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How an Israeli Music Producer Survived a Botched Kidnapping At a Fake Songwriting Camp

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Late last summer, the composer and producer Itay Kashti received an email invitation to a songwriting camp that Polydor Records was running in rural Wales. Kashti, a 44-year-old London-based Israeli who mostly produces recordings for singer-songwriters and makes soundtrack music, has participated in a few such events over the years, and this one sounded worthwhile. “I scheduled a call with them,” he remembers, sitting in his basement studio in Kilburn, London, facing a computer screen and a recording console. But what at first seemed like a promising opportunity soon turned almost deadly.

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The call Kashti scheduled wasn’t much to remember. The guy on the other end of the phone had a strong British accent, Kashti recalls, and he told him that his music had come to Polydor’s attention when a executive liked one of his tracks in an Amazon Prime movie. He agreed to go to Wales for about a week, starting Aug. 26. On a second call, days later, the same man told him that instruments and studio equipment would be provided, asked him if he had any dietary issues, and set up a car service to take him to a cottage in Carmarthenshire, a rural area of Wales north of Swansea.

At 10 a.m. on Aug. 26, Kashti, who has lived in London for almost two decades, walked out of his apartment building and found his car — a white Mercedes driven by a man with short hair and a long beard. “After a couple of miles, he started asking me where I’m from and I was a bit taken aback,” Kashti remembers. They had more than four hours of driving ahead, and Kashti worried that, with antisemitism in the UK flaring during the Israel-Gaza conflict, talking about his heritage could make for an awkward ride. But the driver, who said he was a Muslim, told Kashti that he assumed he was from Israel based on his name and “he reassured me that if it bothered him, he wouldn’t have picked me up,” Kashti remembers. Born in the UK, with roots in Pakistan, the driver was curious about Israel, Kashti says, “and we had a really interesting conversation.”

It took some time to find the right location in Wales, a cottage in a remote field of small houses. Kashti remembers thinking that was odd — wouldn’t the organizers want the creators to stay together? — but he just assumed they would work together in another building. Kashti asked the driver to help him with his luggage, while he made sure they were in the right place. There wasn’t much around. The two of them walked into the cottage — Kashti first, the driver behind him — and “there was an alarming sense that something here is strange.”

Suddenly, three men with masks jumped him and he hit the floor. One punched the driver, who ran out as the men pummeled Kashti. He realized he had walked into a trap. “I saw it in slow-motion and I thought, ‘This is the last scene in the movie,’” he says. “After everything I’ve done — moving to the UK, getting into the music business, getting married — what a sorry ending.”

Kashti tried to run, but the three men threatened to kill him, then handcuffed his wrists together around a radiator pipe and ran out of the cottage themselves. Kashti realized that they hadn’t expected the driver. Then he figured out he could free himself, since the other end of the radiator pipe wasn’t connected to the wall. With his wrists still cuffed together, he grabbed his phone in one hand — the men had left it on a table after emptying his pockets — and the case that held his acoustic guitar in the other.

Wait: The guitar?

‘It’s a Martin!” Kashti says, his voice rising with enthusiasm. “It’s not very common, this model — they only made it from ’97 to ’99!” He opens a closet to show me the case, still smeared with some of his blood. The assault, which turned out to be part of an attempted kidnapping, only became public months later, after a March 14 sentencing hearing, so Kashti has had a few months to recover, reflect and regain at least some of his sense of humor.

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At the time, with phone and guitar case in hand, he ran outside and tried to flag down the first car he saw, but “I looked like Sylvester Stallone at the end of Rocky,” he remembers, with one eye swollen shut, the other partly closed, and blood all over his face. The driver didn’t stop. So Kashti ran behind a bush to hide and call his wife, who alerted police. Hers was one of three calls to authorities, including his driver and the driver of the car that didn’t stop.

The police took Kashti to the hospital — he was badly bruised but suffered no broken bones or lasting damage. By nightfall, after a helicopter search, police arrested the three men, who had planned to hold Kashti for ransom: Mohammad Comrie, 23, from Leeds; Faiz Shah, 23, from Bradford; and Elijah Ogunnubi-Sime, 20, from Wallington, London.

Kashti doesn’t know why they targeted him individually, but a police investigation determined that the three men chose him because he was Jewish.

Under UK law, media coverage of a criminal case can offer the defendants grounds for appeal, so Kashti couldn’t talk about his experience while the investigation in Wales moved forward. “The first month, I was in shock,” he says. He couldn’t talk about his experience much, and no one could really understand what he went through. He worried that the three men might have been working with an accomplice. A trial was set for Feb. 17, with Kashti and his driver scheduled to testify on the second day. But Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime pled guilty, and a sentencing hearing took place on March 14.

Over the course of the investigation, police discovered that Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime had made an elaborate plan to kidnap Kashti and hold him for ransom. They bought handcuffs, a gag, a blindfold and masks, plus enough food and water to last for days. (They also tried to buy ketamine to use as a sedative, according to the prosecutor, without success.) They made some of these purchases with a stolen credit card, rented the cottage in Wales under a fake name and discussed how to launder the ransom money they hoped to get using cryptocurrency.

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After all this effort, the three men failed to plan for the possibility that Kashti would enter the cottage with his driver — or even find a secure way to handcuff him. At the sentencing hearing, which resulted in eight-year terms for the three men — Comrie and Shah will go to prison, while Ogunnubi-Sime was sent to an institution for young offenders — Comrie’s lawyer said the plot had been “highly amateurish in its execution.”

The three men wanted to make money on a ransom. But Kashti had been targeted because of the kidnapers’ “understanding of his wealth and Jewish heritage,” according to Judge Catherine Richards’ statement at the sentencing. They “seemed to justify action against the victim in this case based on his background.” In a message in a group chat they shared, one of the men speculated that Kashti’s “fortune came from West Bank settlements taking Palestinian land.” Ogunnubi-Sime wrote that “all three of us have complete 100 percent faith in Allah, so we can’t fail.”

Any attempted kidnapping would be frightening, but it’s alarming to think that a Jewish person was targeted for this crime in the UK in 2025. Some of the messages shared by Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime show a chilling disdain for Jews, and it’s scary, and a bit absurd, how wrong their stereotypes were. As a working producer, Kashti says he makes a middle-class living in the music business, but if he’s wealthy, he hides it well. “I had to sell the Bentley to afford this amazing look,” he jokes, glancing down at a black shirt, gray trousers and Nikes. His recent involvement in Israeli advocacy amounts to playing guitar at a memorial vigil for the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and he grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv and never spent much time in the West Bank.

Kashti’s harrowing experience is an especially extreme example of how vulnerable working creators and musicians can be. Almost all of them work for themselves, and collaborating often involves traveling to an unfamiliar place to work with people one doesn’t know — sometimes for days on end. Only the most successful have a management staff or assistant to screen opportunities and potential collaborators. They are on their own.

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Before this happened to Kashti, of course, it was hard to imagine that anyone would set up a fake songwriting camp solely to lure someone to a remote location — let alone target someone based on his ethnicity. “This didn’t spark any suspicions,” Kashti says. Why would it? These days invitations come from consultants as well as companies, and phone calls like the ones Kashti was on are often made by external organizers or assistants.

The truth is, Kashti was lucky. “One of the most chilling things is, my life was saved by such random things,” Kashti says. Most important was the intervention of his driver, who helped with his bags, walked into the cottage with them and happened to be fairly big and pretty quick. But that wasn’t just luck, and Kashti takes another lesson from his ordeal. If he hadn’t talked to his driver, he might not have asked him for help with his bags, and the driver might not have agreed. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s the most positive part of the story,” he says. “I connected with him on a human basis and that is what saved me.”

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Entertainment

Luke Combs Was Once Forced to Choose Between Music & A College Frat: ‘I Made the Right Choice’

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With his stadium-packing shows and massive hits including “Beautiful Crazy,” “When It Rains It Pours” and his rendition of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” it may seem obvious that music has been Luke Combs‘ passion his whole life.

But even as a sophomore at Appalachian University in Boone, North Carolina, Combs was already having to make tough choices when it came to following that passion.

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During a recent episode of The Dog Walk With Eddie, Combs recalled that he had rushed at Kappa Alpha Order, but was quickly forced to make a decision between the fraternity and music, due to a scheduling conflict in which the frat’s “Big Brother” reveal was the same night as his a cappella group’s concert.

“On Big Brother reveal night we had a concert for the a cappella group, the same night that was gonna be at the same time,” he said, adding that he was “already kind of over” the process of pledging for a fraternity.

“Why does anyone really join a fraternity? To go to parties and meet chicks is kind of the deal, right?” Combs said. “So I tell the guys, ‘Hey, I really gotta do this concert tonight.’ Because there’s only like 12 people in the group; it’s not like there’s a thousand guys in the a cappella group. I’m like, ‘Your boy’s got solos. I can’t just not go,’ [but] they were like, ‘You’re either doing this or that.'”

When he was forced by his potential fraternity brothers to choose, it seems his decision was quickly made.

“I was like, ‘Well, I’m doing that, dude. I’m out,’” Combs said. Reflecting on it, he said, “It was tough, but I made the right choice. … I ended up here … but I would have loved to do both. … There was no wiggle room.”

Though he added in the interview that he held “no hard feelings” after having made the decision, he noted, “I was just like, ‘I kind of already sing and I’m already kinda good at that. All I’m doing with you guys is paying to be your friend, which I already have a lot of friends anyways.’ It just didn’t line up.”

Of course, pursuing music has paid off for Combs. He just released his new song “Back in the Saddle,” and has had three top 10 hits on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 (so far). Four of his albums have reached the pinnacle of the Top Country Albums chart, while he’s garnered 18 No. 1 Country Airplay hits. After spearheading his Growin’ Up and Gettin’ Old Tour, Combs is playing shows in 2025 including Austin City Limits Music Festival in Austin, and his own Bootleggers Bonfire event, slated for October.

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Teyana Taylor to Undergo Vocal Cord Surgery After Noncancerous Growth Discovered: ‘This Moment Hurts’

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Teyana Taylor revealed on Wednesday (Aug. 6) that she’ll be undergoing emergency surgery after a noncancerous growth was discovered on her vocal cords.

The rapper-actress shared the health update to her Instagram Story, but promised that while she’ll need to cancel some upcoming appearances, like an upcoming podcast with Michelle Obama, her Escape Room album rollout is going to continue with the project scheduled to arrive on Aug. 22.

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“I’ve been quietly dealing with some vocal challenges for a while now. And after a lot of back and forth with my doctors, I’ve been told I need vocal surgery immediately,” she wrote. “They found a noncancerous growth on one of my cords that’s been messing with my voice and causing real discomfort. Thankfully, we caught it & it’s treatable—but it does mean I need to pause and give myself time to fully heal.”

The 34-year-old continued: “That honestly breaks my heart. I don’t take lightly what it means to show up for y’all. I’ve poured so much of myself into this next chapter—especially the Escape Room, which is still dropping August 22! So no worries there. It’s the most personal body of work I’ve ever created. and the timing… it’s not lost on me. Just as I was getting ready to finally share this with you, life handed me my own unexpected ‘escape room’—one I didn’t ask for, but one I now have to find my way out of with patience, rest, and faith.”

Even amid the health battle, Taylor says she put her “whole heart into this music, this film, this rollout. And when I return, it’ll be with even more fire, more purpose, and the best version of me. Thank you for rocking with me through it all.”

Escape Room is set to boast 22 tracks, including her previously released “Bed of Roses” and “Long Time” singles and skits from Issa Rae and Lala Anthony.

The project serves as Spike Tee’s first LP since 2020’s The Album, which reached No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and No. 6 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums.

2025 is shaping up to be another busy campaign for the Harlem native, who is starring in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another film alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, due out later this year.

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An Oral History of Pink Slip’s ‘Freakier Friday’ Reunion: Where Are Lindsay Lohan & The Rest of the ‘Girls in the Garage’ Now?

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One of the most beloved bands of the early 2000s wasn’t even a real band.

When the Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis-starring Freaky Friday remake premiered in 2003, moviegoers were introduced to the teen garage band Pink Slip, led by Lohan’s Anna and her two besties Maddie (Christina Vidal) and Peg (Haley Hudson). Their song “Take Me Away” — originally released by Australian alt-punk band Lash in 2001 — was introduced in the film during a garage rehearsal, before Pink Slip takes the House of Blues stage for their big Wango Tango audition and Lohan and Curtis’ body-swap switch-back.

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Now, Pink Slip and “Take Me Away” are back in Freakier Friday, Disney’s 23-years-in-the-making sequel that hits theaters on Friday. This time around, Lohan’s Anna is still pals with Maddie and Peg, but she’s left Pink Slip behind to focus on her life as a mom to Harper (Julia Butters) and music manager to gen Z pop superstar Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). But the band finds its way back together in the film, starting with Anna’s karaoke-fueled bachelorette party and concluding, once again, on a big Los Angeles stage, this time upgrading to The Wiltern for the musical grande finale.

Ahead of the sequel’s release, Billboard caught up with the three women behind Pink Slip — Lohan, Vidal and Hudson — as well as film producer Kristin Burr (credited with reuniting all five of the original Pink Slip bandmates for Freakier Friday) and music producer Suzy Shinn (who channeled her previous work with pop/rock heavyweights like Weezer, Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy and Katy Perry into a revamped recording of “Take Me Away” and three different versions of brand-new song “Baby,” a centerpiece of the movie’s new mother-daughter storyline between Lohan and Butters).

Below, find Billboard‘s oral history of the epic Pink Slip reunion for Freakier Friday.

–Additional reporting by Lyndsey Havens

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