Laravel 5.1 on Digital Ocean returns 404

I cloned a working repo (with composer install, npm install and bower install) to a new digitalocean droplet on a LEMP stack. I am pointing to the /public folder and getting a 404 error. I get this in the nginx error log: [crit] 19382#0: *2 stat() "/var/www/team-adc.com/html/public/index.php" failed (13: Permission denied), client: 209.2.21.34, server: team-adc.com, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "www.team-adc.com".

I have been trying to deploy these three sites to Digital Ocean for the last 2 days and I am very frustrated. I have created and blown away the droplet at least 20 times and run the LAMP tutorial at least 12 times and now the LEMP tutorial for the 10th time.