For the first time, attorney Tom Ajamie opens up about his pro bono investigation into questionable practices at amfAR that led to Harvey Weinstein's demise
In January 2017, Tom Ajamie sat in a luxury hotel suite at Main & Sky in Park City when Harvey Weinstein came bounding in for an awkward face-to-face meeting. The Houston-based financial fraud attorney had been hired by the amfAR board to investigate a suspect transaction involving Weinstein. Ajamie had recently submitted his eight-page confidential report, the details of which Weinstein appeared to know well.
"Everyone I interviewed started off by saying things like, 'You know he’s a sexual predator, right?' as opposed to jumping right to this issue of financial transactions,” Ajamie says. "As a lawyer who’s done dozens of these investigations, it was very odd." On a cold February day in Manhattan, the maitre d’ at Fleming greets Ajamie by name. The 59-year-old lawyer splits his time between Houston and New York. Days earlier, he won a $79 million class-action settlement against Wells Fargo on behalf of former financial advisers who said they were forced to forfeit deferred compensation when they left the company. Though he rarely intersects with Hollywood, Ajamie says power lawyer Howard Weitzman served as a mentor.
As he dug into Weinstein’s activities, he discovered that at the 2015 amfAR benefit in Cannes, Weinstein struck a deal with then-chairman Kenneth Cole in which Weinstein would auction off two items on the condition that the money be split, with $600,000 going to the American Repertory Theater. Separately, ART promised to reimburse Weinstein for staging the producer’s for-profit playso long as third parties donated $600,000 to the theater by June 1 of that year.
Around the same time as that Main & Sky meeting, Cole began agitating for a new investigation into the transaction and hired Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. Unlike Ajamie’s firm, which did $2 million worth of work basically for free , Gibson Dunn was charging. After a $1 million investigation , the firm found the transaction was acceptable.
But the genie was out of the bottle. And perhaps it was only fitting that the subject of Twohey’s first story on Weinstein — published 12 days before the jaw-dropping Oct. 5, 2017, sexual misconduct exposé she wrote with Kantor — was about the amfAR transaction.On Feb. 24, Weinstein was convicted of third-degree rape and a first-degree criminal sexual act. Ajamie was with clients in Phoenix when the news flashed across his phone.
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