In every way it was Malachi Richardson, except it wasn’t. The two pierced ears. A somewhat scraggly high-top fade haircut. The “Always Reppin’” shirt with the orange block “S” that Syracuse wore during warmups in the NCAA Tournament. And a face that, for someone not entirely familiar with the looks of the former Syracuse standout, could easily be mistaken for Richardson’s.

For all intents and purposes, he’ll be referred to as the impostor. He rode a commercial flight early Saturday morning from Syracuse’s Hancock International Airport to Newark Liberty International Airport, where he stopped for pictures, videos and autographs before hopping on a plane to Florida. Two 20-year-olds from central New York, Dustin DuBrule and Sean Loveless, rode both flights with the impostor and fell victim to his charade.

The impostor signed DuBrule’s basketball and told him that he didn’t care which NBA team selected him in the upcoming draft, just that he wanted to be taken. He posed for a picture with Loveless, who waited to approach the impostor until the crowd of around 10 people surrounding him in the tunnel leading from the plane to the gate dissipated.  He even obliged to the request of a stewardess on the first flight, who asked that the impostor send a message to her son in a video.

“He really woke up in the morning like, ‘I’m trying to be Malachi Richardson today,’” DuBrule said in a phone interview Sunday night.

When the impostor boarded the flight from Syracuse to Newark around 5 a.m. on Saturday, passengers mumbled amongst each other that a recognizable face had joined them. Loveless resisted the urge to approach him immediately and like other passengers on the flight, waited until the plane landed in New Jersey around 7 a.m. to ask for favors.

After the impostor’s fellow passengers finished crowding around him, other bystanders in the airport began flocking toward the Richardson lookalike. He never swayed from character, even taking a video with a mom and her son while advising the son to stay in school.

Richardson, of course, didn’t heed the impostor’s advice and will instead hope to hear his name called in the first round of this year’s NBA Draft after foregoing his final three years of eligibility at SU.

That, in part, is what made the actual Malachi Richardson’s presence on the flight more believable.

“He’s still the type of person where he’s humble because he doesn’t have all that money to own his own jet yet and he still has to drive and fly commercial,” Loveless said.

This wasn’t an isolated instance where a well-known figure’s doppelganger jokes around with one person and pretends to be someone more famous than themselves. This was intentional, effectively scripted from head to toe, fooling masses of people in Richardson’s own home state about an hour’s car ride from his hometown of Trenton, New Jersey.

DuBrule posted his photo with the impostor shortly after 11 a.m. on Saturday, but it didn’t start circulating until late Sunday night, when Loveless tweeted at Richardson to clarify that he had in fact been duped the day before.

“A normal person would be like, ‘It’s not me, but thanks,’ or just says, like, ‘I look like him,’” Loveless said. “I am pissed off … I just have a random picture with somebody who I don’t know who he is.”

The impostor still remains nameless as of late Sunday night to the two 20-year-olds, most likely along with everyone else fooled throughout the day on Saturday.

And while the real Malachi Richardson could see his name grow in popularity over the next month, another Malachi Richardson could be reveling in the humor of his stunt somewhere in Florida’s warm summer while remaining a mystery.

“I got catfished in person,” Loveless said. “Like who gets catfished in person? And then I did.”

Published on May 23, 2016 at 2:06 am

Contact Matt: mcschnei@syr.edu | @matt_schneidman