Gilded Lily (33 page)

But in the end, few questions troubled Lily or the Monegasque authorities. On the day of the funeral Daniel Serdet, Monaco's public prosecutor, announced that Ted had been charged with arson leading to the death of two people. “He [Ted] didn't intend to kill anyone; he wanted to settle an account with the head of the medical team,” was how the prosecutor explained it all away. Ted was sent to jail in Monaco to await his trial.

But the official version of events left many unanswered questions. Edmond's faithful aides and his family in São Paulo would wonder for years about the bizarre circumstances surrounding Edmond's death. Why were the guards absent? Why were Edmond's most trusted aides away from Monaco at the time of his death? Why was Ted Maher hired against their wishes? Why did Maher fabricate a story about hooded intruders and start a fire, risking his own life in the process? Why had the Monaco police and firefighters taken so long to deal with the emergency? Why was Edmond so afraid to leave the bathroom?

Edmond's family in New York and São Paulo went as far as to hire their own investigators. But their efforts were met with frustration. Monaco authorities, worried about drawing even more attention to the international scandal that was bringing unwanted media attention to their privileged principality, would quickly decide to close ranks on
l'affaire
Safra.

The questions lingered, but the big news on December 6, 1999, was not the burial of the legendary banker or the bizarre circumstances of his death. It was the completion of the sale of Republic to HSBC as the Federal Reserve cleared the deal—the final regulatory hurdle to the multibillion-dollar purchase. After the burial of her fourth husband in Geneva, Lily emerged as one of the wealthiest widows in the world.

J
AY SALPETER IS
a no-nonsense, tough-talking former New York City homicide detective who took early retirement from the force and launched a career as a private detective in 1990. In twenty years on the force, he specialized in investigations into the mob, narcotics, homicide, and white-collar criminals. As a private investigator, he earned a reputation for finding new evidence in old homicide cases. Nobody could hide from Salpeter, not even the elusive billionaire widow Lily Safra. In April 2001, when attorneys for Heidi Maher needed to find and serve Lily with legal papers but had no idea how to find her, they turned to Salpeter.

It is no easy task finding Lily, who jets frequently between her homes in Paris, the Riviera, London, and New York, and retains several public relations experts and lawyers to protect her privacy. In the 1970s, she confounded process servers in London who tried for months to find her at her Hyde Park Gardens flat in order to serve her with the notice that she was being sued, along with Edmond's Trade Development Bank, by her former in-laws.

Several years after his brief brush with Lily on an Upper East Side street corner in the early spring of 2001, Salpeter was hard-pressed to recall how he found out that Lily would be dining at Swifty's or that she would even be in New York at all. Salpeter made a reservation for himself and a colleague at the posh Upper East Side restaurant after he learned that Lily would be honored at an intimate dinner party hosted by Robert Higdon, the representative of Prince Charles's charities in Washington. It was an informal welcome back to New York featuring her new best friends Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister of Canada, his wife Mila, and entertainer Joan Rivers. Old friends—“some of my closest and dearest friends,” gushed Lily—Marcela Pérez de Cuéllar (whose husband had been appointed president of the council of ministers of his native Peru), Blaine and Robert Trump, and Evelyn and Leonard Lauder would also be on hand to toast “the lovely Lily Safra, the charmer who also happens to be one of the richest women in the world…”

Salpeter didn't care about rich or charming, and he surely wasn't in the habit of reading the society columns in
Women's Wear Daily
. He wasn't intimidated by the rarefied atmosphere of Swifty's or the condescending tones of the wait staff, who seemed eager to rush him out of the restaurant in order to prepare for the private party. Salpeter had a single goal, and he had committed Lily's face to memory.

“You have to imagine the scene here,” said a lawyer familiar with the stakeout at Swifty's. “You have Salpeter and his associate, this big black former cop, dining at this bastion of Upper East Side snobbery. Nobody knew what they were doing there, and the wait staff was totally shocked.”

On that chilly April evening, Salpeter, a heavyset brick of a man, his brown hair speckled with gray, paid the bill and went to stand outside the restaurant, clutching Heidi Maher's legal papers. He was soon joined by a photographer from the
New York Post
, who had been tipped off, probably by Salpeter himself. The first guest to arrive was
Mrs. William McCormick Blair of Washington, D.C. (known to her socialite friends as Deeda).

“Are you Lily?” asked the former cop. The impeccably dressed, reed-thin, aging socialite with a shoulder-length graying bob could, from a distance, be mistaken for her friend Lily Safra. Deeda managed to ignore Salpeter completely and quickly made her way into the restaurant.

Lily, also impeccably dressed and reed-thin, was the second to arrive, stepping out of a black limousine, accompanied by a security guard.

“Are you Lily?”

It was the unspoken acknowledgment, the fleeting yet at the same time careful look she gave him that told the former cop that he had found his target. He thrust the legal documents into her hand, just as the
Post
photographer snapped multiple frames. Lily touched them, but then decided she would allow them to drop to the ground in front of the restaurant. The papers were retrieved by her security guard. Salpeter had successfully served the richest widow in the world. His job was finished. “It was like taking candy from a baby,” he would recall years later. The following day's headline in the
Post
read “Summons Served Between Courses” and featured a photo of an elegant Lily entering the restaurant.

The ambushes by court bailiffs and process servers would prove semiregular events in Lily's life in the months and years after Edmond's death. The lawsuits started shortly after Edmond's funeral in Geneva and a later memorial service in New York. The first came from stunned Safra family members. Still reeling in disbelief from Edmond's mysterious death, they quickly realized that many had their inheritance reduced. In São Paulo, the Safra sisters filed suit against Lily on behalf of themselves and Edmond's nieces and nephews. Lily, her daughter, and lawyer Marc Bonnant were also sued by Ninaca S.A., a Panamanian corporation established as an art trust by
Edmond and his brothers in 1995. In February 1999 Edmond had designated Lily's friend Anita Smaga, her daughter Adriana, and Bonnant as additional trustees, which tipped the board in Lily's favor. The suit demanded $17 million in damages.

Heidi Maher's legal action came next. Seventeen months after her ill-fated trip to Monaco in 1999, Heidi filed a motion against Lily and various Safra employees in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in Dutchess County. The motion was for a pretrial discovery so that her attorneys could establish the facts of just what had happened to her during her ordeal in Monaco in December 1999.

“I suffered shocking and humiliating treatment during the trip which was avoidable and due entirely to the fault of others,” said Heidi in her affidavit. “I entrusted my safety and the entire itinerary to the Safra organization. Instead…I was diverted without my consent by Safra-related staff to the Monaco police station where I was interrogated for three dreadful days in connection with what I later learned was a criminal investigation of my husband. I was never allowed the promised visit with Ted.”

In a letter to the American consul general in Marseilles, one of the members of Ted's defense team protested the treatment of Heidi and her brother by Monaco authorities: “The rights of these American citizens were violated under United States law, International law, and no doubt Monaco law,” wrote Michael Griffith, one of Ted's attorneys, in March 2001. “Behavior of this type cannot be tolerated in a civilized world, particularly when United States Government property [passports] were stolen and taken for the purpose of securing an illegal confession under the most despicable circumstances.”

In court filings, Heidi demanded to examine and depose everyone from Lily Safra to all of the directors of Spotless & Brite, Inc., the Delaware corporation run out of the Republic Bank on Fifth Avenue that had employed her husband and arranged for her travel to Monaco. According to Heidi's court filings, “We still do not know who orchestrated these events and why. For example, who actually
paid for and later canceled the Delta return flight tickets; who is responsible for the sudden change in our limousine's itinerary; who arranged to deceive me into the coercive police interrogation room; and who converted my trip into a Monaco police investigation without my prior informed consent or knowledge. The requested depositions and documents will lead us to the truth and to those truly responsible.”

But if she felt she was going to get at the truth with the mighty Safra organization and put Lily Safra on a witness stand in Dutchess County, Heidi was clearly naive.

Stanley Arkin, the very able Manhattan lawyer who had helped Edmond take on American Express, easily disputed Heidi's claims and accused her of wasting the court's time. “Mrs. Maher brought this motion, instead of a lawsuit, because she cannot state an actionable claim against any of the Respondents,” said Arkin in his court filings. “Mrs. Maher asks this court to permit her to engage in a far-reaching fishing expedition in the vain hope that she may find a claim for which she can be compensated.”

Arkin did a good job of dismissing Heidi's claims, adding that “Mrs. Maher's application is replete with irresponsible unsubstantiated accusations and innuendo.”

Later, the parties agreed to an undisclosed out-of-court settlement. Heidi, who had tirelessly campaigned to raise awareness of Ted's plight by writing elected officials, starting a Web site, and denouncing the Safra family to anyone who would listen, seems to have had a sudden and complete about-face. In the months after Edmond's death, when Ted's pay stopped being wired to her, Heidi lost the family home because she could no longer afford the mortgage payments. She and her children were forced to move into her mother's house in Stormville. With her settlement from the lawsuit, she quietly purchased a new house in Stormville and determined that she and her children would have nothing more to do with Ted, whose actions had had such devastating consequences for all their lives. The coup de grâce for Ted came nearly three years later, on the last day of his trial
in Monaco. Shortly after the guilty verdict, Heidi decided to end their marriage.

“When [in] Ted's final speech he apologized for what he did to the Safra and the Torrente families I felt like standing up and saying what about me and our children?” said Heidi in an e-mail to writer Dominick Dunne shortly after the end of Ted's trial.

Ted's trial ended almost three years to the day after Edmond's death. While many journalists referred to it as the principality's “trial of the century,” Sandrine Setton, one of Ted's four defense lawyers, renamed it the “trial of the imbecility of the century” in her closing arguments. Setton was referring to both Ted's ridiculous plot to make himself the great hero by starting the fire, and the incompetence of the Monaco authorities in their efforts to save Edmond. Georges Blot, another Maher lawyer, even quoted Shakespeare, characterizing Ted as being “full of sound and fury.”

As with Edmond's funeral, Ted's trial drew members of the Safra clan from around the world. If Lily had hoped that the family would present a unified front for the world's television cameras and sit together in the courtroom, she was clearly disappointed. As the proceedings began in late November 2002, Lily, through her attorneys, invited Joseph and Moise Safra to sit in her row. They declined.

“One day Joseph Safra went as far as to sit in a row in front of the defense lawyers,” noted Dominick Dunne, who covered the trial for
Vanity Fair
. “His beautiful wife Vicki always sat at the back of the courtroom, wonderfully dressed and greatly admired. She and Lily never once looked at each other.” Another day, Joseph sat one row behind Lily, but he never acknowledged her.

On the fifth day of the trial, the proceedings turned into an impromptu memorial for Edmond when Joseph Sitruk, the elderly, white-bearded chief rabbi of France, took the stand as a witness for the prosecution. Lily's staff had chartered a private plane to fly the rabbi from Paris to Nice, where one of her drivers met him at the airport for the twenty-minute drive to Monte Carlo.

Following the rabbi's testimony regarding Edmond's charitable work for the Jewish community, the judge asked Ted if he had any questions for the rabbi. Ted asked him “to say a prayer in Jewish for Edmond Safra.” The odd request was duly translated into French, and the rabbi was quick to oblige. The elderly rabbi handed his wide-brimmed black hat to an attendant, who placed a black yarmulke on his head. He prayed in Hebrew on the witness stand in front of a six-foot crucifix, which was affixed to the wall, as the Jewish men in the courtroom scrambled to cover their heads with their hands as substitutes for yarmulkes.

It was the first time that Lily lost her composure in public. She wept openly during the prayer, and then followed Sitruk out of the courtroom to thank him for his appearance. Downstairs in the courthouse lobby, Joseph and Moise waited to greet the rabbi, and Joseph offered his private plane for the return trip to Paris.

Although the conclusion of Ted's trial surely afforded Lily some relief, it must have been short-lived. Not long after the trial ended, bailiffs acting for the Manhattan lawyer Pompeyo Roa Realuyo, who was representing Vivian Torrente's adult children, served papers on Lily as she prepared to leave the five-star Hotel de Paris in Monaco to board her private jet in Nice. Lily and her entourage of lawyers, secretaries, and security guards had occupied much of the fourth floor of the hotel. Although she had so easily dispensed with security for her husband in December 1999, she made a point of employing several guards to patrol the fourth-floor hallways of the hotel while she was there. For this reason, serving her with legal papers would be nearly impossible. Which is why the process server decided to call Lily from a house phone in the lobby.

Lily's lawyer Marc Bonnant, who has long, slicked-back silver hair and smokes cigarettes in a long holder, arrived in the lobby to accept service on Lily's behalf.

But Bonnant did not take it quietly. Fresh from his brilliant closing arguments in the courtroom—“a court performance worthy of
Laurence Olivier”—Bonnant started screaming and yelling at the process server. The suit, which sought $100 million in damages, was filed against Lily, the Safra estate, and various insurance companies connected to the Safras.

The Torrente children—Genevieve, twenty-three, and Jason, thirty—said they were “victims of a civil conspiracy and fraud perpetrated by the defendants designed to withhold from them critical information relating to the circumstances of their mother's death.” Their most important claim was that the autopsy seemed to show that a struggle ensued between Edmond and Vivian in the locked bathroom. The Torrente children argued that Edmond “imprisoned” Vivian in the bathroom, and that “the combat-like” mark found on Vivian's neck, the bruises on her knees, and Edmond's DNA, which was found under her fingernails, were confirmation “that Mr. Safra's efforts to restrain her were the direct and proximate cause of death.”