Photo: machpi3/Instagram

Andrew first met Matthew Christopher Pietras in September 2019 at the opening-night gala for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Porgy and Bess. A professional piano tuner, Andrew knew plenty of opera patrons, but there was something different about Pietras. At 34, he was considerably younger than the other wealthy donors, not to mention handsome — tall, slim, and stylish. “A friend introduced us. I was intrigued,” Andrew says. “You never know who you’re going to meet at these things. They could be a prince.”

Soon after, Andrew was pleasantly surprised to find an email from Pietras inviting him to dinner. They went to an Italian restaurant in the Village. Pietras was chatty and impulsive, ordering a few of the most expensive dishes on the menu for them to share. After that night, the two began to see each other often. Pietras was generous, sometimes overwhelmingly so. When the weather turned cold, he took Andrew to Loro Piana on Fifth Avenue, where he insisted on buying his new boyfriend a navy-blue winter coat made of pure vicuña wool. It cost nearly $25,000. Afterward, they went to Armani and charged another $50,000 to Pietras’s AmEx black card. Two months into their relationship, Pietras told Andrew he wanted to take him on a safari in Tanzania followed by gorilla trekking in Rwanda. But Andrew couldn’t renew his passport: He owed more than $75,000 in unpaid taxes. Later that day, he explained his predicament to Pietras, who, without much discussion, handed over his credit card and told Andrew he’d cover the debt. “It was like nothing to him,” Andrew says.

Pietras was vague about how he had made his fortune. He told Andrew he’d earned his M.B.A. from NYU and once worked for a billionaire in Nicaragua. He also spoke frequently about one of his two current employers, Courtney Sale Ross, the art collector, filmmaker, philanthropist, and wealthy widow of Time Warner founder Steven Ross. From Pietras’s stories, Andrew gathered that his boyfriend seemed entrenched in Ross’s life. Pietras was just as likely to describe helping her choose an outfit as he was to mention talking business with board members at the Ross School, the Hamptons academy his boss had founded along with her husband in the early 1990s. When Ross began winnowing her art and jewelry collections, Pietras claimed to be overseeing the process, sometimes talking about her estate as if it were his own. “Am watching the magnificent jewelry sale. My lots are about to come up,” he texted Andrew in December 2019. “Fuck yes. Just closed on the big diamond for $200k more than our high ask.”

Not long into their relationship, Andrew got the sense that Pietras might be hiding something. He claimed to live at the Pierre hotel, but the couple only ever slept at Andrew’s apartment in East Harlem. “I didn’t know if he was married or had a partner or family. Or maybe a rich benefactor, which would have made sense,” he says. But when Andrew confronted Pietras about this, he said he just wanted to take things slowly. “I know you want to come over, but I’ve been burned so many times, I keep my home as a safety place for me — it’s not healthy, but it’s what I do,” Pietras texted. Andrew decided to give him another chance. In March 2020, after seeing a variety show at 54 Below, Pietras called an Uber and abruptly invited Andrew over to his place. But instead of heading north toward the Pierre, the car pulled up to an unremarkable brick building on 39th Street. Pietras took Andrew up an elevator and showed him into a small studio apartment. Since they began dating, Andrew had found Pietras to be almost obsessively neat. On a trip they took to London a few weeks earlier, Pietras instructed the bellman to store his empty luggage lest it clutter the closet. But inside Pietras’s apartment, every inch was given over to designer items. Suits, jackets, and coats hung from rows of racks. The floor, counters, and tables were covered with boxes of bags, shoes, and cosmetics. “He was hoarding luxury goods. There’s no other way to describe it,” Andrew says. Pietras’s explanation for living in the studio did nothing to help Andrew better understand the situation. “He told me the rent was reasonable,” Andrew says. “I watched you order a $6,000 bottle of wine, and you like the reasonable rent. What?”

Andrew resolved to end things with Pietras. But it was March 2020, and a few days after the apartment incident, New York went into lockdown. Pietras called with an appealing proposition: Would Andrew join him in the Hamptons, where he was hunkering down with his other employer, Gregory Soros, the youngest child of billionaire hedge-funder George Soros? “The world was ending, and he said, ‘Come out. It will be safe with us,’” Andrew says. So he packed a suitcase and moved in with Pietras, who was living in a $2.6 million Shingle-style home, one of a half-dozen Hamptons properties the Soros family had snapped up in recent years. Andrew made use of the full-size gym, the pool, and the kayaks on hand. He also got a chance to witness Pietras interact with his boss up close. Before the pandemic, Pietras had described his job as uniquely influential. He was responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the “family office,” he said; he’d even texted Andrew a photo of a document that seemed to show he had power of attorney over Greg. But one night, a few weeks after Andrew moved in, the couple hosted Greg and his girlfriend for dinner, and during the meal, Greg casually referred to Pietras as his personal assistant. “That was the moment it really hit me,” Andrew says. “He’d been lying about everything.”

Sitting at the dinner table, Andrew understood there really was no way for the math to compute. No personal assistant can afford a $25,000 coat. After dinner, once Greg and his girlfriend were gone, Andrew confronted Pietras. “He had the weirdest response,” Andrew says. “He didn’t get angry or anything. He just went blank. Like, totally blank. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions. He just stood there and then he walked out of the house.” Pietras spent the night at another house owned by the Soroses, and when he returned the next morning, he acted as if nothing had happened. That’s when Andrew decided to leave. Save for one dinner, he never saw Pietras again.

Five years later, Pietras had donated millions to various institutions across the city, committing enough money to the Met that his name appeared near the top of its board of directors, ahead of a Buffett, a Getty, and even a Soros. The Frick Collection inscribed his name on a wall inside the museum. Although people around him — fellow benefactors, Met and Frick employees, even his close friends — had, like Andrew, a nagging feeling that something didn’t add up, no one meaningfully questioned his wealth. Until this May, when the first tranche of his largest gift yet, a $15 million donation to the Met Opera, didn’t go through. Forty-eight hours later, before anyone at the Met realized what had happened or who Pietras really was, he was found dead in his apartment.

Photo: dr_sharon/Instagram

Pietras got his start in philanthropy more than a decade ago. As a newly minted Stern B-school graduate, he set about joining the junior board of a handful of organizations, including Upwardly Global, a small nonprofit that offers career support to immigrants. He told people that his grandparents had founded a bank in Boston, that he’d started at boarding school in kindergarten, that he lived at the Pierre. He understood rich people, he said, and to get them to open their wallets, he felt Upwardly Global needed to thrill them. “The closest thing we had done to a fundraiser was in an art studio with cocktails for 60 or 70 people,” says Nikki Cicerani, who ran the organization’s New York office at the time. “But Matt really wanted to go huge. He was like, ‘Let’s rent out Ellis Island!’”

Cicerani was reluctant, but something about Pietras’s enthusiasm persuaded her. He promised to bring in large donors, and he pledged $5,000 of his own money. Pietras ended up doing very little to help plan the fundraiser. “His biggest contribution was getting a photographer from Getty Images to come and take the pictures,” Cicerani says. On the day of the event, Cicerani was irritated to find him acting as if he were running the gala, even grabbing the microphone to give a speech at one point. Cicerani and members of her staff were baffled. He was a junior-board member with no experience or knowledge of the organization and its mission. “There was a manipulative nature to him. I remember thinking, I don’t think this person is well. And they don’t mean well,” says Cicerani. Soon after, he resigned.

A few months later, Pietras took a fellowship with another nonprofit, Agora Partnerships, which focuses on helping entrepreneurs in Latin America. The offices were in Managua, Nicaragua, and he seemed eager for the opportunity to move. He didn’t fit in with his Agora fellows, either. He overdressed, showed up late, and occasionally drank at lunch. “He wanted to be around money and power, and he talked the talk like he knew how to do that. He had a certain charisma and interest in fundraising, and we were hoping he would leverage that to bring in local donors,” says an Agora colleague. “But nothing ever materialized.” He managed to secure a job working for a different nonprofit, Aproquen, which provides health care for burn victims. Aproquen was founded and run by Vivian Pellas, a burn victim herself whose husband, Carlos, happened to be Nicaragua’s first billionaire. According to public records, Pietras’s official job title was “fund raising representative,” but he would later tell people he worked for Vivian. He bragged about going to board meetings and flying on the family’s private jet or helicopter. “We were in the second-poorest country in the hemisphere, and this guy figured out how to make friends with the richest people in the country,” his colleague says. His job with the Pellas family was apparently short-lived — it never even appeared on his résumé. (An attorney who worked with the Pellas family said, “I know who Matthew Pietras is, and I have no comment.”)

Pietras moved back to New York before his fellowship was over. He tried making it as an actor, booking background roles on shows like Younger and Saturday Night Live. Then, in October 2015, he found a job that stuck: personal assistant for Andco, LLC, Ross’s private family office. The two got along, and eventually Pietras was promoted to “chief of staff.” According to a job listing for the position, Ross was searching for someone to take care of almost every aspect of her life and was seemingly unafraid to give whoever she chose complete access to her finances. The job entailed oversight of all charitable giving, daily meetings with family lawyers and financial professionals, supervision of “residences/collections, yacht, etc.,” and management of all cash flow. It also seemed she was looking to curtail her spending. “He or she will establish systems for downsizing and budgeting and will monitor all costs and expenses,” read the listing. “It is imperative that he or she understands the global picture of the family’s finances including the extensive philanthropic entities.”

Pietras did well in the job, deftly toggling among his roles as Ross’s executive officer, personal assistant, and chatty companion. He kept track of her calendar and travel, watched over her various properties, and decorated her Christmas tree. Soon, he took on more important business affairs, like reviewing contracts at the Ross School and managing the housekeepers, butlers, landscapers, chefs, art advisers, and drivers who maintained her world. When one of Ross’s personal assistants told Pietras he had recently been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder after their boss had cut him with scissors for doing “a shitty job at wrapping gifts,” Pietras was coolly indifferent, according to claims in a wrongful-termination lawsuit against Ross that was later resolved. “What does this mean for your ability to work?” Pietras responded. Later, he called the assistant and fired him.

After he started working for Ross, the life Pietras projected on social media began to shift. He posted photos of himself flying business class, lounging by turquoise infinity pools, and sipping Champagne next to tins of barely touched caviar. The captions were vague. “Today’s commute” accompanied a photo taken inside a private helicopter; another, from inside the cockpit of a private plane, referenced “deal due diligence”; one of a sun-speckled Hamptons morning said “board meeting prep.” In reality, he was most often by Ross’s side. His boss had come to trust him implicitly. Pietras’s growing involvement in Ross’s finances rankled her daughter, Nicole Eloff, especially as some around her noticed her mother’s memory declining. But Ross seemed to like having Pietras near. They traveled abroad together, and he accompanied her to galas and board meetings. When Susan Weber, a board member at the Ross School and the second ex-wife of George Soros, told Ross that her son was looking to hire a personal assistant, she recommended Pietras. Greg, a then-32-year-old conceptual artist, struggled with mental-health issues and was seeking someone trustworthy who could look after both his well-being and his finances.

Pietras began working for Greg in April 2019, just a few months before he started dating Andrew. The day-to-day work was similar to his job with Ross, except their closeness in age meant their dynamic could be more playful. “My baby doesn’t walk! He gets taken around in blacked-out vans,” Greg once replied to a photo of Pietras inside a car on the way to a meeting. When Pietras asked if his boss wanted anything from La Colombe, Greg responded, “Cappa for Dad.” Around friends, Pietras would refer to Greg and his elder brother, Alex, as “my boys.” After Andrew left the Hamptons, Pietras rode out a stretch of the pandemic with Greg in the Bahamas.

He also told friends he was managing the finances of both Soros brothers, a job he claimed they paid him handsomely for. While Pietras wasn’t, in fact, managing any Soros portfolio, his job did require him to keep tabs on various properties Greg owned. He was his boss’s emissary at Hamptons zoning meetings and was looped in on a legal dispute involving a studio Greg owned in lower Manhattan. Just as he had with Ross’s art, Pietras sometimes talked about Greg’s properties as if they were his own. He would casually slip references to “our Hamptons house” into conversations. Greg didn’t follow Pietras on Instagram, but he was aware that Pietras lived a luxurious life. Pietras had told his boss what he told other people: that he was independently wealthy.

Greg gave Pietras a work credit card and access to his email account, nothing unusual for a personal assistant. But eventually, Pietras used that access to set up a system by which he approved his own expenses. By this point, Pietras was already stealing money from Andco, LLC, the company Ross used to pay her household employees. In the early days of the lockdown, when the stock market hit rock bottom, Pietras set up Andrew with an investment portfolio and seeded it with more than $5,500 from Andco, LLC. Soon he began using his Soros credit card for personal charges, too, connecting it, for instance, to his Barry’s account.

Then he began making donations.

In September 2022, the Met kicked off its season with a debut production of the 1797 French opera Medea. Pietras, dressed in a Tom Ford tuxedo, was milling around in the crowd shaking hands. He seemed happy to break free from the Soros pod — Greg had been especially COVID conscious. Pietras looked different, too, having emerged from the pandemic with a notably stronger jaw, a full head of hair, and lifted cheekbones. He was one of the evening’s benefactors and had invited dozens of guests from various parts of his life: a classmate from NYU, colleagues who’d worked for Ross or Greg, people he’d met as a background actor years earlier. “We only knew each other through him,” says Stefanie, who had met Pietras through work.

Opening-night galas are easy money for the Met’s development office, which gives patrons some recognition and perks while pressing them for donations. They are also a good opportunity for ambitious junior philanthropists to show off. It had cost Pietras $50,000 to be one of the gala’s benefactors. He’d also spent at least $100,000 on boxes and seats for his guests. The extravagance was not lost on his friends, many of whom had never attended the opera before. “I looked down and Brooke Shields was in a shittier seat than I was,” says Stefanie, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym. After the third act, in which Medea murders her own children, the standing ovation subsided and the VIPs tottered down from their boxes and out to Damrosch Park, where they ate dinner in a candlelit tent.

Stefanie adored Pietras. He was fun and energetic, and as someone who was bad at keeping in touch, she appreciated Pietras’s commitment to their friendship, always checking in with her and making plans. But from the start, she was perplexed by his financial situation. While he’d told other friends that he’d inherited a fortune from his grandparents, or he lived in a relative’s apartment at the Pierre, or he had an allowance from a wealthy aunt, he’d never offered such a story to Stefanie. Instead, he claimed only that Ross and the Soroses paid him well. Beyond that, she assumed he was good with money. “I was thinking he must have invested well or Courtney was just giving him tons of money,” she says. “And every time I drifted toward thinking something was funky, there would be something else that made it legitimate — like the Met.” The Medea gala was chaired by another Met Opera board member, Daisy Soros, George’s then-93-year-old sister-in-law. “One moment I was wondering if something was off, and the next I look over and he’s making lunch plans with Daisy Soros,” Stefanie says. “I thought, Okay, maybe I’m the dope.”

Photo: Matteo Prandoni/BFA.com

Pietras told people he was estranged from his family, implying he and his parents had had a falling-out over his sexuality. He referred to his friends — the lawyers, accountants, and background actors, plus his current personal trainer and his former personal trainer, his dermatologist, and his cosmetic dentist — as his chosen family. And in the years after the pandemic, “we all became genuinely close friends with each other,” says one. “That was because of him. He was good at bringing people together.” Pietras spoiled his chosen family with gifts as if they were the children of a fairy-tale king. In addition to Medea, Pietras brought groups of friends to at least 14 galas at the Met and the Frick. Sharon Huang, his dentist, meticulously documented their adventures — the lavish dinners, the front-row seats at the U.S. Open, the helicopter trip to see Taylor Swift at MetLife, a private suite at a Beyoncé show. In 2023, he rented the Polo Bar for a private dinner. Other friends joined him on trips to Morocco, Egypt, and Bhutan. He invested in a friend’s Broadway production and another friend’s real-estate business. Last winter, he treated a group of friends to three weeks of skiing in Courchevel, where he covered room and board for most of them at Les Airelles, which has been described as the most expensive hotel in the French Alps.

For his 40th birthday, in February, Pietras surprised 11 friends, telling them to pack their bags and meet him at Teterboro Airport early one Wednesday morning. He’d chartered a private jet to fly them to the British Virgin Islands. After landing on Tortola, the group was ferried to Rosewood Little Dix Bay, where they stayed for four nights in private villas and played on a superyacht called Just Enough.

The contrast between his lifestyle and his responsibilities could strike friends as odd. One night, he’d pay tens of thousands of dollars to be listed as a prime benefactor at a Met Opera gala, and 48 hours later, he’d be talking about the height of Greg’s fence at a town-hall meeting. Eventually, Pietras seemed to recognize his spending necessitated a new cover story. Some time over the past year, he started telling people he’d gotten a job with an even richer boss — the Qatari royal family. His new employers, he claimed, had given him a generous signing bonus. “I said to him, ‘Matthew, you’re a gay guy who just converted to Judaism. I’m surprised they hired you,’” one friend says. Pietras was quick to reply, “It’s part of their new image.”

The new job helped explain Pietras’s ever-ballooning philanthropy. Late last year, he gave a gift to the Frick big enough for the museum to name a position after him: the Matthew Christopher Pietras Head of Music and Performance. Soon after, he was elected a managing director of the Met’s board, its top tier, which requires annual dues of $250,000. His fellow managing directors were titans of finance (Bruce Kovner, Marc Stern) and heirs to coal and oil fortunes (C. Graham Berwind III and Marlene Hess). By contrast, no one seemed to know anything about Pietras. “You looked at his board bio and it was like, ‘Matthew Christopher Pietras currently runs a private family office in New York and London.’ That was it. Uh, what? It didn’t make any sense,” says a current board member. “Who is this guy?”

In March, Pietras co-chaired yet another gala, this one marking the Frick’s reopening after a five-year, $330 million renovation. On a rainy evening, some of the city’s biggest philanthropists funneled into industrialist Henry Clay Frick’s mansion on the Upper East Side. In rooms lined with Whistlers and Rembrandts, Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, and Walmart heiress Alice Walton swanned about while younger heirs like Ivy Getty, Larry Milstein, and Jordan Roth posed for photos nearby. Pietras was among them, as was his crew of some 55 adoring guests. He stood with a martini in hand, a large diamond-studded brooch glittering on the lapel of his tuxedo. He looked especially thin, his cosmetically chiseled cheeks hollowed out. Other procedures — hair augmentation, revisions to his already revised nose, fillers — made him look even more like an avatar of himself. Yet his pleasure was unmistakable as he stood in the museum’s reception hall looking at his own name stamped on the wall of a gilded-age mansion. He’d given between $1 million and $5 million to get it there. “It was an evening of opulence, profound beauty, and celebration of art,” Huang later posted. “To see Matthew’s name on the wall lifted my heart.”

Lately, though, Pietras had seemed on edge. In a cab on the way to another event, he snapped at the driver for making a wrong turn. It was so out of character it startled the friend who witnessed it. Pietras apologized, saying the onboarding process for his new job with the Qataris was stressing him out. But he might have been concerned about a recent pledge he’d made that was large even for him: $15 million to the Met. The gift had been announced by Peter Gelb, the opera’s longtime general manager, only days before the Frick gala. At least part of it was intended to go toward building a speakeasy below the building’s lobby that would bear Pietras’s name.

A few weeks later, he flew to London. He’d been making trips across the Atlantic more frequently, part of his new job with the Qataris, he told people. His last Instagram post, on May 22, was a photo of Grosvenor Square, where he claimed he would soon move into a flat in one of the city’s most luxurious buildings. “Time for the new adventure to begin …” he captioned it.

The Met was expecting the first installment of his $15 million gift. Pietras had gone to great lengths to steal from his bosses — he’d impersonated Greg, fabricated documents, and rerouted fraud alerts from Greg’s phone to his email. But how would he hide a multimillion-dollar lump-sum transfer?

On Wednesday, May 28, a $10 million transfer was routed to the Met from an LLC associated with a property Greg owned. But it was flagged as fraudulent and didn’t go through. That night, back in New York, Pietras attended the American Ballet Theatre’s spring gala at Cipriani, where he wore a cold expression for photographers on the step-and-repeat. He looked pale and jet-lagged. Meanwhile, Met employees waited to hear from him — surely the whole thing was just a mistake. Before they could figure it out, on Friday, May 30, a housekeeper found Pietras dead in his apartment. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Stefanie. “The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense. It was all just too weird. I was like, Something isn’t adding up here. But nothing ever did with Matthew, and no one could say what the hell happened.”

Pietras grew up in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Springfield best known for being the longtime headquarters of Friendly’s Ice Cream. His actual family is solidly middle class: His mother spent most of her career as a prosecutor, and his father, a Vietnam War veteran, managed a food-packaging factory. They raised Pietras and his younger sister in a Colonial Revival at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. Pietras never attended boarding school. He attended Minnechaug Regional, a public high school that serves two towns, where he was active in student government and wrote for the newspaper. Classmates remember him as outgoing, ebullient, effeminate — it seemed obvious to everyone that he was gay, but even his closest friends said he had never come out to them.

There was a persistent rumor at Minnechaug that Pietras was waiting for a trust fund to kick in. No one seemed to know whether the trust was real. A group of his childhood friends offered one theory for how the rumor started. For Pietras’s sixth- or seventh-grade birthday, his parents sent a limo to pick up him and his friends after school and chauffeur them to Spaghetti Warehouse in Springfield, an extravagant gesture his friends talked about for years. “I just have this memory of a bunch of us sticking our heads out of the window, laughing and yelling, and then looking over and he was sitting there in the limo just smiling,” says Nathaniel Piel, one of Pietras’s childhood friends. “I’m sure all of the kids thought he was rich, and we started joking with him that he was the heir to a napkin fortune because of his dad’s job.”

In 2005, Adam Herder, another of Pietras’s childhood friends, needed a place to stay after Hurricane Katrina flooded his college campus, and Pietras agreed to take him in. When Herder arrived at Pietras’s apartment off Astor Place, he was baffled. “He was living in an apartment that no college sophomore has the money to live in,” Herder says. When Herder needed a haircut, Pietras referred him to his own stylist near Fifth Avenue. The haircut ended up costing $500, and Herder had to call his parents for money. “He was like, ‘Oh yes, I go there every month.’” Herder never figured out how Pietras could afford the haircuts, the expensive dinners he treated him to, or the rent, to which Pietras insisted that Adam not contribute. “He wanted money and status, and part of that was because he loved to be able to show that he could be generous, that he could spend the money, and he would never ask for anything back.”

After NYU, Pietras abruptly stopped paying rent on his Astor Place apartment and, in the years that followed, his landlord chased him and his father, who’d acted as co-signer, for more than $25,000. After that, Pietras began receiving mail at a P.O. box on the Upper East Side. In 2011, he was caught squatting at a friend’s family vacation home in Connecticut. Later, he would confide to a friend that he experienced homelessness during this time of his life, making use of the bathrooms in luxury hotels. All the while, he was telling people he lived at the Pierre. Not until 2016, after he started working for Ross, was Pietras able to sign a lease for his apartment on 39th Street. Two years later, he agreed to make settlement payments to his Astor Place landlord. Meanwhile, he began posting photos of his glamorous lifestyle on Instagram, making some Minnechaug classmates wonder if he’d truly come into that trust fund.

At an emergency meeting after Pietras’s death, Gelb and the Met’s top board members discussed what had become suddenly, alarmingly clear: Not only was the promised gift not coming but they had accepted millions in fraudulent funds. The Met scrambled to develop a communications strategy, a plan of action for when reporters inevitably called. But the problem went beyond bad press. Even as audiences have trickled back after the pandemic, the opera — like most every cultural institution across the city — has bled cash. Gelb has tried to plug the holes with contemporary stagings and celebrity-driven marketing, but his efforts have been mostly futile. Critics say he let costs run wild while doing a poor job of fundraising, forcing him to look further afield for new donors. Now, to make matters worse, he’d counted on one of those new donors for a massive pledge that wouldn’t be arriving. Over the past two years, the board had allowed Gelb to dip into its endowment multiple times to cover basic costs like payroll. After Pietras’s death, he once again got the board’s permission to reach into the endowment.

Lately, in interviews, Gelb has teased a “transformative” gift some say is almost certainly a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia. Board members who don’t want the opera to play a role in the kingdom’s global campaign to divert attention from the ugly parts of its reputation, like its alleged assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, have pushed back. But major gifts to vaunted institutions have always had a cleansing, hypnotic effect — something the Sackler family and Henry Clay Frick, whose anti-union agents once slaughtered his own employees, used to their advantage. As did Pietras. Each gala was a chance to prove to everyone that his fortune was real. For a while, he managed to convince even himself.

In the weeks after his death, word spread through his friend group that Pietras had died from complications related to his enlarged heart. The medical examiner has not yet ruled on the cause and manner of Pietras’s death, but in all their years of friendship, he had never mentioned an enlarged heart to Stefanie. She was confused, as were many people in his chosen family, about how he died and who he’d been in life. One thing was certain, though: Pietras had been the most generous person they’d known. “The craziest part about all of this,” one says, “is that Matthew never wanted to take anything from anybody. That was his thing, why he never wanted us to pay. In return, he just wanted us to be there for him.”

The evening after Pietras was found dead, a parterre box he had purchased for The Queen of Spades at the Met sat empty. He had made dinner plans with friends and already committed at least $350,000 for tables at future galas. There was no funeral or memorial service, something he’d apparently stipulated at some point. The will instructed nine of his friends to select a few pieces each from his collection of jewelry and whatever else he owned. After that, the rest of his estate — estimated at about $500,000 worth of property and $1.5 million in bank accounts — is to be divided among his chosen family and the Metropolitan Opera.

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