Metro

Inside the bizarre, desperate life of NYC’s most notorious party crasher

When a young, up-and-coming actress met Priyantha De Silva at a party at The Plaza Hotel in 2017, she thought she’d hit the jackpot.

De Silva said that “he had been working in finance and used connections from that to fund the movies he produced,” the actress recalled.

Swarthy and well-dressed, he invited her to the film premieres of her choosing. When the actress, who asked to remain anonymous, selected the movie “Stockholm” starring Ethan Hawke, she even got to sit next to the actor at the screening. It was a thrill, she said, until De Silva became inebriated at the after-party at Up Down.

She left early but met him again two nights later for a screening of “Jonathan” starring Ansel Elgort, and the movie’s bash at 1Oak.





But soon enough, the actress recalled, “Security asked us to leave.”

Over the last 20 years, De Silva has claimed to be the movie producer behind “Crash” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” an influential magazine editor and an affluent man about town.

In truth, he was none of those things.

“I figured he had some kind of film company and that gave him entrée,” model and actress Loydeen, who only goes by her first name, told The Post. In 2010, she accompanied him to parties for “The Tourist,” “Blue Valentine” and other movies. “He seemingly got in so easily,” she said.

By the time the unnamed actress met him, he wore a tuxedo but lived in a homeless shelter in Bed-Stuy — and had gone to jail multiple times for forgery and larceny.





De Silva is one of New York City’s biggest imposters, with decades of lying and deceit in his past.

Earlier this month, he was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to possession of a forged instrument. De Silva was charged with passing a forged $15,000 check to buy a VIP package at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival (to which he pleaded not guilty).

The 60-year-old’s glitzy endeavors started drawing attention in 2006 when Gawker described him as a “drunken leech who feeds off of Manhattan’s more exclusive social scene” and “a semi-professional gate-crasher.” He was allegedly going around telling people he was a producer on the film “Crash.”





That year, a Condé Nast editor caught De Silva red-handed. Weeks earlier, she had started receiving attendance confirmations for parties to which she had never RSVP’d. She found out why at a Gucci event.

“I was asked my name at the door,” she told The Post of her androgynous-sounding moniker. “I gave it and was told that this man just gave my name. I [found him and] said, ‘You’re the person who’s running around town posing as me to get into these events!’ He just took off.”

Not long after, when he tried to RSVP on behalf of legendary Glamour editor Cindi Leive for a Hamptons event, Condé reportedly took action — setting up a security sting at the Bridgehampton Polo Club.

The hope was that he’d try getting in as an employee of the publisher. According to New York magazine, he showed up but evaded attention by pretending to be an employee of Cosmopolitan — a magazine published not by Condé, but by Hearst.





Insiders then on to him, De Silva reportedly failed to get into events for Donna Karan and Christie’s.

The crasher seemed to disappear until 2010. “We would go to parties, he would get super-drunk and start hitting on girls,” recalled Loydeen. “He . . . would get asked to leave and they would just let me stay.”

But the friendship stalled after De Silva allegedly asked Loydeen, “if a friend of his could use my bank account as a place to temporarily park checks. I told him to forget about it.”

That year, De Silva talked his way into a a charity dinner put on by the Young Philanthropists of the Cancer Research Institute — reportedly by acting shocked that he wasn’t on the guest list. He said his check must have gotten lost in the mail and gave his credit-card number instead. When it was ran later, the card was declined.

Then, pulling a similar stunt at a gala for the Elizabeth Seton Pediatric Center, he took it too far.

“He won the silent auction, paying $1,500 for a Prada purse with a bogus credit card,” said Kelly Jones Howell, an attorney affiliated with the event, who recalled De Silva claiming to be a producer of “Crash” and “Slumdog Millionaire.”

De Silva was charged with fourth-degree grand larceny, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 2½ to three years in prison. There, Page Six reported, he bemoaned missing Fashion Week.

He was out by May 2013, when he deposited five credit-card convenience checks from someone else’s account, then withdrew some $15,000 that was not his. That August, he deposited $19,985, purportedly issued and signed by a Contessa Garzadori, into his Citibank account. The next day, when he attempted to withdraw $12,500, the NYPD was alerted.

Looking through De Silva’s bag, police found a bank statement and a copy of a check belonging to Garzadori, the driver’s license of one Justin Adams, and documents belonging to ­others.

Told that he was to be charged with grand larceny, De Silva said: “I’ve been charged with [that] before; I’ll beat it this time, too.”

Instead, he pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a forged instrument, and to grand larceny for the May incident. He received a sentence of 30 months to five years in 2015.

By late 2017, De Silva was back on the scene, wiggling into events such as a Polaroid party where he bragged about working with Lady Gaga.

He was also planning his most ambitious alleged scam to date. According to court documents, in February 2018 De Silva deposited to his Woori America bank account $4,275 in checks made out to him from Artisan Russian Dumpling LLC, which is the legal name for the Upper West Side shop Daa! Dumplings.

In April 2018, said De Silva’s lawyer Glenn Hardy, he e-mailed the Tribeca Film Festival to purchase VIP tickets, with a fake check for $15,000 from Russian Dumpling. Court documents show that the check bounced.

“I have absolutely no idea how this guy got a hold of the company checks or did what he did,” Raphael Nieto, owner of the dumpling joint, told The Post.

In September 2018, De Silva was arrested once again, this time at the shelter where he had been staying, and charged with stealing property from the film festival, among other counts. He is now serving two to four years at Ulster Correctional Facility upstate.

For all the identities De Silva has tried on, one remains a mystery: his true self. No one interviewed for this story knows anything about him or how he landed in New York. He has said that he is originally from Sri Lanka.

Called for comment on this story, even De Silva’s lawyer Hardy remains in the dark. “[De Silva] was very distrustful of attorneys and authority as a whole,” he said. “It was tough to get underlying information from him.”

De Silva had told both Loydeen and the actress that his name was Pryan Silva. When the latter Googled him, she found a photo of him with a gorgeous blonde.

“He told me she was his ex-girlfriend who looked like Charlize Theron,” the actress said. “He told me they went out for 10 years . . . and they lived in the Hamptons.”

The agency caption for the photo, which was taken by society lenser Patrick McMullan, does not list the woman’s name — yet another mystery in De Silva’s background.

As for how De Silva will make out in jail this time, his lawyer Hardy is not worried.

“He’ll keep telling everyone that he is a director and will probably tell the other inmates that, once they all get out, he will put them into movies.”





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