Part 1: A.K.A || Tracking Down The Fake (Dodi) Fayed

How One Imposter Managed to Fool Duran Duran, Jodie Foster, And My Friend Pete B.

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When I was only 25, my friend, a filmmaker named Peter Bahlawanian, asked me to track down the impersonator who posed as the late Dodi Fayed, the eldest son of the Egyptian billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed and Samira Khashoggi, sister of the notorious weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

Before he died in 1997, Dodi al-Fayed was known in Hollywood as the producer
of the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire and two box-office disasters, Hook and The Scarlet Letter. His name and face meant little to the public before Princess Diana.

The conman’s real name was Yehia Sead, and he’d used more than 25 aliases, posing as a Saudi Prince and a professional soccer player. But Dodi al-Fayed was his favorite. The Egyptian scammer befriended and defrauded rock musicians and athletes while posing as both Mohamed al-Fayed, owner of Harrods department store in London, and his playboy son, Dodi.

In 1996, he strolled into my friend Pete’s Montreal store, which specialized in Middle Eastern music, saying he was Dodi al-Fayed and that he was working on a "secret project" for the National Film Board of Canada.

The two men dined at Costas, an expensive Mediterranean seafood restaurant, the following day. Bahlawanian enjoyed his new friend's company and hoped the relationship would help his budding film-directing career. Yehia lulled Peter and other of my friends with props.

Posters of movies financed by the real Dodi al-Fayed hung in his living room. A box with a gold nameplate was filled with screenplays and provocative pictures of women. Yehia owned Armani suits, a $4,000 camera, a Rolex watch, and smoked exquisite cigars. He played the part.

He paid round-the-clock bodyguards an extra $100 a day to coordinate appointments and book reservations. They carried his daily planner, cellular phone, and up to $3,000 in cash. Later another sucker in Jersey would say that Yehia would ask him to pretend to be his bodyguard. Optics go a long way.

Yehia claimed his father, al-Fayed, gave him $40,000 monthly—less than half the real Dodi al-Fayed's reported allowance. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who investigated his case, could never trace the source of the money Yehia threw around. Yehia spent approximately $20,000 entertaining his new Montreal buddies in only two months.

Luck Runs Out

Yehia had a penchant for strip clubs, where he spent a lot of money attracting pretty women half his age. He instructed his bodyguards to remind his dates of their good fortune. Bahlawanian listened to his friend crying, claiming his father was "out to get him." Yehia's bouts of depression continued, and Bahlawanian said he saw him taking Xanax. Others would also tell me about his disgruntled stories about his dad.

Bahlawanian eventually became suspicious. On a trip to Los Angeles, Bahlawanian
began remembering inconsistencies in Yehia Sead's stories and asked a friend to
find some information. Soon, Bahlawanian received an article from the Toronto
Sun, titled Pharaoh of Fraud.

"The sympathy disappeared, and the anger set in. I especially didn't want him
near my family," Bahlawanian said.

He contacted al-Fayed's security chief, and Yehia was arrested in Montreal
on Oct. 30, 1996. He was escorted back to Toronto for trial.

An Egyptian ConArtist Is Born 

I had just started my career but already had a knack for finding stuff. I joked that my mom’s affair was what forged my investigative skills. When I was only 12, my dad took it upon himself to tell my 10-year-old sister and me that she was having an affair. He hired a private investigator after finding a matchbook from a hotel on their bed. He told my sister and me that we couldn’t tell my mom, and that’s when I realized I wasn’t into living a lie. I was young but already wise, and I couldn’t understand why my dad had put us in this awkward position. I eventually told her that I knew.

But first, I hid behind a baby blue plush reclining chair while she was in her bedroom and found out she hid love letters in her pantyhose stockings. After I read some of them, I looked up his name in the phone book and made my first prank call. When I heard his voice, I knew it was him. A few years later, I’d decided that even though I’d graduated high school in business administration, I wanted to be a journalist. I had a vivid imagination; I wrote and read voraciously; I was wildly curious, and I liked finding things. 

Yehia had left some of his belongings with Pete. I rummaged through them and learned a whole lot. 

Yehia Sead was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on July 25, 1949, the same day my mom was born. I tracked down his half-nephew, Hussein El Said, who told me Yehia’s father, Mohamed El-Said, was a wealthy landowner in Egypt with four wives and 14 children. Hussein El Said told me in a phone interview from Egypt that Yehia felt neglected.

"You can't expect much care from your father when he's 75," El Said said.

I was able to communicate with him in my broken Arabic. Some former friends suggest that Yehia Sead's fascination with the al-Fayeds springs from his relationship with his own father, who died when he was 22. Yehia Sead, in conversations under many aliases, would complain that he had been an unloved son. 

After his father died, I learned Yehia Sead left Egypt. He visited the United States at least twice in the 1970s. In 1982, he settled in Vancouver and got married, becoming a Canadian citizen. He also became a nightclub regular with the nickname Ya-Ya.

"Everybody knew him," recalls John Teti, owner of Richards on Richards Cabaret. "But I eventually barred him from my club. The way he tossed his money around and made demands just gave me a bad vibe."

Waitress Valerie Fox described him as a "sleazy land shark" who claimed he had been a professional soccer player in Egypt.

Relatives say that Yehia Sead returned home when his mother died in 1985 and sold some land he'd inherited from his father. In Canada, Yehia Sead and his wife divorced, and in 1988, he headed south. He was jailed briefly in California on fraud charges. On Oct. 18th,1988, he surfaced in San Francisco with a new identity.

On The Road With Duran Duran

Duran Duran was staying at the Portman Hotel.

“Dripping in jewelry," Yehia sent the group a bottle of champagne, photographer Dennis O'Regan would later tell a British tabloid.