On a fall afternoon in 2015, Petra Bartosiewicz was walking her daughter to the pool when her nose caught an unmistakable scent of smoke-and-spice. “I could smell the barbecue from two blocks away,” she recalls.

It led her to Argus Farm Stop, where Matteo Melosi was selling his home-smoked meats in the parking lot.

“I was, like, ‘Wow, this is amazing! What are you doing here?’” Bartosiewicz recalls.

She’d always loved food, and “had this dream that I’d run a restaurant someday,” she says. The following summer she realized that dream when Melosi asked her to join him in opening Westside BBQ on E. Madison.

Customers loved the bright-red barbecue stand. But soon, Bartosiewicz says, she realized that Melosi was taking money from the business and gambling in Detroit casinos. Then he got an inheritance and used it to take a trip around the world—while she worked eighty-hour weeks to keep the business going.

When Melosi returned, she says, conflicts over money resumed. That set off dueling lawsuits—and at first, Melosi was victorious. In October 2017, backed by a court order and county sheriff’s deputies, he fired the staff Bartosiewicz had hired as she watched helplessly on the building’s security cameras. Her dream had vanished in a cloud of smoke.

Westside BBQ closed in 2019 after the U-M bought its building. But Melosi kept the custom, wood-fired smokers that Bartosiewicz had paid for. Since last year, their enticing odors have been wafting from the parking lot of an Ypsilanti Township bar.

Matteo Melosi isn’t tending them, though. Though Bartosiewicz’s civil lawsuit is still unresolved, their ownership conflict led to his indictment on federal wire-fraud charges.

Melosi pled guilty and is serving an eight-month sentence in the federal correctional institute in Milan. He did not respond to a letter requesting comment.

Bartosiewicz is a veteran, New York–based freelance journalist whose articles on the war on terror and its victims have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Guardian, among other publications. She moved to Ann Arbor in 2013 as a Knight-Wallace fellow at the U-M.

Early on, Bartosiewicz and her daughter appeared on Instagram with cheeful AAPD officers. Later, when Melosi cut her out of the business she’d financed, she called in the FBI.

The yearlong fellowship let her continue her work on terrorism, and after it ended, she decided to stay in the area and raise her young daughter. That’s when she met Melosi. “He looked like he was having a lot of fun,” she recalls.

According to a 2016 article in Current magazine, Melosi was born in Italy and grew up in Kalamazoo. He cooked at the Ann Arbor Country Club and Wolverine State Brewing Co. before launching his pop-up at Argus.

Bartosiewicz and Melosi struck up a friendship, bonding over their love of good food. Six months later, when he came to her with an idea for a restaurant and a story about how an investor had backed out, Bartosiewicz agreed to help.

“He was a great salesman, very charismatic, funny, and smart,” she says. And after more than fifteen years of war reporting, she was ready for a change. In the spring of 2016, she gave Melosi $20,000 in exchange for a 20 percent ownership stake in the business.

“I’m going to run the business side, and you’re going to be the chef,” she recalls telling him. “I didn’t just want to give him money. It was an exciting thing to be a part of.”

They worked together to get the newborn business off the ground. “It was really great in the beginning,” she says. “We had a compatible style of what the restaurant should be.”

Westside BBQ opened in July 2016 under the ownership of a company Melosi had started prior to her involvement, called A2Q. Though they’d signed a contract confirming her ownership, Bartosiewicz hadn’t insisted on having her name in the business records.

“I think this was a real mistake on my part,” she says. “I should have opened a new [company] with him. But I thought he was the sole owner.”

Apparently, he wasn’t. An accountant Bartosiewicz hired discovered a 2015 federal tax return that listed another owner of A2Q, Sanjit Jayakar.

When she confronted Melosi, she says, he shrugged it off as a mistake. He told her that Jayakar was a friend who had given him money to help start the business but wasn’t an owner.

“I didn’t immediately think ‘I’m getting scammed,’” she recalls. “I just thought he did something sloppy that had to be corrected, and that’s how the accountant saw it too.”

In fact, Jayakar was the investor Melosi said had “backed out.” According to Melosi’s federal indictment, Jayakar made an initial investment of $6,000 in October 2015 and was signing checks to A2Q until June 2016 for varying amounts, including one for $25,000.

Bartosiewicz contacted Jayakar. She says he told her that the money was a loan, not a gift. While he wanted to be paid back, he had no interest in being part of the restaurant.

Meanwhile, Bartosiewicz kept pumping money into the business. The fledgling eatery was still making a name for itself, and, more money was going out than coming in.

“Every time I gave money, we memorialized it in a new, updated contract which stated my percentage ownership,” Bartosiewicz says.

In December 2016 Bartosiewicz and her attorney sat down with Melosi and Jayakar to straighten out the mess. As summarized in a state appellate court opinion, Jayakar acknowledged that Melosi and Bartosiewicz were working together and that he had no intention of interfering with their business relationship. However, he considered himself a 50 percent owner in A2Q and intended to keep that interest in order to secure the money he loaned Melosi, which Melosi said he could pay back after receiving a family inheritance.

Bartosiewicz says that it was also around this time that she discovered Melosi was withdrawing large sums of business funds and spending the money at casinos and on other personal expenditures. All parties agreed, she says, that Melosi should step away from Westside BBQ.

“We weren’t trying to get Matteo out of the restaurant,” Bartosiewicz recalls. “He was the chef. I wanted us to succeed, that’s all I cared about; I wanted him to pay Jayakar back and take his leave of absence.

“His mom was pretty sick at the time. I thought, ‘He’ll go, he’ll get his inheritance, pay that guy back, and when he’s ready he’ll come back to the restaurant.’” 

In the original plan Bartosiewicz would only handle Westside’s finances—Melosi and manager Adam Bota would run things day to day. But with Melosi gone, she worked double time to keep things going. Her daughter worked the counter, and they sold pies baked by a local woman.

Bartosiewicz hired a small staff and the business began to grow. They started to do more catering, making more money each month until the place became profitable.

But when Melosi returned in the spring of 2016, Bartosiewicz says, he didn’t repay Jayakar’s money. She tried to organize a meeting with them, but they didn’t show. Melosi and Jayakar’s lawyers contacted her and told her they weren’t coming to the table.

At that point, she says, “I reluctantly filed a civil suit” asking the court for an injunction denying Melosi access to the business; a later amendment charged that he was dipping into company accounts for personal expenses.

Melosi and Jayakar countersued, contending that they were the only owners of A2Q and Westside BBQ. Though Bartosiewicz presented signed contracts, taped conversations, and text messages to document her ownership, they won an order allowing them to take over the restaurant.

Bartosiewicz was in New York when she got a call from Joe Schenke, a manager she hired to run Westside when she was away. He told her that Melosi and Jayakar had shown up with an entourage of cops and lawyers.

Connecting to the business’s security cameras with her iPhone, a pregnant Bartosiewicz watched as Melosi and Jayakar fired every employee, then rummaged through drawers and cupboards.

Once Melosi noticed the cameras, he shut them off. “The last image I have is Matteo going over to the tip jar and pulling the money out and shoving it into his pocket,” Bartosiewicz says. “I never touched that jar—it was just for my employees.”

“In life, the stars rarely align to start something like this,” Bartosiewicz says of her time in the barbecue business. “It has to be the right time with the right people, and for a moment it was the perfect alignment of all those things.

“I loved it, even the horrible parts of endless dishes and sweeping and mopping. Ann Arbor is a great place to do business, so when it all came crashing down, I was so disappointed.”

She appealed the court ruling that tossed her out of Westside, arguing that Melosi had breached their contract: “Either I was an owner, or I was defrauded; there’s no middle ground,” Bartosiewicz says. The state court unanimously allowed her lawsuit to continue.

“It was a quick reversal,”says her lawyer, Ellis Freatman.

The case is still pending. “We’re trying to see if we can get this resolved,” Freatman says. “The attorneys are trying to work toward a resolution, but if not, it’ll be tried.” (Melosi’s lawyer, Nik Lulgjuraj, did not respond to a request for comment.)

While appealing the civil case, Bartosiewicz sent a letter outlining what happened to the FBI’s Ann Arbor field office. They invited her in, she says, and she presented agent Bryan Taube and assistant U.S. attorney Mark Chasteen with thick binders overflowing with documentation. (Taube says he’s unable to comment on the case.)

“I spent a month pulling together a timeline that’s almost 10,000 words, and I annotated every single line so they could look day to day exactly what happened,” Bartosiewicz says: wire transfers from New York banks labeled “investment,” the corresponding thank-you texts from Melosi, taped conversations featuring Melosi saying “you are my partner” and stating her percentage ownership.

In 2021, a federal grand jury returned an indictment against Melosi for wire fraud. He pled guilty to one charge. In addition to his prison sentence, he agreed to repay the money and time Bartosiewicz had invested: $118,000 at $400 per month.

Jayakar was not included in the federal case but later found himself in hot water over a medical clinic he ran with his father. Both men were indicted for billing Medicare for unnecessary procedures, including some that were performed by Jayakar himself—illegally, because he is not a medical professional. Jayakar eventually pleaded guilty to health-care fraud conspiracy and was sentenced to ten to sixteen months in prison and ordered to pay $42,000 in restitution. He completed his sentence and is now on supervised release.

Before Melosi started his own sentence, he worked at the Regal Beagle, a bar on Michigan Ave. near Ecorse Rd. According to the online publication Concentrate, his title was bar manager—but he brought along the smokers Bartosiewicz had purchased for Westside. (Ian Greenlee, owner of the Regal Beagle, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Melosi—and the smokers Bartosiewicz paid for—resurfaced last year in Ypsi Township. He’s now serving time in Milan’s federal prison. | Photo: Doug Coombe

Bartosiewicz says that Westside did $700,000 in food sales the year she worked full-time. She continues to pursue a civil judgment in part because she believes its future earnings were worth far more than the federal restitution.

“I’ve had to be tough through all this,” she says. “I didn’t want to have to fight this hard to recover my money—I think most people would have abandoned it a long time ago.

“But if I walk away, it’ll be like letting him get away with it. I built and paid for this whole restaurant.”

Even if she wins a civil judgment, does she think she’ll be able to collect? “I hope so,” she says. “He is not without funds.” 

Bartosiewicz says she’s thought a lot about the warning signs she missed. “When you’re hopeful, when you’re emotionally invested, it can make you vulnerable to certain dangers,” she reflects. “I put everything into this, I put myself completely out there into making this thing, my dream; and overnight it was gone.”

Bartosiewicz moved back to New York after losing the business. She continues to freelance, writing about the legal system. She’s considering focusing her work on the civil court system.

“And when I get a chance,” she says, “I barbecue.”