shops and cutting it up with people he knew. Sullivan kept his distance as he tailed him; getting caught would torpedo months of work. But he sometimes struggled to keep up with the remarkably spry old man, picking up his pace and ducking behind buildings as needed.

Massei had an odd habit of doing pushups in public and kept a strict routine, as if he were still in prison. When Sullivan mentioned it to Solet, the prosecutor grew queasy over dinner. Massei was still strong, possibly capable of violence, Solet realized, and he lived just a county away from his children, who at that moment were doing homework in their rooms.

It’s possible Massei knew he was being followed. During a snowstorm, he visited a Lynn acquaintance, Maureen Hohmann, a pet-grooming business owner in her early sixties who’d bought pills from him in the past. Massei occasionally stopped by her shop and sat with anxious dogs, Hohmann recalls now. She pitied him—he didn’t have a car, and she thought he was funny. He called her Mo.

Hohmann says Massei warmed up from the cold in her house and mentioned that police were after him for a murder he didn’t commit. “We were snowbound in here, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’” she recalls. Still, he was old. He didn’t seem the murderous type.

With only circumstantial evidence, Solet knew proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt would be challenging. He wanted physical evidence to help bolster his case—and there was a chance to get it.

When Scheublin’s body was discovered, police collected a piece of rope found under her. Four decades later, following DNA forensic breakthroughs, lab analysts determined the rope was handled by an unknown male. If Solet could obtain Massei’s DNA and prove a match, it was game over.

That wouldn’t be easy. Massei would never agree to submit DNA voluntarily, and a court-ordered swab would make him run after police let him go. Solet needed to collect it covertly and asked Sullivan to find a way.

A few days later, Sullivan watched as Massei walked through the market, gripping a coffee cup. For the next hour, he, his partner, and two more Bedford officers tailed him from afar, watching as he stopped for pushups and conversation. Massei held onto the cup the entire walk, and when he reached his apartment, he flipped it into a trashcan.

When Massei was out of sight, they rushed to the trash can, where an officer reached a gloved hand in and fished out the coffee cup. It said “Artie.”

Sullivan called Solet with the score, and the prosecutor told his friend at the State Police crime lab to be on the lookout for a sample.

Days later, the analyst called back. Solet braced himself. It was a miss.

Solet still believed he had the right man and typed up a letter of indictment for first-degree murder. A grand jury indicted him. Sullivan and a team of police and state fugitive officers went into Massei’s apartment building and asked the manager to call him down and play it casual. When Massei emerged from the elevator, he tried brushing past them but didn’t get far.

“Mike Sullivan, State Police. We have a warrant out for your arrest from Bedford,” the trooper said.

“Bedford?” said Massei. “For what?”

“Murder.”

Sullivan’s partner cuffed Massei while Sullivan read him his rights.

Before the arrest hit the newspapers, Solet called Kenneth Scheublin in Cambridge. “A man has been arrested for your mother’s murder,” Solet told him. Kenneth became emotional. “I was thinking that whoever it was would be dead by now,” he later said.

Back in Middlesex County, Massei pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. When Solet locked eyes with him at the arraignment, Massei had no idea who he was looking at. But I know you well, Solet remembers thinking, staring at the man whose photos he’d studied for nearly two years.

In the Middlesex jail, Massei set up a commissary account—flush with cash from a $25,000 personal injury settlement against UPS, after claiming he’d been hit by a truck, Hohmann says. He named Hohmann power of attorney and told her to keep the funds flowing.

As his case moved toward trial, Solet began listening to audio files of Massei’s recorded jail calls. For hours, the prosecutor tried to stay awake as Massei droned on about bad jail food and dwindling canteen funds.

Then Solet listened as Massei told Hohmann it was unwise to discuss certain things on the phone—better to use the mail. Solet jotted a reminder on a piece of scratch paper. The recording wasn’t enough for a search warrant, but if anyone could persuade Hohmann to hand over a letter or two, it was Sullivan.

Days later, Sullivan knocked on her door. After brief hellos, Sullivan told her they had questions for her about Massei. Her response caught him off guard.

She ducked inside, returned with dozens of envelopes, and handed him the bundle. Many were still sealed. Massei had grown threatening, she told Sullivan. Eventually, she stopped reading them.

“He turned nasty on me when his money was running low,” Hohmann says now. “Once he threatened my mother, all bets were off.” Sullivan called Solet with the hopeful news. “Bring ’em back, and we’ll read them together,” Solet said.

An hour later, the envelopes were splayed across the State Police conference table, organized by postmark date. Solet and Sullivan dug in. Several notes, which alternated between uppercase and lowercase letters, were threatening. Solet also learned Massei ran a loan-shark operation on the side, charging some destitute borrowers up to 100 percent interest.

Solet wasn’t surprised by Massei’s repeated claims of innocence. But then he noticed something that made him stop in his tracks.

Massei referenced a woman named Judy Emma—the since-deceased girlfriend of Massei’s cousin George, the one he’d accused of the Scheublin murder during the 2005 Winchendon interview. Solet recognized the name.

“Hey, you don’t know anyone in their fifties or seventies or eighties who may have gone to AA meetings in Peabody, a church on Lynn Street, may have buddied up with Judy Emma?” Massei wrote. He mentioned one of Hohmann’s pet-store clients, a woman named Mary Ann Lupo. “Didn’t she go to AA meetings?”

Then he offered a proposition: If Lupo told his lawyer that Emma had once claimed George killed Scheublin, “I’d sure give one thousand so she could get to court.”

Solet couldn’t believe the gift. Innocent people don’t try to bribe witnesses.

The prosecutor was too measured to call it a clincher. But he might have just found the fourth leg of his stool.

The morning of opening statements, in Massei’s trial, Solet slipped on a navy suit, knotted his favorite striped tie, and nibbled on a piece of toast—too nervous to eat anything more. At the defense table, Massei wore a hearing amplification device—a strategy to emphasize his old age, Solet suspected.

Kenneth Scheublin was preparing to testify. Since Massei’s arrest, Solet had come to know Kenneth as kind and dignified. The two men at the center of this—Kenneth and Massei—had both been in their mid-twenties when Natalie died. Now, after 10 presidential administrations, each was pushing 80, unable, in their own way, to escape the darkness of 1971. Their lives had collided again.

During Kenneth’s testimony, he talked of fond memories of his mother and the moment he learned of her death. There was also this: Three years after the murder, a sheet of paper arrived in the mail with magazine-clipped letters of various shapes and colors cut and pasted onto it. “You killed your mother over the will,” it read. During cross-examination, Massei’s attorney asked whether Kenneth’s father, Raymond, had any ties to organized crime—whether there was any reason he might have hired someone to kill his own wife.

Kenneth answered no to both.

Herbert Pike, the only living officer at the crime scene, traveled from Florida to testify. Silver-haired and dressed in a camel-hair sports coat, the 85-year-old spoke about the murder as his adult sons watched from the gallery. “I probably never stopped thinking about it,” he says now. As he left the stand, a former colleague pulled him into an embrace.

During closing arguments, Massei’s attorney declared there was “no evidence” connecting Massei to the crime. Massei’s appearance didn’t match the original police sketch. The theory that Massei broke into the Scheublin’s home to steal Raymond’s bank keys was “sheer speculation.” And the brutality of the murder—the stabbing, the bludgeoning, the bindings—suggested the crime was personal, not a calculated home invasion.

When it was his turn, Solet told jurors the DNA on the rope could have come from a gloveless police officer, a hardware store clerk, or an accomplice. The sketch might have depicted a potential accomplice, he said. Then he pulled out his ace—motive. Massei, he said, “went into the home of a bank president likely looking for bank documents or bank profit, and encountered Ms. Scheublin and tied her up. And having tied her up had to decide whether to let her live and potentially identify him, or to kill her. And after a period of deliberation, weighing the costs and the benefits, he killed her.”

After three days of deliberation, the jury found Massei guilty of murder—and of solicitation to suborn perjury for attempting to manufacture a witness in his letter to Hohmann. Solet took a deep breath and listened to the room exhale behind him. He allowed himself a moment of pride, then turned and spotted Kenneth in the front row. He seemed calm, even carrying a soft smile. When court adjourned, Solet and Sullivan huddled with Kenneth. (Kenneth chose not to comment for this story. Citing Massei’s appeal, Sullivan and Vitale did not have permission to comment. Massei did not respond to two letters sent to him at Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Shirley; his trial lawyer, Mark Wester, and appellate attorney, Neil Fishman, each declined to comment.)

During the sentencing two weeks later, Kenneth again took the stand. “One thing that hasn’t varied is the ache in my heart that I have carried with me for 53 years,” Kenneth said, describing the “image and the horror of what my mother must have gone through.” He pictured her getting dragged down the stairs onto the basement’s cement floor. “Did she plead with the perpetrator?” Kenneth said. “Did she say, ‘Don’t hit me?’ Did she pray to God? Did she yell out my father’s name?”

After learning of his mother’s death over the phone, it took him a decade before he could hear a phone ring without his heart pounding, he told the jury. “I resigned myself to the fact that my mother’s murder would never be solved,” he said, looking directly at the defendant. “It didn’t quite work out that way, did it, Mr. Massei?”

In the months following the trial, Solet continued leading the Middlesex Cold Case Unit, reinvestigating and prosecuting several murder and sex assault cases to conviction. He was named the county’s prosecutor of the year.

Behind the scenes, though, Solet says things were tense between him and his boss, District Attorney Marian Ryan. Both before and after the Massei case, he asked her repeatedly to add a second prosecutor to staff the Cold Case Unit, but she declined. At one point, Solet says, she offered a volunteer lawyer—a longtime campaign donor with no criminal law experience—who wrote just one memo.

Things came to a head after Solet began investigating a 1980s rape case—a stranger who had climbed through a first-floor hotel window in Bedford and raped a 33-year-old woman on a work trip. Solet used genetic genealogy to match crime-scene DNA to a man still alive. But the Massachusetts statute of limitations for aggravated rape is just 15 years. Forty-seven other states have longer limits—many with a DNA exception that stops the clock until a suspect is identified.

Solet says he approached Ryan to suggest she use the case to lobby for a new state law, but she declined, worried that a prominent local defense attorney wouldn’t get on board. “I was dumbstruck,” he recalls. “I think that she thought for her own political purposes, it was good to keep as many influential people happy with her as possible.”

When Solet called the victim to recommend a civil lawsuit, Ryan had instructed him not to reveal the suspect’s name—unless she asked. She didn’t.

In September, Solet typed up his resignation letter, handed it to Ryan, and told her he was running to unseat her as DA. “I said, ‘Marian, it’s not just about the Bedford case, but it is about the Bedford case,’” he says. “‘I don’t think what you did was right.’”

Solet announced his campaign that month, pledging to expand the Cold Case Unit into a national model. “We will not forget about the victims,” he says. He also promised to lobby to change the statute of limitations for rape. Ryan then announced she’d do the same. It infuriated him. (Ryan did not respond to requests for comment.)

More than 300 murder cases in Middlesex County remain unsolved. There is no state tracking system for cold cases. Boston reached out to all 11 of Massachusetts’ DA offices to ask about their oldest case resulting in a conviction; only the Hampden County office could cite a murder predating 1971, which was pleaded down to a manslaughter conviction.

That leaves more than 300 families in Middlesex County waiting. More than 300 Natalie Scheublins. Their files still sitting in a box.

Was it the first fight ever to break out at Nantucket’s annual Christmas Stroll? That we don’t know. But what we do know is this: It was the first Christmas Stroll skirmish ever to end up on TMZ.

On a misty Saturday this past December, the denizens of Nantucket, along with tourists who’d ferried over from the mainland for a visit, gathered in the island’s quaint downtown for the local chamber of commerce’s annual holiday celebration—a charming little affair featuring crafts, seasonal entertainment, all the hot chocolate you could drink, and a visit from Santa himself. Although, as we shall see, the man in the big red suit would soon be overshadowed.

The trouble started inside the Boarding House restaurant when a woman apparently bumped a man at the crowded bar. For whatever reason, the man didn’t take kindly to this; there may, in fact, have been a return shove. In any event, before you knew it, the hubbub inside the bar had spilled out onto the street. When the video starts—because of course there’s video—you see a group of guys pacing around, pointing fingers. Things actually look like they might be simmering down, until one guy makes an aggressive move toward another guy. He’s quickly restrained, but just a few feet away, a third guy takes this opportunity to coldcock a fourth guy, at which point a fifth guy jumps on the fourth guy’s back—and throws him to the ground.

Just like a Bruins game, the benches cleared.

A pack of people, including a sixth young man with a sweatshirt knotted around his neck, goes after Guy Number Five. But Number Five deftly eludes the swarm, ducking under one punch, then backpedaling, Muhammad Ali–style, to avoid another. His agility seems to throw the pack off their rhythm, and after a few more moments, calmer heads prevail. Exhale.

In a different age, of course, that would have been the end of that. But this being the age it is, the end was really just the beginning. Video of the tussle soon made its way into the hands of the Nantucket Current, a local news site, which posted the footage to its Instagram account. Over the next day or so, virality ensued. TMZ did an item about the incident, as did many other click-seeking publications, including Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Beast, and the Daily Mail. When an eyewitness named Kathleen called into radio station Kiss 108 to talk about the fight—she described it as a battle between twentysomethings and sixtysomethings—video of that conversation was viewed more than 22,000 times. But who could blame people for being interested? As Kathleen put it, “It was like the Sharks and the Jets from West Side Story, only in Ralph Lauren and Burberry.”

My hunch is that the Nantucket Christmas Stroll Brawl of 2025 will be a one-off; it’s hard to imagine the island’s powers that be allowing a rematch or teaming up with UFC for something bigger. That said, the buzz about the incident is absolutely emblematic of the current cultural fascination with all things Nantucket.

For decades, New Englanders looked at the island as the pretty, preppy destination just off the coast where a certain well-heeled segment of the population spent its summers. Today, though, Nantucket has become something more than that: a symbol to the rest of America—maybe even the world—of life among the billionaire class.

And they—and we—can’t get enough. Nantucket-set books and shows are having a moment. Nantucket-focused content creators are swimming in views. Meanwhile, journalists are spilling buckets of digital ink about Nantucket, from stories about the fast-rising cost of island real estate to its ever-swelling number of billionaires. (One estimate puts the total at more than 75, including financiers David Rubenstein and Stephen Schwarzman, Fidelity honcho Abigail Johnson, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.)

And then there are the delicious tales of Rich Nantucketers Behaving Badly, which includes not just the Christmas Stroll fight, God bless it, but also the tale of the über-wealthy Nantucketer who chainsawed his neighbor’s trees to improve his view of the ocean. There’s the recent litigation-filled feud among three Nantucket titans over a clam shack downtown. And then there’s the elevated levels of cocaine in Nantucket’s wastewater, discovered last summer and continuing into recent months (which, come to think of it, may explain all the other incidents).

What’s going on here? Well, in part it reflects our current cultural interest in money, which I’d argue is greater than at any point since the 1980s. Not only are business titans now treated like Hollywood stars—Jeff Bezos’s nuptials last year were covered like a royal wedding—but in a survey not long ago, nearly 50 percent of Gen Z and Millennial respondents described themselves as “obsessed” with becoming wealthy.

But I also think our great Nantucket fascination says something about Nantucket itself. As I learned on a recent excursion there, there’s something about the place, sociologically speaking, that’s not quite the same as other rich locales.

Then again, it’s possible I’m overthinking all this. As longtime Nantucketer David Worth opined to me, “Maybe it’s just human nature to enjoy the spectacle of privileged people with sweaters tied around their necks, young and old, pummeling one another.”

Fair.

A few weeks after the Christmas Stroll, I find myself on a chilly January day in downtown Nantucket. Locals describe winter here as “peaceful,” although another apt term would be “dead.” As I texted my wife on the lonely ferry ride over from Hyannis, “I think there might be more golden retrievers on board than people.”

Fortunately, I discover that plenty of islanders, perhaps because they’re bored stiff, are game to chat, including Bernadette Meyer, an engaging woman who happens to be one of Nantucket’s most successful real estate agents.

“Nothing surprises me anymore,” she says when we start talking about Nantucket’s housing market. Not only have home prices nearly doubled since 2020—the median price now tops $3.5 million—but buyers, who once hailed mostly from New England and New York, are coming from all over, including Florida, California, Texas, and Europe. (The Texas connection initially perplexes me—it seems an odd cultural match—until I’m reminded that Houston in August is the most miserable spot in the entire Western Hemisphere.)

The common link among these New Nantucketers is money. Lots of it. Look at the windows of local real estate offices and you’ll see no shortage of houses on the market for $10 million, $20 million, $30 million. And oftentimes that’s just the starting point. Meyer tells me about a client of hers who bought a home on the island for $14 million—and is now putting another $15 million into it.

Of course, when it comes to extreme wealth, this isn’t—pardon another Texas reference here—Nantucket’s first rodeo. Back in the 18th century, the island was the center of the lucrative whale-oil industry, which helped light and lube a growing nation. “It was really the Silicon Valley of its time,” says William Cohan, the New York–based author and journalist who’s written frequently about Nantucket in recent years. (More on Cohan in a moment.) But the dominance of Big Whale Oil didn’t last forever, and when it was disrupted by electricity, Nantucket slumped. Indeed, as one local tells me, the difference between Nantucket in 1900 and Nantucket in 1960 wasn’t really that big.

So how did that Nantucket become the high-priced one we’re now obsessed with? Well, lots happened, but there were a few significant moments of change. One was the 1970s, when local land conservation efforts kicked into high gear; today, more than 50 percent of Nantucket is off-limits to development, which has not only preserved the island’s back-to-nature vibe but also created scarcity in the real estate market. The ’70s were also the period when New Yorkers first started summering on Nantucket in significant numbers, drawn by a runway extension at the island airport that allowed jets to take off and land.

Speaking of New Yorkers: Even more came in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when paydays on Wall Street started getting really huge. Nantucket real estate agent Robert Young—whose family has owned a bike shop in the wharf area for generations—remembers that in the year or two after Goldman Sachs went public in 1999, no fewer than 10 partners built pricey homes on Nantucket. Also going all in on Nantucket during that era was Boston developer Steve Karp, who in 2005 spent $75 million on 50 island properties and pushed the island, hardly a shabby place, in an even more upscale direction.

The most recent period of disruption was COVID. Suddenly running their businesses via Zoom, CEOs and finance titans began to realize they could really live anywhere, and many of them hightailed it to places like Wyoming, Colorado, and especially Florida. “Florida is a great place to live 10 months out of the year, but where were they going to go for the other two months?” asks Meyer. For a growing number of America’s wealthy, the answer has been Nantucket.

The island’s natural beauty is one reason for that; its chill vibe is another. Nantucket may now have the net worth of a midsize European nation, but its old ways still hold: Ratty summer shorts and worn Top-Siders are perfectly fine attire.

Of course, maybe the biggest reason for the mass gathering of the rich on Nantucket is what we might call Newton’s Third Law of High-Net-Worth Individuals, which states that if you put two billionaires together in the same space, they will instantly attract two more billionaires. And then those four billionaires will instantly attract four more billionaires…and so on.

“It’s an enclave,” Boston real estate developer Bruce Percelay, also the publisher of N Magazine and the Nantucket Current, says of the island. “People can be themselves here because they’re surrounded by other wealthy people. There’s no apologizing for your success.” Nantucket is so clubby, Percelay continues, that well-known people don’t even bother to unlist their phone numbers. I’m a little skeptical about that claim—until I go to the Nantucket Atheneum, ask for a copy of the phone directory, and indeed find numbers for David Rubenstein and Wendy Schmidt (wife of Eric).

While Percelay emphasizes chumminess, others point to a different reason for the gaggle of billionaires: status. One of those people happens to be Percelay’s media competitor, David Worth, a retired business exec who a few years ago put together a group to buy the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, the island’s 200-plus-year-old newspaper. (Worth is a fitting owner: His family was among Nantucket’s first white settlers.) “There’s a portion of the population that has got a lot of money and wants the validation that comes from being with other people with a lot of money,” Worth tells me. “They want the reflected status of attaching themselves to other wealthy people.”

It goes too far to say the influx of the rich has had no impact on Nantucket. They’ve certainly driven up real estate prices, which has, in turn, created a crisis for the non-wealthy people of Nantucket—many of whom are being priced off the island. It’s a problem, and most islanders know it.

That said, the general consensus is that Nantucket’s spirit hasn’t really changed. Today’s mega-rich Nantucket is not really so different from the merely affluent Nantucket that preceded it, nor from the middle-class Nantucket that preceded that. “You don’t usually see people driving around in Bentleys,” Percelay says. “Last summer I think I saw one, but that person does not get Nantucket.” He pauses. “Nantucket is a language. There’s an underlying expectation of behavior.”

To emphasize his point, Percelay tells me a story. Recently, an impressed-with-himself diner at local restaurant Galley Beach kept snapping his fingers, trying to get his server’s attention. When the server came over to ask how she could help, Mr. Finger Snapper said he was in a big hurry and needed to close out his tab right away. “Mine’s the Amex Black Card,” he instructed.

The server came back a moment or two later and unfurled her shirt, at which point any number of Black Cards spilled out and landed on the table. “Which one’s yours?” she asked.

Percelay laughs. “Don’t try to be important here.”

Nantucket was never an unknown place—the island is central to Melville’s classic Moby-Dick; its signature red pants feature prominently in the nearly-as-influential The Official Preppy Handbook from 1980—but there’s no question there’s been an increase in interest in the island over the past decade, an uptick in its status. In 2016, the Financial Times was one of the first publications to report on the influx of Really Big Money in a piece headlined “Why Homes on Nantucket, Massachusetts Are Reeling in the Rich.” Two years later, Forbes noted that real estate prices on Nantucket had actually exceeded those in the Hamptons. Two years after that, Vanity Fair reported that some of those pricey homes, alas, were in danger of falling into the ocean thanks to climate change.

The author of that Vanity Fair piece was William Cohan, a Wall Street–exec-turned-writer who’s made a career out of reporting on the rich and powerful—and who’s arguably become the foremost chronicler of Nantucket’s (occasionally misbehaving) money crowd. In addition to that Vanity Fair story, Cohan has written pieces about the island for Town & Country, Air Mail, and Puck—the last of those offering a tasty account of a battle involving billionaires Steve Karp (of real estate fame), Charles Johnson (of Franklin Templeton Investments fame), and Charles Schwab (of, um, Charles Schwab fame) over a planned clam shack on Nantucket’s wharf. The gist: Johnson, and initially Schwab (who later changed sides), were concerned that said clam shack was going to attract Very Loud People, which billionaires who live nearby do not appreciate. After a going-to-the-mattresses period involving lawyers and threats and Johnson taking his private jet to a select board hearing, the dispute was resolved (with help from—he’s everywhere!—Bruce Percelay).

Cohan has had some sport with Nantucket in recent years, but when we talk, it’s clear he has deep affection for the place. His family vacationed on the island when he was a kid, and in 2009, he bought a summer home there (albeit one whose existence is threatened by the coastal erosion he wrote about in 2019). Cohan tells me he and his wife have made great friends on Nantucket through the years—people who are smart, interesting, and accomplished. “It does attract people who’ve been successful,” he says. “And it’s fun to just hang out with them in this incredibly beautiful setting.”

As for the bad behavior he’s chronicled among the Nantucket billionaire set, Cohan says it might tell us more about the media age we’re in than Nantucket’s fundamental character. “There’s actually still a Puritan streak on Nantucket,” Cohan says. “But now with social media, one little thing happens and—boom!—it blows up.”

I should note here that not all of the news from Nantucket is of the scandalous or eye-rolling variety. There’s now a whole vein of Nantucket-related content online that’s decidedly celebratory and aspirational, offering ways that you, too, can be a Prep and no longer care about the trend cycle. “These 18 Nantucket-Inspired Dresses Will Make You Look Old Money Rich,” Us Weekly’s website gushed last year, rounding up a dozen-and-a-half outfits that are “comfy, classy and all sorts of chic” and that “start at just $18!” (A good Prep loves a deal.) Influencers have also become attuned to Nantucket. On Instagram, a search for #Nantucket will net you 1.2 million posts, while inputting “Nantucket” on YouTube will give you an endless stream of videos, from “My Favorite Places in Nantucket” (courtesy Rich Person Bethenny Frankel) to “A Week in My Life on Nantucket” to “I Survived on America’s Richest Island with $0.” (To which I say: too far, friend. A good Prep is thrifty, not a mooch.)

When it comes to #NantucketLife, no one has been more of an evangelist than author and Nantucket resident Elin Hilderbrand. Over the past quarter century, Hilderbrand, who’s sold more than 20 million books, has written two dozen bestselling beach reads that essentially feature Nantucket as the main character. Her secret? Her ability to blend beautiful Nantucket with bad-behaving Nantucket.

That was the secret sauce of The Perfect Couple, Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel that became a six-part Netflix series in 2024. Filmed mostly in Chatham (with some exterior shots of Nantucket for authenticity), the series had it all—money, sex, drugs, great settings, good cheekbones, and a deliciously nasty Nicole Kidman as the main character. It did so well—the series was among Netflix’s most streamed programs of the year—that this year Peacock is rolling out a streaming version of Hilderbrand’s The Five-Star Weekend, which filmed on Nantucket last fall. Hilderbrand told N Magazine that the series’ stars—especially Jennifer Garner—fell in love with Nantucket. “She’s like, ‘Elin, I am in heaven,’” Hilderbrand shared.

Which, you know, was basically correct.

In many ways, the current cultural obsession with Nantucket is easy to understand. From Shakespeare to Succession, we’ve always been enthralled with the rich and powerful. On the one hand, we want to know what it’s like to live their lives; on the other hand, we can’t believe how good it feels when they behave like asses. It’s such a magical way to balance the scales—to chainsaw such people down to size. Okay, I might not be rich. But at least I’m not a douchebag trying to shut down somebody’s clam shack.

But I’d argue there’s an additional layer to our fascination with Nantucket. Most of the people I talked to for this story emphasized that, despite the number of billionaires on the island, it isn’t really like other ultra-wealthy places. There are lots of gorgeous homes, but most of them are not the old-money, ostentatious mansions you see in Palm Beach or Newport. There’s a social scene, but it’s not defined by the exhausting social climbing and name-dropping that typifies the Hamptons. And while of course there are wealthy boldfaced names on Nantucket, they’re not the kinds of “stars” you associate with Martha’s Vineyard (Oprah, Carly Simon, Larry David, the Obamas). Nantucket’s heavy hitters are people who—at least before COVID—got up and went to offices and sat in boring meetings and tapped things on computers, just like many of us do. They just happened to make a billion bucks doing it.

The point: For all its wealth, Nantucket is actually kind of…normal. Granted, it’s the most perfect version of “normal” you could imagine—the cute cottages! the unbelievable sunsets! the golden retrievers!—but “normal” nonetheless. Indeed, it’s the kind of place many of us imagined ourselves having access to if only we worked hard and got into good schools and played by the rules.

The problem? The world no longer seems to work that way—or maybe it only ever did for a few people. And so when it comes to Nantucket, the rest of us press our noses against the glass, fascinated, appalled, and occasionally envious, while fingering the fabric on an $18 frock.

It’s the kind of place many of us imagined having access to if only we worked hard and got into good schools and played by the rules.

How much longer will our Nantucket fascination last? Perhaps that question is connected to another: How much longer will Nantucket last?

I’m not referring to the shoreline erosion—though houses dropping into the ocean would at least have me checking my homeowner’s policy. I’m referring more to Nantucket as it currently exists.

Among a couple of people I spoke with, there was concern about the future, at least when it came to the have/have-not divide I mentioned earlier. “Here’s the misconception,” one person says. “The people who make their living on Nantucket are not wealthy. They struggle with the cost of living. They struggle for housing. The middle class is getting priced out.”

There’s a moral component to that complaint, but there’s also a practical one. The people we’re talking about are the ones who keep Nantucket running—cops and firefighters and teachers and nurses and town employees. A growing number have already abandoned ship, so to speak, and make their daily commute via ferry from the mainland.

To Nantucket’s credit, there are efforts afoot to deal with the issues. There are plans for more affordable housing, and Percelay has led the charge on ending hunger on Nantucket with an organization that pulls together all the different forms of support that are out there. All of that is to Nantucketers’ credit—it speaks to the sense of community people told me about—but the responses feel more like Band-Aids than actual cures.

Then again, if you have enough money, you can pretty much buy Band-Aids forever. And Nantucket has enough money.

The day I was leaving Nantucket, I took a walk. I’d seen a home listed for nearly $32 million, and I wanted to get a close-up look at it. The house was in the most affluent part of the island—Monomoy—and while that was a mile-and-a-half away from where I was staying, I decided to hoof it. The wind had kicked up, and so this was not the most enjoyable stroll I’d ever had. But after about 20 minutes I finally made it.

When I got there, I looked at the house, then got out my phone to double-check the address. This place?

It’s not that it wasn’t nice. It was really nice. It was on more than an acre of property, and the view was spectacular, and it had the cedar-shingled Nantucket look you see all over social media. Then again, it seemed like it could use a little work, and the house next door was kind of on top of it. $32 million?

I write that as if I were wrestling with whether I had an interest in this place, which, of course, I didn’t. Mostly because I don’t have $32 million.

But somebody does—probably someone who has a Black Card, maybe someone who speaks Nantucket. I hope they enjoy it. Then again, if I ever see that person in a video, caught up in a melee with a sweater tied around their neck, oh my God, I’m going to laugh so, so hard.

The old script went like this: A lovestruck fellow would save his paycheck—for months, maybe years—to afford an engagement ring. Or a lucky heir would receive a rare bauble handed down across generations, the same one that glittered at a great-grandmother’s cocktail party.

These were natural diamonds: formed more than a hundred miles beneath the Earth’s surface under intense pressure and heat over billions of years, no two exactly alike, and eventually gleaming behind glass in jewelry cases. Romantic, rare, and—let’s be honest—ruthlessly expensive.

But when Spencer’s Mikaela Smith got engaged, she had something else in mind: a lab-grown diamond. Produced in a controlled setting with less labor and less environmental disruption, the stone has the same chemical and physical properties as a mined diamond, at just a fraction of the cost, and even the most experienced jeweler can’t tell the difference by sight alone.

A salon manager planning a June wedding at the Beauport Hotel in Gloucester, Smith says price was the primary driver for her and her fiancé, a high school English teacher. “We talked about it and just looked at the cost,” she says. “We could get a lot more for the value with a lab diamond.”

Smith worked with Wright Jewelry & Design Company in Hudson to customize a 2-carat, oval lab-grown diamond with side stones. The ring cost around $7,000, she says—far less than a comparable natural version. “I didn’t really care about the heirloom aspect,” Smith says. “What mattered was how it looked. And it was really cool to support a local business and get a custom design.”

A $7,000 stone that passes for a $70,000 one would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Today, it’s transforming the diamond industry, with even local jewelers at the highest end selling pieces made with lab-grown stones. “Lab-grown diamonds tend to resonate because they allow [buyers] to invest in something that’s still certified and has a quality design,” says Alyson Iarrusso, who runs New England–based Cove Fine Jewelry. “It’s really gone from ‘What can I afford?’ to ‘What do I want?’” Which, if you think about it, is a pretty big shift in a business that has always depended on the distance between those two questions.

For many Boston couples, lab-grown is more than just a budget-friendly choice: It’s a way to signal values—sustainability, ethical sourcing, smart spending. As Iarrusso puts it: “People buy lab-grown and are proud: They love the sustainability and the accessibility, and nobody is hiding it.”

Woburn’s Melissa Gutierrez Cronin sought out a lab-grown stone from the South End’s Laura Preshong, known for eco-friendly rings. “I had ethical concerns related to mining,” Cronin says. “We also really like the store we bought it at: It’s a small business, women-owned, and they only sell ethically sourced diamonds. That’s so important to me.”

Cronin says she’s never been asked about her ring’s pedigree. In Boston, “Nobody asks you what kind of stone you have. Even if they did, I wouldn’t mind telling them it’s a lab-grown diamond.” A California native, she’s noticed something about her adopted city: “I think people here are very social-justice-oriented, which is nice.”

Westford’s Kayla Prange—whose 3-carat oval-cut ring from Andover’s Melanie Casey cost just over $5,000—feels similarly. “It’s so freeing to just let go of the whole idea of natural diamonds and get what makes more logical sense,” she says—both from a financial and sustainability perspective. Prange did have to explain the lab-grown concept to a few befuddled family members, but she wasn’t losing any sleep over it. “It’s no surprise that the majority of diamond mines are located in places where people have historically been severely exploited,” she says.

But here’s what the diamond industry would rather you not think too hard about: When a whole generation shrugs off the mythology that made diamonds valuable—the scarcity, the sacrifice, the heirloom permanence—the disruption isn’t the stone. It’s the shrug itself.

You’re not going to find a lab-grown diamond at an antique jewelry store, “but that doesn’t make them less meaningful.”

So the buyers are on board. But what about the people who actually sell the things? Hannah Florman, a custom jeweler with a Newbury Street boutique, sees customers of two schools of thought walk into her store. “I see a lot of couples who are in the health and science fields who are genuinely excited and interested in the lab-grown diamond concept, and also those who are eco-conscious,” she says.

On the other hand, she’s worked with Boston clients concerned about the heirloom quality of their purchase. Natural diamonds, she notes, tend to retain long-term value because they’re tied to the whims of mining and availability. Lab-grown diamonds, which can be produced readily as literal carbon copies, don’t command the same scarcity-driven prices. You’re not going to find a lab-grown diamond at an antique jewelry store, “but that doesn’t make them less meaningful,” Florman says. “It just means they’re better understood as deeply personal objects rather than investments.”

That distinction—personal object versus investment—is the fault line running through every jewelry store in the region.

Anto Aboyan, co-owner of Adamas Fine Jewelry, a luxury jeweler in Newton, admits he was initially skeptical of the trend. Over three decades in the business, Adamas has catered largely to deep-pocketed clients, and natural diamonds accounted for most of the business’s sales. “In the beginning, I really felt that it’s going to be negative. But it really hasn’t been a negative: This is another avenue of selling engagement rings to a certain consumer who generally couldn’t afford a $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 diamond,” he says.

His sister and business partner, Veronica Sagherian, believes the trend is ushering in a more egalitarian era for the jewelry industry. “It’s basically opened up the opportunity for a younger, less affluent person to be able to afford something that would normally be only for a luxury market,” she says.

Natural stones continue to make up about 75 percent of their business, Aboyan estimates. The remaining 25 percent comes from buyers requesting lab-grown diamonds, often in larger sizes or elongated cuts. “If the consumer is asking for lab-grown, then we’ll be in the business of delivering lab-grown,” Aboyan says. “If the [demand] changes and 90 percent want lab, we’ll supply 90 percent lab.”

Boston Diamond Company, meanwhile, began carrying lab-grown diamonds about three years ago, but only after extensive vetting. Founder and CEO Stephanie Binder’s initial hesitation stemmed from quality concerns: Many lab grown diamonds are mass-produced and, despite strong certificate reports, at first weren’t up to the company’s standards. Certificates give baseline metrics like color, cut, clarity, and carat, the gemologist says. “But you can’t grade things like light, scintillation, brilliance, if it has haze or milky tones.”

Today, Binder estimates that about 90 percent of her clients choose lab-grown diamonds, and she believes they’ll be fully normalized within five years. In Boston, “We’re in a newer luxury market where consumers are no longer impressed by buzzwords,” she says. “They want to understand what they’re buying, how it performs, how it’s set, and how it will last over time.”

In other words, Boston’s jewelers say they haven’t been disrupted so much as recalibrated. The question, then, isn’t whether they can survive the lab-grown revolution; it’s whether the thing they used to sell—not the stone, but the story around it—can make it through.

Pull back a bit, and the bigger picture is hard to ignore. In 2015, lab-grown diamonds accounted for one percent of the overall market; in 2024, they accounted for 20 percent and have caused natural-stone prices to drop as demand shrinks. They’ve also upended a long-standing social ecosystem built on price, status, and meaning. In the past, “For a long time, the size of the diamond signaled what someone spent,” Iarrusso says. “Lab-grown diamonds are changing that equation.”

And while many of the Boston buyers in this story are proud, open, and even eager to sing their ring’s lab-grown status from the rooftops, not everyone is. One local jeweler who often works with clients in swanky enclaves like Palm Beach describes a quieter dynamic: buyers who choose lab-grown stones discreetly, especially in traditional or luxury-oriented circles. “I’ll hear, ‘I only want natural,’” says another local jeweler. “But then, privately, they’ll say, ‘I do want that. Can you create that for me? Nobody needs to know.’”

Then there are those who still gravitate toward natural diamonds—and don’t apologize for it. When Emily Baer was on the cusp of getting engaged, she says her fiancé, real estate agent Hans Nagrath, was firmly in the natural camp. “He was more in the heirloom, traditional, in-the-family-forever, work-of-art type mindset,” says Baer, a therapist and yoga instructor.

While Baer was initially indifferent to what type of stone her fiancé chose, she says her ring—a three-pronged teardrop stunner with a gold band from Boston Diamond Company—is perfect. “I trusted him with the design, and it’s beautiful,” she says. “It’s simple and timeless, and that’s where the heirloom piece ties into it.”

Beverly’s Noelle Guerin, meanwhile, went the other direction, eventually. When the hospitality and lifestyle marketing professional got married 23 years ago, she was proud to sport a natural diamond. But after it popped out of its setting on Thanksgiving last year and required replacement, she did some research: “I’d never considered lab until I did some digging and learned more about them: They’re ethically sourced, more affordable, and with great clarity,” she says.

Despite its lab-grown status, Guerin still considers her new ring an heirloom and plans to pass it on to her daughter someday. After all, it’s about the symbolism, not the stone. “To me, the ring signifies a beautiful marriage that I feel blessed to have and the journey to get there. That’s where the importance lies. I think there’s a misconception that lab-grown isn’t ‘real’ and therefore can’t be an heirloom,” she says.

And maybe that’s the real disruption—not that lab-grown diamonds exist, but that they’ve made the whole question of “real” beside the point. The scarcity is gone. The high cost is optional. The mythology has been politely yet firmly shrugged off. What’s left is just the ring on your finger and whatever story you decide it tells. For a lot of Bostonians, that’s turned out to be enough.

Moments before it all fell apart, Suhail Kwatra—the most coveted stylist in Boston—was entirely in his element. It was already dark, just after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 18, and he was in his second-floor office within the exclusive Fifth Avenue Club inside Saks at the Prudential Center. This was his domain—a gold velvet couch, champagne, and racks of clothes he’d personally selected for each client.

It was chilly in the store that evening, and Kwatra was dressed in a Roberto Cavalli purple python-print puffer. He was styling the resident of one of Brookline’s grandest estates, and she wanted more sweaters and purses to peruse. Kwatra told her he’d venture into the store to fetch them.

Downstairs, a shopping bag full of Chanel knits and purses in hand, Kwatra was about to head back upstairs when he was approached by two men in dark suits from asset protection: Tim Wade and John Wells, according to a police report. Kwatra says the men suggested he follow them and ushered him past the designer shoes, through a code-locked door, and into a small office.

By the time Kwatra left the room, he no longer had a job—and police were waiting to charge him with larceny and fraud. The allegation: He had returned unclaimed merchandise and pocketed the funds on Saks gift cards for himself. The total: $11,707.51.

But that wasn’t it. Wade and Wells handed police a handwritten letter from Kwatra in which he apologized and admitted to stealing $429,400 by way of fraudulent returns, mismanagement of promotional cards, giving away merchandise, and abusing his corporate credit card over the course of his career at Saks. (Kwatra denies the charges and says he was forced to write the letter under duress.) He was then marched out of the store, flanked by management and police, for all to see.

By midnight, everyone in town knew. Kwatra’s life, as he’d built it, was over. And so, too, was an era in Boston society.

By midnight, everyone in town knew. Kwatra’s life, as he’d built it, was over. And so, too, was an era in Boston society.

Originally from New Delhi, Kwatra was not just any stylist. Over more than two decades, he had cultivated a cult-like following among Boston’s social elite, powerful professionals, the married-well set, and anyone else with tens of thousands of dollars a year to burn on clothing, bags, and jewelry. Starting in the early aughts, he was the man who enabled the city to transition out of country-club attire into avant-garde fashion replete with flashy markers of wealth—something unheard-of among Boston’s Brahmin set. He amassed a client list that read like a social register, became the gatekeeper to Boston’s fashion world, and orchestrated the look of the city’s entire social scene.

And then there was Saks, his stage. As a prized stylist with the Fifth Avenue Club—the store’s exclusive personal-shopping program—the company gave him a private office and, it seemed, free rein to build an empire inside its walls. It sent him to Fashion Week in Paris with his clients and to the galas around Boston for which he dressed the guests. His black book made him invaluable. And—according to some former employees and clients I spoke to—untouchable.

Along the way, he became a fixture of Boston society himself. “It was part of the social fabric of the town to go to Saks and go to Suhail,” an heir to a real estate fortune explained. And clients’ relationships with Kwatra extended far outside the confines of the Fifth Avenue Club. They texted with him at all hours, accompanied him to lunches, parties, and clubs, and traveled all over the world with him. They introduced him to the ins and outs of Nantucket. They told him their secrets and gossiped about other women with him. Among his most frequent lines when talking about someone—“Tragic!”

Despite his power and popularity, rumors began circulating among clients and coworkers that he could play things fast and loose—double-billing, charging for items that weren’t purchased, and capitalizing on women who didn’t pay attention to their credit card bills because an office or a husband handled them. These stories mostly stayed quiet. “In Boston, it’s old Brahmin—we don’t say anything,” one spouse of a finance titan and former Kwatra client explained. But some took their complaints straight to the management at Saks—and they say they watched as the company seemed to simply look the other way.

Until it didn’t.

The question is why. Why now, after two decades? The answer may have as much to do with Saks as it does with Kwatra. By the time security pulled him into that small office, the company was drowning in billions of dollars of debt. Vendors hadn’t been paid in months—some had filed lawsuits; others had simply stopped shipping. A dying institution, it seems, needed someone to blame.

Or so Kwatra claims.

Gossip moves fast in Boston, and news about what happened to Kwatra escaped Saks almost immediately. That evening, just down the street from the department store, the Australian luxury brand Zimmermann was opening its first Boston location on Newbury Street. Inside, moving between elegant clothing in muted colors and passed canapés, was a carefully curated crowd consisting of the city’s power glam spenders and socialites. Many were Kwatra’s clients.

The whispers arrived mid-party: Did you hear? Phones lit up. Jaws dropped. Shock registered on carefully made-up faces. “I’m not even sure people looked at what was happening at Zimmermann that night,” the spouse of the finance titan said.

By midnight, the police report had traveled far beyond Newbury Street—forwarded, screenshotted, texted from one boldface personality to the next. As it moved through the city’s gossip circuit, it triggered a kaleidoscope of responses among current and former clients: disbelief, hurt, satisfaction, and no small dose of schadenfreude. Others scrambled to find old Saks receipts.

The finance mogul’s wife, who said she’d spent “upward of a million dollars” with Kwatra over the years, told me the news left clients feeling “violated in the same way as having a husband cheat on them.” Another client—fabulously wealthy and close to Kwatra—began to wonder if his attention to her parents and her pets was only a ruse to get her business. Following the news, she read a 2014 Boston Globe profile of him for the first time. When she came across the part where he said he had a “folder” of notes about clients’ pets—and their favorite treats—to endear himself to them, she said it “kind of made me throw up in my mouth.” Yet she concluded that there must have been other elements of the relationship that were genuine. They had been such close friends. For all the public galas she attended, there were few people she let into her selective social circle like she did with him. Reflecting on their relationship in this new light was “hurting my heart,” she said.

Kwatra denied any strategy or “agenda” behind remembering a client’s dog’s name. But, if a client mentioned the name of a pet or brought a dog to the store, he said he would have one of his assistants take note. “You want to make the clients feel welcome,” he said.

Some clients rose to his defense, more disgusted by certain women’s reactions than by the alleged infractions. “There are people who almost want to see him fall,” noted one well-known gala regular on the philanthropy circuit. “People always love to see people on their knees. The glee in some people’s faces. You can hear it in their voice.” Sure, Kwatra could be pushy and sometimes judgmental, and, upon further reflection, she acknowledged he did charge her twice for an item—but it only happened once. She insisted she continues to “like him very much.”

One former client, who said Kwatra had long been one of her best friends, described his bill infractions as “just something we were used to.” She had learned to “accommodate it,” she said, because she assumed it was either an honest mistake or an assistant screwing up.

Others saw the charges Kwatra was facing as his just comeuppance. “Karma is a bitch, isn’t it?” said one local businesswoman. “I couldn’t be less surprised.” She guessed Kwatra had gotten away with it because “there are a lot of idiots who just pay their bills without looking at them.” In her experience, “the receipts would be screwed up all the time.” She would get charged for items she didn’t buy and alterations that never happened. “He deserves all of this,” she said. (Kwatra says that many of these issues were a result of wider billing and administrative problems at Saks.)

But many of the women left reeling by the news were also perplexed—after all, some said Saks had known about the issues with Kwatra the whole time. The socialite who had spent more than a million with him said she complained to the store years ago after noticing he had billed her four times for the same item. She had warned management: “Something is drastically wrong at Saks right now, and it’s all in the hands of Suhail.” That was years ago—and nothing happened.

Which leads to the obvious question one former client posed: “Who is worse: Saks or Suhail?”

Before the scandal, there was just a kid from New Delhi. Kwatra grew up in a large, extended family, the son of the owner of a third-generation clothing business that specialized in European styles. “Fashion was always in my blood,” he told me.

His family had Boston ties, and he’d spent time in Weston growing up. He got a job at Saks in 2005, then moved to New York to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology—working for Saks there, too—and by 2007 was back at the Pru.

Saks opened in Boston in 1971, a few years after a store official brushed aside the notion that Bostonians are a drab lot, and insisted in an interview with the Boston Globe that the city was “receptive to high fashion.” The Globe’s fashion editor agreed, writing that Saks could be the “giant hand that whips Boston fashion into place.”

It would take a while. But by the time Kwatra came to work there some three decades later, Boston was in the midst of a cultural and economic renaissance. There were more people flashing money and fewer Brahmins around to turn up their noses at them. Even if the rich were no longer strictly old school, they were still playing Brahmin games: the fundraisers, the galas, the tables at charity events—all of which required designer looks that could compete with New York’s social scene. There were also ambitious women rising in real estate, medicine, and law, looking to close big deals in an increasingly global world. They needed to look the part. They needed someone to help. Kwatra—with his infectious love of luxury and his preternatural ability to immerse himself in his clients’ lives—would become their guide, their gatekeeper, their man.

Around 2013, Kwatra said, the store’s marketing manager told him that she wanted to get him out into Boston—“outside of these four walls.” Saks sponsored luncheons and charity events, inviting Kwatra to attend. At one of these luncheons, the manager introduced Kwatra to a group of very social women of means—whom Kwatra calls “the girls”—telling them they needed to visit him at the store. “After lunch,” he recalled, “I went back to work, and the gaggle of girls rolled in.”

The rest is history. Kwatra was a smashing success on the floor, and in 2015, after a record-breaking year of sales—some $7 million, he says—he was promoted to the Fifth Avenue Club, where he built something unprecedented: a personal-styling empire within the store.

His second-floor office at Saks became a destination. The champagne. The personalized, special treatment. The racks of clothes preselected for each client. He would have all the outfits before the big events, dressing each woman to ensure no duplicates. Kwatra made regular trips to New York to get special items, then messaged his clients—and they would come to what he called his “magic closet.”

A lot of boldface names moved in and out of that closet: Tiffany Ortiz, former wife of Big Papi; Christy Cashman, an author and equestrian well-known in Boston society; Janet Sharp Kershaw who co-owns Cheers and private events venue Hampshire House with her husband; socialites Laura Baldini and Ashley Bernon-Miller; swimwear designer Sinesia Karol; Madhu Chopra, mother of Priyanka; and Sarah Mars, of that Mars family—to name a few.

Along the way, he shifted the fashion culture of Boston. “I’ll take credit for it,” he said, explaining that Boston is “a knit city” where women “love their cozy knits.” He pushed them to expand their tastes. Women back then were wearing Escada and Malo—“those were tolerable.” Then Rick Owens. He got them interested in Yigal, then Issey Miyake. And on it went, until he had elevated an entire city’s sense of style.

Dressing the powerful made Kwatra powerful in his own right. He controlled the velvet rope at after-parties with designers—a you-can’t-sit-here attitude—and was often in charge of the seating list. Women would let him pick the guests at their fundraising tables. He would also hold his own events, which he refers to as “thoughtful experiences,” that many people wanted to get in on so they could connect with his clients and climb the social ladder. Some people wanted to spend time around his clients because it was “good for their business,” he says. “I was doing my job well, I was successful, and I had the right contacts. A lot of people in this Boston social scene that I don’t think need me, I come to find out that they do because they want to be seen and they want to be included in these events. And it wasn’t me chasing after them—it’s them chasing after me.”

If Truman Capote had his swans, Kwatra had his “girls.” They partied with him. Shared their secrets with him. Gossiped with him. Beyond “tragic,” his clients recalled him calling other women “peasants” and “D-list.” And they loved it. The former client said Kwatra was “totally fun to be mean with…I could not wait to be mean with him.” She would go to Saks to find out “who had gotten fat and who had gotten skinny. If I was having a moment with somebody that I was a little jealous of, I’d have Suhail look up what size they’re wearing these days just to make myself feel better.” (Kwatra denies making fun of his female clients’ weight, and says that though he may have used “peasants” in conversation, it was all “silly talk.”)

Meanwhile, his coworkers watched with amazement—and, Kwatra says, no small dose of jealousy—at the loyal and highly profitable relationships he built. “The women would flock to him,” said Bianca Carney, who worked as his assistant in the early 2010s. His clients loved him and enjoyed having him around. Willem Learn, who worked in Saks’ jewelry department during Kwatra’s tenure, said Kwatra could be pushy and rude to his clients, but they seemed to eat it up: “There is some skill set that he has that was addictive to them.”

Still, there were rumblings that underneath the glitz, glam, gossip, and success, something was rotten. Coworkers had warned Learn that Kwatra played things “fast and loose.” But Learn understood why nothing would ever come of it. Kwatra was more powerful than Saks “because he owns the book”—meaning he had the contacts. “With that much power, it would be dangerous to mess with him,” Learn said. “He could have gotten in trouble a long time ago—he shouldn’t have lasted this long.”

Another former employee, Steven Ertel, who sold shoes from 2017 to 2018, agreed. “If you are a top seller at the store, selling millions of dollars, they are going to look the other direction.… It’s all about whoever is a top earner—they turn a blind eye.”

For many years, little about Wendy Appel suggested she was a woman of means. She drove Subarus or Volvos, and one of her only extravagances was buying a designer purse every few years. In reality, she was fabulously wealthy. She ran both the real estate company her father had founded, and the family’s charitable foundation, through which she donated quietly and generously to the Museum of Science, GBH, hospitals, and arts organizations.

Starting in 2012, she suffered a series of strokes. That’s when, according to multiple people close to the situation, everything started to change: her appearance and—perhaps most tellingly—the boxes upon boxes of unopened merchandise from Saks that began piling up in her building’s lobby.

According to spending records I reviewed, she became a regular Saks shopper in early 2013. Her purchases mostly consisted of skin care, makeup, and handbags. But as the months went on, her expenditures increased dramatically—more bags and expensive jewelry, often topping thousands of dollars each. By the end of 2013, she had spent close to $100,000 at Saks.

The next year, her jewelry purchases increased, and she started buying big-ticket items more frequently. She bought two $20,000 Chanel watches in a single day. One day in October, she made three jewelry purchases totaling more than $154,000, followed by a necklace for $320,000 in December. The total for 2014: $1.2 million. In 2015—Kwatra’s biggest sales year ever—she spent just under $3 million.

That year, Appel’s son Michael had started to grow concerned about his mother’s spending. After he confronted her about it, Appel was adamant there was no problem. That July, Appel sent Kwatra an email—which I reviewed—asking him not to share information about her account with anyone, including family members. When Michael reached out to Kwatra directly, Wendy caught wind of it and left Kwatra a voicemail—I’ve heard it—apologizing for Michael’s actions. “For some reason he thinks I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “I told him, ‘I can assure you I know exactly what I’m doing.’”

In December, Michael tried to get Saks to intercede, meeting in-person with the company’s head of northeast security to ask for help. Nothing came of it. In the first two months of 2016 alone, according to sales records, Appel spent half a million dollars at Saks.

Then, in February 2016, Michael received a text message from a Saks employee warning him about his mother’s relationship with Kwatra. “They are taking advantage of your mother,” it read. The employee added that Kwatra “made her buy a leather top from [Louis Vuitton]. Is that a joke? I don’t see your mother wearing that…. He is terrible.”

Michael had had enough. In May 2016, his attorney sent Saks a formal cease-and-desist letter: “Michael is concerned that Wendy is being taken advantage of by Suhail Kwatra, a salesperson at Saks…. It appears that Mr. Kwatra is exploiting Wendy and taking advantage of her diminished capacity by suggesting that Wendy purchase large amounts of merchandise, most of which is quite expensive.”

Appel was subsequently diagnosed with dementia. She can no longer communicate verbally.

Kwatra says the sales associate who sent those texts to Michael did so because the colleague was “jealous of me and my success.” In one message I reviewed, the associate wrote: “I am the number one sales associate in this store and they are just trying to ‘beat’ me in sales by using your mother.” As for Michael’s efforts to get Saks to stop selling to his mother? Kwatra says Michael was “freaked out because I’m sure he’s thinking, ‘Well, there goes my inheritance.’”

Kwatra says he doesn’t think he did anything wrong—morally or otherwise—in his dealings with Appel. He was doing his job, he says, and Saks encouraged him to keep selling to her. “She was a number one client, and they wanted her to keep going. So they would say, ‘Well, if she’s not buying jewelry, then you should show her handbags.… Cross-sell, don’t just focus on one thing.’ Nobody ever said stop.… I got a huge pat on the back from leadership and executives that I was able to develop a cosmetics client into a top client of the store.”

One current store employee—no fan of Kwatra—agreed that the store encouraged Kwatra to sell to Appel. “They said, ‘There’s this trunk show, do you think there’s anything Wendy might like?’ That’s encouraging someone.” (Saks declined to comment on the record about matters pertaining to Appel.)

But Appel’s family members weren’t the only ones with complaints. I spoke to seven people who claimed Kwatra had mismanaged their accounts, either charging them for items they didn’t buy or overcharging them for items they did. Some said the discrepancies were in the thousands—and yet some of these women continued to shop with him.

Most who spoke to me did so on the condition of anonymity. Some were embarrassed to publicly admit how much they spent on clothes; others were concerned, they said, about how much Kwatra knew about their personal lives and what he might say about them, given the way he had talked about other women in the past. “A lot of us went through divorces with him,” one said, adding that she wished Saks had required him to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Kwatra says he would never reveal information about his clients.

Amber D’Amelio, a former client who is now an animal-rights activist, was willing to tell her story. She met Kwatra in 2011 when she was new to town. As they became friendly, he helped fill her charity foundation tables, and she threw his 30th birthday party on her yacht. She considered him a friend.

Then, a few years later, her husband “clocked a big charge” on her credit card bill for a “very expensive Chanel bag” she had never ordered. When Kwatra told her he had ordered it for her, she said she didn’t want it and asked him to return it. When the refund didn’t materialize, D’Amelio says, she reported the issue to Saks’ general manager, who refunded the charge. (Still employed by Saks, the general manager declined to comment for this story.) Incidents like that kept happening, D’Amelio says, and Kwatra made excuses, blaming his assistant.

Kwatra said that when D’Amelio was new in town, she “wanted to climb the ladder, and I was her ticket”—something D’Amelio denies. As for the billing issues: “If Amber had any issues with any of her charges, they were taken care of by the store manager,” Kwatra said.

Zach Haroutunian, who runs a private investment firm, had a similar experience. As a student at Suffolk University, he began shopping with Kwatra and believed they were truly friends. As the relationship progressed, he says, Kwatra began telling him he needed to hold charges on his card so Kwatra could bring items from New York to Boston for him to try on. Haroutunian initially agreed, but then “it snowballed into him sending racks of fur coats to my house.… I told him, ‘Suhail, this is a little bit too much,’ and he would be like, ‘Well, of course you need clothes.’” Haroutunian believes that management knew “exactly what was going on.” (For his part, Kwatra says that if anyone brought any discrepancies to his attention, “it was addressed right away.”)

When he tried to return items Kwatra sent him, Haroutunian says Kwatra made him “feel cheap,” suggesting that returning items was distasteful. People who return items were “tragic,” he recalls Kwatra saying. Later, Haroutunian says he found he had been charged for items he didn’t purchase at all. “Suhail took advantage of the fact that people weren’t checking their credit card statements,” he said.

Kwatra, though, contends Haroutunian “was an impulse buyer. He would buy and return and buy and return.” Kwatra also said Haroutunian would try to return items he had worn, clothes that came back with “stains on them and gum wrappers [in the pockets].” (Haroutunian denies he ever returned or attempted to return used merchandise.)

Whether Saks knew what Kwatra was doing—whether it was part of their business model or they simply never bothered to look into the complaints they received—is now a matter of legal dispute. What is not in dispute is that the whole thing was about to come apart at the seams.

By the time Kwatra was pulled into that small office by two men from asset protection, Saks was in trouble. Within two months, the company would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $4.7 billion in debt. The company owed Chanel $136 million; Kering (the conglomerate behind Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga) nearly $60 million; Christian Louboutin more than $21 million; Brunello Cucinelli more than $21 million; Georgio Armani upward of $10 million; and Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, and Vince more than $9 million each, according to the company’s bankruptcy filing.

It was a staggering turn for a brand that opened its flagship store on Fifth Avenue in 1924, the brainchild of two merchant families who dreamed of a store synonymous with gracious living. Back then, department stores were grand symbols of commerce—glittering public sitting rooms for affluent women to socialize while they spent. They shaped urban areas and were once so powerful that in 1939, industry titans successfully lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving one week earlier to lengthen the holiday shopping season.

The department store reigned for decades, but it could not reign forever. In 1992, department stores claimed 14 percent of all retail sales nationwide. Then came the Internet, and brick-and-mortar stores were hit across the board. Analysts believed luxury retailers were resilient—above a certain price point, customers want to try items on before buying, with a tailor on site. Going to a department store was not an errand, but an experience—the kind people like Kwatra provided.

Yet few foresaw that designers would find ways to connect with consumers directly and, through a series of mergers, become powerful enough to challenge the department stores. Brands worried that department store sales—especially online—would interfere with the strict price discipline and perception of exclusivity on which their success depended. Some brands began pulling their products from department stores altogether.

Saks fought back, purchasing Neiman Marcus and becoming Saks Global in a July 2024 deal, hoping that together they would have more leverage with brands. Executives put on a strong face. But behind the scenes, Saks had a crisis on its hands. Suppliers weren’t getting paid. Smaller companies couldn’t take the hit. Designer brands began refusing to send merchandise to the stores.

Kwatra, who earned commission from his sales, felt the successive hits the company was taking. Over the previous few years, he had started talking about a move within the company. He thought Saks Global would be an opportunity to expand into international markets, but when he received notice that he would no longer be able to take clients to Paris Fashion Week, he began to take more seriously an offer he had gotten from a competitor.

The merger may have affected Kwatra in another way. One Saks employee theorized it may have been the Neiman deal that set everything into motion. “If this merger with Neiman’s had not happened, it never would have come to light, because I think when Neiman’s came in, they started looking at the books and exploring. I think that’s when it really started to crumble.”

Kwatra claims that Saks heard about his outside offer and tried to retain him with a $50,000 bonus. When he didn’t accept, he says, it became clear he was leaving. He believes Saks knew that if its top earner left, he’d be taking the “city’s elite” with him.

His theory is simple: An already spiraling Saks couldn’t afford that hit, so they tried to destroy his reputation and keep his clients. Kwatra—the man who had operated in the gray zone for two decades, whose arrangements with Saks had seemed to be more handshake than policy—made an easy target.

Kwatra’s since-deleted Instagram account was my first introduction to his aesthetically dark and dazzling world. There, in video reels set to Kesha dance tracks—do I have your attention?—and Chris Brown instrumentals—gimme that—he could be seen in jewel-encrusted velvet sport coats with a string of colorful gems down his chest, glittering turtlenecks, and an array of black leather statement boots, posing, hip cocked to the side, in Italy and Paris. Then there was his Facebook account. In one video, he is clad in a leather trench coat, posing in an open elevator and strutting down a hall, a lobster-shaped Louis Vuitton clutch—complete with dangling claws and a rumored price tag of $18,000—in his hand. “Have your people call my people,” his bio read.

So I did. Joe Baerlein, a crisis communications adviser, got back to me and set up a meeting at the Post Office Square offices of Goulston & Storrs, where Kwatra’s lawyer, Jennifer Furey—who is representing him in a civil complaint against Saks—is a director.

Kwatra did not disappoint. I found him in the lobby, where most of the couches and chairs are white leather, wearing a black fox-fur coat, an R13 cardigan—distressed, black, and covered in chains and safety pins—and black patent platform cowboy-style heels with a gem-encrusted toe. He clutched a small silver lunchbox-shaped purse, “FENDI” printed in bold across the bag. His wrists were wrapped in bangles that chimed as he shook my hand.

Kwatra told me he is innocent. The charges are bogus. This is not a story about a thief, he insisted—it is a story about a flailing corporation that knew about and encouraged the very practices for which it later fired him. They did it, he believed, because they feared he would leave and take his client book with him. When asked about Kwatra’s allegations, Saks only said: “We take any allegations of employee misconduct seriously and conduct thorough investigations when matters are brought to our attention.”

Kwatra described the moment he was standing there in his purple python-print puffer, a bag of Chanel knits in hand, when the “mall cops”—as Baerlein calls them—led him into a secluded office, through a door with a lock code he didn’t know. There were no security cameras documenting what unfolded, Kwatra noted. The omission, he claims, was to ensure there was no record of what happened.

At first, Kwatra told me, he had no idea where the conversation was going. Wade explicitly mentioned that he knew Kwatra was in talks about employment elsewhere, insisted Kwatra knew why he was there, and said that if he didn’t come clean, Saks would destroy his reputation and ensure he never worked in luxury retail again. Kwatra felt “trapped.” (Wade directed all inquiries about this case to Saks public relations. Wells declined to comment.)

Then, Kwatra says, the conversation turned to gift cards. He would go on to be accused of mismanaging $50,000 worth of promotional cards. Kwatra said he didn’t understand what they were asking about—in Kwatra’s court filings, he noted the cards were generated by his supervisors in management. Kwatra himself couldn’t generate gift cards, and Saks knew it. Kwatra’s court filings also claimed that his manager and previous manager created numerous “accommodation” gift cards and encouraged salespeople to distribute them to high-spending clients. His manager at the time, Kwatra alleged in court filings, was generous with gift cards and “frequently provided them to clients and club stylists.”

As for the accusation that Kwatra kept unclaimed merchandise or returned it in exchange for gift cards for himself—he’d eventually be accused of doing this with $375,000 worth of merchandise—Kwatra claims everything was known to management. There was a lot of unclaimed merchandise lying around storage closets, he says, and after a year, Saks managers told him and other stylists to distribute it as gifts to clients or take it home. He alleges that they encouraged him to wear the items at events or on social media to promote Saks and the brands. It was better to take the abandoned merchandise for personal use rather than reselling it at a deep discount or donating it, he says management told him.

A Saks employee pushed back on this, saying no one else had a designated room full of merchandise like Kwatra did, and that it was odd that all the billing problems people complained about seemed to happen only to him. (Kwatra says he had more merchandise because he had more clients, and that billing issues were a broader problem at Saks, and no fault of his own.) But the employee agreed with Kwatra on one point: Whatever was going on, management knew about it. “I’m just saying that the executives were also complicit. I mean, they allowed it to continue to happen. And in a small way, I even think they sort of encouraged it.”

Back in that room without any cameras, Kwatra says, Wade claimed to have a folder of “evidence” on Kwatra but refused to show him the contents. Wade claimed that Saks had been building a case against Kwatra for more than eight years—though Kwatra points out that they had offered him a retention bonus just weeks earlier and repeatedly praised his value to the company.

Kwatra recalls that they wanted him to guess the cumulative value of all the unclaimed merchandise he had turned into gift cards over the years—in writing—and they would “make it ugly” for him if he refused. “In my mind, when I heard that ‘make it ugly,’ I’m thinking, if I don’t sign this document, I’m gonna be handcuffed in the store.” The visual impact would have been immediately devastating.

Kwatra says they told him that if he confessed, they wouldn’t call the police—no one external would have to know. So he started writing. “Anytime I wrote something that didn’t really align with them, they would make me cross it out and be like, ‘No, no, no, cross that off and write this instead,’” he said. (By presstime, Saks had not responded to questions about Kwatra’s claim that he was coerced into writing the document.) Kwatra didn’t know the letter was legally enforceable. He figured he could get an attorney later, and if he signed, he could leave with his reputation intact.

That’s not what happened. When Kwatra was done, his store director came in, and he signed papers agreeing not to return to Saks. Then a police officer entered the room. Kwatra’s Prada tote was collected from his office, and he was escorted out of the building. “Do we have to make a scene?” Kwatra asked as he was led out. “Because I thought no one’s gonna make a scene.”

On a frigid January morning, Kwatra arrived at Boston Municipal Court near Haymarket for his arraignment on larceny and fraud charges. The date had been pushed back once already, and socialites had been calling me about it for weeks, wondering how the first scene of this legal drama might unfold. When the day came, Kwatra appeared in a relatively demure Hugo Boss blazer—black with a silver-tipped collar—and Alexander Wang boots in some kind of reptile skin. He looked smaller than usual in low-cut heels. Local TV crews arrived five minutes too late. I was the only reporter in the room.

After sitting through a morning robbery hearing involving an opioid-addicted amateur hockey player, Kwatra stood before the court, his face deflated, as the prosecutor read the charges alleging that he had appropriated $429,400 via “fraudulent returns and mismanagement.” The hearing did not go well for the state. The prosecutor requested $5,000 cash bail in what she said was a case carrying “state prison time” and asked that Kwatra be ordered to stay away from former clients. But Judge Paul Treseler released Kwatra without bail and ordered only that he stay away from Saks property and employees.

Then came another blow to the prosecution. Kwatra’s criminal defense attorney, Joseph Eisenstadt, demanded to see specific evidence to support the more than $429,000 figure—and Treseler agreed. Saks had turned over video evidence and records from three recent transactions, purportedly totaling more than $11,000 in fraud, but nothing else. “It looks like an $11,000 case right now,” the judge said, questioning the state’s evidence—as if “someone just threw a $429,000 figure out there.… You come up with that big number, and you have to explain the big number and explain where that number came from.” The prosecutor conceded that Saks had not yet provided the state with any additional evidence. Beyond Kwatra’s handwritten confession, the prosecution could not explain the number either. The judge ordered the state to turn over the evidence before the end of March; the next hearing is April 10.

Weeks earlier, it had been a very different scene. Kwatra stumbled out of Saks in his Gucci platform clogs, dazed. His phone died, so he couldn’t reach his partner, Michael, a music teacher who was teaching a class that evening. It wasn’t until he caught a cab and made it home to his Fenway apartment that the reality of what had happened hit Kwatra. He recalls feeling as though he “got hit by a bus.”

Then Kwatra mentioned the letter to his partner. “I wasn’t thinking. I maybe signed something,” he told Michael, who started freaking out.

“Where is the document?” Michael asked.

Kwatra told Michael they didn’t give him a copy.

“Why didn’t they give you a copy?”

The next morning, Kwatra called Jennifer Clark, a client who also happened to be general counsel at the commercial real estate firm RMR Group and was nearing retirement. Clark thought the absence of a copy was strange. The charges didn’t make sense, she says, because Kwatra’s assistants rang in the merchandise—“so there would have to be a conspiracy.” (Kwatra’s supervising manager, who was on maternity leave at the time of his firing, was due back in December. She has not returned to work and did not respond to my inquiries.) Clark sprang into action, connecting Kwatra with a civil attorney, who in turn connected him with a criminal attorney and crisis manager. Two weeks later, Kwatra attended a party thrown by Clark at Contessa—Kwatra in a long-sleeve fishnet top with shoulder pads and glittering silver pants, as seen in a screenshot from an Instagram story that was promptly passed around town. He was not hiding.

Meanwhile, Kwatra’s attorneys at Goulston & Storrs have filed a civil claim against Saks Global alleging that the company owes Kwatra punitive and compensatory damages for firing him, ruining his reputation, and false imprisonment for holding him in the interrogation room. The lawsuit calls it “a calculated campaign by a global luxury retailer to silence one of its most valuable employees” while attempting to “shift blame amid severe financial distress.” But perhaps Kwatra’s strongest argument is this: Why would Saks offer him a retention bonus in October if the company claims to have evidence of him conducting fraudulent returns in September? (Saks declined to comment on Kwatra’s claim that he was offered a retention bonus, as well as many of the allegations set forth in this story.)

Then I discovered something startling: Kwatra wasn’t the only stylist Saks had allegedly gone after.

In May 2025, Antonio Ferreira—reportedly a leading personal shopper at Saks Beverly Hills—claims he was also pulled into a room by asset protection and accused of involvement in improper use of gift cards. Ferreira filed a lawsuit against Saks three months later, alleging discrimination, defamation, and a hostile work environment, claiming the charges were brought in retaliation and that they stand “in stark contrast to Saks’ tolerance of similar conduct by others,” the complaint reads—including by management itself.

Both of these lawsuits are on pause due to Saks filing for bankruptcy. But on Newbury Street, the question isn’t really about the legal case—it’s about what happens next in a town that just lost the man who told it what to wear. Gala season is here, and this article comes out in the first days of it. Some women may be scrambling to find dresses—yet the ones who’ve been around Boston forever aren’t too worried. Kwatra was the one who created the pressure—new, avant-garde, no repeats. Turns out it’s more Brahmin, and more contemporary, to re-wear an old outfit. “You even get bragging rights if you can fit into a dress from 10 years ago,” says one gala regular.

Still, not everyone has moved on. Madhu Chopra, for one, remains loyal—calling Kwatra “impeccable and forthright” in a statement provided by her niece. Real estate developer Deborah George is also unwavering. She has been devoted to Kwatra for more than a decade, ever since he told her that her Ralph Lauren outfit looked “awful” and switched her over to Dolce & Gabbana. She insists that the allegations against Kwatra came about because Saks was “scared that he was going to leave.” In George’s eyes, Kwatra “is not a man who’s driven by money at all. This is a man who’s driven by things that we Americans don’t always put great value into. You know, honesty, beauty, art forms, things like that. I’ve never known him to be money hungry.”

Others have not been so generous. A group excursion Kwatra had organized to India—costing tens of thousands a head—fell apart when his clients backed out after news of Kwatra’s legal troubles broke. They want their money back. Kwatra says he told them to buy travel insurance at the outset and isn’t responsible for their decision to back out; in any event, he says, their beef is with the travel agency. He says he didn’t profit from the trip.

And then there are those who suspect Kwatra will somehow come out ahead of where he started. One former client called the whole saga his “sex tape”—a spectacle he’d find a way to profit from. Several compared him to Anna Delvey, the fake socialite who parlayed infamy into a Netflix deal. They wonder whether Kwatra will do the same.

As for Kwatra, he wants to keep doing what he loves—styling women of taste, like his fashion icons Daphne Guinness, Maye Musk, and Moza bint Nasser. He says the job offer he received from a Saks competitor was rescinded, and he’s thinking of a life beyond Boston, hopefully somewhere abroad. But as Baerlein, his crisis manager, says, it’s hard to plan a future “when you’ve had so many of these false accusations thrown at you in a short period of time.”

Asked how it feels to go from the center of Boston society to the fringes, Kwatra rolled his eyes. “In fashion,” he told me, “like they say—one day you’re in, one day you’re out.”

This article was first published in the print edition of the March 2026 issue with the headline: “”Tragic!”.”

In the weeks before Michelin announced its first-ever Boston selections, whispers among dining insiders spread across town faster than whipped butter. The first question—“Did you hear who got an invite to the gala?”—was always chased by a second, more scandalous follow-up: “Did you hear who didn’t get an invite?” And underneath it all, the real question: Was Boston about to justify the estimated seven-figure bet it had placed on the world’s most prestigious restaurant guide?

Even those who received the coveted invite remained very much in the dark. The organization had sent out emails to every restaurant included in Boston’s guide, but they were vague. Each chef who found a golden ticket in their inbox didn’t know if they were about to be crowned with a coveted star or score one of Michelin’s other designations, like “recommended” restaurant, which denotes good cooking that isn’t yet star-worthy (but could be in the future).

The anticipation hung thick at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Philadelphia on Tuesday, November 18. The opening reception that night was crowded with chefs from Boston, Philly, Chicago, New York City, and DC—all of whom would see their fates revealed in one joint ceremony.

Familiar faces from Boston’s dining world gravitated toward one another—Erin Miller of Urban Hearth, Chris and Pam Willis of Pammy’s, Carl Dooley of Mooncusser—while servers carrying platters of canapés weaved through the crowd. Bibendum, the walking, talking stack of tires that serves as the Michelin mascot, beckoned guests to take photos alongside him on the step-and-repeat.

After an hour, ushers waved attendees into the auditorium. This was it. After decades of watching talent and attention drain to New York City and its many Michelin dining spots, Boston restaurants were, for the first time ever, about to be crowned with Michelin stars. Some of the most renowned chefs in the country, including Thomas Keller, of three-Michelin-starred Per Se, and Daniel Humm, of the three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park, sat in the audience. It was showtime.

The Boston crowd erupted when Michelin’s very first award of the night went to a hometown hero: Chompon “Boong” Boonnak, of Brookline Thai restaurants Mahaniyom and Merai, won Michelin’s “Exceptional Cocktails” award for the Northeast Cities. It was just about the strongest start that anyone could ask for. A shocked Boonnak made his way to the stage.

Then came the Boston guide selections. Stars are the highest honor, followed by Bib Gourmands—“exceptional food at great value”—and “recommended” restaurants, the inspectors’ nod to good cooking that hasn’t yet risen to the level of a Bib or a star.

The presentation started with the recommended list. Five restaurants were called, then 10, then 15, then 19. Asta, Mooncusser, Nightshade Noodle Bar, Wa Shin—tasting-menu spots that had surfaced on just about every Boston prediction list published over the past six months—rolled across a gigantic screen above the stage.

For those in the building who had noticed all the Boston-area chefs milling around the reception, something was becoming uncomfortably clear: The city wasn’t going to walk away with an armful of stars. By the time it was over, 19 restaurants had earned recommended status, and six got Bib Gourmands. One restaurant—South End spot 311 Omakase—took home a star.

The reaction was immediate and merciless. Local content creators Marc Lewis and Marwa Osman, of @thecitylists, held up the list and its meager handful of picks as evidence that Boston’s restaurant scene has a long way to go. Boston.com polled nearly 100 readers and found that 74 percent disagreed with Michelin’s selections. How had local darlings like chef Cassie Piuma’s Sarma, Comfort Kitchen in Dorchester, or Italian favorite Tonino been left out entirely? Had Boston bet big just for this?

The answer was, for better or for worse, yes. And the story of how Boston got here had been years in the making. In recent times, Michelin—the more-than-century-old French tire company turned global restaurant arbiter—has become a worldwide marketing juggernaut and money-making machine with a simple business model: Tourism boards pay for new guides. And Boston’s tourism arm, Meet Boston, led by president and CEO Martha Sheridan, paid handsomely for a three-year deal. (Meet Boston declined to disclose the exact figure, but other U.S. cities, such as Atlanta, have paid sums around $1 million for three years. The Boston Globe reported in May 2025 that the partnership between Meet Boston and Michelin “costs just over $1 million.”)

It was a move initially championed by local hotels and chefs alike. Yet the results—26 restaurants, one star—left kitchen insiders with a burning question: Was it even worth it?

Three years earlier, when Sheridan heard the word “Michelin,” her mind snapped to images of white tablecloths, cosseting servers, and a guide that only promoted exclusive restaurants in expensive neighborhoods. Tasked with championing Boston to the world as head of Meet Boston, the city’s tourism organization, she wasn’t interested in ponying up the estimated seven figures to promote that image.

In spring 2023, I approached Sheridan while I was the editor of Eater Boston, writing a story about why Boston didn’t have a Michelin Guide and how the organization’s pay-to-play model worked. When I asked whether she would consider paying for the guide if it came calling, she said no. “Making that kind of investment for what would likely be a smaller subset of our restaurant community probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense for us,” Sheridan said at the time.

The story, published on May 3, landed like a grenade. Some cheered Meet Boston, praising the organization for not paying into Michelin’s scheme. “The next time your NYC friends shit on Boston food, you can tell them Boston’s food is so good that we don’t need to pay to play,” @BostonFoodGuide posted on TikTok. Others thought the decision was shortsighted and didn’t take into account Michelin’s impact within the restaurant industry. “Challenge and pushing for competition is the way to bring a better food scene in our city,” Bonde Fine Wine Shop, a boutique Cambridge shop, wrote on Instagram.

One of the people reading the story was Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli, a lifelong Boston-area resident who had spent years working inside some of the area’s most sought-after restaurants, including one-time Cambridge hot spot Craigie on Main. He now runs Alcove, a neighborhood-y waterfront spot with a deep wine list in Boston’s West End.

Even though Schlesinger-Guidelli worked with Meet Boston as a culinary ambassador for the city at the time, Sheridan’s take didn’t sit right with him. “I wasn’t really a fan of that response,” he says. “I’m a rising-tides-lifts-all-boats kind of guy, and the more focus and attention that we have on the city’s culinary scene is an opportunity for us to continue to get better, and continue to be looked at throughout the country, and the world, in a way that I think that many of the chefs, restaurateurs, bartenders, wine professionals, and cooks deserve to be looked at—as real restaurant professionals.”

He had another reason to worry. Boston’s food media scene was shrinking fast. Fewer local outlets were writing about Boston’s restaurants, which meant fewer reasons for the rest of the country to pay attention. The Improper Bostonian and the Boston Phoenix had folded years ago, and there was only one full-time restaurant critic left covering the city. In the aftermath of 2020, when Boston needed more coverage of its restaurants, there had never been less. “I didn’t feel like we had the resources locally to advocate for ourselves nationally,” Schlesinger-Guidelli says. “And I felt like we were losing talent as a result of it.”

So Schlesinger-Guidelli decided to do something about it. Two days after the Eater story came out, he was on the phone with his publicist, Martha Sullivan, who has worked for decades as a restaurant rep for some of the Boston area’s top chefs. “I said, ‘Well, why don’t we get in a room with Meet Boston?’” he recalls. “These are great people. I think we can have an honest conversation about why we think [Michelin] is important—and why it might not be.”

It wasn’t a sure bet that they would be open to talking, Sullivan told him. “Some people make a decision and move on,” she says. “I didn’t know if the book was closed.” But she decided to give it a try. Later that same day, she reached out to Sheridan and her communications director, Dave O’Donnell. “I said, ‘Hey, I saw the article in Eater. I would love to share with you some input from other chefs. Would you be open to coming to Alcove?’”

Eighteen minutes later, Sheridan responded. She was in.

Three weeks after that, the Meet Boston duo headed to Alcove for a roundtable lunch with Schlesinger-Guidelli, Sullivan, Pam and Chris Willis of Pammy’s, Trevor and Kate Smith of Thistle & Leek, Douglass Williams of Mida, and Carl Dooley of Mooncusser. Inside Alcove’s private dining room, over a casual spread of salads and sandwiches, the chefs opened up, one by one, about their experiences working in Michelin-starred kitchens in other cities and countries.

Dooley recalled that when he worked in Washington, DC, prior to Michelin launching a DC guide, the city was known for politics, and that’s about it. Now, its restaurant scene regularly commands national headlines. Williams laid out what it would mean for Boston’s next generation of cooks to be able to have a shot at Michelin without decamping to New York or Chicago. The group talked through Michelin’s different categories, and how it didn’t only spotlight $300 tasting-menu spots. “One of the real fears was that we were going to do all this work and figure this all out, and one restaurant was going to be the only thing that mattered,” Schlesinger-Guidelli says. “[We were] trying to have a conversation about how much bigger Michelin is than just the stars.”

Throughout the lunch, Sheridan and O’Donnell listened more than they talked. “It wasn’t a ‘you should, you should, you should,’” Sheridan says. “It was just more like, ‘listen to our perspective’ kind of thing, and educate us.”

Afterward, the talent-retention argument stayed with Sheridan. “It builds a legacy,” she says. “I’m all about legacy. This organization, we’re building a legacy for tourism in Boston. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of it. I only thought about the guide itself, the dining experience.”

If Michelin could help attract and retain chef talent in Boston, making the city a more attractive place to take big swings—and keep pushing Boston forward as a culinary destination—then Sheridan was listening. “I have always wanted to elevate Boston’s culinary scene,” she says.

But she wasn’t going to beg. Though Sheridan was ready to have another look at Michelin after the lunch, she didn’t want to simply go knocking on their door. “I wanted it to be their idea and not mine, because I felt like, if we’re going out to them—and I knew they had a pricing model—like, I wanted them to not think we were chasing it, right?”

So she and O’Donnell reached out to John Fraser, a New York City–based chef and restaurateur who was expanding to Boston with a mini food hall and steakhouse inside Downtown Crossing’s Winthrop Center. Fraser had run Michelin-starred restaurants in New York, and his newer Tampa restaurant, Lilac, had just won a Michelin star following the hospitality group’s recent expansion into Florida.

The pair listened to Fraser’s pro-Michelin perspective before O’Donnell dropped a hint at the end of the conversation. “If you ever hear about them wanting to engage with us,” he said, “just let them know that we’re, you know, perhaps more open-minded than they might have thought if they read the Eater article.”

The stage was set.

By the end of 2023, Michelin reached out to O’Donnell and Sheridan. It’s not clear whether the company heard Meet Boston had changed its mind, but in any case, Michelin had conducted a “destination assessment,” according to a spokesperson, and deemed the Boston area worthy. Thus the courtship began. Michelin put its best foot forward, presenting case studies and statistics positioning itself as a marketing tool for city tourism organizations. A Michelin-commissioned Ernst & Young study shared with Meet Boston offered data points like these: 57 percent of frequent travelers said they’d extend their stay at a destination if there were Michelin restaurants nearby, and 61 percent of frequent travelers, when presented with two similar tourism options, said that the existence of Michelin “is decisive” in where they choose to go.

Around this time, according to O’Donnell, restaurant inspectors started coming to Boston. Michelin was hedging its bets. If Meet Boston eventually agreed to pay for a guide, the organization wanted to make sure that there would actually be something to publish. (“We don’t reveal specifics about the inspectors’ methods, but generally the process takes several months, at least,” according to a Michelin spokesperson.)

As the talks grew more serious, Sheridan and O’Donnell had one more important task: convincing a slew of local hoteliers that Michelin was worth the price tag. Early on in her tenure as CEO of Meet Boston (at the time, the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau), Sheridan had spearheaded the formation of the Boston-Cambridge Tourism Destination Marketing District (TDMD), which includes all hotels within the two cities with 50 or more rooms. The idea was that since destination-based marketing has a direct impact on hotel bookings, it was in Boston hoteliers’ best interest to fund those marketing efforts. A 1.5 percent fee gets tacked onto hotel guests’ bills, with the money set aside for tourism marketing projects and development.

The move had helped Meet Boston grow from an annual budget of $10 million to $50 million, according to Sheridan—but not without stipulations. Instituting the TDMD also involved the formation of a committee of hoteliers overseeing how Meet Boston spends those millions of dollars. It was that committee that Sheridan and O’Donnell now needed to convince that the Michelin play was worth it. “We suddenly were playing the role of those chefs at Alcove,” O’Donnell says. They had gone from completely writing off Michelin to thinking it was worth the considerable sum it charges tourism boards. Now, they needed to walk the hoteliers through a similar shift in perspective.

Carlos Bueno, general manager of the luxury Back Bay hotel Raffles Boston, recalled the TDMD board meeting at Meet Boston’s office downtown, where the Michelin play came to a vote. Reps from Michelin presented statistics on how the guide boosts foot traffic and hotel bookings. Sheridan and O’Donnell brought in Schlesinger-Guidelli, Williams, and Cambridge chef and restaurateur Will Gilson of Puritan & Company to talk about what the guide would mean from a dining-scene perspective—basically, a 20-minute version of the lunch at Alcove. Williams recalled reiterating the same points to the assembled hoteliers that he had at Alcove, though by this point, he was ready for someone to just make a decision already.

The hoteliers weren’t easy to convince. The estimated million-dollar price tag was significant, especially for a proposal where the benefit to hotels wasn’t immediately clear (as opposed to, say, supporting Boston’s bid to be a World Cup host city). Ultimately, though, the hoteliers began to see Michelin as a selling point, especially if they were going to compete with cities like Orlando or San Antonio for meetings and convention business. Raising Boston’s profile as a dining destination, they decided, would translate into more business for their hotels. The expenditure got their stamp of approval.

O’Donnell then went across the river and served up a similar pitch to the Cambridge Office for Tourism board, since Cambridge would be footing about 25 percent of the bill. Some of the committee members, including the office’s executive director, Candice Beaulieu, had already warmed to the Michelin proposal. Revenue from the city’s meals tax had been declining, an indicator that residents might not be dining out as much. This was a way to spotlight Cambridge restaurants on a much larger scale than, say, a restaurant guide on Cambridge’s tourism website.

The committee voted in favor of the proposal, and the deal was done. Greater Boston was getting a Michelin Guide. “It felt incredible,” O’Donnell says.

On Monday, May 12, 2025, the announcement went wide. Michelin was heading to Boston. The online reactions came fast and furious, from pure excitement to shock and dismay that Boston was, in fact, going to pay to play after initially saying it would never.

While diners debated who would make the Michelin list, chefs tied on their aprons and got to work. Dooley Googled the names of solo diners booked at Mooncusser to see if anyone might be visiting under a suspicious alias. At 311, the South End Japanese sushi spot that ultimately earned Boston’s only Michelin star, co-owner Carrie Ko kept an eye on diners, too, wondering if they were inspectors. Jason Doo, chef-owner of American-Chinese restaurant and tiki bar Wusong Road, posted an ad on Instagram offering to pay diners who were familiar with Michelin to come eat at the restaurant and test whether it would make the cut for a Bib Gourmand. Chef Robert Sisca turned the occasional tasting menus at Back Bay French restaurant Bistro du Midi into a nightly affair, just in case that might make the restaurant more attractive to Michelin.

A few weeks ahead of the mid-November launch of Boston’s first guide, the whispers started circulating. Michelin didn’t release a list of awardees to Meet Boston ahead of time, so everyone was left to piece together who made the cut on their own. Chris and Pam Willis of Pammy’s had received an invite to the awards ceremony in Philly, and so had Michael Serpa of Select Oyster Bar. Dooley and Rachel Miller, of French-Vietnamese tasting menu Nightshade Noodle Bar in Lynn, were in. The entirety of Columbus Hospitality Group (Mistral, Ostra, and Mooo…, among others) and Himmel Hospitality Group (Grill 23 & Bar, Bistro du Midi, the Banks Seafood and Steak, and Harvest) were out. Not one of the properties within powerhouse Xenia Greek Hospitality (including Kaia, Bar Vlaha, and Krasi) had gotten a Michelin ticket. “By the time we got to Philly, I was aware of about 18 of the 26 or so,” O’Donnell says. “But [we had] no idea if these were stars, Bibs, recommended, whatever.”

Then came the ceremony. There were some highs: Boonnak had nabbed a big-deal cocktail award for the region, beating out New York, DC, Chicago, and Philly for the honor. A couple of restaurant owners received nods for all of their spots: Chef Karen Akunowicz swept up Bibs for both of her Boston restaurants, Fox & the Knife and Bar Volpe, and Michael Pagliarini and Pamela Ralston, the duo behind Cambridge restaurants Giulia and Möeca, were awarded recommended status for both of their places. A third of the selections were for Asian restaurants, including Uyghur, Thai, and Japanese spots, tipping a hat to Boston’s strong Asian food scene. The inaugural guide also underscored Boston as a hub for talented female chefs, with Akunowicz, Ana Sortun (Oleana), Jody Adams and Amarilys Colón (La Padrona), Rachel Miller (Nightshade Noodle Bar), Erin Miller (Urban Hearth), Tracy Chang (Pagu), and Kate Smith (Thistle & Leek) all receiving recognition.

Yet there was no mistaking the feeling in the air that Boston’s guide was, well, thin. South End omakase restaurant 311, run by the husband-and-wife team of chef Wei Fa Chen and Carrie Ko, took home the city’s only star. Where was Cassie Piuma’s Sarma, the eight-time James Beard honoree? How about Boston’s hottest new restaurant in recent memory, Comfort Kitchen? Or the elder statesmen of Boston’s fine-dining scene, like O Ya and Uni? It didn’t help that another of Boston’s Northeast rivals, Philly, was also getting its inaugural guide that night. Everyone in the audience watched as the (admittedly more populous) city beat Boston out with 33 restaurant selections, including three one-star awards.

The next morning, the headline practically wrote itself: “Boston Scores Just One Michelin Star After Paying to Get Rated,” a Bloomberg story blared. Locally, the coverage was kinder, cheering on the whole group of restaurants in the guide versus singling out the lone star. Still, no one’s prediction list had guessed this outcome. For chefs like Dooley, who won “recommended” status for Mooncusser but was hoping for a star, the guide felt like a gauntlet thrown. “I think there was a little bit of an emotional letdown, like, ‘Oh, we didn’t do so well as a city,’” Dooley says. “But then, I think that immediately turned to—certainly for me—the competitiveness to be like, ‘Okay, we’ve got work to do.’”

For Ko and Chen, the moment was pure validation. A few years earlier, after supporting Ko in her dream to launch a medspa, the couple had turned to focus on Chen’s dream to open his own restaurant. Every decision involved sacrifice. Chen trained at the then-three-Michelin-starred sushi restaurant Masa in New York City, driving back to Boston every week to spend his one day off with Ko. When the pair signed the lease on the South End space, they ran through their savings and were using credit cards to make up the difference and get the restaurant off the ground. Ko worked a second job during the day until almost a year after the restaurant opened. They opened without a liquor license and were unable to get one until nine months later.

Still, they knew exactly what they wanted. In Chen’s bio on 311’s website, he stated that he was striving for “Michelin-level excellence” in the restaurant, two years before Michelin announced its entry into the city. The duo is meticulous about sourcing in every area of the restaurant; Ko can say exactly where, when, and from whom they bought each piece of serveware used during dinner service. The pair fought tirelessly to convince high-end seafood purveyors who mostly did business in New York to expand deliveries to Boston. In one instance, the president of a Japanese company was more willing to work with 311 after dining at the restaurant and determining that Chen was talented enough to carry their products.

The couple recently spent upward of $3,400 for 20 pounds of Oma tuna, a legendary type of bluefin tuna caught near the town of Oma, located on the northernmost tip of Japan’s Honshu Island. Ko did some quick calculations during a recent interview on the restaurant’s one closed day per week. The price per pound of Oma tuna worked out to about $20 per slice served during the omakase. The current price of dinner at 311 is $280 for 18 courses. Between their uncompromising sourcing standards and the constant spiking of ingredient costs due in part to the tariffs levied over the past year, “we don’t make money from the food,” Ko says.

This way of running a restaurant is not feasible for everyone, nor should it be the only yardstick that determines a successful restaurant. Fellow South End resident George Mendes, a longtime chef who ran his own Michelin-starred restaurant Aldea in New York City for a decade before moving to Boston to lead culinary operations at Raffles, then branching out on his own with a forthcoming South End tasting-menu spot, is careful to explain that Michelin isn’t the only gauge by which to determine a great restaurant. The organization states plainly that it only cares about what is on the plate. “It’s really putting the chef under a microscope,” Mendes says.

Despite how difficult it is to win Michelin’s favor, Mendes and Ko both expected Boston to earn more accolades. Ko says that she and Chen were both surprised but also sad to be the only ones on stage receiving a Boston star that night. Mendes, for his part, wasn’t surprised that 311 earned a star—but he was surprised that it was the city’s only star, given the “depth of talent” that exists in Boston’s dining scene. “There are so many talented chefs, and I’ve eaten in so many great restaurants [here],” he says.

Due to the way Michelin shrouds its operations in secrecy, it’s impossible to know exactly how the inaugural guide was shaped. Michelin doesn’t disclose how many inspectors it dispatches to a new city or how many restaurants it visits to determine its inaugural lists. Still, when Nyacko Pearl Perry heard that the Michelin Guide was launching in Boston, she knew right away that Comfort Kitchen, the Dorchester hot spot that she co-owns with partner Biplaw Rai, probably wouldn’t make the cut.

It didn’t matter that the restaurant had swept up just about every local restaurant award available, or that it had secured a James Beard nod in every award cycle since it opened three years ago. Comfort Kitchen doesn’t fit the bill for Michelin, “and I say that even not knowing exactly what they’re looking for,” Perry says. For starters, it’s run by a Black chef, the menu focuses on tracing the spice routes out of the African diaspora, and it’s located in Dorchester, which historically does not see a lot of shine as a dining destination. There are far fewer African restaurants in Michelin’s guides versus French or Italian fare; and who knows which neighborhoods the non-local inspectors were visiting when they touched down in Boston. (Michelin, for its part, notes that its inspectors have “no set quota on the types of restaurants or cuisine types included in a selection.”)

Perry also acknowledges that the restaurant has evolved significantly in its three-year lifespan. “We are working on consistency,” she says. “It’s a growth area for us, as it is for many restaurants.”

David Doyle, the Jamaica Plain restaurateur who co-owns Centre Street hot spots Tres Gatos, Tonino, and Casa Verde, is more forthright in his criticism. “Michelin as an arbiter of taste, for me, is a little suspect,” he says. Doyle believes the standards that Michelin looks for, especially in its star ratings, are at odds with what it takes to build a successful restaurant in Boston: warm service, a community focus, and the kind of price point that can sustain regulars. The organization, in his mind, wasn’t interested in restaurants that function as cornerstones of their community and pack dining rooms on Monday nights.

“That whole notion of scarcity bugs me because there’s an implication that we just don’t have a lot of restaurants that qualify for whatever their standards are,” Doyle says. “I’m opposed to the idea, because, for those of us involved in the restaurant world here who take pride in what we offer, I feel like it automatically excludes a lot of wonderful chefs, and a lot of wonderful concepts that are beloved in their neighborhood and that really succeed as restaurants.” (The online uproar when Tonino didn’t get a Michelin nod, even with proven Boston talent Luke Fetbroth leading the kitchen, was almost visceral.)

Perry and Doyle’s critiques point to a larger question that Michelin faces in every city it enters: Can a European institution built on French fine-dining traditions recognize excellence in restaurants that don’t fit that mold? Michelin’s thin first guide—with no selections in Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, or Hyde Park, as well as the entire cities of Somerville and Quincy, which were all within Michelin’s stated geographic bounds—didn’t reflect the full wealth of neighborhood spots and immigrant-run kitchens that are a strength of the Boston dining scene.

A spokesperson for Michelin wrote in an email that inspectors worldwide are focused on five criteria when grading a restaurant: the quality of ingredients, mastery of cooking techniques, the “harmony of flavors,” how well the chef’s personality comes through on the plate, and consistency in execution. Whenever the organization expands to a new geographic location, the inspection team conducts “an initial study” of the area to “evaluate the main major culinary hotspots for the inaugural selection,” according to the spokesperson. They focused on “the metro Boston area” for the initial guide and expect to see the selections grow in the coming years. “It is only the beginning of our story with Boston, and as the Michelin Guide works on a long-term scale, we observe very often the extension of its geographical scope within a country, a region, or a state over time,” the spokesperson said.

Still, whatever Michelin’s blind spots, the hoopla that follows the organization wherever it goes translates into tangible benefits, according to every chef I spoke with for this story. Mendes predicts a stronger relationship with suppliers as chefs are more motivated to dial into their ingredient supply chain and work more closely with specific farmers in the region. Schlesinger-Guidelli hopes that Michelin aspirations will help stave off corporatism and guide developers toward favoring ambitious, independent restaurant ideas. Williams is already looking forward to the day when he can dine in a Michelin-starred restaurant run by one of the next generation of chefs coming up through the city’s kitchens. Now that inspectors are allegedly slipping in and out of Boston’s restaurants throughout the year, all diners will benefit from chefs who will be more on their toes, Dooley says. After all, Michelin recognition could be hanging in the balance.

Sheridan, who originally rejected the idea of Michelin because she didn’t want to pay for yet another spotlight on Boston’s white-tablecloth steakhouses, now calls that fear “unfounded” in the face of the guide’s initial selections, with its mix of Uyghur, Thai, Korean, and Hunanese restaurants alongside New England seafood stalwarts like Neptune Oyster. “It’s tamping down that feeling that people have about that sort of outdated perception of Boston’s dining experience,” Sheridan says. “When I hear the disparagement [about Boston’s dining scene], it sits so wrong with me.”

Still, was that worth an estimated seven-figure investment? Sheridan says it’s too early to tell. Chefs in the guide have been seeing upticks in sales, but the more important gauge to Meet Boston will be the overall buzz about Boston restaurants and whether Michelin’s presence boosts the number of hotel bookings in the city. “I think, really, years two and three are going to be what tell us, What does this really mean for us?” Sheridan says.

Bueno, Raffles’ general manager, says that post-guide launch, he remains “100 percent on board” with the decision to pay for Michelin. “When you’re making an investment like that, I don’t think you’re looking at 26 restaurants, or 50, or 100,” Bueno says. “You’re looking at the number of lives that we have the opportunity to impact. We take a look at the opportunity to elevate our city.” On that, Michelin promised many returns. Bueno noted, though, that when the contract comes up for renewal, the board will look at those statistics that Michelin initially presented to the TDMD and closely measure how they lined up with reality.

Back in Jamaica Plain, Doyle says Tonino will keep doing what it does best—friendly service, exacting standards, a packed dining room on Monday nights. If Michelin doesn’t notice, he notes, perhaps that says more about them than it does about us.

A Boston real estate developer once told me, “In Boston, I’m a rich old man. In Palm Beach, I’m a poor young one.” I’ve been playing in that luxurious sandbox on and off for many years and have witnessed endless sightings of incredibly rich people who look like characters out of zombie movies. I’ve seen elderly men, even on canes or walkers, escorted by much younger blond women. The thought balloons over the heads of the men surely say something like, “Where were you when I was in high school?” Then there’s the line about the women taking care of the older guys: “The women down here are either nurse or purse.” But if you loved Vanity Fair, Palm Beach is for you. Thackeray is alive and well.

People want to be with their tribes. It’s human nature. True in Boston. True everywhere. A gossipy friend of mine, whose parents owned a home in Palm Beach for many years, told me, “A number of Bostonians, when they became prosperous in various manufacturing businesses, typically shoes or textiles, migrated there in the winters. Several of them helped to found the Palm Beach Country Club, whose members have included Bostonians such as Robert Kraft.” Most people who own escape homes go there because friends moved there first and said, “You should come to Palm Beach, you’d love it.” Then my friend made another observation: “The three most insecure places in America are Beverly Hills, East Hampton, and Palm Beach.”

“Why insecure?” I asked him.

“They’re insecure because they can’t stand that the guy at the next table in the hottest restaurant has millions…or billions more than they have. It drives them crazy. And all these people are so proud that the maitre d’s know their children’s names. That’s insecurity.”

I visited Palm Beach last winter, happy to be in the sun, checking out the gilded playground. The classic WASP flavor—old money, jackets and ties, linen and seersucker, Panama hats, one-trick ponies from Greenwich, Darien, Lake Forest, Dearborn—has given way to arrivals from anywhere in the country where you’ve made enough to strut your stuff. These people are almost all from three industries: private equity, venture, and…consulting. They’re the modern Gatsbys. They made it themselves and they want you to know. They’re flocking to Palm Beach and West Palm, fleeing the cold and the taxes.

Everyone’s biggest complaint is the traffic. The second complaint from waitstaff and Uber drivers can be summed up in one word: entitled. “No one ever used to blow their horns down here. Now, rudeness rules,” an Uber driver told me. She said she’s writing a novel about the Palm Beach attitude: “If this place is progress, count me out. On the other hand, I’m having a great year.”

Still, for all its changes, Palm Beach remains what it’s always been: the poster child for capitalism. The old money is nervous. The new money is loud. And everyone is keeping score.

A couple of decades ago, Bernie Madoff took a big bite out of Palm Beach. Dozens of Palm Beachers, including not just wealthy people but solidly middle-class folks as well, got caught up in the Ponzi scheme. He fleeced his best friends, he destroyed his family, and he wiped out widows. I first heard about Madoff in the 1990s. I had a lot of clients at that time who were in the shoe business. “Shoeies,” as they called themselves, were born gamblers. Because every season for them was a bet on fashion trends, shoeies could be on top of the heap one year and in bankruptcy the next. They all competed with one another in loving ways, playing gin rummy, golfing, and debating who had the hottest money manager. Many of them went to Palm Beach in the winter. One of them I called “Mr. K.” He often gave me his impressions of life in Palm Beach. And I know he had put money with Madoff. In the early 2000s, he said to me, “Do you know why I came to Palm Beach? Not just for golf.” (He had a low handicap.)

“No, why?”

“Well, I sell shoes, right? You have to always look like you’re a big success. Show no weakness in the shoe business. We like good service in restaurants. So if you’re gonna make it in Palm Beach, you’ve got to learn how to duke.”

“Duke?” I said.

“Slip the maitre d’ a folded bill, down around your pants pocket so no one can see. You duke him. Palm Beach is basically Duke City.” I asked him about Madoff. “Well,” he said, “you weren’t ‘in with the in crowd’ down here if you didn’t have money with him. It was its own club. You know, I never could read any of his monthly statements. And neither could my accountant.”

“And you didn’t think anything might be phony?”

He smiled a sad little smile. “Well, I did think that.” He paused. “But I liked the checks.” Many of the early investors took money out on a regular basis. The classic Ponzi scheme. Fear and greed. Pay out the old investors with money from the new ones.

Boston, in a sense, created Madoff. A clothing manufacturer in Boston was one of Madoff’s first investors. They met, and the con man did his magic. It’s human nature to share with friends when opportunity presents itself. Friends spread the word to other friends. Madoff eventually expanded his action to Palm Beach, introducing his Ponzi scheme at the country clubs there, his perfect stage. In the major playpens of sun and money, there is a herd mentality: “We have to go where the action is.”

Speaking of going where the action is: Peter was an amusing client of mine from Pittsburgh, a divorced man who spent winters in a Palm Beach apartment. He was an outlier, a loner, not a member of any of the tribes that dominated there: high WASP old money at the Everglades Club and the Bath & Tennis Club and the Society of the Four Arts, or the Jewish population, with the Palm Beach Country Club at the top of the social food chain. Peter belonged to a different beach club that had a lot of members from the Midwest. “We’re down market from the East Coast crowd,” he told me. “We shake your hand; we have a deal. We don’t come to meetings with 20 lawyers. We don’t need the flash and dash. I wear khaki pants and a blazer everywhere. Women seem to like it. The waiters at Café L’Europe all wear ties. It’s more genteel than the other restaurants. I sit at the bar when I don’t have a date, sip a bourbon, and talk to the bartender. Recently, an attractive woman sat next to me and said, ‘You must be really rich to dress like that, as if you don’t care.’” Peter laughed. “I’m a single man in Palm Beach. Women are always fixing me up. They have a ‘hook’ when they describe me: ‘Peter’s like a prep school kid in the 1950s. He talks about William Faulkner and restaurants in Paris.’”

Peter smiled at me. “I grew up in L.A., Bel Air. It’s fun to live in places so insecure. You can be The Talented Mr. Ripley all the time.” Peter called the bartender over. “Give my friend a peek at the stash,” he said. The bartender brought out a cardboard box, put it down on the bar, and opened it. It was full of scarves. Peter said, “Every time I have a date, I’ll surprise her by whipping a scarf out of my blazer pocket, and I’ll give it to her.”

“Pretty expensive date,” I said. “Ferragamo.”

He smiled. “Why do I live in Palm Beach? I’m trolling to find a rich widow. At least I’m honest about it. And the odds are in my favor. Nurse or purse.” He knocked on the bar. “I’ll take the purse.”

Peter was playing a role, but so was everyone else. The difference in Palm Beach is that the stage keeps getting more expensive—yet some of the old backdrops are still worth the price of admission.

I would suggest, if you travel to Palm Beach today, that you stay at the Breakers hotel. Or at least have dinner or lunch to experience hospitality at the highest level. I cannot imagine another large hotel run like a boutique one, where the employees—up and down the spectrum of jobs, from concierge to shuttle-bus driver—are like the citizens of It’s a Wonderful Life. Last year, I was having a drink with a friend staying at the Breakers on the Flagler Club floors, which covers you with butler service and free cocktails at cocktail hour. “Yup,” my friend told me. “Free drinks and great hors d’oeuvres…I’m paying $4,000 a night.” I clinked my glass with his.

One day, I wandered into the Polo Ralph Lauren store just outside the lobby of the Breakers. A salesman wanted to help. “Online shopping is killing the buying experience,” he said. “All the great stores are going, going, gone down here. Neiman Marcus, Brooks Brothers, Saks. And there was a gentleness to Palm Beach, high standards. Yes, they were superrich, but they read books and listened to classical music and drove Bentley convertibles. Now it’s the Barbarians at the Gate.”

“And Gatsby’s your favorite book, I bet,” I said.

“Well, that’s why I work at Polo. I still want men in suits and ties and women in dresses not hiked up to their pippick.” He smiled a sad smile. “Sooner or later, it’s all gone, the gentility.”

Golf is big in Palm Beach, as is everything else in this bastion of money. There is a pecking order: good, better, best. My friend Jerry from Texas has a timeshare apartment and belongs to the cream of that crop: Seminole Golf Club, one of the elite courses in America that I call “CEO Paradise.” And as another friend, a Boston transplant, told me, “In Palm Beach, people-watching gives me laughs every day. It’s like one big New Yorker cartoon.”

Jerry, high up the food chain in the automobile business, was put up for membership at Seminole by several heads of major corporations. He took me out to play. The course is on almost every golfer’s bucket list—like Augusta, it’s hallowed ground. And tough to get into, even as a guest. The Seminole locker room is among the most impressive in golf, with shining wooden lockers so large you could almost sleep in one.

On one visit years ago, Jerry and I were going to lunch after our round. “Best jellied consommé in America,” Jerry said. Then he noticed a couple coming into the dining room. “There’s a new member and his wife,” he said, nodding toward them as they walked in with the president of the club. He mentioned the new member was the CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the country. The CEO looked nervous to me. He was wearing a blue suit and a tie. His wife was wearing gloves, as if they both had come from church on a Sunday. They both looked as though they were trying to pass muster.

Which was exactly what they were trying to do. Even CEOs of Fortune 500 companies can have imposter syndrome. In Palm Beach, they can make you feel that way. Can I fit in with pedigreed Eastern preppies? Do I measure up?

Here’s a sign of the golf times: Real estate developer Stephen Ross has built three new courses just north of Palm Beach: the Apogee Golf Club. The initiation fee is more than $500,000, and I’m told the caddie fees run $600 to $700 a round. When I caddied at Putterham in Brookline, I got $5 a loop.

My favorite place to dine: outside at Bice. Then I’ll explore shimmering Worth Avenue. Two of my favorite stores in America are on opposite sides of Worth Avenue, facing off. Maus & Hoffman is one. The shop has flair and endless colors, from shoes and jackets to bathing suits. Don’t expect cheap on Worth.

Across the street is Trillion. Beautiful clothing as well. And as the name implies, incredibly expensive. While wandering around recently, I saw the perfect advertisement for the store: an elderly man, high patrician, white hair slicked back, standing with a walker. He was wearing a brilliant green cashmere sweater, and he was staring into space, as if he had no idea where he was. “Nice sweater,” I said to him.

“It was my father’s,” he said. “Used to wear it to the beach.” There was a display of cashmere sweaters on the table behind him. They came in multiple bright colors. I picked one up and looked at the price. “This one’s $700,” I said.

“The Baron,” he answered. “That’s what everyone called my old man. The Baron always told me, ‘Free is better. And if it isn’t free…wait for the sales.’” I put the sweater back.

Back across the street is the Adelson Galleries, which several years ago had a space in Boston’s South End. They always have wonderful artists. And they still do, including one of my favorites, Andrew Stevovich, who lives in the Boston area. And also Boston’s Robert Freeman, whose paintings of Black lives inspire me.

I met a woman that week at a dinner party in a client’s apartment on Breakers Row, next to the hotel, right on the beach. Her name was Charlie. She had run a major consulting firm and retired to Palm Beach, with several other dwellings where the one percent gather. I asked her about the current Palm Beach scene. “The people in Palm Beach are overwhelmed by what they have: fatigue from counting how many houses, how many planes. Fastest game in the past few years is to buy a great house and location, tear it down, and build a tribute to your success. Then buy the house on your left and the house on your right and say to yourself, ‘Can you top this?’” She went on. “Palm Beach used to be a sleepy place. Rich, yes. But kind of seersucker suit and straw-hat rich. Polo, not pickleball. Years ago, when I came down here, everyone lived a gentle life. Now there’s a crowding out, a wall of people, the toniest clubs, the Everglades, the Bath & Tennis, all taking in more members than they’ve ever had. The dream of being ‘in with the in crowd’ is relentless.”

“Well,” I said, “Everything changes in life, whether we like it or not. Why don’t you move someplace else?”

Charlie smiled. “Well, I like to see how people live. I was a marketing whiz and a history buff. I do like to people-watch at La Goulue because it has a New York feel. Then I can go to Kapsiki on Worth Avenue. They have a one-of-a-kind flair for original outfits.”

As she was leaving the party, she said, “Looking around Palm Beach, I wonder if it’s somewhat like Paris right before the revolution—the royals about to lose their heads. When you run into new friends here, they all tell you they’re running off to visit somewhere else: Venice, Antarctica…they’re nervous.”

My friend Frank has lived half the year in Palm Beach for at least 30 years. He was a star at one of the premier investment firms in the country, based in New York. He has a great sense of history about the world around him, and some sharp observations about his second home: “It was a quieter place when I came down here. Now, new clubs are popping up and are immediately filled up, with most of the members from other places, making the traffic out of control,” he said. “One recent place got this all started, the Carriage House, modeled on Annabel’s, the über club in London. Symptoms of the times. Young crowds, rock ’n’ roll. When it opened, it was around $250,000 initiation fee. Now it’s more than $400,000. No sports, just ‘see and be seen.’ Fun, fun, fun, till Daddy takes the T-bird away.”

“It’s finance-bro city,” Frank added. “They’ll probably bring back the dress code: suspenders and suits, slicked-back hair, huge watches…cuff links. They already have the clubs to go with it all.”

Real estate and hotel rates, accordingly, have skyrocketed. “We can’t believe the home prices…$120 million. New hotels are going up all over the place. I visited friends in a new hotel in West Palm. A tiny room is $2,000 a night. And getting a restaurant rez is crazy. We stay home mostly. And so do our friends.” He winked at me. “But we’ll go to the Everglades…no tourists there.”

My favorite place in Palm Beach is the Society of the Four Arts, with an amazing sculpture garden designed by the great Boston landscape architecture firm Morgan Wheelock. The Four Arts was created in 1936 to bring education and culture to Palm Beach County. There are courses and programs featuring visiting speakers, the best America offers in politics, literature, music, and current events. Name your favorite person in any field, and more than likely, they’ve spoken and delighted the gatherings at Four Arts.

I was writing in a notebook, dining outside at Bice, when a woman alone at the next table asked, “Are you a food critic?”

Donatella had been an opera singer, not quite the Met or La Scala, but a diva nonetheless. “I’m a culture maven,” she told me. “The new big money here means Palm Beach will be one of the great cities in America for the performing arts. I heard the most interesting people in the world, like Boris Johnson and Neil Gorsuch, want to speak here. The greatest symphonies as well, and wonderful theater at Glazer Hall. And every single great New York restaurant is opening a place down here. I could go to the Kitchen in West Palm or Milos every night, but I hope your wallet is fat.”

I guess whether Palm Beach is getting better or worse depends on your perspective. But either way, the point of coming down here is rubbing elbows with the economically rarefied, playing in the pools, the golf courses, the clubs and dining, the shopping, the people-watching. On my last night on a recent visit, I was waiting for a shuttle bus to take me back to my hotel. I sat in a small vestibule. Four young women came over and sat next to me. They noticed me writing in a notebook. One of them said, “You writing a book?”

“Always,” I answered. “I’m writing an article about Palm Beach.”

“We’re here on a long weekend, down here from Quincy, staying at the Breakers.”

“Having fun?”

“The best big hotel we’ve ever stayed in. Palm Beach is really lit. All kinds of old guys, young guys hitting on us. Buying us drinks. It’s like a great parade, taking it all in, away from the cold. And we get to pretend we’re as rich as they are. We’re all from Quincy but thinking that we’re Cinderella and the prince will show up and ask us to the ball. Wanna buy us some stingers?”

“A little late for me,” I said.

“Too bad—you should really act like we do. Pretend you’re really rich.”

This article was first published in the print edition of the February 2026 issue with the headline: “Scenes from the Gilded Sandbox.”

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• 18 Winter Travel Destinations to Escape This Mess

A single beam of light bobbed in the darkness as Patrick Bittman, cold and winded from hours of hiking, hauled himself up the last stretch to the summit of Little Haystack. Hours earlier, he’d set out alone on a nighttime winter hike in New Hampshire’s White Mountains to climb the three peaks of the Franconia Ridge loop and watch the sun rise from the final summit. He had left the trailhead at 12:15 a.m. under a light snow, shortly after scribbling down his first journal entry: “Maybe this is foolish.”

Three hours later, as he scanned the first peak with his headlamp, he felt as though he’d stumbled into a Norse hellscape. The summit of Little Haystack, at nearly 5,000 feet above sea level, was far colder, windier, and buried under much more snow than the trailhead. Off the sides of the ridge, stunted trees—gnarled and bent by years of pounding wind—were caked in thick layers of frozen snow. Icicles jutted out at improbable angles from the black rocks. Then there was the sound—that unnerving, haunting sound. He took off his gloves, exposing his hands to the cold, to pull his journal out of his pack. “The wind is primordial, not a roar, but a deep, unceasing, guttural back-of-the-throat growl,” the 28-year-old wrote. Still, he pressed on.

On his way up Little Haystack, the trees on either side of the trail had kept him on course. Now, above the tree line, the path vanished under fresh snow. Every few steps he strayed from the invisible, rocky spine of the mountain and sank up to his waist in drifts. Each time, it took him 10 minutes to fight his way out, leaving him colder, wetter, and more exhausted than before. A distance that would have taken 15 minutes in normal conditions took him two hours. He was badly behind schedule. But he didn’t turn back—he just adjusted his goal. Instead of sunrise from Lafayette, he’d catch it from Lincoln, the middle peak.

As he slowly advanced, Bittman kept stripping off his gloves, exposing his hands, to consult his GPS or write in his journal, yet decided against eating food or drinking hot coffee from his thermos because he was worried about the cold. After a while, the words he wrote weren’t making much sense either.

Finally, a realization cut through his mental fog—unless he made strategic decisions right away, he would freeze to death on this mountain. He thought of his friends and family, how he’d be letting them down if he never made it home. None of them even knew where he was out hiking.

But when he finally decided to turn back, it was too late—he couldn’t find the trail. Instead, he started frantically down a steep, treeless gully, thick with snow, moving faster and faster. He figured he’d eventually intersect the trail and, even if he couldn’t go any further, a hiker would find him in the morning. Sliding 10 feet at a time in the deep snow, then getting back on his feet and sprinting again, he was animalistic, his body buzzing with adrenaline, his heart thundering beneath his layers.

He ran on in a panic, littering the mountainside with his belongings—his hat, his gloves, his walking stick, his headlamp. His mind was locked in flight mode.

After about a third of a mile, his mad dash came to a sudden halt as he sank waist-deep into the snow. He could no longer move his body, nor did he even want to. His adrenaline drained away, and his heartbeat slowed. Peace settled over him. He closed his eyes and waited for death.

Just before 8 a.m. on December 19, 2024, New Hampshire Fish and Game Department Lieutenant James Kneeland drove north through Franconia Notch on Route 93 to a meeting in Lancaster. It was wild in the notch that morning, the mercury at 25 degrees, with 40-mile-an-hour winds blowing snow everywhere. As always when driving north, he decided to check out the scene at the trailhead to the Franconia Ridge Loop, which lies just steps off the highway, to see how busy things were. The loop is one of the most popular hikes in the Northeast—and the single most frequent site for rescues in New Hamsphire.

He pulled his Chevy Silverado into the snow-covered lot where a single car sat parked. Who the eff would be up there in this goddam weather? he wondered. Still, with so few cars in the lot, he felt confident he wouldn’t get an emergency call that day.

Minutes later, more than 3,000 feet above that parking lot, Bittman opened his eyes, surprised he was still alive. One lucid thought surfaced: Maybe he had cell reception. He fished his phone out of his jacket and dialed 9-1-1. To his disbelief, a dispatcher answered. He told her he needed help.

Kneeland had only made it 20 minutes up Route 93 when State Police texted him at 8:13 a.m. about a hypothermic hiker on Little Haystack. He pulled over, took out his laptop, fired up his GPS mapping software, and entered the coordinates. Bittman’s location appeared as a red dot in the Dry Brook drainage, a gully he knew all too well. Two years earlier, on Christmas Eve, he had sent a team of rescuers up there to find a lost hiker. They returned on Christmas Day carrying his lifeless body.

Kneeland called Bittman and asked if he could move, explaining he could guide Bittman back to the trail over the phone. But Bittman was too cold and his limbs were frozen. Kneeland knew a helicopter was his best chance, and he asked how far Bittman could see. When Bittman replied that he was in the clouds and could only see about 50 feet, Kneeland knew a chopper wouldn’t be able to safely fly through the clouds to get there. He would have to send rescuers up on foot. “I’m going to get a team together and send them up to you. It’s going to be several hours till they’re there, though,” he told Bittman, adding that he would call every 30 minutes to check on him.

“I know it’ll take you as long as it took me to get here,” Bittman replied.

Kneeland hung up and started calling members of his team. It was time to save Bittman.

Fish and Game Lieutenant Bob Mancini was sitting on the exam table at the doctor’s office getting his blood pressure taken when his phone lit up with a message from Kneeland about Bittman. He read it and turned to the doctor. “You might want to give me a minute,” he said. “My blood pressure could be a little high.” He called Kneeland to accept the mission, then hustled out to his truck.

Fish and Game Conservation Officer Christopher McKee was at home when he got the call. He opened his pantry, snagged two cans of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup from his kids’ lunch cache, boiled them up, and poured it into his thermos before grabbing his coat and jumping in his truck, where his rescue gear was already packed and ready to go. Conservation Officer Jim Cyrs was on his way to pick up a potentially rabid bat for testing when he received the call. He rerouted his GPS and headed for the notch. Conservation Officer Joseph Canfield also responded.

Kneeland knew he was going to need more rescuers for a carry-out—it would take a minimum of 18, in shifts of at least six, to carry Bittman down the mountain in a litter. He called Allan Clark, founder and then-president of the Pemigewasset Valley Search & Rescue Team (Pemi SAR), an all-volunteer group that covers this stretch of the White Mountains, and gave him the details.

Dan Allegretti, a semi-retired private equity guy and Pemi SAR volunteer, was walking his poodle with his wife when an alert hit his phone: We have a male off trail below the ridge; he is currently alive. We will be going up Falling Waters Trail to Shining Rock and then bushwhacking north to his coordinates. Staging will be at the normal trailhead. This will likely be a carry-out. Fish and Game is bringing the litter. This is for winter crew only. Temperature is dropping currently 15 degrees, wind 25 mph. Need traction and likely snowshoes.

Allegretti walked home, filled a thermos with hot black coffee, wrapped up a piece of his wife’s homemade banana bread, and gathered some electrolytes and additional food for the mission. Then he grabbed his snowshoes, pack, and fluorescent yellow Pemi SAR jacket, and headed for his car.

When Rusty Talbot, a local climbing-gym owner and mountain guide, saw the alert, his mind flashed back to nearly two decades earlier, when he and some friends had gotten caught in a snowstorm after ice climbing. When they tried to get down the mountain, they got lost for a couple of hours in deep snow in the very gully where Bittman was located. He knew exactly how disorienting that terrain could be.

Talbot quickly checked his calendar. That night was his son’s last concert of his elementary school career. He crossed his fingers that he’d be back by then and accepted the mission. Six other winter-qualified members also responded.

Kneeland knew the cloud cover was too low for a helicopter medevac mission, but he also knew that weather moves fast on Franconia Ridge. He put in the call to the New Hampshire Army National Guard base in Concord, just in case.

National Guard Chief Warrant Officer Luke Koladish was in the flight operations room that Thursday morning when the call came in. He knew from the sense of urgency on the line, and the time it would take a ground crew to reach the hiker, that the Guard’s medevac team was Bittman’s best shot at survival. He agreed to take the mission as pilot-in-command, asking Chief Warrant Officer Jeremy Gray to serve as pilot and Sergeant First Class Aaron DeAngelis to build out the rest of the crew. DeAngelis recruited Sergeant Daniel Bourque to operate the hoist and Staff Sergeant Ethan Major to serve as medic. It was a solid team; they all had extensive experience, including some who had rescued wounded soldiers from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, often under fire.

After their commanding officer signed off on the mission, Koladish headed to the Black Hawk on the tarmac, where the crew had already prepared their gear for the mission. He and Gray climbed into the cockpit, pulled on their headsets, and ran through their lengthy preflight checklist. The engine whined, and after a while, their seats began to shudder as the rotors came to life overhead. The rest of the crew climbed in. As the Black Hawk began to slowly rise into the air and head north, Gray radioed base: “We are off of Concord, en route to Franconia Notch.”

At about 9:15 a.m., Conservation Officer McKee swung his truck into the snowy parking-lot staging area where Kneeland was waiting. Kneeland briefed him on the plan as McKee pulled on his outer layers, grabbed his radio, and hauled his 60-pound pack from the back of his truck. Inside it were warm clothing, a chemical warming blanket, sleeping bags, and a bothy bag—a pole-less survival shelter used for keeping warm. McKee waited for Canfield to arrive on the scene, and by 10 a.m., they were heading up the trail.

Allegretti and fellow Pemi SAR volunteers Corey Swartz and Mark Casale pulled into the lot shortly after, checked in with Kneeland, and started up the mountain. Then Mancini arrived from the doctor’s office, stripped out of his dark-green Fish and Game uniform right there in the parking lot, and started pulling base layers and outer layers from the drawers in the back of his Chevy Tahoe before grabbing his spikes, snowshoes, and 50-pound pack. Kneeland handed him the litter, and Mancini began up the trail, dragging it behind him. Soon after, Talbot and three other volunteers checked in and set out with Jim Cyrs from Fish and Game.

Eventually, Allegretti and the other two Pemi SAR volunteers caught up to McKee and Canfield. Since the volunteers were carrying much smaller packs than the Fish and Game officers, they decided the volunteers should push ahead as the hasty team to reach Bittman first and start warming him. McKee handed over some of his warming gear, including the bothy bag and chemical blanket. The volunteers stuffed them in their packs and took off, moving at as fast a pace as they thought they could reasonably sustain.

Meanwhile, far overhead, the Black Hawk closed in on Franconia Ridge. In the back, medic Ethan Major was readying his rescue gear. If the clouds were high enough to get to Bittman’s location, they were going to have to move fast. They would need a long enough break in the weather to lower Major down to Bittman, hoist both back up, and safely get out of there. DeAngelis monitored visibility out the left-side window, down toward the notch. “We have an escape route down to the left, toward 93,” he said over the chopper’s intercom.

As they neared their target, their rotors whipped up fresh snow from trees and created a rotor cloud from the moisture—both limiting visibility. But the most dangerous obstacle by far was the low cloud ceiling. Koladish and Gray inched the Black Hawk slowly up the mountain to avoid punching into the clouds if they suddenly shifted. When that happens, pilots lose all visibility in an instant and with it, often, their sense of orientation. It’s an extreme emergency—and often fatal.

Over the chopper’s intercom, Koladish announced their emergency plan: If they went into the clouds, they would immediately turn left and climb to 7,500 feet—far above the range’s peaks. The pilots would fly to the edge of what was possible, but they couldn’t risk five lives onboard to save one on the mountain.

The chopper got within a half mile, then a quarter mile to where the needle on their grid indicated Bittman should be. But as they inched higher, they reached 3,900 feet—as high as they could safely fly in the clouds. Bittman’s coordinates were at 4,300.

Just then, DeAngelis piped up: “93 is starting to fade.” They were losing visibility, and their escape route was disappearing. The pilots backed off, turned left, and prepared to retreat down toward the notch.

Still, there was one last possibility: Maybe Bittman was just above the top of the clouds. The chopper climbed over the band of clouds and tried to descend to him from above, but no luck. Bittman was unreachable.

The National Guard team radioed Kneeland and told him that they would land at the Cannon Mountain Ski Area, just north across the highway, to conserve fuel and wait for a possible break in the weather. “Granite ops this is ABLE 12,” Koladish radioed to the base in Concord. “We’re unable to get to the patient. We’re going to land at the Cannon Mountain parking lot to stage.” Down in the parking lot, Kneeland sat alone in his pickup, following it all on the Guard’s radio channel. “Goddammit,” he said aloud.

The pilots lowered the chopper onto the snowy surface and powered it down. Then they strode into the ski lodge in their camo flight gear, where ski-school kids buzzed around the lodge. Around that time, Kneeland called Bittman to check in. “Could you hear the helicopter overhead?” he asked. Bittman said he could not.

Kneeland felt a pit in his stomach. Either it was far windier up the mountain than he thought—putting Bittman in even more danger—or his coordinates were off, meaning the rescuers might need to conduct a search before they could even get to him.

At about noon, the hasty team reached the turnoff to Shining Rock, just below the summit of Little Haystack. They checked their GPS maps. Bittman was at that same elevation, but about 1,000 feet off the trail. They decided to climb a bit higher, figuring they’d naturally drift downhill as they traversed toward the little red dot marking Bittman’s location.

The trail they’d climbed was hard-packed snow. Now they faced 3 feet of undisturbed powder. They pulled the spikes off their boots, unhooked their snowshoes from their packs, strapped them on, and ventured off trail.

Swartz took point, using his GPS to guide the trio through the spruce-fir forest’s nasty, matted low-lying branches. They pushed tree limbs aside with their arms and clomped over them with their snowshoes. It had taken them nearly two hours to climb the 3 miles to where they left the hiking trail. After 20 minutes of bushwhacking through the forest, they’d only made it about 500 feet.

Meanwhile, the four Fish and Game officers, Talbot, and the other Pemi SAR volunteers had made it to the point where they too would leave the trail to move toward Bittman’s location. Their mission was different: to secure Bittman’s exit. That meant blazing a trail through the trees wide enough for the litter and the rescuers carrying it, and as level as possible to avoid jostling him. Sharp or rough movements can send a hypothermic patient into immediate cardiac arrest.

They got out their hatchets and saws—Cyrs pulling his recently sharpened two-handed axe—and started hacking. Early on, McKee hit a steep drop-off. He knew they would never get a litter back up it, and they backtracked to cut a new path. They did this again and again, backtracking, rerouting, and searching for a way through.

While the ground crew made their way toward Bittman, Kneeland sat in his truck at the trailhead, calling Bittman every 30 minutes. On an earlier call, he asked again if Bittman felt strong enough to try to reach the trail. Bittman said he could not. Kneeland reassured him that help was on the way and gave him a warning: “Whatever you do, if you do move, do not go downhill.” On another call, Kneeland asked if Bittman could build a snow shelter. The answer was no.

Kneeland kept calling to check in, but by late morning, Bittman could only respond with moans. He was fading.

At noon, Kneeland called him again. The phone rang and rang. No one answered. He dialed once more. No answer. “Fuck,” he said, banging his fist on the steering wheel. He thought the worst. If Bittman’s battery had died, the call would have gone straight to voicemail. Calls were going through but Bittman was no longer answering.

Kneeland knew his team was moving as fast as they could, yet he needed them to understand how dire the situation was getting. He picked up his radio and reported that Bittman was no longer responding to calls.

At 1 p.m., about 45 minutes after the hasty team had left the trail, they were closing in on the red dot. Swartz was out front, whacking through what his map showed was the final stretch. Then a clearing came into view, and he emerged from the forest into the open gully.

There, precisely where the map said he’d be, was Bittman. A few feet away lay his phone, dropped from his frozen hands.

Down in the parking lot, Kneeland picked up his cell phone again. One more try to see if he would answer. He dialed Bittman. It rang. Then he heard a voice on the other end.

“This is Corey.”

“Oh, Corey. Sorry. I must have dialed the wrong number,” Kneeland said.

Before Kneeland could hang up, Swartz explained that he had just gotten to Bittman and picked up his phone.

“Is he alive?” Kneeland asked.

Swartz said he was, and the team was already working on warming him. Kneeland felt a wave of relief. “Update me when you can,” he said before hanging up.

Bittman was in bad shape, sitting dazed in the snow. When Swartz told him they were from search-and-rescue, he seemed to understand, but he had a vacant look in his eyes, like he wasn’t even there.

The three volunteers got busy constructing a makeshift platform out of their snowshoes and packs to get Bittman off the ice. Then they opened the red bothy bag and climbed inside. Under the warm glow of the shelter, they started pulling layers and blankets out of their packs.

Allegretti pulled out the chemical blanket McKee had given him and tried to activate it. Nothing. It was a dud. “Okay, what else do we have?” he asked. They rifled through their packs—a Thinsulate blanket, an extra jacket, a hat, and gloves—and started dressing Bittman. Then Swartz and the other volunteer opened their bright yellow Pemi SAR coats and sat on either side of Bittman, sandwiching him between them, using their own body heat to warm him. Allegretti pulled out his thermos. “I’m sorry, all I have is some black coffee,” he said. “Will you drink that?”

“I’m a barista,” Bittman replied with a smile.

Allegretti was relieved to see a sliver of the person who was still in there. They got him to eat some of Allegretti’s wife’s banana bread. He seemed to be coming back.

Still, Bittman was confused. He gazed at the strangers around him offering sips of hot coffee, a puzzled look on his face. After a while, he asked Allegretti if he could lie down. “So long as you keep talking to us,” Allegretti said. They didn’t want him to drift off.

Allegretti checked in with Kneeland, relaying that Bittman’s condition was inconsistent and unstable. He looked at the time—they’d been with Bittman for more than an hour now. Where was the litter?

Just a few hundred feet away, the rest of the ground crew was hacking through the forest, searching for the best route. They were moving as fast as they could without sweating through their layers, which would chill them and turn them from rescuers into liabilities. They looked skyward. Still socked in. This would be a carry-out, no question about it. That meant the hardest part of the day was still ahead of them. The carry-out would require great care, potentially ropes to maneuver the litter down hairy sections, and as many as 10 hours. What was less clear was whether, somewhere along the way, this rescue would become a body-recovery mission.

Down the mountain, time was running out. In the basement of the Cannon Mountain ski lodge, the National Guard members gathered around their radio, tracking the slow progress of the ground rescue and monitoring the weather. Mount Washington’s weather station predicted a break in the clouds at 6 p.m.—four hours away.

It was two days shy of the winter solstice, with sunset at 4:13 p.m. Outside, daylight was draining from the sky. Just before 2:45 p.m., they radioed Kneeland that they had run out of time—they couldn’t carry out the mission after dark without night-vision goggles and would have to head back to the base in Concord. The news rippled across the forested hillside and into the gully where the Pemi volunteers were huddled under the red bothy bag, trying to keep Bittman alive.

If Koladish had worked expeditiously through the lengthy preflight checklist on the way out here, he was now slow-walking his safety check outside the chopper, hoping for a break in the clouds before they left. He climbed into the Black Hawk, grabbed the checklist off the hook behind his seat, and methodically ran through it with Gray, one item at a time.

Up on the mountain, the trail crew knew they were almost there and had sent Talbot ahead with the litter. In the bothy bag, Allegretti kept Bittman talking. Then Allegretti heard rustling outside and stuck his head out to see Talbot emerging through the trees. He climbed out to meet him and discuss the plan for getting Bittman into the litter.

Down in the parking lot, Kneeland looked skyward and saw a break in the clouds. He radioed Talbot and Allegretti, who confirmed they were seeing it, too, as did McKee. For the first time all day, he and the other Fish and Game officers could see the entire mountainside, meaning that they—and Bittman—were about 100 feet below the cloud ceiling. “Send the helicopter,” McKee said. “It’s now or never.”

At 2:55 p.m., the pilots and crew were already in the Black Hawk, ready to fly home, when they heard the chatter on the Fish and Game channel. The three crew members in the back looked at one another and knew the mission was back on. By the time they heard one of the Fish and Game officers asking Kneeland if the Guard was up on the channel yet, Koladish had already thrown the throttles into fly.

The pilots still had Bittman’s location on their grid and headed up the mountain, this time with urgency. In back, Major was already out of his seat, preparing to rappel out of the chopper. DeAngelis monitored their escape route on the left, while Bourque scoured the mountainside through the right-side window, looking for their target. The chopper made a pass over Bittman but didn’t see him. McKee came on the radio: They were one ridge off and needed to come back.

Then Bourque spotted them—the bright yellow Pemi jackets against the fresh white snow. “I’ve got him at 4 o’clock, a half a mile or so,” he said. He opened the side door. Cold air rushed into the cabin. The pilots slid the chopper sideways toward the mountain.

By now, Major was hooked into the hoist, bringing along a bright orange stuff sack containing an air rescue vest. He leaned backward on the edge of the chopper door, his harness tightening around his pelvis, and fist-bumped Bourque before stepping off into the abyss. Bourque began lowering him, calling out directions for the pilots. “Five, continue right, four, continue right, three, two, one, and hold,” Bourque said. They were on target, with Major hanging just feet from the ground.

On the snow below, the Pemi SAR volunteers stood sideways and leaned into the slope, bracing against the downdraft that threatened to blow them off the mountain. Bourque lowered Major the rest of the way. When Major’s boots finally touched snow, he unhooked from the cable and gave the signal. The pilots retreated to hover off to the side to spare them the hurricane-force winds—but not too far in case the weather changed and they needed to get out fast.

Major made his way over to Bittman, who was still inside the bothy bag, raised his visor, and looked him in the eyes. “My name is Ethan. I’m a medic, and I’m here to help you.” He quickly assessed Bittman’s condition and asked him his name. Bittman answered. Good—he was alert enough to follow directions. They removed Bittman from the bothy bag and Major laid the triangular-shaped rescue vest on the snow and told Bittman to roll onto it. Together, they got his arms through the armholes. Then Major clipped it across Bittman’s chest and between his legs, before clipping himself to Bittman.

From the chopper, Bourque was monitoring everything on the ground. When he saw Major and Bittman were clipped in, he guided the pilots back until they were hovering right overhead, then lowered the hoist. The hook swung in the downdraft, and Allegretti reached up, grabbed it, and immediately handed it to Major. He clipped in and they were hoisted into the air.

In an instant the chopper was in motion again, banking left toward the notch, with Bittman and Major dangling beneath. Bourque hauled them up, and as soon as they were inside and he’d shut the door, the pilots blasted the heat. Major immediately knelt beside Bittman, wrapping him in the litter on the chopper floor, defibrillator pads close by in case his heart stopped. “We have the patient and are en route to Littleton Hospital,” Koladish said over the radio.

An instant later, the pilots and crew heard the sounds exploding from the radio channel—cheering, whooping, and several top-of-the-lungs “fuck yeahs” from the gully where the Pemi SAR volunteers had kept Bittman alive; the mountainside where the Fish and Game officers and Talbot had hacked through the forest; and the parking lot where Kneeland had coordinated it all. They smiled as they heard the radio channel. After all, they’d all had rescues that didn’t end the way they wanted. This one did. The mountains didn’t take this one, Cyrs thought to himself as he watched the chopper fly off toward Littleton. They’d made it just in time. Five minutes after the helicopter disappeared from view, the cloud ceiling came down again. The window had closed.

Ten minutes later, the Black Hawk set down on the hospital helipad, where medical staff were waiting just inside the building. Major orchestrated the handoff, hustling alongside the gurney into the hospital before jumping back in the chopper to head back to Concord. The doctors went to work on Bittman. His body temperature was in the 70s, at the edge of death.

At the gully, the rescuers gathered their gear, strapped on their snowshoes, and met up with the trail crew on the path they’d hacked through the forest. As they approached, Cyrs put his fist in the air and shouted, “Pemi SAR”—a salute to the volunteers who had been on the frontline all afternoon. McKee opened his thermos of Chicken and Stars, and they passed it around, sipping from the cup. Cyrs broke out his gummy bears for everyone to share. Then they headed down the mountain together, the empty litter dragging behind them.

At the parking lot, Kneeland waited for every one of them to come off the mountain and sign out before heading to a McDonald’s on the way home. He hadn’t eaten all day and ordered three cheeseburgers and fries from the drive-through.

Talbot knew that if he hurried, he could make it to his son’s winter concert. Mancini could, too—it was his kindergartener’s very first one. They both hustled toward their vehicles and drove to the school. Still in their wet mountaineering gear, they raced into the building, took their seats, and watched their children perform.

When Cyrs went home, the first thing he did was lay out his gear on the floor to dry. If a call came in the next morning, or even that very night, he’d have to be ready to head back out.

The first thing Bittman remembers from the hospital was doctors moving around the room talking about his organ function. He was lying there, his hands and feet extending off the table, warm water streaming over them, as the doctors tried to save his fingers and toes from amputation.

The next morning, Allegretti woke up unable to shake Bittman from his mind. He called Kneeland to ask if it would be okay to visit Bittman in the hospital. Kneeland said it would.

When he walked into the hospital room, Allegretti didn’t recognize Bittman—he was like a different person. “Do you remember who I am?” Allegretti asked. Bittman said he did. He was grateful for the mission that was orchestrated across two government agencies and a volunteer group, but to him, it had felt very personal. Strangers had fed him coffee and homemade banana bread. When Bittman’s mother walked into the room and he introduced Allegretti, she threw her arms around him.

As Bittman improved, his nurse joked with him about defying natural selection. Bittman thought of all the people—volunteers, Fish and Game officers, National Guard officers and crew members—who’d dropped what they were doing that day to save his life, risking themselves in the process. Maybe it isn’t survival of the fittest that matters most, he thought. Maybe the strongest force in natural selection is community.

A Fish and Game officer also showed up at the hospital—to collect information for their report, which would cite cotton layers, insufficient preparation, and poor judgment. Bittman hadn’t purchased the state’s $25 Hike Safe Card, meaning he could be charged for the rescue. But Bittman knew no amount of money could repay the strangers who had risked their lives for his. (In the end, he was not charged.)

Months later, Allegretti saw a message pop up on his phone. It was a video of Bittman, healthy and happy, back at his café job in Portland, Maine. In the video, he waved, then lifted a pitcher of foamed milk over a cup of espresso and poured a perfect tulip, topping it with a heart.

This article was first published in the print edition of the February 2026 issue with the headline: “Stranded.”

Below you’ll find the 10 most-viewed longform stories we published this year, a handy list of things to (re-)read that includes Boston’s in-depth coverage of watery deaths (Nathan Carman’s deadly fishing trip, a Charlestown houseboat murder), civic controversies (bike lanes, South Station Tower), and much more. But our most-read story of 2025 wasn’t about national AI or influencers. It was about what can still happen in the basement of a fraternity house. Scroll down to revisit the stories people couldn’t stop reading.

10. The Quiet Evolution of Joe Kennedy III

by Tom McGrath

Four years after becoming the first Kennedy ever to lose an election in Massachusetts, JK3 is ready to talk—about his 2020 defeat, his divisive uncle, and how the Democratic Party desperately needs a radical reinvention. Read the story>>

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9. This Isn’t About Bike Lanes

by Jon Keller

City Hall’s ambitious plan to reshape Boston’s streets has ignited a battle over who really controls the town’s future—and exposed an identity crisis long in the making. Read the story>>

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8. The Ultimate (and Unabridged) Guide to New England Seafood

by Rachel Leah Blumenthal, Wyndham Lewis, and Jacqueline Cain

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7. Could This High School Football Tragedy Have Been Prevented?

by Julie Suratt

When Sharon sophomore Rohan Shukla suffered a devastating brain injury during a Thanksgiving game, the small Massachusetts town had to confront a difficult question: How can we get the balance of sports culture and student safety right? Read the story >>

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6. They Tried to Silence Her COVID Origin Theory. Now Even the CIA Agrees with Alina Chan.

by Rowan Jacobsen

In 2020, the Broad Institute scientist ignited a controversy by suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a Chinese lab. Five years later, it sure looks like she was right. Read the story >>

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5. The Crypto Con Woman and the Charlestown Houseboat Murder

by Michele McPhee

Nora Nelson charmed Boston’s elite with tales of virtual millions and Harvard dreams. Prosecutors say her final performance was homicide on the water—taking the lives of a lawyer who’d fallen for her and his dog. Read the story >>

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4. Inside South Station Tower, Boston’s Big Bet on Downtown Living

by Kyle Paoletta

At 51 floors, the city’s newest skyscraper embodies both the neighborhood’s potential and its inequality problem. Read the story>>

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3. The Chilling Case of Nathan Carman’s Deadly Fishing Trip

by Casey Sherman

Linda Carman vanished on a boating excursion near Block Island, Rhode Island. Her 22-year-old stood to inherit millions. Then came one final surprise. Read the story >>

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2. I’m a Rapper Who Starred in “The Town.” Then Addiction Nearly Killed Me.

By George Carroll

A Boston kid became a Hollywood actor and an underground rap legend, then watched it all disappear. He’s since returned to the streets that raised him, trying to save the ones still fighting the same disease that nearly killed him. Read the story >>

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1. Greek Tragedy: A Drowning at Dartmouth College

By Susan Zalkind

Last summer in New Hampshire, a night of ritualized drinking ended with a sophomore drowning in the Connecticut River. Yet in the place that gave us Animal House and beer pong, will the party ever really end? Read the story>>