“They’re back on the boat,” joked Prince Rupert. “In the Dufy suite.”
“No, I’m not staying on the boat,” she said. “I’m at the Cotton House.”
At the far end of Lord Glenconner’s enormous swimming pool stands a maharajah’s pleasure palace, discovered in India, purchased in India, and then brought to Mustique, along with two Indian stonemasons to put it together again. Constructed entirely of white marble, it has lattice marble screens on all four sides, which gives the interior constant dappled light by day. By night, for the ball, its interior was illuminated by gold fluorescent light, and smoke from smoke pots drifted through the lattice screens. A plan to have Raquel Welch emerge from the pleasure palace as part of the entertainment portion of the evening had been scratched, and an alternative plan had been substituted: another princess.
Princess was not the only princess at Lord Glenconner’s ball. Princess Josephine Lowenstein was there, as well as her daughter, Princess Dora Lowensteih. And then there was Princess Tina—just Tina, no last name. Princess Tina provided the cabaret entertainment, appearing late in the evening in front of the pleasure palace, doing gymnastic gyrations while she balanced full glasses of something on her head and pelvic area. The crowd surged out to watch her—blacks and swells vying for the good positions from which to view the tantalizing spectacle. One heavily wined English lady sat in the reflecting pool in front of the pleasure palace and pulled up her skirts to the refreshing waters. “My God, look at her—she’s showing her bush!” another lady cried out.
Thrice Miss Welch upstaged Princess Margaret. She didn’t show up at her own party on the Maxim’s des Mers, at which Princess Margaret was a guest. She arrived later than Princess Margaret at the Peacock Ball. And on the day following the ball, at Princess Margaret’s party, a picnic luncheon on Macaroni Beach, under the same pink marquee from the ball of the night before, transported after dawn from the Great House, Miss Welch, accompanied by Mr. Weinfeld, made another late entrance, as the princess and her guests were finishing dessert. Miss Welch was all smiles as she greeted her hostess. Princess inhaled deeply on her cigarette through a long holder protruding from the corner of her mouth, exhaled, pointedly looked at her watch, wordlessly established the time, and then returned the greeting with a stiff smile. One-upmanship was back in the royal corner.
That night, Lord Glenconner’s party drew to a close with a farewell dinner aboard the Wind Star. New friends were exchanging addresses. Bags were being packed. Princess arrived on board and was seated at the right of Lord Glenconner. People said over and over again that they would never forget the week-long celebration. John Wells, who writes the “Dear Bill” column in Private Eye, rose and in mock-Shakespearean rhetoric recited a long poem to our host which ended with these lines addressed to Princess Margaret:
Your Royal Highness, may I crave
Leave not only to ask God to Save
The Queen, your Sister, but to bless
The Author of our Happiness—
This Prospero, Magician King
Who makes Enchanted Islands sing;
King Colin, at whose mildest Bate
King Kong himself might emigrate!
So charge your Glasses, Friends, to honour
Our reckless Host, dear Lord Glenconner.
Amid cheers and tears, Lord Glenconner rose. Dressed all in black, his energies spent now, his production over, he thanked the people who had helped him in his yearlong preparations: Lyton Lamontagne, Nicholas Courtney, and others. He thanked his son Charlie “for getting a little better,” he thanked his son Henry and Henry’s friend Kelvin for working out the treasure hunt on the island of Bequia. He thanked his daughter-in-law Tessa for her constant assistance. He did not thank Lady Anne, who seemed not to notice not being thanked. “You all say you’ll never forget,” he said wistfully. “But you do, you know. You do forget. I can’t even remember own wedding day.”
March 1987
GRANDIOSITY
The Fall of Roberto Polo
In retrospect it’s always easy to say, “Oh, yes, I knew, I always knew,” about this one or that one, when this one or that one comes to a bad end or winds up in disgrace. Any number of people who knew Roberto Polo have told me that when they first heard that disaster was about to befall him, they said to the person who informed them, “I’m not surprised, are you?” and the informant invariably replied that he or she was not surprised either.
Polo, a thirty-seven-year-old Guban-born American citizen with residences in Paris, New York, Monte Carlo, and Santo Domingo, is currently in prison in Italy, where he was arrested in June. He is wanted for questioning in Switzerland, France, and the United States concerning the alleged misappropriation of $110 million of his investors’ money. At the time of his arrest, he had been a fugitive from the law for five weeks, and had been rumored either to have sought and bought refuge in Latin America or to have been murdered by the very people he was said to have swindled, on the theory that, if caught, he might reveal their identities.
“Roberto had so many personas it was hard to know which was the real person,” one of his former employees said to me in describing him. A middle-class Cuban with dreams of glory, Polo appeared to be many things to many people, from family man to philanderer, from elegant boulevardier to preposterous phony, from fantasizer to fuckup of the American Dream. A man with the capacity to endear himself to many with his likability and charm and to enrage others with his grandiosity and pomposity, he provided uniformity of opinion among those who knew him in one thing only: He had exquisite taste.
I first met Roberto and his extremely attractive wife, Rosa, a Dominican by birth, the daughter of a diplomat and the cousin of a former president of that country, in 1984, at a small dinner for eight or ten people in New York, at the home of John Loring, senior vice president of Tiffany & Co. They were the youngest couple in the group, known to all the guests but me.
It was not until we sat down to dinner that I noticed the extraordinary ring Rosa Polo was wearing, a diamond so huge it would have been impossible not to comment on it. As one who has held up the hands and stared at the ice-skating-rink-size diamonds of Elizabeth Taylor, Candy Spelling, and Imelda Marcos, I realized that the young woman across from me was wearing one bigger and perhaps better than all of them. I asked her about it, and before she could reply Roberto called down from his end of the table and gave me the whole history of the jewel. It was the Ashoka diamond, a 41.37-carat D-flawless stone named after Ashoka Maurya, the third-century B.C. Buddhist warrior-emperor. Polo had bought it for his wife from the Mexican movie star Maria Felix.
Clearly the Polos were a young couple of consequence, but it was hard to get a line on them. Rosa was quiet, almost shy, a Latin wife who lived in the shadow of her husband, and Roberto sent out mixed signals. He was said to be a financial wizard, and he had his own company called PAMG, for Private Asset Management Group. He handled the monetary affairs of a select group of very rich foreign investors with assets in the United States.
He reclined in languid positions that first evening, and his talk was decidedly nonfinancial, about jewelry and fashion and Jacob Freres, Ltd., an antiques shop that had recently opened on Madison Avenue at Seventy-eighth Street, which was run by Rosa’s brother, Federico Suro. They sold ormolu-encrusted furniture fit for palaces, and massive porcelain urns, all at prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Roberto was obviously a genuine aesthete, mad about beautiful things, and his interest in fashion, which would become obsessive in the years ahead, was already evident. As a graduate student at Columbia in the early seventies, he had worked at Rizzoli, the art bookstore, and had come up with the idea of doing a show called “Fashion As Fantasy,” with fashion designers showing clothes as art objects.
They were a couple in a hurry, or rather Roberto was in a hurry, and Rosa was swept along in his vortex. He had reportedly created his wife, turning her from a sweet Latin girl into a sleek and glamorous international figure. He picke
d out her clothes, told her what jewels to wear, chose their dinner guests, did the seating, and ordered the flowers and menu. He went to the collections in Paris with her, and in one season spent half a million dollars on clothes for her. He had a passion for jewelry and a knowledge of gemology. His role model, according to the interior designer and socialite Suzie Frankfurt, was Cosimo de’ Medici.
“I didn’t want it said I was just a rich boy,” he said in an early interview, before his woes, as if he were the heir to a great fortune instead of an alleged usurper of other people’s money. Like a Cuban Gatsby, an outsider with his nose pressed to the window, Roberto Polo wanted it all and he wanted it quick, and he saw, in the money-mad New York of the eighties, the way to achieve his ambitions.
July 1988. The picture was improbable. A young blond girl of extraordinary loveliness, wearing a light summer dress, was leaning against the pay-telephone booth in the courtyard of the prison in Lucca, an Italian walled town between Pisa and Florence. She was reading an English novel and occasionally taking sips of Pelligrino water from a green bottle. On the roof above her, a guard with a submachine gun paced back and forth on a catwalk in the scorching Tuscan sun. There was about the girl a sense of a person waiting.
I was waiting too, reading a day-old English newspaper and leaning against the fender of a dented red Fiat. I had been waiting for a week for a permit that was never to come, from the Procura Generale in Florence, to visit the most famous detainee in the prison. Roberto Polo had been arrested by the Italian police the week before in the nearby seaside village of Viareggio, after an alleged attempt, by wrist slashing, to commit suicide. Bleeding, believing himself to be dying, Polo had made farewell telephone calls proclaiming his innocence to one of his investors in Mexico, to members of his family, and to a former associate, the man who had set the case against him in motion.
It occurred to me, watching the young girl, that we were there for the same reason. I offered her my Daily Mail, and she said that she hadn’t seen an English paper for days. She knew a girl whose name was in Nigel Dempster’s column. “She’s always in the papers,” she said. We exchanged names, and it turned out that I knew the mother of her stepsisters in New York.
“Why are you here?” I asked. We had stepped through rope curtains into the shade of the Caffe la Patria, a bar and tobacco shop adjacent to the prison.
“I’m with people who are seeing someone inside,” she said cautiously.
“Roberto Polo?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said.
“I supposed you were,” she replied.
The previous week I had made my presence and purpose known to Gaetano Berni, the Florentine lawyer retained by Polo’s family. Berni had explained to me that Polo was frighting extradition to Switzerland. “It is better for him to remain in Italy,” he had said. “The Swiss will be harder on him. Besides, there is insufficient evidence to extradite him. He didn’t kill. He didn’t deal drugs. He’s not Mafia. As the judge pointed out, he was not escaping when he was arrested.”
My new friend, Chantal Carr by name, was the girlfriend of Roberto Polo’s brother, Marco, a banker in Milan, where she also lived. Early that morning she had driven Marco and his father, Roberto Polo, Sr., to Lucca in her tiny Italian car. Even for the family of such an illustrious prisoner, visiting hours were restricted to one hour a week, on either Saturday or Sunday.
When Chantal Carr saw Marco Polo come out of the prison, she joined him, and I could see her telling him that I was in the bar, hoping to talk to him. Marco Polo is thirty-three, younger than his brother by four years, and handsome. His hair is black and curly, combed straight back. He has the look of the rich Italian and Latin American playboys who disco at Regine’s. Standing in the hot sun, he was weeping almost uncontrollably while Chantal Carr patted him comfortingly on the back. Behind him stood his father, a smaller man with wounded eyes. Roberto Polo, Sr., seemed desolated by the disgrace that had befallen his family, as well as by the shock of having just seen his son in such awful circumstances.
“My brother is devastated. He is destroyed,” said Marco when he came into the cafe. The prison was filthy, he told me, the food inedible. Prisoners with money could purchase food and sundries in the prison store, but they were not allowed to spend more than 450,000 lire, or $350, a month. Roberto Polo, one of the few prisoners to have that kind of money, had spent his whole month’s allowance in the first few days of his imprisonment. During the time I was in Lucca, he could not even buy stamps.
“I am living in subhuman conditions … with murderers, thieves, drug traffickers, etc.,” Polo wrote in a press release from his cell. For two hours each morning, they were allowed to pace back and forth in an enclosed patio for exercise. “He is totally incommunicado. He does not know that people have come to see him,” said Marco. The only visitors he was allowed to have were his lawyers and members of his immediate family, but even they were not allowed to bring him a prescription he needed or a brand of toothpaste he requested—only food.
Marco expressed shock at the newspaper coverage of his brother’s dilemma. “They have convicted him without a trial,” he said.
The family was hoping to obtain Roberto’s release on bail. That afternoon the lawyers were due, Gaetano Berni from Florence and Jacques Kam from Paris. It seemed in keeping with the glamorous aspects of Roberto Polo’s recent life that Makre Kam, the principal lawyer he had picked to defend his interests at the time the warrant for his arrest was issued, was also the lawyer of Marlene Dietrich, the late Orson Welles, Dior, and Van Cleef & Arpels. “Speed is of the essence,” said Marco. “Everything comes to a standstill in August. The judicial system closes down. Of course, even if bail is granted, all his money has been frozen.”
All around us in the cafe, waiting for the afternoon visiting hours to start, were prisoners’ relatives, many with small children. Looking at them, Marco said, “Roberto wants to see Marina, his daughter. But Rosa and he have decided that it is best she not come. She is five. She would remember.”
I asked about Rosa, who was expected in Lucca the following day from Paris, and whom I had spoken with a few days earlier. “Rosa has not cried once,” replied Marco, and there was an implied criticism in his voice. It is a known fact among all their friends that Rosa Polo and her husband’s mother have never gotten along. Rosa, however, who had every reason to be outraged at the position she found herself in, had been staunchly loyal to her beleaguered husband when I spoke with her. She is, after all, the daughter of a diplomat. Shortly after her husband’s disappearance five weeks before his arrest, the French police confiscated $26 million in paintings and furnishings from the couple’s Paris apartment, leaving Rosa and her daughter only mattresses on the floor to sleep on. “This whole thing has been a double cross,” she had told me. “We know who has been feeding everything to the press. When the press destroys you, it is hard for anyone to ever believe you.” The person who she believed had double-crossed her husband was Alfredo Ortiz-Murias, the former associate of Roberto Polo who had received one of his farewell calls. “We are united,” she had said to me about Roberto and her.
Marco and his father were also scornful about Alfredo Ortiz-Murias. “He was always jealous of my brother,” Marco said. Ortiz-Murias was the principal witness in the suit brought against Polo by Rostuca Holdings, Ltd., an offshore company operating out of the Cayman Islands, whose money was managed by Polo’s company, PAMG. It came out in the conversation that the man behind the company known as Rostuca was the governor of one of the poorest states in Mexico. I remembered Gaetano Berni saying to me a few days earlier, about this same man, “What kind of person has $20 million in U.S. dollars in cash outside his own country? Even Mr. Agnelli or Mr. Henry Ford, when he was alive, did not have $20 million in cash.” He had grimaced and shaken his head. The implication was clear.
“Will you tell me the circumstances of Roberto’s arrest?” I asked Marco.
“I have h
eard three stories. I do not know which one is the truth,” he replied, dismissing the subject.
I had heard several stories too, the first from Alfredo Ortiz-Murias in New York, about his farewell call from Roberto. According to Ortiz-Murias, who had blown the whistle on Polo, Roberto had said to him, “Good-bye, Alfredo. It’s 6:30 A.M. in Europe. I am sorry you felt that way about me. Good-bye.” When I asked Ortiz-Murias what his reaction to the call was, he said, “He was trying to make me feel guilty.”
I had also heard from Pablo Aramburuzabala, one of Polo’s investors, a well-to-do Mexican businessman whose wife is the godmother of the Polos’ daughter, that Roberto had called his house four times to say that he was going to commit suicide. “The first three times I was out, but my wife spoke to him. He was calling from a public telephone. When I talked with him, he said he had never done anything wrong. He gave me the address in Viareggio and said that I could call Interpol if I wanted. He said he was full of blood and didn’t have too much time. Then he must have called his mother. She called me to say that Roberto was dead. She said she didn’t know where to go to claim his body. I gave her the address in Viareggio. Then the brother, Marco, called from Tokyo. Marco said that Roberto had been picked up by an ambulance and was in the hospital in Viareggio.”
Roberto Polo gave his own version of his arrest in a press release: “I ate some fish which apparently made me very sick, because early in the morning, I called my brother (who lives in Milan), who speaks Italian, in order to ask him to call the police station to have them send a doctor because I felt like I was dying. My brother, who has a friend in Viareggio, asked his friend to call the police in order that they send a doctor to see me. By the time the doctor arrived, I had already vomited and had some tea: I felt much better. However, the doctor took my blood pressure, stated that it was a bit high, then left. A few hours later (I was already dressed to go to the beach on my bicycle), the police returned without the doctor and asked me to go with them to the station.… I was interrogated.… After that I was taken, handcuffed, to the prison where I am in Lucca.”
The Mansions of Limbo Page 21