A fleet of black Cadillac Escalades hums outside Chelsea hot spot Avenue -- the A-list watering hole of such celebrities as Justin Timberlake and
Lindsay Lohan. As the car doors open, a dozen men emerge and a bouncer whisks them over the club's threshold, past a group of shivering models behind the velvet rope. "Who is it?" one of them wonders out loud. "Is it
P. Diddy?"
But the man at the center of the entourage isn't a celebrity. He isn't even a mogul. He's Taek Jho Low, a 20-something Wharton grad from Malaysia who has burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars at the city's hottest nightspots in the last three months -- and shows no signs of stopping.
The nightlife scene is abuzz with tales of this international man of mystery -- who goes by the name Jho Low and whose chubby, bespectacled appearance hardly meets the image of a wealthy gadabout. In September, during Fashion Week, sources said, Low helped rack up a $160,000 bar tab at Avenue, including several $900 bottles of Cristal champagne.
One month later, Lindsay Lohan was belatedly celebrating her 23rd birthday at downtown drinking den 1OAK when 23 bottles of Cristal suddenly appeared. They were reportedly paid for by a "mystery Malaysian," who, sources claim, was Low. At chic 27th Street hangout Pink Elephant, Low routinely spends $50,000 to $60,000, according to the club's owner, David Sarner. One night, at the Pink Elephant outpost in Southampton, Low enjoyed himself so much that he kept the revelry going -- all the way to Malaysia, Sarner said.
"He ended up flying eight of our [waitresses] to Malaysia for a party," he added. Strangely, for a man attracting so much attention, very little is known about Low. According to his official biography, he currently serves as a group adviser of several international corporations and was appointed to the board of
UBG Berhad, a financial-services group in Kuala Lumpur, last year. But when The Post interviewed Malaysian experts at such think tank as the Council on Foreign Relations, no one had ever heard of Low.
According to inside sources, Low lives at a $100,000-a-month apartment in the Park Imperial, on West 56th Street, home to James Bond actor Daniel Craig and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs -- and he won't go anywhere, not even on the elevator, without at least one bodyguard. Some of Low's entourage of eight to 12 people also reside in two other apartments at the Park Imperial -- a $30,000-a-month pad and a 2,200-square-foot loft with Central Park views that costs $20,000 a month, according to real-estate investor Michael Hirtenstein, who used to live in the latter.
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