Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  If Alfredo had committed suicide, perhaps he didn’t want anyone to hear the sound of the gunshots. Clearly, the towels were placed around the room to muffle any sound. But if he was going to kill himself anyway, why would he care if anyone heard the noise? Obviously, the question did occur to police, which is why it is strange that they did not note it in their official report.

  Nor did they enquire about Alfredo’s habits. The police photographs show a dead body in a strangely immaculate bedroom setting. Yet anyone who knew Alfredo well would have been immediately suspicious of those photographs. Alfredo was a notoriously messy person, and it was unlikely he would have taken the time to arrange his blazer just so, or put his shoes away. This was a man who was accustomed to living with several servants who picked up after him. He was careless with his clothes, regularly leaving them in a heap on the bathroom floor, recalled Laurinda.

  Of course, someone as meticulous as his secretary Maria Consuelo could have cleaned up the room before the police arrived at the scene. But why not also clean up the sheet of crumpled newsprint that police found on the bedside table? According to the police, the newsprint had been used to wrap the revolver while it had been in storage in the hallway cabinet.

  The police photograph of the gun is probably the most intriguing piece of evidence gathered in the investigation because the most startling conclusion of the initial police report was not that Alfredo Monteverde had committed suicide by locking himself in his bedroom and shooting himself in the chest. What was more shocking was that somehow he had managed to shoot himself twice.

  In the black-and-white photograph of the weapon, a police officer’s hand points to the revolver’s six-bullet chamber, showing four bullets intact and two missing.

  “He shot himself twice,” said Alfredo’s friend Abitbol. “He really must have wanted to die.”

  Samy Cohn, another wealthy Romanian-born businessman whose wife Ruth was one of Lily’s closest friends and who had introduced Lily to Alfredo years before, noted about Alfredo’s passing that “we were all very heartbroken when he had to give [sic] two shots in order to die.”

  SHORTLY AFTER REPORTING Alfredo’s death to the police, Conrado began the grim task of informing Alfredo’s mother and sister. Regina was on a European cruise, and could not be reached, and Rosy was on vacation. After several phone calls to her home in Lake Como, Conrado finally tracked her down to the seaside villa of Camillo Olivetti, the Italian industrialist, who owned a magnificent vacation villa near Antibes, next to the legendary Hotel du Cap. Rosy and her husband were unpacking their bags when the telephone rang, no doubt echoing through the cavernous Mediterranean villa.

  Rosy picked up the phone with some annoyance. She had left strict instructions with her secretary and the household servants in Italy not to bother her on vacation, and under no circumstances to give out her number in Antibes—unless it was an emergency, of course. What could possibly be so urgent at this hour? Why were they already bothering her when she hadn’t even started this desperately needed rest cure?

  But when she heard the voice on the other end of the phone pronounce her name with a familiar Brazilian-Portuguese inflection—“Rozee?” said Conrado—she knew immediately.

  “How?”

  Momentarily dazed, she could barely take in what was being said to her.

  “Suicide,” he said. “With a revolver.”

  Do you want the body embalmed? We can wait for you, for your mother, for the funeral. But even as Conrado said this to Rosy, he knew that they couldn’t really wait. Regina’s ship would not dock in Rio for another week. Rosy felt the shock would simply be too much for her mother if they telegraphed her with the news aboard ship.

  Lily had given Conrado specific orders. She did not want to wait to bury her husband. Although Alfredo was not a practicing Jew, he would be buried as one, and Jewish law required that the burial occur almost immediately after death.

  How are the children? How is Lily? Rosy asked. She told Conrado that she would leave immediately for Rio, but would not make the funeral. She told him to proceed without her.

  Still in shock, she hung up the phone and went to inform her husband, who arranged for a taxi to take them back to Italy. They were simply too tired and too startled to drive themselves. She mentally planned their route to Brazil: She could arrive at Lake Como by dawn, take a taxi to the Milan airport, and catch the first flight to Rome, where, by the end of the day, she could be on her way to Rio de Janeiro.

  Yes, that was what they would do. The planning cleared her head. She was temporarily relieved to have a series of logistical problems to solve.

  But the relief was temporary. The cab was rickety and the driver tuned his radio to a rock-and-roll station, possibly to keep him alert as he drove along dark and winding coastal roads through the Alpes Maritimes. She politely asked him to turn off the music, preferring the sound of crashing surf and the occasional speeding car as she tried to come to grips with the fact that her dear younger brother, Fred, was really dead.

  The thought suddenly turned her stomach, and she demanded that the driver stop the car at a seaside hotel. She walked purposefully through the darkened lobby and to the ladies’ room, where she threw up, staying for a few minutes to press her head against the cool marble walls before heading out the door.

  Although she was always ready to listen to her brother’s problems, she seemed increasingly unable to play an active role in Alfredo’s life. Besides, he had seemed so much better after marrying Lily. Still, she felt that he had not quite been himself when he had come to Italy to visit her in June, two months before he died.

  In the only surviving photograph from that 1969 family vacation, Alfredo is pictured standing at a café or restaurant behind his mother, Rosy’s husband and his own wife. A relaxed and suntanned Lily is laughing into the camera, her sunglasses pushed back on her head. Regina is wearing dark glasses and lots of gold jewelry—the very picture of the wealthy matriarch on vacation. Alfredo, casual in a white, open-collared shirt, is standing slightly stooped with an arm around his sister, pointing a finger at the unknown photographer. His sister is stiff and rigid beside him, in a buttoned-up blouse, her hair conservatively pulled back.

  Perhaps it was the medication he was taking that made him seem at times slightly inebriated. Alfredo had also told his sister that he was in the early stages of diabetes. He had put on weight. But Rosy didn’t think much of it. Her mind was on her own business. Then, several weeks after he returned to Rio, Alfredo called her at her villa in Italy. Had it been the day before he died? Yes, it probably had been the day before he died. Things were not good, he had said. He was having trouble with the business, with Lily. He wanted a divorce. He needed to figure out how to deal with the children, to lessen the trauma of separation, and had invited Lily’s first husband to lunch the following day to discuss the situation.

  Rosy hadn’t had much time to talk to him. She was in a meeting, rushing to finish her work because she was heading out on vacation the next day. Perhaps she should have invited him to meet her in Europe, to get out of a situation he was finding increasingly difficult to handle. But maybe he didn’t sound so desperate after all. Whatever the problem, she would deal with it after her vacation, have a good long chat with Fred.

  But now it was too late.

  AS ROSY AND her husband were racing to catch a flight to Rio, many of Alfredo’s friends who had assembled at the house on Rua Icatu watched in stunned silence as two brawny officers carried his body out of the bedroom. Fighting back tears, Paulinho Guimarães, one of Alfredo’s best friends, raced into the bedroom and grabbed one of the blood-soaked sheets to cover the body, which was loaded into an idling police van parked outside the front door of the house. Alfredo’s remains were then driven to the Instituto Médico Legal—the coroner’s office in downtown Rio de Janeiro—where the medical officer on duty waited to perform an autopsy.

  The Ponto Frio executives worked into the wee hours of the morning to arrange th
e funeral, and more important to secure the deceased’s financial holdings, which were scattered throughout Brazil and around the world.

  “It’s just like Fred to give us work even after he’s dead,” quipped Conrado, who was charged with convincing Jewish authorities to give Alfredo a proper burial. Suicides are against Jewish law, and the victims are usually buried against the back walls of a cemetery with little ceremony. Conrado would have to offer a sizable “donation” to the Jewish authorities who oversaw the cemetery on the industrial outskirts of Rio, in order to ensure that Alfredo received a proper Jewish burial.

  “We had to pay a great deal of money to get Fred buried,” said Maria Consuelo, adding that shortly after they discovered the body Geraldo was dispatched to various banks in the city in order to gather the cash.

  “It was a huge headache for Geraldo,” recalled his wife Lourdes. “Geraldo ran around looking for cash soon after Fred was found dead. Geraldo said that Fred’s death was very strange and could not have happened the way it happened.”

  Indeed, the autopsy and a half-hearted police investigation would leave some difficult questions.

  On the morning of Tuesday, August 26, a day after Alfredo’s death, as final preparations were underway for the funeral, his secretary Vera received a call from the coroner’s office in Rio’s Lapa neighborhood. Could she come immediately? The medical examiners had some urgent questions. “When I arrived, the medical examiner told me that he found it very strange that they could find no traces of gunpowder on Fred’s hands,” she said.

  Indeed, in the initial police investigation and the subsequent autopsy report there is no mention of gunpowder residue on Alfredo’s hands. In a suicide with a revolver, one of the first things a medical examiner will inevitably record is the gunpowder residue on the victim’s hands.

  “Then they asked me another question,” said Vera. “They wanted to know if Fred was left-handed. I couldn’t figure out why they would want to know that, but I answered right away that Fred did everything with his right hand.”

  The coroner shook his head and asked her if she was certain. Vera told him that in the nine years that she had worked for Alfredo, she had always known him to be right-handed.

  “Then he couldn’t have shot himself.”

  If the statement shocked her, she kept it to herself, too frightened to carry its implications to their logical conclusion. Vera remained silent for nearly forty years after Alfredo’s death. But there were others who were unaware of the coroner’s pronouncement but were never convinced that the owner of Ponto Frio had taken his own life.

  Hélio Fernandes, owner of the Tribuna da Imprensa, was one of them. “The newspapers omitted most of the details of his death,” said Fernandes, whose newspaper was the only media outlet to resist the strict military censorship of the time. “The incident was never properly investigated.”

  Geraldo never believed that his boss had committed suicide. On the morning of August 25, Alfredo was full of plans for Ponto Frio’s expansion. Until his death in 2006, Geraldo repeatedly told his family and friends that it was impossible for Alfredo to have killed himself.

  Others, like Alfredo’s friend Paulinho, who covered his body with the sheet, also refused to believe the official version of events but seemed powerless to do anything about it, except beg Alfredo’s sister to demand a homicide investigation.

  Shortly after Alfredo died, there were some rumors that police officers had been bribed in order to suppress the investigation. Lourdes said that part of the money that her husband gathered in the hours after Alfredo’s death went to pay off investigators—a dirty deed that haunted Geraldo for the rest of his life, according to his wife and daughter. Lourdes recalls that $80,000 changed hands. Such a bribe paid to counter bad publicity or shelve an investigation would not have been unusual in military-era Brazil, where corruption was widespread. Death was bad for business. However, there is no hard evidence to suggest that the police accepted bribes in order to suppress the investigation into Alfredo’s death.

  But who would want Alfredo Monteverde dead?

  Could his social activism have caused him to run afoul of Brazil’s military rulers? After all, the country was in the dark years—the so-called “years of lead”—of a military dictatorship when Alfredo died. In 1968, a year before his death, the dictatorship entered its most brutal phase when military police fired on unarmed students who decided to protest against the quality of the food and hygiene at their university cafeteria in Rio de Janeiro. On March 28, dozens of police, armed with machine guns, tear gas, and grenades, invaded the Calabouço student restaurant, near downtown Rio. In the ensuing melee, police killed Edson Luís Lima Souto, an eighteen-year-old student from the Amazon state of Para. The following day there were 50,000 people at his funeral, which set off student protests across the country. The government reacted immediately and with force, passing Institutional Act Number 5, which closed Congress, suspended all civil rights, and made it legal for the military to throw civilians in jail without trial.

  Deeply moved by the tragic events of March 28, 1968, which became known in Brazil as the Calabouço, Alfredo publicly offered to pay half the expenses of rebuilding the cafeteria, provided that all the authorities were in agreement on its reconstruction. But they weren’t, and the cafeteria was eventually forgotten.

  Despite his social activism, Alfredo was a businessman at heart and knew it wouldn’t do him any good to alienate Brazil’s military rulers. Even in the years that he admired opposition politician Carlos Lacerda, Alfredo never became actively involved with any political parties. He knew he needed to remain on excellent terms with the government of the day in order to continue to thrive in an economy that was becoming increasingly centralized and controlled by the state. In a country that was beginning to impose huge import duties on appliances and other manufactured goods, Alfredo and Ponto Frio needed to have friends in high places in order to circumvent the duties and remain profitable in a business that concerned itself with import and export.

  “He was a very popular man, and a great formulator of public opinion,” said Sztern. “When [former president Alencar] Castelo Branco died, Fred paid for a full-page ad in the papers in which he wrote what a great president he was. But mostly he was pretty much apolitical.”

  Castelo Branco, who was one of the leaders of the March 31, 1964, military coup that ushered in more than two decades of military rule in Brazil, became president in 1964 and died in a plane crash shortly after leaving office in 1967.

  While he supported social activism on the left, Alfredo also supported the military governments. In fact, the only trouble that Alfredo appears to have had with the military authorities was in December 1967 when he had been called into a meeting at the Ministry of Revenue. The meeting, at the cavernous ministry building in downtown Rio, went on for several hours, during which he was questioned about his taxes and how he imported foreign products into Brazil, then one of the world’s most protected markets. “I have no idea why they wanted to see me,” said Alfredo to Sztern.

  While he may not have wholeheartedly supported Brazil’s military regimes, it is unlikely Alfredo worked against them to the point that he would be a target for murder.

  If investigators ever demanded to know who benefited from Alfredo’s death, they had only to look to his wife and son. According to a 1966 will that Conrado produced on the day of his death—a document he swore was Alfredo’s last will and testament—Lily and Carlinhos were the main beneficiaries.

  But neither Lily nor Carlinhos pulled the trigger. Lily was away from the house, and Carlinhos was a month shy of his tenth birthday.

  Still, someone else could have grabbed the gun in the hallway cabinet, entered the room, and shot him at point-blank range in the chest while he was sleeping. Alfredo’s lifelong battle with manic depression would have been the perfect cover for murder.

  In theory, in order to make the murder look like suicide, the murderer could lock the door from the inside an
d leave through the open window. Alternatively, if the assassin had the key to the bedroom door, he or she could easily lock it from the outside and leave the house, being careful not to disturb the rolled-up towels.

  Despite the coroner’s obvious concerns, he nevertheless released Alfredo’s body for burial hours after the autopsy. Strangely, the investigating officers were also quick to surrender two of their most valuable pieces of evidence—the bullet and the revolver, which they seized after their investigation at the house.

  “Received the revolver, four bullets intact, two spent cartridges and one bullet,” reads the handwritten scrawl on one of the margins of the original police report. The sentence is followed by initials that are difficult to decipher.

  THE FUNERAL TOOK place a day later, and drew more than two thousand people to the Jewish Cemetery at Caju, on the industrial outskirts of Rio. All the managers of his twenty-two stores attended, as did the majority of the six hundred employees of Ponto Frio. The flags at the Rio Yacht Club, where Alfredo had been a member for years, remained at half mast for three days in his honor.

  “I think so many people went to the funeral to see if he was really dead,” laughed Marcelo Steinfeld. “You could never be sure with Fred if he was playing another practical joke.” Indeed, at the time, the rumor making the rounds of the business community was that Alfredo had filled his coffin with rocks and disappeared to start another life far away from Rio de Janeiro.

  Alfredo was buried in what a reporter for the Jornal do Brasil described as a hasty ceremony, barely lasting more than three minutes. But it was thanks to Alfredo’s status as one of the richest men in Brazil that the ceremony lasted as long as it did. Since suicide is considered a grievous act under Jewish law, brief prayers are said but there is often no eulogy, which is why none of Alfredo’s closest friends or business associates were allowed to make any kind of public statements at the cemetery.