When the world’s largest painting was finished, few knew its true size. One magazine estimated the piece spanned two football pitches. Another news channel reduced the canvas to ten tennis courts. The truth was smaller: 17,000 square feet – a garish colossus of hearts, planets and splatters titled The Journey of Humanity.
It had taken the painter, Sacha Jafri, seven months, working alone in a barren hotel ballroom in Dubai that was his studio and then his auction house. Once finished, it was to be sliced into 70 pieces so it could be sold in segments at separate auctions across the world, with proceeds bound for charities that aimed to alleviate the suffering of children. But by 22 March 2021, the evening of the first auction, that plan had changed.
Seated in the ballroom at a dozen black-clothed tables were leaders from Dubai’s crypto community and Emirati royalty. Only a select few of them knew that, rather than being sold in individual segments, the entire painting was going up for sale. The bidding for the artwork quickly soared to $62 million. Out in front was a short, squarely built Frenchman, André Abdoune. ‘This gentleman here is going to make history,’ the auctioneer cried. ‘Once, twice, three times, sold! Sacha Jafri, go and shake that man’s hand!’
In that moment Jafri became the fifth most expensive living artist, and André, a billionaire few had ever heard of, was hailed as an international philanthropist, achievements breathlessly reported by international media. But it was an illusion, one the pair have closely guarded for years. What’s certain is that no child ever received a penny – and that both the world’s largest painting and André have vanished.
Jafri had always longed to be one of the world’s great artists. The 49-year-old British painter’s work has purportedly been exhibited alongside Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and is said to hang in the collections of US presidents and Oscar winners. To date, he has 20.4 million Instagram followers, making him the world’s most-followed visual artist.
Throughout his career, Jafri has worked outside the clutches of large, blue-chip galleries. He prefers to sell his art directly to private clients, individuals he must meet in person. Nearly all prospective buyers are rejected. His paintings, he says, are fragments of his soul that need to be loved.
He was raised in Virginia Water, a wealthy enclave of neoclassical mansions concealed behind tall hedges. Former classmates remember the young painter. At preparatory school, his class was given the task of drawing a picture based on the letter ‘N’. While other children finished quickly, Jafri spent weeks sketching a piece of such immense detail that it became the talk of the school. At Eton College, Jafri stood out. He was half-Pakistani and born to a father who he said twice went bankrupt, studying at a school where the overwhelming majority of pupils were white and wealthy. But he was well-liked, an outstanding cricketer and a great dancer remembered for a brave pair of high-ankled buckled boots, similar to the ones worn by Michael Jackson. Jafri was dyslexic, and struggled academically. It was through art, the painter claims, that he was able to make sense of the world.
To help, Jafri said the headmaster handed him the keys to a Portakabin where he could paint as much as he wanted, so long as he attended class. This intervention ‘probably saved my life,’ Jafri reflected years later. The wife of that same headmaster also offered to buy one of his earliest works. ‘I remember going with my mum to their house and they had Picassos, Mondrians and Rothkos on their wall,’ he once told a magazine. ‘There was actually no space for my painting, and so the headmaster took down a Picasso to put up my painting.’
Jafri enrolled at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Art in 1996. It was the height of the YBA movement, when Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition transformed the insular world of British contemporary art into a lucrative spectator sport. On campus, he was renowned as a handsome charmer with paint-stained clothes who glided about campus on rollerblades, greeting others as ‘man’ or ‘bruv.’ His performative confidence was attributed to his schooling. One even described him as ‘Johnsonian.’ Jafri’s bluster amused some of his peers, but it couldn’t mask what they saw as a lack of substance. ‘They just didn’t take him seriously as an artist,’ remarked one. His hedonism often interfered with his studies. Come final year, there was a debate among other students as to whether Jafri would even pass. He arrived late to his final degree show and stuck his painting to the studio wall with Sellotape. Jafri has always maintained he graduated from Oxford with a first, but two contemporaries dispute this. ‘He got a third,’ replied one.
Qualifications notwithstanding, Jafri’s ambition was meteoric: he coined his artistic style ‘magical realism’ while he was still at university. His early works attempted to evoke the nightmarish surrealism of his literary idol, Franz Kafka. Reflections of the Soul, a painting of his from the late 90s, is intricate and gloomy, with the bottom half stretching into a deep blue abyss. Over time, his paintings grew more abstract, producing work derivative of Jackson Pollock. Jafri says he paints in a meditative trance and claims that he was once studied in this state. They put pads on his head and found his brainwaves ‘entered Theta’. In Jafri’s telling, Theta is a dream state of total surrender. ‘You can’t create in a state of surrender,’ he later told an interviewer. ‘It’s a contradiction. Mozart did it, Beethoven did it. But no painters have done it.’
After graduating, Jafri moved to London. In 2002, he opened the Bermondsey Street Gallery. Kevin Spacey was an early admirer, and bought several pieces. ‘I just love Sacha’s feel for colour,’ the actor told the Telegraph. A year later, Madonna and Guy Ritchie entered the gallery and bought £8,000-worth of prints for their London home. Pictures of Jafri’s boyband looks are splashed in noughties editions of Tatler. To date, even higher-profile celebrities and political figures are listed as collectors of his work, such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson and David Beckham.
Jafri’s indisputable talent has always been convincing for a crowd looking to part with their money. It’s a reason why his artwork is frequently sold at star-studded charity galas. Live paintings are one of his trademarks, as is having A-listers daub his canvas with paint-covered hands. You can find pictures of Jafri grinning with a vast array of red-palmed celebrities, from Boris Becker to Brooklyn Beckham. His charity work is most commonly dedicated to alleviating the suffering of children.
It was in Darfur that Jafri saw that suffering up close. He said that he was in the Sudanese province with George Clooney in 2004, tasked with creating a poster for a documentary the Hollywood star was producing: Sand and Sorrow. It was one of the first feature films to document a genocide that killed 300,000 people. To meet those fleeing the Janjaweed militia, Jafri and Clooney flew over vast stretches of Darfur. 12 years later he recalled moments of that journey to Esquire: ‘I turned to George and said: ‘Wow, the sand is really red here,’ He then turned to me and said: “No, Sacha, that’s blood.”’
Yet Jafri never set foot in Darfur. When we contacted Paul Freedman, the director of Sand and Sorrow, he said he had never heard of the British painter. Presented with Jafri’s statement about his flight over Darfur and the blood-soaked earth, Freedman simply responded, ‘He’s lying.’ Freedman shot the documentary in Darfur alone in 2005 without Clooney’s involvement. The filmmaker had to wait for a month in Ethiopia to get permission to simply enter the territory, paperwork that was granted to him only after assistance from the Rwandan government. The movie star agreed to do the voiceover for the film only after returning from a separate humanitarian trip to neighbouring Chad and what is now South Sudan in 2006. A former Sudanese aid worker who organized Clooney’s trip has no recollection of a British painter ever being present.
Many of Jafri’s other claims do not stand up to scrutiny. He is often touted as an artist whose work sells in the millions, but publicly available commercial auction records are more modest. His most expensive painting before The Journey Of Humanity was a piece called Dance of the Midnight Samurai, which sold in 2019 for approximately $70,000. The previous year, another work, Dreamscape II, went unsold at two auctions, before eventually being acquired for $893. Newspaper articles document purchases by Kevin Spacey and Guy Ritchie, but there are no reports of sales to Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. No pictures exist of their red-printed hands.
Tales of his earlier years are also contested. Responding to Jafri’s claim that Eton’s headmaster removed a Picasso to hang up one of his adolescent paintings, the teacher’s son, David Anderson, replied: ‘Completely ludicrous.’ Among the first things Jafri claimed when we eventually interviewed him was that he exhibited with other YBAs at the Saatchi Gallery in 2002 at a show called New Sensations. Again, we have been unable to find proof that such an exhibition ever occurred. It’s not listed on the painter’s old website. When we reached Charles Saatchi for comment, he said he didn’t know Jafri.
Jafri relocated to Dubai in the late noughties. The reasons for the move are unclear, but romantic and financial difficulties likely played a part. At 30, he had already been divorced twice. The resulting legal battles had been ruinous. ‘The system in the UK is not very favourable for men,’ he later told the Times. The city’s aspirations and tax benefits would have been alluring.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was founded in 1971, six years before the painter was born. Back then, Dubai, one of the country’s seven Emirates, was a single-story fishing port. Throughout the 70s and 80s, the revenues the ruling Al Maktoum family pulled from its oil fields were shrewdly invested. First, a deep-sea port brought international shipping companies. Then, 30 free trade zones and a corporate tax rate of nine per cent encouraged businesses to relocate. Now, from the airport’s palm tree walkways, tourists step into a city of emerging skyscrapers where anything is possible – and everyone is safe.
The city’s con artists are safe too. Over the past two decades, the city has metastasized into a haven for white-collar criminals, who are secure in the knowledge that they are unlikely to be pursued so long as their activities remain discreet. Emirati authorities seldom question their backstories, nor how their fortunes were made. Luxury apartments can be bought with bags of cash. Rolexes and Lamborghinis can be rented by the hour.
By 2020, Jafri had been living in the city for more than a decade. His plans for Dubai’s first World Expo and the Tokyo Olympics were postponed by the onset of COVID-19. The Journey of Humanity was born from Jafri’s discovery that, in the first four months of the pandemic, the number of children in extreme poverty worldwide was set to double. In response, he would create the world’s largest painting and sell it to raise a target sum of $30 million. The initiative was backed by Dubai Cares, the Sheikdom’s royal charity, and the Atlantis hotel, which gave Jafri their ballroom as a studio. The money raised would be collected by Dubai Cares, and then split between themselves and three other charities: UNICEF, UNESCO and the Global Gift Foundation (GGF). The proceeds would then be distributed through all four organizations to poverty-stricken children across the world.
A videographer who filmed the creation of The Journey of Humanity relayed the arduous process. For seven months, Jafri worked on the painting at night, from 9 PM to 6 AM, listening to a Tracy Chapman album on repeat. He slept in one of the Atlantis’ famous underwater suites, with windows that peer directly into the hotel’s aquariums, barracudas and jellyfish drifting by as he slept. By autumn, it was complete. The world was slowly reopening and plans for the auction were being made. It was decided that the first auction would be held in one corner of the ballroom.
André Abdoune, the Frenchman who would go on to buy the world’s largest painting, came to view it at the Atlantis in February, soon after it was formally unveiled. He had arrived in Dubai in the mid-2010s to claim his own piece of this brave new world. People who’ve encountered him describe a polite, friendly man dressed in tight t-shirts and fitted jeans, driving the streets of Dubai in a red Ferrari. He even published an official biography titled An Extraordinary Man, a 200-page book that chronicles his impoverished Parisian childhood to the fame and fortune he later made in the UAE. According to the book, he was invited to view the painting after being connected with Jafri through a mutual friend, an unnamed broker. At the sight of the enormous painting, André wept, devastated by the thought that it would be split up and sold as individual segments, returning to the ballroom several times to gaze at the artwork. Jafri told us he briefly met André there, just once. Upon seeing the Frenchman's intense love for his art, the painter recalled thinking: ‘That's a guy who might be interested.’
One of the only videos that captures André’s victory that night in the ballroom begins moments after the entire painting goes up for sale. In under two minutes, bidding goes back and forth between two remote clients on the phone bank and André, who wins with a final bid of $62 million. After the hammer goes down, Angels by Sarah McLachlan is blasted from the speakers, and the two men embrace. Jafri, dressed in cowboy boots and a dark velvet blazer, lifts the Frenchman’s hand up into the air and screams, ‘André!’
The auction had been plagued by organisational issues. Set for December 2020, then pushed back to February 2021, it was finally scheduled for 22 March 2021. The press invite, sent out four days before, stated the event would be held with Sotheby’s involvement. But no one from the famed auction house was on stage that night. In their place stood Tom Urquhart, a Dubai-based British radio host and charity auctioneer. While Sotheby's declined to comment about their alleged involvement, a person familiar with the situation said that the auction house had been asked to lend an auctioneer weeks before the event but promptly declined due to a lack of interest in Jafri’s work. The painter was, in Sotheby’s view, an artist of only regional interest with no real secondary market. ‘They were never going to do it,’ the person said.
It was also unclear what was supposed to be on sale. Pre-auction news coverage said the plan was to sell the 70 pieces of the giant painting at a number of auctions across the world. The press invite clearly stated Dubai would be the first of these auctions and five ‘lots’ would be sold there, with the aim of raising over $3 million. But shortly after the attendees took their seats, they learnt that four of these five ‘lots’ were not segments of the giant painting but other Jafri artworks. The fifth and final lot was the entirety of The Journey of Humanity. It was ‘a huge, huge, change in the plan,’ remarked one attendee. The painting's starting price of $30 million also raised eyebrows. Even if there were no subsequent bids, a sale at that price would mark a huge overvaluation of a Jafri artwork.
All of the auction’s key players knew each other. Urquhart, the auctioneer, is an acquaintance of Jafri’s and had sold his artwork at previous charity events. Sitting to André’s left was a Scottish man named Riccardo Scala, a real estate broker who can be seen whispering in the Frenchman’s ear during the bidding. Scala is likely the same broker the biography Extraordinary Man credits with introducing André to the painter. Scala is also a friend of Jafri’s. Days before the auction, the pair can be seen on Instagram shopping together for Lamborghinis. At least one of the people running the phone bank and taking calls from a remote bidder appears to be a Jafri employee. Her name is Falguni Wheadon, the manager of Studio Jafri. When countering André’s offer, Whedon raised her hand on behalf of an anonymous client multiple times, including the penultimate bid of $61 million. None of these people replied to requests for comment, so the strange setup is left unexplained.
Typically, an auction has three key agents: the seller, the buyer and the auctioneer. The last of these is often a representative of the auction house. As are phone clerks, the official title of the individuals operating the phone banks. It is the auctioneer’s job to ensure the bidding process is legal and transparent, and to form an agreement with the seller on the item’s starting price. Concurrently, it is the auction house’s responsibility to oversee the registration process of potential bidders, and to make clear to all the attendees what goods will be on sale. At a starting price of $30 million, Know Your Customer (KYC) checks at established auction houses would be stringent: bank and credit statements, source of funds, sanctions screenings and criminal records. For their service, the auction house gets a percentage cut from both agents, and the seller pockets whatever remains.
Charity auctions are different. They are good-faith events, regularly run by charities themselves. The buyer’s incentives can be more complex. They may be bidding out of goodwill or philanthropic largesse, not simply because they want to purchase the item on sale. Consequently, the value of an artist’s work can easily become inflated. At a 2012 philanthropic gala, one of his paintings was reportedly bought for $850,000. Speaking on a podcast this summer, the painter claimed to have sold another artwork for $100 million at a private charitable event. There is no public record of any such sale.
Regulations at charity auctions are often looser. When items are sold below the $1 million price range, there is less rationale to submit potential charitable donors to the same rigorous KYC checks required at commercial auctions. Neither do the charities that run them possess the technology, expertise or infrastructure of industry experts to apply those kinds of checks. But at any high-value auction where the starting price is $30 million, the same stringent rules should always apply. It is virtually unheard of for a painting to sell for $62 million, at any type of auction, without the regulatory oversight of an established auction house.
At charity auctions, artists usually get a cut of the hammer price. Some take as much as 50 per cent, but it’s a figure rarely disclosed to the public. For The Journey of Humanity, Jafri was set to take home 10 per cent of the sale. Had the Frenchman paid, that would have amounted to $6.2 million. That fine detail appeared in a profile of Jafri published in a UAE paper, The National, in the months prior to the auction. The painter told us that he has delivered over 150 charitable creations over the course of his career; but how much money he has pocketed from all these sales remains unknown.
In an interview three months after the sale of The Journey of Humanity, Jafri gave some explanation as to why the painting wasn’t sold off in individual segments as planned. Speaking with an Emirati magazine, the painter clarified that he and his team made a decision in advance of the auction: if they received a bid of over $30 million, the painting would be sold in its entirety. ‘But we didn’t expect it would necessarily happen!’ But a Dubai-based gallerist says Jafri knew full well that multiple $30 million bids would come in. The entire painting was put on sale, the gallerist explained, because Jafri had learned that there were numerous parties interested in buying it whole.
As of September 2026, the painting still hasn’t been paid for. In February 2022, 11 months after the auction, Dubai Cares filed a civil court case demanding the Frenchman pay the $62 million he had promised and that Jafri deliver The Journey of Humanity to them. The filing named Jafri as ‘the organiser’ of the ballroom auction, and accused him of exploiting its logo and name by participating in interviews and events without their consent. The charity wanted the painting because it had allegedly learnt Jafri may have had plans to sell the artwork or profit from it electronically, digitally or in some other capacity. The judge dismissed the claims against the Jafri, citing a lack of evidence, but ruled that André must pay Dubai Cares the full hammer price. After this, Jafri would be obliged to hand over the painting. But André didn’t have the money. He was briefly detained by Emirati authorities in August 2023 for his failure to pay, according to two people with knowledge of his criminal past. Presently, André is somewhere in Dubai, widely accused of owing far more than $62 million.
On an old Blogger.com page titled ‘André Abdoune Fraud ’, the Frenchman’s victims congregate and cautiously trade stories. They range from IT consultants to doctors and gallerists. ‘Do you know where he is?’ were the words of a dentist who eventually replied to a message we left on the web page. He was one of 10 people we met who had been fooled and exploited by the serial conman.
In 2019, André had walked into the dentist’s Dubai surgery. Four years later, the dentist had willingly deposited around $1 million into three different bank accounts, an investment in a crypto scheme in which his money was secured against the Frenchman's own personal gold reserves. By then, they were friends and André’s only guarantee was his promise. The dentist believes he was a fool. But was he? André had spent $35,000 on dental implants, always paying his installments on time. The Frenchman then began taking the dentist to high-end sushi restaurants where he could proudly display a showreel of fake philanthropic clips that showed surgeries he had paid for. ‘He is an artist,’ the dentist said, with grudging respect.
Alex Bondy and Sophie Rey believed they had met André by chance. In November 2022, the two of them had stopped to stare at a red Ferrari parked outside the main entrance of the Sky View Hotel. André heard them conversing in French. ‘It’s mine. Do you want to have a look at it?’ he interjected. A tour of the Ferrari F8 Tributo quickly led to an invite for dinner and a viewing of his penthouse on the hotel’s top floor.
Throughout the meal, André spoke about the billions of dollars he had made trading cryptocurrencies; his $62 million purchase of a giant painting; and the same origin story he gave to the dentist.
Rey stayed in touch with André and in the run-up to Christmas 2023, she asked him if he could help her invest in bitcoin. Rey was hard up, working 12-hour shifts at an A&E department in Lyon. Her friends advised against it. ‘Your friends are nothing but pieces of shit,’ he wrote to her on 5 December. ‘We don’t ask for advice from people who drive a Twingo on how to drive a Ferrari.’
So from 11 to 15 December 2023, Sophie transferred a total of €4000. But André soon replied that this wasn’t enough. With a larger investment of €20,000 he estimated she could get a 400 per cent return on her money. But to do that Rey would need to take out a loan from the bank. At that point, Bondy convinced his friend to back out. André became irate. ‘I wonder how I could have wasted my time with all the, “I want to get out of this” bullshit and believing you, but I'm really an absolute idiot, it won't happen to me again,’ his message read.
He started making legal threats about ‘harassment and false accusations’ which could result in a year in prison. That Christmas she received several calls from unknown numbers. The French voices on the other end of the line said they knew where she lived and that if she didn’t leave André alone, thugs would be paying her a visit.
Many more were duped by André, convinced of his immense wealth and crypto expertise. Pierre,* a French student, met André by chance in a Dubai shopping mall four years ago. The self-described philanthropist bought Pierre and his girlfriend two VIP tickets to go to the top of the Burj Khalifa. He also showed them his digital wallet. On the screen read the number 121,000 BTC. At the time, it amounted to $4.5 billion, a figure jumping and falling by hundreds of thousands of dollars in real time.
André had an ambitious plan for the painting, one that he revealed to several of his victims. A gallerist who also attended the auction, and subsequently lent thousands of euros to André, said she met the Frenchman for coffee where he told her he would resell pieces of The Journey of Humanity digitally as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). He told the same to Pierre. ‘He was confident he would make way more money out of it than what it cost him,’ the student said.
Like Bitcoin, NFTs were tradable tokens, lauded at the time as a way to digitally own prized collectibles and paintings. They had exploded onto the fine art world in 2021 when a token of an artwork by an unknown artist named Beeple sold at a Christie’s auction for $69 million. That sale was on 11 March 2021, just two weeks before The Journey of Humanity auction.
The painting was never scanned and tokenised because André was never in possession of it. Jafri was. The painter was also monetising the new technology. At another charity auction three months after the sale of The Journey of Humanity, he sold over 1,000 tokens of his painting, On the Wings of an Angel, for nearly $1 million. This digital exploitation of The Journey of Humanity is quite possibly what Dubai Cares was referring to when they accused Jafri in court of having plans to sell the painting ‘or profit from it electronically, digitally or in any other capacity.’
André is no longer at The Sky View Hotel. A receptionist said there is currently no one staying there under his name. But we tracked down a member of his estranged family in France, the conman’s great antagonist. His eldest brother.
Hamid Abdoune hasn't seen his youngest brother in over a decade. At their home in Villecresnes, the 65-year-old and his wife, Florence, spoke with us for almost three hours. Across their coffee table, they folded out a brown, aged copy of a 1990 article in Le Parisien. The lede image showed a 19-year-old André alongside Hamid and the three other Abdoune brothers, all dressed in white judo robes. They were close then.
André was the second youngest of ten siblings born to Algerian refugees. His parents had fled to France in 1962, at the height of the Algerian civil war. The Abdoune family grew up in a beige, ten-story tower block in the Parisian suburb of Créitel. In that old three-bedroom apartment, André’s book recounts the cockroaches, the mice and curling up on the family sofa pretending to be asleep, longing for his mother’s attention. ‘Every step I take, I take thinking of you’, André writes in a letter addressed to his father printed in the back of the book. ‘Some of your children ruined you, yet you still gave to them.’ It’s a reference to Hamid, who has been recast as Hamza.
According to the biography, it was Hamza who stole André’s sweets when they were children. In adulthood, it was Hamza who demanded half of André’s salary as payback for having secured him a job at the local judo club. An older brother portrayed as a violent alcoholic and got together with a woman Duquesne, the biographer, brands as ‘a good-time girl.’ In the very last chapter, Hamza is blamed for virtually all the hardships that befell the Abdoune family.
Hamid first noticed a worrying pattern of behavior emerge in André when his younger brother was around 18. First, Hamid’s bank card would go missing. When confronted, André would blame other members of the family, and once, when caught, insisted it was only a practical joke. As a young man, he would devour sports car magazines, imagining he was somewhere and someone else.
Hamid is a judo world champion who fought in both the under-65kg and under-71kg weight classes. During the noughties, he was credited by Le Monde with transforming the martial art into the most popular sport in Créitel, when he was sporting director of the suburb’s judo association. In those same years André worked as a bookkeeper at the association. Florence, an amateur judoka herself, was its president. For a period they were all colleagues. ‘He hated me,’ she said.
Family relations broke down in 2009 after André was accused of embezzling the association's money. According to Florence and Hamid, he stole thousands of euros. The number of club members didn’t match with the membership fees received. Fake invoices had been issued. Florence later learned that André had told other employees that she, the president, had been too busy to review the judo club's balance sheets. The married couple's narrative is supported by an ex-employee from the association’s finance department who said André ‘was manipulating the books.’
In the years prior to the discovery, André had been travelling back and forth to Las Vegas. Hamid and Florence believe he was gambling the association’s money across the city's casinos. A decade ago, masked men with guns turned up at the association dojo where Hamid used to work. Thankfully, only the janitor was in. Hamid has no idea who they were but suspects they had a score to settle with André.
André was married. His wife left him shortly after he relocated to Dubai. André’s fantastical account of their breakup is detailed in Chapter 28 of his biography: André is blackmailed by a friend; amid the fallout, his wife leaves him, returning to France and taking their two children with her; then, somehow, André is homeless, a vagabond wandering the streets of Dubai for a year, sleeping in alleyways, drinking from garden hoses while connecting to shopping mall wifi to trade crypto. His fortunes suddenly change when he is taken in by a Costa Coffee waitress. Next, he is saved by $800,000 he makes in a hazily explained business deal. With money in his pocket, he steps into Burger King and begins to sob uncontrollably at the sight of an oversized Double Whopper and curly fries. It’s his first proper meal in 45 days. ‘It all reminded him of another time – the time when he ordered these meals with his children.’ André’s family, and others who knew him then, said André was never homeless. He was in prison.
Jealousy is the trait Hamid and Florence continually refer to when trying to make sense of their relative’s actions. Hamid had many nicknames as a professional judoka. One of them was ‘The Extraordinary’. It’s the same moniker André chose for the title of his biography: An Extraordinary Man.
We tried to find LightenSpace Edition, the company that published André’s fantastical biography. At the doorstep of the company's stated address in Paris’ 8th arrondissement, an employee at the post office opposite told us the small publishing house vacated the building two years ago. But there was a phone number for Duquesne.
Her relationship with André is complex. She is his accomplice but also seemingly a victim lost within his web of lies. They still speak regularly. ‘He’s working right now on something incredible and all the planet is behind him, so just be careful where you put your feet.’ She insisted the biography had been properly fact-checked, and challenged us to prove any inaccuracies. When we asked her about André being homeless, she said his narrative was supported by pictures he had sent her. On the slanderous and unfounded claims she willingly published about Hamid and Florence, individuals she had never met, there was no doubt. Hamid was the real evil brother. We asked Duquesne if she had considered the possibility that she too may have been lied to, and that André hoped to use the fantastical biography to scam more people in France. But that just couldn’t be the case, she explained. ‘The book was my idea.’ Duquesne had agreed to put us in touch with André and his lawyer, but instead blocked our number after the call ended.
But Duquesne did know about the dispute surrounding The Journey of Humanity. She said André refused to pay for the giant artwork because 17 of the 70 pieces had gone missing, sold off by Jafri to somebody else. ‘The one who is lying is not the one you think it is’, she said.
Jafri was late to our interview, a call he rescheduled three times. The first delay came with an emoji-filled apology: he was busy finishing a new heart-themed painting to be sold at George Clooney’s charity gala in London, an event he would try to secure us tickets for. Then, he was bedridden by a stomach bug, pushing the meeting back twice more. When Jafri eventually showed up, he came armed with a member of his advisory team, a lawyer named Mark Hill. We had 20 minutes.
It was April 2026 and Dubai, Jafri’s home, was being swept away into a strange new reality. The city that the al-Maktoums had built, and their promise of eternal safety and limitless opportunity, was being shattered by barrages of Iranian rockets and drones. A fireball had risen from a luxury hotel on the Palm Jumeirah. Flights were suspended after a Shahada suicide drone obliterated part of the airport’s runway. Residents and influencers were being arrested for ‘misinformation’ deemed harmful to the Emirate’s reputation.
When we asked Jafri how André, a serial scammer with a criminal record, was allowed into the auction, there was a protracted pause. ‘Okay. Interesting question. Good question!’ For several minutes he deflected, speaking about his artistic process before eventually declining to offer an explanation to the question. In a series of shorter responses, he refused to answer any other queries related to the logistics or regulations of the auction. He was just the artist, he insisted, responsible only for the painting’s creation and unveiling. ‘He wasn't involved in any KYC that was or was not done,’ Hill interjected, on the painter’s behalf. ‘It's not a Christie's auction,’ Jafri later clarified. ‘It's a charity auction with people with good intentions.’ It’s the closest we got to an admission that appropriate KYC checks were lacking, or just entirely absent. Had they been properly applied, André would never have been allowed into the ballroom.
Jafri firmly denied André’s claim that 17 pieces had been sold off. ‘I think everyone knows that’s not true.’ In his defence, we could find no evidence to support it. But the painting’s current location he kept a mystery. ‘I think it's stored safely and ready, hopefully.’
When asked about the 10 per cent fee, the $6.2 million he was supposed to collect from The Journey of Humanity, and how André’s failure to pay impacted him, Jafri bit back with a flash of cold anger. ‘What was that?’ His tone then softened again. ‘What's the question? How am I affected by it?’ After we rephrased the question, he chose to talk about the tens of millions he claimed to have raised for charity in the years since the auction. ‘It’s felt really good,’ he said.
Our time was up. ‘If I’ve got some interesting things coming up, which I always do, I’ll always think of you guys and put something your way,’ were his last words to us.
It’s hard to accept Jafri’s protestations that he bears no responsibility for the auction’s failure. In the court case launched by Dubai Cares, the language is explicit: ‘On 22 March 2021, the first defendant [Jafri] organised a public auction at the Atlantis.’ It didn’t name another organiser. Jafri himself admitted he and his employees were behind the decision to put the entire painting on sale at $30 million. The incentives for making that change are obvious: headlines, a massive sum, and the prospect of becoming one of the world’s most expensive artists. When we later asked for a response to our findings, he didn’t reply. As to whether he knew about André’s purported intention to sell the painting as NFTs, there was also no response. Neither did he give an answer to our follow-up questions about the auction’s peculiar arrangements; his journey to Darfur; The Charles Saatchi New Sensations exhibition he supposedly took part in; the first-class degree he allegedly achieved; or the painting of his that he claimed hung in place of a Picasso in the house of his Eton headmaster.
There were at least two other phone bidders that evening who competed with André from $30 to $61 million. If the Frenchmen had been properly vetted and prohibited from entering the auction house, Jafri, Dubai Cares, and all the poverty-stricken children could have received as much as $61 million. But we'll never know. And it doesn’t address the underlying question: why would anyone pay that kind of money for a Jafri painting?
After it became obvious André wouldn’t pay, and Jafri had been conned, was it on the painter to make that public? It would have taken months for that to have become clear. After the auction, he was, in the eyes of the world, the fifth most expensive living artist – the painter whose work had alleviated the suffering of millions. To admit it was all a lie would mean destroying his crowning achievement. So he protected the illusion, even as it further ensnared him.
André’s success as a con man has always relied on his patient investment in relationships. He spent years slowly manipulating Raye, the dentist and others. He never pushed or demanded, at least not at first, instead focusing on his script. Eventually, his victims would come to him, unknowingly complicit in their own downfall. The Journey of Humanity, the fake crypto wallet and the Ferrari are secondary to the craft. He is, as the dentist said, ‘an artist.’ Perhaps André believes he can evade the debt forever, calculating that Dubai’s royal charity and Jafri are unlikely to go public and tell the world they were victims of one of the biggest scams in modern art. A ploy he could escape from, and so far has. He’s still in Dubai, manufacturing chance encounters.
Since The Journey of Humanity, Jafri’s career has drifted. Public sightings of him in Dubai have become less frequent. He can’t be found at the gallery openings or events that comprise the city’s art scene. He appears mostly on podcasts with a big beard that gives him the aura of a guru. No longer is he an ambassador for the Global Gift Foundation, one of the intended beneficiaries of the auction. His biggest project since the auction was a rocket launch of his laser-etched heart motif to the moon in 2024. But the propellant malfunctioned and Jafri’s artwork came crashing back down to earth, burning up over the South Pacific.
This spring, three early Jafri works were on display at a gallery opening in Marylebone. Their owner, Clinton Pugh, father to actress Florence Pugh, is sad to be parting with them. Pugh bought them from Jafri for only a few thousand in the late 90s when he was still a student at the Ruskin. For nearly 30 years, they hung in his Oxford café, The Lemon Tree. Given that The Journey of Humanity sold for $62 million, Pugh is hoping to get a decent price.
Six years on from its creation, The Journey of Humanity is no longer the world’s biggest painting. It was surpassed in 2025 by an artwork named Impossibility is a Myth by Kanyeyachukwu Tagbo-Okeke, a 15-year-old Nigerian artist. It is seven times larger.
