Gilded Lily (29 page)

The court dismissed Edmond's petition to have the case thrown out, and the suit was eventually settled out of court in October 1996. But the fissures between the Safras and the Sephardic community had already begun. In many ways, they had always been just under the surface after Edmond married Lily. Not only did Edmond's siblings disapprove of Lily, but many in the Sephardic community who were close to Edmond had little tolerance for his ostentatious wife. For years, Edmond and his brothers supported Sephardic causes and synagogues all over the world. But after his marriage to Lily, she began to divert their giving to other charities. Perhaps Sephardic community leaders were aware of Lily's lack of interest in their causes and so treated her with frosty indifference. Or perhaps she simply was never accepted because she was of Ashkenazi origins.

“We were having dinner with Lily and Edmond at the Pierre ho
tel in New York when Lily asked me about the Jewish community,” recalled Albert Nasser. “She asked me why the Syrian Jews who live in Brooklyn hated her so much. I told her it was because every father in Brooklyn had hoped to marry his daughter to Edmond Safra, and she beat them all to it. Lily laughed hysterically.”

Whatever the reason for their dislike of her, Lily didn't pay too much attention, and almost as soon as she married Edmond she began, at first quietly, to redirect their charitable contributions to the arts and education. Gifts to the Sephardic community in Brooklyn just didn't create the high-level buzz that Lily loved. They didn't make the society pages of the
New York Times
Style section, and they had no place in
Women's Wear Daily
.

In September 1996, the Safras threw a magnificent party to honor a generous gift that Edmond and Lily had made to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Edmond donated a seventy-two-page manuscript written by Albert Einstein in 1912 in which the scientist laid out his theory of relativity for the first time. The manuscript had been purchased at a Sotheby's auction for an undisclosed price, although the presale estimate was $4 million.

“The…party was a celebration of a magnificent million dollar gift from the super rich and super generous international banker Edmond Safra of Albert Einstein's manuscript in which, for the first time, he outlines his theory of relativity and its famous E=MC
²
formula,” noted a columnist for
W
. “Edmond and his beautiful wife Lily flew in with a planeload of friends and
foie gras
and gave one of their opulent dinners in a flower-bedecked tent under the desert sky. Heaven.” It was the last time that the entire Safra clan, including brothers Joseph and Moise, would be together with Edmond.

Lily took a break from the couple's philanthropy in the fall of 1998 when she decided that she wanted to simplify her life and get rid of her controlling interest in Ponto Frio in Brazil. But just as she prepared to sell, tragedy struck. Her stepson, Carlos, suffered a horrific crash on the Imola racetrack in Italy. Carlos, a serious collector and racer of
antique sports cars, lost control of the vintage Ferrari he was driving on the same racetrack curve that had killed Formula One champion Ayrton Senna in 1994. For Lily, the accident was a blow. Following the accident, Lily, who had had little contact with Carlos after he married Isis in the late 1980s, now frantically called the family to make sure he was all right. Carlos spent several weeks in the hospital recovering from his injuries and thousands of dollars on plastic surgery to repair his mangled body. The accident left his face partly paralyzed, making it impossible for him to chew his food properly.

Lily was distraught after the accident, said one observer who was close to her at the time. She may have also been concerned about how the accident would affect the sale of the company, but clearly it was her stepson who took priority. In the end, it wasn't Carlos's accident that scuttled the deal. The sale did not go through because they simply could not obtain a good price for their shares.

When the Ponto Frio sale failed, Lily refocused her energies on taking the Safra philanthropy in a new direction. In 1999, the year he died, Edmond was honored for his contribution to the arts in the United States. Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., presented Edmond and Lily, among others, with the Medal for Distinguished Service. For this occasion, Edmond's banks had financed an exhibit of Italian baroque painter Annibale Carracci's drawings at the museum.

In addition to the arts, the direction of their giving now had a decidedly royal bent. Lily's critics say the new thrust in the couple's philanthropy—mostly charities run by the British royals—was simply an ill-disguised effort to promote her own social advancement. Others simply praised her generosity. Clearly, Lily loved the attention and the opportunity to gain access to Britain's royals.

The royal giving had begun sporadically at first. In May 1985, the couple threw a fund-raising party at their home in Geneva for the World Wildlife Fund, with Prince Philip, a royal patron of the charity, as their guest of honor. But in 1999, Lily attended a flurry of royal
events in New York and London. In a burgundy velvet jacket and silk skirt by Yves Saint Laurent, she attended a benefit concert by Zubin Mehta at Buckingham Palace in March along with a reception for the Prince's Trust. In April, she was among a select group that included billionaire Michael Bloomberg and cosmetics executive and philanthropist Evelyn Lauder at a luncheon at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan for the Foundation Claude Monet Giverny. Princess Michael of Kent was the keynote speaker.

Lily and Edmond were also considered near and dear friends of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. They were among a select group of guests at Buckingham Palace in June 1999—the first time that the royal couple hosted a joint event at the official residence of Elizabeth II. The occasion was a reception for the American members of the Prince's Foundation. The next day, the select group was invited to lunch at the Prince of Wales' official residence at Highgrove, and then back to London for a drinks party chez Viscount Linley, the Queen's furniture-designer nephew. Later, they gathered for Pimms at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill.

The royal weekend in the summer of 1999 marked the last time that Edmond would appear at a high-society function.

In the months before he died, Edmond was preparing to make a different kind of news. Once again, he was rocking the world's financial markets with the sale of one of his beloved “children.”

 

IN THE WEEKS
before Edmond sold his Republic holdings to HSBC in what would be the biggest business deal of his career, the photographs started to disappear. They were the intimate family snapshots—happier moments of the Safra clan at a bar mitzvah or wedding of a favorite nephew in São Paulo. The images of the Safra sisters on the beach in Punta del Este also disappeared, as did the pictures of
Moise and Joseph and the faded black-and-white photos of the family patriarch, Jacob.

It's not clear that Edmond, in his heavily medicated state, noticed that the pictures were gone from the Monaco apartment or La Leopolda, the villa that he no longer had the will or the energy to enjoy. In the months since he had appeared in Washington to receive his award from the National Gallery of Art and had attended the royal parties in London, Edmond had retreated to the beaux-arts apartment in Monaco attended by his small team of nurses, who administered his medications and helped him to eat his food and go to the bathroom.

By most accounts, his health continued to deteriorate and he became increasingly isolated from his family in Brazil. In better days, Edmond used to speak to Joseph or Moise or both on a daily basis. But in the spring of 1999, the intercontinental telephone calls ceased. Sem Almaleh, a bank manager who worked with Edmond for four decades, said that Edmond “called his brothers several times a day, but there was a problem and they had had a rift” just before Edmond died. During the last months of his life in Monaco, Edmond spoke only to a few trusted employees, his nurses, and, of course, Lily, who now wielded tremendous control over every aspect of his life.

Family friend Albert Nasser attributes Edmond's split with his brothers to a family spat over undisclosed financial matters. Perhaps the Safra brothers could not understand why Edmond had decided to sell his Republic holdings to HSBC, especially after the press announcement of the previous year which clearly stated that Edmond, despite his illness, would be working closely with his younger brothers to oversee his banks.

“It was my understanding that Edmond wouldn't speak to his brothers for a year before he died,” recalled Nasser.

Joseph seemed to confirm this years later when he told a Monaco court that he had not seen Edmond for a year before his death, and that indeed there had been “a few problems,” although he was confi
dent that they would see each other again. A month before Edmond died, he had even spoken to him on the phone, recalled Joseph.

“He was a brother—a real brother—and also a father,” said Joseph. “He was the head of the family. I adored him, and I still adore him.”

Still, it seemed strange to Nasser and other friends that such a deep split had occurred between Edmond and his brothers. He also couldn't understand why Lily abruptly changed Edmond's most trusted physician. Edmund H. Sonnenblick, a pioneering New York cardiologist, had been one of Edmond's physicians for thirty years, said Nasser, who was also a patient of Sonnenblick until the cardiologist's death in 2007. The Sonnenblicks were so close to the Safra clan that Annie Sonnenblick, the cardiologist's daughter, had worked as an assistant treasurer at Republic National Bank in New York before her death from septicemia in 1984.

“Lily cut him off after thirty years and started parachuting other doctors into Monte Carlo to take care of Edmond,” said Nasser. “The doctor [Sonnenblick] was the same person who took care of the Safra brothers in São Paulo. Joseph had him flown to São Paulo when he was not well.”

According to those closest to Edmond at the time, Lily was so concerned about Edmond that she kept consulting new doctors. In the spring of 1999 he was so overmedicated with the drugs that each new physician recommended to control his Parkinson's that he started to be seized by violent hallucinations. Edmond was hospitalized in New York for the condition, but when his team of lawyers and accountants informed him that the hospitalization was going to cause tax problems because he would be overstaying his six-month residency limit in the United States, Lily made the decision to go across the border to Canada for medical treatment. The Safras moved with their entourage of aides into Toronto's Four Seasons hotel for a few weeks while Edmond recuperated from the violent seizures and his deep depression.

Whether his depression was brought on by the medications he was
taking—a daily drug chart shows he took drugs to control his cholesterol and Parkinson's—or the estrangement from his brothers and the imminent sale of his bank, or all of these, is difficult to say. But by the time he returned to his apartment in Monaco in the fall, Edmond was taking a potent cocktail of antidepressants that included daily dosages of Xanax, Samyr, Clozaril, and Depakote. While most of these drugs are administered to Parkinson's patients to keep the anxiety associated with the disease at bay, physicians who regularly treat Parkinson's disease were puzzled as to why Edmond was taking Depakote. The drug, which is used to treat bipolar disorder, has been known to cause tremors, and could have canceled out the effects of the other drugs that Edmond was taking. It could have also led to severe depression.

Similarly, before he died in 1969, Alfredo Monteverde was also taking a potent mix of antipsychotic medications that included lithium carbonate, which was used to treat schizophrenia, and Tryptizol and Nardil, both powerful antidepressants that interfered with his cognitive function.

It was during their time in Toronto that the Safras met Bruce Sutton, a local psychiatrist who helped Edmond through his crisis. Sutton would become such an important figure in the Safra universe that Lily would fly him and his family for a vacation at La Leopolda, where he helped Edmond deal with his depression.

The Brazilian branch of the Safra family has provided few details about the rift since Edmond's death. It is also unclear if Edmond ordered the removal of the family photographs from his home, or if they were removed without his knowledge. Did he make the conscious decision to stop speaking to his brothers, or was that decision simply made for him when they called and were told he was indisposed? Was his judgment so clouded by the medications he was taking that he had become paranoid about his family in São Paulo? What was their real intention in helping him to oversee his banks? Were they being honest with him? Perhaps these were now questions that were going
through Edmond's own mind. Yet it's hard to believe that the Safra brothers had anything but Edmond's best interests at heart. This was their beloved elder brother who had been instrumental in building the Safra banking empire on three continents. Their relationship had always been one of complete trust.

Whatever the reason for the family split, it became irreversible when Edmond, frail and in ill health, began to negotiate the biggest deal of his financial career—to sell Republic New York Corporation to HSBC, a venture valued at over $10.3 billion when it was first announced in May 1999.

“The acquisitions we have announced today will bring together two complementary private banking franchises,” said Sir John Bond, HSBC chairman. “At the stroke of a pen, it doubles the size of our consumer-banking operations in the United States, and it doubles the size of our private-banking business around the world.”

But while the sale would prove a huge boon to HSBC, it effectively ended Edmond's banking career. As the
New York Times
noted in a front page article, the deal would “mark the end of independence for a banking business founded more than three decades ago by Edmond Safra, a Lebanese-born Jewish businessman who is regarded as an enduring figure in the banking world.”