Department: Craig Drake and All That Glittered

Always the life of the party, Drake was a jet-setting jeweler who catered to Philadelphia’s wealthiest clients and hosted the city’s most lavish soirees. Then, suddenly, the party stopped

By the time Drake and I finally connect again for our long-delayed lunch, he seems ready to jump out of his skin. After his second chardonnay, he starts prodding some more. “Has anybody said anything bad about me?” he asks.

 

I glance up from my dish. “Are there people who will say bad things about you?”

He slugs back a gulp of wine. “Yes.”

“Like who?” I ask.

“I can’t tell you that.”

And really, he doesn’t have to. It’s out there, in court documents and in the gossip mill that grinds through Rittenhouse Square and the Main Line, where Drake’s sudden vanishing act has led to the kind of conjecture usually reserved for Kim Kardashian’s love life. He’s still a steady presence at the Union League, which he claims is proving fertile hunting ground for new business, and he talks a lot about a deal involving a Congo diamond mine. The message is clear: Craig Drake will be back. Though he might not ever be “Craig Drake” again. “He’s a little more guarded,” says Bob DeBolt, the CEO of Vesper Hospitality Investments, which owns Zavino and iconic Philly watering hole Doc Watson’s; he’s been a friend of Drake’s since 1988. “I did see a change in him, with all of these things in his life.”

Before we left his apartment for lunch, I asked Drake about his legendary whistle. It looks like a gym teacher’s whistle, only Drake’s is gold, and it’s around his neck whenever he’s in party mode. The whistle is Craig Drake’s signature. It’s how you know he’s there. “In Brazil, they blow these whistles during Mardi Gras, so he carries his all over,” says Sharon Pinkenson, who’s been a social acquaintance of Craig and Tania Drake for years. “And then eventually it gets to be, ‘Craig, please stop with the whistle.’ Only he can get away with that.”

I’d seen pictures of the whistle  —  in the snapshots that fill the walls of the Drake apartment, and in the photo albums Tania keeps of their international jaunts  —  but I wanted to see it up close. “Oh, here, I’ll show it to you,” Drake said, and clambered out of his armchair.

He opened an antique chest of drawers stuffed with ephemera from his party days: Mardi Gras beads, yellowed invitations, photos of Tania in tight beaded dresses, in gossamer ball gowns, in very little at all. But though he searched high and low  —  opening this drawer, closing that drawer, muttering, “I just saw it here … ”  —  Craig Drake couldn’t find what he had been searching for. His whistle had gone missing.