The Rothschild Who Wasn’t, Part II: Arrested in Miami
On the evening of February 25, before the cops arrived, the man known as Kyle Deschanel was at 1 Hotel South Beach, the cabana-dotted Miami compound where a peak-season suite can go for $3,000 a night. Since the middle of 2025, he had been living further down the island in a $25,000-a-month apartment on the 15th floor of Portofino Tower, an iconic South of Fifth skyscraper that practically invented modern Miami Beach luxury. Deschanel’s pad had sweeping views of Biscayne Bay, and he lived there with his fiancée, whom we’ll call Heather. They met in December 2024. He received the keys August 15 of last year, according to a letter sent to the apartment by the landlord’s attorney, starting a yearlong lease.Deschanel was a New York transplant who ended up in Miami, like so many before him, in search of a fresh start. He needed one. In 2021 and 2022—the post-pandemic heyday of hot-vax New York, Deschanel allegedly scammed socialites, financiers, movie stars, and party kids, seducing them with a worldly sensibility, easy access to capital, and the promise of so much more—one deal he allegedly shopped around involved an AI-assisted travel start-up that he claimed would go from $1 million in revenue in 2024 to $113 million in 2027. According to former friends, it was all enhanced by his unlikely home: a $25,000-a-month multistory SoHo pad that later sold for $6 million, often stocked with an ever-flowing buffet of drugs and booze. He claimed he was the heir to the Rothschild European banking fortunes, according to associates. He slipped restaurants a gold AmEx emblazoned with the Deschanel name before the check arrived at dinners costing five figures. He flexed Wall Street heft, gabbed in Arabic, supposedly with members of the Saudi royal family who run Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company. He claimed he ran a fund called Oxshott Capital Partners, and he was always pushing these investor decks, taking full advantage of the free-flowing post-COVID dealmaking of Manhattan. Many went for it.“The great pitch was that this is a front for the Rothschild family office,” said a person who witnessed his alleged scams in New York.It all came crashing down in 2023 when his closest friend found his Global Entry card with his face, and a different name: Aryeh Dodelson. The truth came out: He wasn’t Kyle Deschanel, and he certainly wasn’t a Rothschild—he was a rabbi from Lakewood, New Jersey, with a wife and a son, who had been trained at a famous yeshiva founded by his great-grandfather. Instead of committing to that path, he spent years infiltrating New York social circles, ending up with a late-night party house in the middle of SoHo. By the time my story about him was published in the November 2023 issue of Vanity Fair, Aryeh Dodelson, and all of his guises, had disappeared from the face of the earth.At 9:27 p.m. on that late February 2026 night in Miami Beach, as the beachfront DJ spun tracks, five officers from the major crimes unit of the Miami Beach Police Department, all equipped with body cams, hurtled out of squad cars and onto Collins Avenue, hightailing it to the 1 Hotel, looking for Aryeh Dodelson. They had been working on the investigation for weeks, obtained a warrant in January, and hashed out an interception operation. Inside they found Dodelson, who had been going by another alias, Ary Davidssen, and placed him under arrest. He was hauled across the causeway and booked in a Miami-Dade County jail. On February 26 he was charged with battery by strangulation, a felony, and battery by domestic violence, a misdemeanor.
