Bull City Summit’s Discontents  – INDY Week

Groovewagon cans are bright and eye-catching with the important figures spelled out: the amount of delta-8 each THC beverage contains, its caloric content, and the phone number of company co-owners Reilly Dunn and Sasha Klimczak. 

The couple, who don’t have social media for the product, prefer to do business this way, directly over text. Sure, it might seem like a gimmick, Dunn says one November morning over coffee, but Groovewagon is a homegrown “mom and pop operation” and the number really is theirs. To illustrate, he holds up a beat-up iPhone with a glittery pink case. 

This number was how Parag Bhandari, CEO of the marketing and events company UG Strategies first reached out to them last May. “Big fan of your products,” Bhandari, who lives in Fuquay Varina, wrote. “I wanted to reach out to someone about events in NC.” 

Bhandari explained that he was the founder of Bull City Summit, a “music, art, science and technology festival” planning its second year. He told Dunn and Klimczak that he thought Groovewagon would be a perfect fit for event sponsorship at the next summit, scheduled for September 18 to 24, 2023. 

The summit, as Bhandari described it, was dynamic and polished, with a draw like SXSW. Events would take place all over downtown Durham, at venues like Motorco, the Fruit, the Pinhook, and the Armory. There would be fireside chats, VIP lounges, happy hours, concerts, and community events alongside keynote speeches from prominent thought leaders. There would be an NFT of a “key to the city.” 

It seemed promising, but within months, the relationship between the two companies soured, and venues and vendors distanced themselves from the summit. Groovewagon accused Bhandari of financial fraud amounting to $18,500 in unfulfilled services and filed a charge of obtaining property by false pretense with the Durham Police—a class H felony in North Carolina. On December 29, Fuquay Police arrested Bhandari and released him on unsecured bond that night. 

In reporting this story, the INDY reviewed court documents, emails, texts, recordings, and contracts regarding the summit, and spoke with more than 20 local business owners, artists, and former contractors and employees who have worked for UG Strategies or as contractors for other events. Many did not want to speak on the record, citing fear of litigation and retribution.

In the beginning, though, Dunn and Klimczak, who live in Raleigh and have four children, were excited by the partnership. While they describe their core audience for Groovewagon, founded in 2020, as “dads, dogs, and banjos,” THC drinks are an adventurous market and they’d recently sold their drinks at Hopscotch and Dreamville, even selling out of beverages at the latter event. Festivals seemed like a solid path for growth. 

Bhandari sent the couple a link to the UG Strategies (“UG” stands for underground) website—skeletal, but polished—that greets visitors with an assurance: “We work with the world’s most famous brands.” 

“He had no social media, [but] I didn’t view it as suspicious because we don’t have social media,” Dunn says. “So my dumb ass is like, ‘This is cool as shit. Of course there’s no real evidence of any of this work he’s done—because he’s underground.’” 

Bhandari and Groovewagon drew up plans for promotional events across the state, including the summit. He told them he envisioned even greater things for the young company, and that he would see to it that Groovewagon got into festivals like Bonnaroo, Sundance, and Coachella. 

“You guys are Red Bull,” Klimczak recalls Bhandari telling them often. “You guys are gonna be so big.”

Festivals are a difficult business, one that generally requires specific personalities— galaxy-brained, charismatic, determined—to helm them. Bhandari, a 45-year-old raised in New Jersey, fits the description. Animated and imaginative across various interviews on podcasts and videos, he seems quick to see potential in branding opportunities, weaving enthusiastic connections between ideas.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Bhandari has been CEO of UG Strategies since 2003. The website lists offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Durham, and lists clients ranging from University Studios and JetBlue to HBO and Armani Exchange. Over the years, Bhandari has produced events and business through UG Strategies but says that he wanted to “start fresh” with the Bull City Summit LLC, which is what he is producing the event through. According to the NC Secretary of State’s website, UG Strategies’ certificate of authority to do business was revoked, effective May 16, 2023. 

Bhandari came to North Carolina in 2018, when the popular electronic festival Moogfest, then newly relocated from Asheville to Durham, was in the throes of management troubles. Moog Music granted Bhandari the license to the festival, which he then administered. It proved successful; headlined by artists like Kelela and Yves Tumor, it created $7.1 million in economic impact for Durham and received a glowing recap from online music magazine Consequence of Sound calling it a “festival to remember.” 

It would be one of the last Moogfests to remember: Several months after the festival, Moog Music terminated Bhandari’s festival licensing. The following year, the 2019 festival, run by a different festival CEO, became the final event. Soon after, UGS sued Moog Music, claiming that the festival was in breach of its three-year contract. 

Pitchfork reported in September 2021 that UGS sought damages in excess of $25,000—a relatively low figure, but one that Bhandari told vendors allowed him to finance Bull City Summit. (According to records from the Wake County Superior Court the case was dismissed; Bhandari says he is legally restrained from discussing the settlement.)

Festivals, for all their complications, can be game changers for mid-sized cities. In 2023, Hopscotch brought 25,000 attendees to downtown Raleigh and generated about $3.3 million for the local economy. J. Cole’s high-voltage Dreamville drew an audience four times that size and left an economic footprint of almost $8 million. 

Durham’s Full Frame Documentary Festival has brought consistent international prestige since 1998, in addition to economic impact: $3.7 million in 2019, the last year the film festival was held (it’s slated to return this April). The city also had a solid seven-year run with The Art of Cool, a festival shining light on local Black music, that held its last event in 2019. 

“A rising tide does lift all boats,” Durham Bottling Co. owner Nick Jordan says, reflecting on the need for more downtown events. “That’s why we all want a festival in Durham.” 

By the time live events began to return post-pandemic, downtown business was sluggish and Durham was in a festival deficit. Bhandari had been involved in a few successful downtown events, like a series of pandemic-era outdoor concerts in the parking lot formerly adjoining Motorco, and had his sights on an ambitious new event to fill the gap. 

Depending on how you feel about the promise of things like cryptocurrency and AI, the tenor of proposed Bull City Summit events might seem like an odd fit for Durham, a city more commonly associated with Pride parades and the performing arts. But the city’s demographics are also rapidly changing, with an influx of tech companies and a new upper middle class, and Bhandari seemed to feel there was solid ground for a new venture. 

The first summit, originally planned for March 2022, was postponed to that September and scaled down when the timeline proved tight. Bhandari described it as a “pilot” in an interview. 

“I didn’t realize what a debacle enacting BCS was going to be until I was in too deep. Little of the important details were organized, things were missed, overlooked, or changed often,” says one contractor for the 2022 summit, who asked to remain anonymous, fearing litigation and retribution. “He wanted basically 18 months of work to come together in 6 weeks.”

Jeromy Barber, a videographer hired to shoot and edit videos for the 2022 summit, said the first year was bumpy and seemed disconnected from the community. 

“Lack of management and lack of communication appeared, to my eyes, to be rampant,” Barber says. Turnout was also low. 

“Like 75% of the seats were empty, easily,” Barber says. “There would be a band playing to a room of their girlfriends and that’s it, with nobody from the festival except for us.”

But Bhandari seemed confident enough in the summit’s vision to pursue another year. 

“Durham, North Carolina,” Bhandari wrote in a press release last year, “is a visionary hotbed of creativity and we are proud to share our diverse, purpose-led programming with the community and abroad.” 

The 2023 summit seemed off to a good start, with $13,000 in grant funding from the city of Durham, routed through the summit’s fiscal sponsor, local nonprofit Families and Community Rising. It was one of the 15 cultural events the city supported through grants. 

In most fiscal sponsorships, a non-profit lends its tax-exempt status to a project related to its mission. Established in 1969, Families and Community Rising (FCR) states that its mission is “to educate and empower children, families, communities and organizations by delivering unique educational and supportive services.”

It’s unclear what FCR saw as the mission-related benefit of partnering with Bull City Summit, but the nonprofit covered festival costs, including some contractor and artist payments, and contributed a day of community programming featuring local artists and food trucks. 

By the end of the summit, the nonprofit—which did not have a contract or MOU in place ahead of the event—had spent around $80,000 on the summit, according to Bhandari. In a conversation with the INDY, Bhandari said that FCR did not want a contract and was content with the arrangement. 

“It was always about, ‘We’ve got a budget and we can help,” Bhandari says.“We’re gonna do this together and take care of bills that are related to the festival with the understanding that BCS is going to create corporate funding programs for FCR.” 

Bhandari told the INDY that he had fundraised about $30,000 in sponsorships, ticket revenue from Motorco door sales, silent auction sales, and the city grant, for the nonprofit, and had plans to raise more. “I want to go into 2024 raising 100 grand for them,” he told the INDY. 

FCR seemed to have a different understanding of events. When the INDY reached out to the nonprofit’s CEO, Terry David, with quotes from Bhandari and a request for comment, David contested Bhandari’s characterization of the relationship. 

“What Parag is not saying is FCR expenses for BCS were over $100,000 and FCR was not reimbursed for those expenses,” David wrote, adding that the nonprofit is considering legal options, “up to and including litigation.” 

Bhandari says that FCR declined to be involved in the 2024 summit but that local nonprofit the Triangle Blues Society is on board to be the fiscal sponsor. (Attempts to reach the Triangle Blues Society for comment were not successful.) Meanwhile, Bhandari says that, while FCR has declined future fiscal sponsorship, he has plans to generate “additional value that their CEO is well aware of, and is welcoming.” 

“FCR has no plans for a continued relationship with BCS or Parag,” David wrote.

In the months leading up to the summit, Groovewagon was also experiencing troubles and were, they say, losing money on projects with Bhandari. He’d told them that Elements, a three-day EDM festival in Pennsylvania, wanted 24,000 cans—a large figure, given that 18,000 people reportedly attended the festival. 

“From the beginning, I was very skeptical just about how large of an amount of orders that was,” Dunn says. “I was like, ‘Nobody knows who we are up there. This is an entirely new product category, that sounds kind of crazy—are you sure? And over and over, he’d be like, ‘If anything, I’m concerned we’re not going to have enough.” 

A fraction of the cans sold. Groovewagon says they ended up with around $6,000 in the hole, an amount they still owe Elements. 

The couple also allege that they’d wired Bhandari $31,500 for tents, banners, and other merchandise from Telepathic Graphics, a local design company that worked with UGS. But months later, Telepathic Graphics sent an invoice, saying that Bhandari had told them Groovewagon was paying directly. The companies are still disputing the payment. 

The INDY reviewed an email from Bhandari in which he states that the materials cost $31,500 and asks Groovewagon to wire him that amount, as well as two deposits the couple made earmarked “Elements.” Bhandari denies receiving money specific to the merchandise from Groovewagon. 

When reached for comment, Telepathic Graphics owner Bob Boyle declined to say much, beyond stating that he’s always had a positive experience with Bhandari: “No comment except that I want someone to put on their big boy pants and pay me.”

“There is an element,” Dunn says, reflecting on UG Strategies’ touch-and-go events approach, “that is just moving from one to [the next]—shuffle money around for a long time; keep people involved.”

Contractors who worked with Bhandari on past events also cited a track record of the entrepreneur not paying bills.

Matt Lascala was hired by Bhandari as a contractor a few times, including one occasion where he was hired to organize Bhandari’s tax documents, after the 2022 Bull City Summit, and shortly thereafter when he was hired to work as event staff at the Fortnite Championship Series at the Raleigh Convention Center in November 2022. 

Lascala cited concerns about unpaid bills for things like contractors and storage rentals and says that, while organizing the tax documents, he found “bills and invoices and organized them into which [expenses] he still had to take care of, believing his answers when I ran each invoice by him and he told me which were paid, resolved or expired.”

“I presented him with the small pile that he definitely needed to take care of to avoid small claims court and traffic court,” Lascala says. “He thanked me genuinely, tore them up and threw them away.” 

Lascala says he also still has a $1,000 outstanding invoice from working the Fortnite event. Bhandari denies ignoring invoices, tearing up bills, and owing Lascala money. 

“That’s just not true,” Bhandari says in response to the allegation. “He was paid for his services and his work. I have the invoices and the payments and if there’s an additional amount that’s in dispute, I have the right to dispute that, right? If he didn’t do what I think he should have done, or vice versa?” 

Ryan Snyder worked for Moogfest for several years as a photographer and as a staff member. In the summer of 2018, he was hired by Bhandari, through UG Strategies, as an Editorial Manager. In August of that summer, Moog Music pulled Bhandari’s license to run the festival.

“He paid me up until the day that he was no longer managing the festival,” Snyder says. “However, he left me hanging without the severance that I was owed in the amount of $4,000.”

Bhandari says that he isn’t sure about the severance and suggested payments he could not make were the responsibility of Moog Music. 

“If there was a payment that was not made we may have not been able to pay it based on the fact that we didn’t get the funds from Moog,” Bhandari says. “It’s not like we got paid everything and then just didn’t pay invoices. With Moogfest, if there’s $4,000—compare that to the $2 million of invoices we did pay.”

Sean Thegen, who worked for Bhandari as a contractor for Moogfest in 2018, says he also has an unpaid invoice for UG Strategies. “I was told Moog should be paying it, but that’s the only explanation I ever received despite all my other invoices pre-festival being paid by UG Strategies.” 

“I have no comment to this,” Bhandari said, “These are invoices from 5 years ago that I do not have.”

Many people who worked with the summit or for Bhandari on other events were reluctant to speak on the record. Conversations with dozens of sources began and ended the same way: they wanted to talk, but worried about legal or reputational risk. 

Bhandari says those characterizations of him are false. 

“I hate litigation,” he says. “I don’t seek it. I don’t want it. You know, I just love Durham and want to do my best here.”

With Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of The Recording Academy, as headliner and performances from Lee Fields and Death From Above 1979, 2023’s Bull City Summit promised “a mammoth gathering of minds in music, the arts, science, and technology.” Events included topics like the “new crypto bull market” and the “synergy between personal branding and the visual arts industry.”

By this point, Dunn and Klimczak say, they were still holding out hope that the hometown exposure might justify the expenses they’d already shelled out. Of their appearances at the festival, the couple says they had three summit events scheduled: one at Motorco, another at Fruit, and another at LouElla. 

“If they’re telling you that certain amounts of money were to go to certain venues, that’s completely false,” Bhandari told the INDY. 

The INDY, however, reviewed correspondence between Bhandari and Groovewagon confirming logistics for the three events, as well as a recording in which Bhandari said he had spent $32,000 on Groovewagon sponsorship for the festival, including $13,000 on the Motorco event, $3,000 on the Fruit event, and $2,500 on the LouElla event. 

The events didn’t happen. When Groovewagon employees showed up at Motorco and the Fruit with a stash of drinks, venue owners told them they had no knowledge of the arrangement and turned them away. Bhandari canceled the brunch event at LouElla, an indoor venue, citing rain. 

When Dunn emailed Bhandari to ask how the $32,000 was “deployed” Bhandari replied, “It is not upon you, nor is it in our sponsorship contract, to dictate how our sponsorships funds are used. You do not have auditing rights.”

Some events did draw a sizable crowd, like Motorco’s Saturday evening concert from Canadian duo Death From Above 1979. (When the INDY reached out to the band’s manager and asked for a comment on the festival, he replied that “it doesn’t benefit me or my artist to comment on my experience that day” but added, “this email doesn’t surprise me.”) 

The INDY also reached out to several local musicians who performed at the summit. While a few provided background information, none were willing to go on the record, citing reputational concerns. Former festival employees also declined to speak at length on the record, including Tess Mangum of Sonic Pie Productions, an experienced local producer who abruptly quit working with UGS last summer. “I/Sonic Pie Productions will not work with [Bull City Summit] again,” Mangum wrote. 

Some cited more mundane concerns, like low attendance or poor promotion of events. Tim Walter, owner of the Fruit, said that while attendance was “below expectations,” he is “sympathetic to any producer who is persevering during these slow times” and is holding dates for the 2024 summit. 

A series of daytime talks at coworking space Durham Bottling Co. were well-attended, Nick Jordan says, though he was surprised when an employee of Families and Community Rising showed up and asked for $5,000, stating that Bhandari had told the nonprofit that the company was a festival sponsor. Jordan said no—he was already letting UGS use the space free of charge—and the issue was dropped. Jordan says that he is “undecided” about participating in the 2024 event. 

Durty Bull owner Matt Pennisi says that, following its experience with the event in 2023, the brewery does not plan to work with the summit again. 

“They were supposed to have one event at Durty Bull, but didn’t promote it and no one showed up for it,” Pennisi wrote in an email. “Another event, they never actually scheduled with us, but they promoted. No one actually showed up for that either.”

“Motorco is no longer involved with Bull City Summit,” Jeremy Roth, co-owner of Motorco, said on a phone call, declining to say more on the record. 

LouElla owner Cam Davis also says that he does not plan to work with Bull City Summit in the future, and adds that he has worked with Groovewagon since the company launched and was upset about its experience with Bhandari. 

“I’ve enjoyed doing business with them and selling their products. It’s great to have a product like that from good people,” Davis says of Dunn and Klimczak, “For them to be affected is very unfair.”

The Pinhook is also not participating again. “I want something that calls itself Bull City anything,” owner Kym Register says, “especially Bull City Summit, to really have the values of our community intact and communication with people and cultural workers and artists venues that reflects how the Durham that I know has held space for the culture and art that creates a big part of the vibrance of this city.” 

After 2023’s summit drew to a close, Dunn and Klimczak began talking to people across town who had been involved in it. Throughout their sponsorship, they say, Bhandari had a habit of keeping communication siloed between various employees and vendors, often telling them that other people were untrustworthy, an allegation that Bhandari denies. They soon learned they were not the only people who had issues with Bhandari. 

“There’s just enough legitimacy,” Dunn says. “I bet the killer bands are getting paid. But then there’s also this element of like, what’s real and what isn’t? Because some of it is real.” 

Sensing a pattern, Dunn and Klimczak decided to pursue fraud charges in the hope of regaining some funds and making other local businesses aware of their experience. Fuquay police arrested Bhandari on December 29 and released him that night on unsecured bond. 

“Cute. Get ready,” Bhandari texted Dunn and Klimczak the next morning after he learned who was behind the charge. “You have no idea who you are dealing with.”

That may have been true at the start of the relationship, but Dunn and Klimczak say that they now have a clearer picture of the entrepreneur. One night after the summit, for example, the couple’s nanny, outraged on behalf of her employers, sat down with an Excel spreadsheet and a bottle of wine and began Googling Bhandari’s various enterprises.

Search results pulled up civil lawsuits against UGS in New York—a photographer alleging copyright infringement, another pending case against UGS from a capital fund—as well as a lawsuit against Uphoric, a streaming service (described by Bhandari in a press release as “ESPN for festivals”) that Bhandari had co-founded. 

Reflecting on their experiences, across hours of interviews, sources expressed conflict about how to quantify their experiences with UG Strategies and Bull City Summit. Many say that they believe that Bhandari was committed to executing his vision for a creative festival experience in Durham. Maybe a bad experience was just the product of someone who wasn’t very good at writing checks and signing contracts; a dreamer who’d bitten off more than they could chew. 

Reilly Dunn, though, believes the situation is more straightforward. 

“I do think he’s specifically preyed on us,” Dunn says. “I think he chooses artists and people who he knows won’t fight back or people who he thinks that he can bully into not talking to other people.”

Dunn and Klimczak say they have fallen behind on mortgage payments as they try to recover lost costs and continue to run their business. They’re also gearing up for a district court hearing on February 28. 

“At the end of the day,” Bhandari wrote in an email to the INDY, “I’m proud of the work that I do, and the money that I spend in this town and the relationships that I am building, for this town, which is my home.

The third annual Bull City Summit is planned for November 12 to 17, and the Durham Cultural Advisory Board has recommended that the city allocate another $13,000 to support it. Early-bird badges, according to the website, include “exclusive discounts on concert pre-sales, VIP ticket upgrades, exclusive BCS artist experiences, and more.” Tickets start at $99.

Disclosure: Both Groovewagon and Bull City Summit have been INDY advertising partners.

Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Twitter or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected]. 

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