Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  It’s not clear when Edmond made the decision that he and Lily needed a security detail. As early as 1978, when he was consulting with his architect Eli Attia on the plans for the expansion of the Republic National Bank of New York, Edmond insisted on a state-of-the-art security system. Attia put Edmond in touch with an Israeli firm in Geneva that ended up handling his security around the world. At the bank, Safra’s twenty-ninth floor residence was inaccessible to visitors. Guests had to get off at the twenty-eighth floor and be escorted one floor up by an armed security guard.

  Edmond must have redoubled his security efforts after the kidnapping of his nephew Ezequiel Edmond Nasser in São Paulo in 1994. Ezequiel, the son of Edmond’s sister Evelyne, cut his teeth in banking working for his uncles Edmond in New York and Joseph in São Paulo. He was the prosperous owner of Banco Excel in São Paulo at the time of the kidnapping. Nasser spent seventy-five days in the hands of his captors, who kept him confined to a tiny basement room where they blasted loud music and kept the lights on twenty-four hours a day. He was finally released when his family paid an undisclosed ransom. But the experience damaged him. For the next three years, he became a virtual recluse, refusing to leave his home.

  The kidnapping spooked the entire Safra clan. In São Paulo, Moise and Joseph increased their security staff and brought in former Mossad agents to train their Brazilian team. They also refused to battle São Paulo traffic, where they would be sitting ducks for well-trained kidnappers. In Brazil, many kidnap victims—most of them well-to-do executives and the children of the rich and famous—have been snatched driving to work. The Safra brothers’ solution was to buy helicopters and build helipads at their sprawling homes in the exclusive Morumbi neighborhood of São Paulo. This way they could fly to work every day and avoid the mad rush-hour frenzy on the streets of São Paulo, a city of more than 20 million people.

  Although Edmond had long been obsessed with his personal security, he must have felt a heightened sense of paranoia shortly after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the mid–1990s. In addition to crippling rigidity and uncontrollable shaking, other symptoms associated with Parkinson’s include anxiety and a reduction in cognitive function. In other words, Edmond may not have been able to think very clearly, to perceive real dangers as opposed to Parkinson’s-fueled paranoia.

  In 1996, before he and Lily moved into their new apartment in Monaco—“so glorious and impeccable in every detail that that may well be what heaven looks like”—Safra created a mini-fortress. After he consulted his specialists in Geneva, steel windows and doors were ordered for the 10,000-square-foot apartment where they would be spending most of their winters. As in New York, his residence was on the top floor of the building, which housed the Monaco branch of his Republic National Bank on the avenue d’Ostende.

  Samuel Cohen, Edmond’s security chief in France and Monaco, helped set up the security system at the Monte Carlo penthouse. “The system of security was based on several things,” he said. “The windows were bulletproof, and there were cameras, burglar alarms, and fire alarms. All the systems were connected to Monaco Sécurité. If one system didn’t work, there was a backup of a second one. If one system wasn’t registering, there was another one that took over.” There were fifteen surveillance cameras at the penthouse, ten of them outside, with alarms attached.

  The only problem with the elaborate security system was that it could do nothing if a potential attacker was already inside the apartment. The reinforced doors and windows also made it difficult for the apartment’s inhabitants to leave in an emergency. As Cohen himself noted: “There is no security system if someone from inside decides to do harm. There is nothing you can do. If someone gains the confidence of the people and you are on the inside, there is no limit to the damage you can do.”

  Edmond’s bedroom was the safest part of the twenty-room duplex apartment. The bedroom, fitted with panic buttons and steel doors and shutters, was described by security experts as “a survival cell” that was impregnable.

  Cohen trained with the Mossad in Israel. He was “in perfect physical condition, a tough, no-nonsense guy trained in the art of protection,” noted Vanity Fair journalist Dominick Dunne. Cohen commanded eleven other bodyguards, all of them highly trained former elite members of the Israeli army, and all of them billeted at La Leopolda, a twenty-minute drive from the Monaco penthouse. Cohen, affectionately known to staff as Schmulik, was himself paid $1,000 a day to supervise Edmond’s security.

  With the onset of Parkinson’s, Edmond retreated to the safety of his bunker-like homes around the world. By the time he started to shuffle to get across a room, slur his speech, and drool uncontrollably, Edmond had limited his public appearances and often conducted his business affairs from his bedroom. After Edmond went public with his illness in July 1998, several nurses were added to his staff to provide him with care around the clock. In a statement released to the press at the time, Edmond acknowledged that he suffered from the disease, but reassured his business associates and investors that he would continue to work closely with his brothers Moise and Joseph to oversee his banking empire. At the same time, he also committed $50 million to the launch of a foundation to support research into the disease.

  Despite his illness, Edmond’s philanthropic good works continued apace, precisely because he was gravely ill and determined to leave a lasting legacy. Like his father, Jacob, who had contributed to many Jewish and non-Jewish causes in Lebanon and Syria, Edmond also focused a great deal on philanthropy. Throughout the world, there are medical research centers, and religious and educational trusts that bear the family name. At Harvard University alone, the Safra name is particularly prominent. There is the Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization and the Jacob Safra Courtyard at the Harvard Hillel that Edmond funded to honor his father. In 1986, Edmond and the Republic of New York Corporation also established the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies at the college, allowing academics, business people, and artists from Latin America to teach at Harvard for one semester.

  At one point, Edmond also decided that he needed his own synagogue and asked Eli Attia, the architect who had worked on the Republic tower, to draw up the plans for a house of worship around the corner from one of his apartments on Fifth Avenue and East Sixty-third Street. The synagogue was also conceived for a group of fellow Upper East Side Sephardim who prayed in a dingy basement on Sixty-second Street. Although the grand Temple Emanu-El is located just three blocks away on East Sixty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, it is mainly an Ashkenazi and Reform temple. Edmond and his small group of Sephardic congregants—all of them Orthodox Jews—could never feel welcome in the Temple Emanu-El community.

  Edmond probably felt that a synagogue named in memory of his father would round out his philanthropy in New York. Attia found an old townhouse 100 yards from Edmond’s Fifth Avenue home and began drafting plans and seeking city building permits for a 25,000-square-foot synagogue, comprising five stories and two basements, with space for nearly four hundred congregants. “As was the case with a number of Attia’s projects for Safra, the agreement was consummated with a handshake.”

  But Edmond’s synagogue, which was named Beit Yaakov, in memory of Jacob Safra, proved problematic from the start. Attia, who had worked with Edmond and his brothers since 1978, became exasperated “because Edmond and Lily kept changing their minds about what they wanted.”

  Work on the project, which had begun in earnest in 1991, dragged on until 1993. But the coup de grâce came when Edmond and Lily refused to pay Attia’s bill for work he had done on the synagogue and the renovation of burial plots for two Sephardic rabbis in Israel. The Safras claimed that Attia had completed only a small percentage of the total work, but was charging as if the job was already completed. Attia’s bill was estimated at more than $600,000. As a result of the financial shortfall, he was unable to pay his employees. He filed a lawsuit against Edmond in a U.S. district court in New
York City after Edmond fired him in 1993. Attia had lost so much money in the stalled synagogue project that midway through court proceedings he could no longer pay his attorneys.

  “He [Edmond] told me that the bill was the responsibility of the Beit Yaakov congregation,” said Attia in an interview with the New York Post. “But he and Lily hired me and to all intents and purposes they are the congregation.”

  In the early days, the Beit Yaakov congregation comprised Edmond’s family and employees. One of the trustees was Jacqui Safra, Edmond’s nephew, the son of his eldest brother, Elie, and a film producer who worked on several films with Woody Allen. Republic president Dov Schlein and Nathan Hasson, vice chair of Republic, were also among the trustees of the synagogue. Walter Weiner, one of Edmond’s most trusted advisers and the chairman of the board and chief operating officer of Republic of New York Corporation, was on the synagogue’s executive committee.

  But in court papers, Edmond tried to argue that he had no signed contract with Attia and that Attia had done only 10 percent of the job and was demanding more than 70 percent of the payment—an allegation that Attia dismissed outright. Attia alleged that Edmond was putting pressure on him for other reasons. In addition to the synagogue, Attia was involved in a project in Israel at the time. The Shalom Center was the largest real-estate development in the country’s history. David Azrieli, the Canadian architect and developer who had hired Attia for the project, wanted to share the design credit with him, and was allegedly withholding Attia’s fees until he agreed. Attia initiated arbitration proceedings in Israel to obtain the $1.5 million that he was owed. But what Attia didn’t know at the time was that Edmond’s bank in Israel, the First International Bank of Israel Ltd. (FIBI), had been competing to finance the Shalom Center. According to legal papers, “In the course of the five month arbitration hearing it became clear that Safra’s decision in January 1993 to force Attia to resign from the synagogue project had been an attempt to pressure Attia into dropping his fight with Azrieli, which was impeding the chances for Azrieli (and FIBI) to develop the highly lucrative Shalom Center Project.”

  Edmond denied the allegations. A furious and disappointed Attia sued Edmond personally. “I have always given you all that I can give—my talent and my time,” wrote Attia in a handwritten resignation letter dated January 15, 1993, that was introduced as evidence in court. “The telephone conversation we had last night caused me to realize that you, unfortunately, see our relationship in a different light.” For all of his “devotion and sacrifice,” Attia says he was left with “financial strangulation, insult and more than anything else, mistrust.”

  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 hotel 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=MC2 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.