A Jewel Thief’s Audacious Comebackhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/fashion/17CROOK.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&Derek Khan, imprisoned in New York for pawning borrowed jewelry, he is now designing a jewelry line.
Daryl Visscher for The New York TimesDEREK KHAN arrived in Dubai last November the same way he arrived in New York nearly 30 years ago — dead broke and determined to be famous.
He was drawn to the desert metropolis by an acquaintance, a freelance writer he had once asked to help write his memoirs, who told him that Dubai was a city so preoccupied with its future that no one would be interested in his past. Mr. Khan, who is 50, was convinced that there he could restart his career as a stylist to the stars, just as soon as he figured out who they were.
“People here, they know,” Mr. Khan said during a late-night phone call this week from a villa where he is staying in an exclusive compound known as Emirates Hills. “But they try not to know. They don’t like to dwell on the negative.”
To a sizable contingent of the hip-hop and fashion worlds, Mr. Khan’s felonious history is so well known that it seemed unlikely he would ever resurface publicly. In 2003, he was imprisoned for pawning more than $1.5 million worth of jewelry he had borrowed from Harry Winston, Graff, Piaget and other companies on the pretense that they would be worn by his celebrity clients.
During the 1990s, he had been the most sought-after stylist in the music business, celebrated for changing the prevailing look of artists like Missy Elliott, Mary J. Blige and Lauryn Hill from street fashion to Prada, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent (labels that then became a part of the rap lyric lexicon). He had used the money to fuel a lavish lifestyle, supplying an entourage of friends with Champagne and dinners at Mr. Chow.
His downfall, following his arrest, was swift and humiliating. When he was released from prison in 2005, his green card was revoked, and he was deported to his native Trinidad, with, he said, all of $10 in his pocket.
But in Dubai, Mr. Khan is again a star. He has appeared as a commentator and a makeover specialist on Dubai satellite channels and on the covers of celebrity magazines, including OK! Middle East and Mondanité, which have treated Mr. Khan’s arrival as validation of the worthiness of the United Arab Emirates as a stylish destination.
Declared Mondanité: “When one of America’s premier fashion stylists decides to make Dubai his home, you know that we have finally truly become a fashion capital to be reckoned with.”
And from XPress, a style supplement to The Gulf News: “Celebrity designer Derek Khan says he finds Dubai women 100 times more stylish than Los Angeles celebs.”
No mention of his incarceration appears in the accompanying press.
“They’ve never brought it up,” Mr. Khan said. “A lot of people who have a background come here. It’s like a new Australia.”
He has been accepted into the society of wealthy expatriates and Saudi royalty, even by those Mr. Khan said are aware of his prior accommodations. Timm Lemcke, a German property developer, said he invited Mr. Khan to stay, for free, in his villa, which has a swimming pool in the backyard. (“He’s a nice guy,” Mr. Lemcke said. “I had no problem with it.”)
But surely the most surprising development in Mr. Khan’s life in Dubai came shortly after he appeared as a guest on “HerSay,” on the Dubai One network. He was approached by a jewelry company that wanted him to design a Derek Khan collection.
“I thought I’d never see jewelry again,” Mr. Khan said.
The company, Hof Jewellery, once had a store on Old Bond Street in London (hence, the British spelling), but it has focused almost entirely on its wholesale business since the 1990s, often designing diamond necklaces anonymously for other stores.
Maria Oustwani, the Dubai-based general manager at Hof, said that the company plans to reassert its brand over the next three years by opening stores in Saudi Arabia and that she believes Mr. Khan will help draw attention to its collections. His 35-piece collection will be sold this fall. Ms. Oustwani said Mr. Khan would not be paid until the designs go on sale.
“He took Dubai by storm,” she said. When they began discussing the collection, she said, he confessed that he had pleaded guilty and been in jail for reselling borrowed jewelry.
“We think Derek has paid his dues,” Ms. Oustwani said.
Some who knew Mr. Khan in New York would disagree.
“I am sick to my stomach,” said Eve Goldberg, a vice president at the William Goldberg Diamond Company, one of the concerns involved in legal action against Mr. Khan that was unable to recover the jewelry he borrowed. Ms. Goldberg described Mr. Khan as a “con man.” “If he was smarter and not a criminal, he could have been very successful,” she said.
“It’s funny. I kept imagining him getting out of prison and having the nerve to call me.”
The worst part of prison, Mr. Khan said, was losing his friendships from the fashion world. Despite the nature of his crime, he was surprised to find that none of his former clients visited him at Rikers Island, or at two upstate prisons, the Watertown Correctional Facility and the Ulster Correctional Facility. Mr. Khan continued to follow their careers in the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and his reading selections — along with the awareness of his formerly pampered lifestyle — made him a target of other prisoners and also guards.
“I was given the worst things to do, like scrubbing the toilets,” he said, “even though I was capable of helping G.E.D. students.”
When he was released and returned to Trinidad, Mr. Khan, for the first time, allowed himself to feel depressed.
“It was at that moment that I realized that this was worse, even, than jail,” he said. “It was hot and humid and alien to me.”
Mr. Khan had not been in Trinidad since his teenage years. His mother, who died in 2002, and his siblings had long ago settled in Canada. As a youth he had moved to New York and worked as a sales assistant at Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy. In the ’80s, as he tells the story, he met Madonna and made a deal to manage her backup dancers. His big break came a few years later, dressing Salt-N-Pepa in borrowed Chanel, a makeover that caught the attention of Motown Records, which hired Mr. Khan to work with new artists as they were signed.
“He had a very powerful following in the fashion world,” recalled Brian Jones, a friend from that period who was working in Motown’s video production department. Artists would demand Mr. Khan’s services as part of a “glam squad”; he would go on tour with them to style their clothes and imagery, and also to entertain them. He appeared on countless talk shows and on “America’s Next Top Model” as a guest judge.
Cheryl Lala, a childhood friend, remembered seeing Mr. Khan talking about Pink on a VH1 special. Years later, after his return to Trinidad, she was surprised when driving down a street in Trincity to see Mr. Khan walking the other way.
“What impresses me about Khan is that he is never down,” said Ms. Lala (who is not related to the professional golfer of the same name). “You would think he would be depressed, back in Trinidad, no money, no place to live, but he is always looking up.”
Ms. Lala invited Mr. Khan to live with her. A successful copy writer for political campaigns, Ms. Lala used her own money to pay for Mr. Khan’s ticket to Dubai, a visa, hotel rooms and other travel expenses worth more than $20,000. She said the money was not a significant amount to her, “no skin off my nose.”
“I said, Way hey, Khan, the only way I’ll get you out of my house is to pay,” she said, laughing. “I wanted to help him get back on his feet again.”
Mr. Khan has landed. All that weighs on his mind today is whether to order up more diamonds, more rubies or more pearls.