The extraordinary chutzpah of Anthony Ritossa

Anthony Ritossa is back. This week, Ritossa and his Global Family Office Investment Summit are in Miami, holding a conference that promises to be “the most influential gathering of private wealth in the USA for 2026”.

​For those of you who don’t know Ritossa, the Australian “entrepreneur,” as described on Google, has hosted a series of family office conferences around the world since at least 2015.

Capital flight from the region is real, and hosting a family office conference with a lot of Gulf Arabs in Miami right now couldn’t be better timed

​But he’s also been described as a con man by many, including a particularly daming article by investigative reporter Adam Ciralsky for Vanity Fair entitled “The Knight’s Tale”. And there have been other accounts of his alleged dishonesty, including by Matthias Knab on his website Opalesque and by the UK wealth publication Spear’s Magazine.

​All these accounts paint a picture of a con man, even a convicted criminal. On his website, Knab usefully listed the revelations in the Vanity Fair article on Ritossa.  Here they are:​

• Ritossa was jailed multiple times by authorities in Croatia and the U.K.
• He amassed nearly $500,000 in unpaid child support.
• He defaulted on his family’s mortgage, resulting in foreclosure.
• He failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt.
• The Pelham Manor Police Department in New York has an active arrest warrant for Ritossa for criminal contempt in the first degree.
• In a particularly disturbing incident, he intercepted and stole his deceased father’s body while it was en route from Australia to Croatia.

As Knab adds in the article: “Perhaps most telling: Ritossa did not dispute a single statement in Ciralski’s article. Not one. He couldn’t.”

​Given this notoriety, you might think Ritossa would be tempted to disappear from the world of family offices and wealth management conferences, even change your name and seek out another career well away from the family office sector. Perhaps become a taxi driver in his native Australia?

​But you’d be wrong. Ritossa is back and hosting what, at least on paper, looks like an impressive family-office conference at the Trump International Beach Resort (appropriately??) on Sunny Isle Beach, just north of Miami.

​A look through the event brochure shows many Gulf Arabs as either speakers or attendees. The brochure says the conference is “Under the Patronage of Sheikha Jawaher Al Khalifa”, who is a prominent member of the Bahraini royal family, according to her Google profile.

​Given Ritossa’s reputation, many will look at all this in disbelief, just another chapter in the con man’s life, they might feel.

​Yes, that might be true, but there are two factors that play in his favour.

​The war in Iran and regional instability will likely make Ritossa’s Miami conference a big draw for Middle East-based investors and business executives. Capital flight from the region is real, and hosting a family office conference with a lot of Gulf Arabs in Miami right now couldn’t be better timed – of course, that was completely unintended. Luck has probably played in Ritossa’s life more than a few times, and so it seems to be doing so this time as well.  

​Another factor in Ritossa’s favour is the post-truth world we appear to increasingly live in. Ritossa is probably a great example of a beneficiary of the times we live in – he continues to thrive despite the revelations about his shady past, and apparently shows no shame in doing so.

​This viewpoint is no endorsement of Ritossa. I come down very much on the side of the Vanity Fair article and all the revelations about his shady past, but you’ve got to admire the man’s chutzpah. He seems irrepressible.