“I just asked him to raise his arms,” said Bouery, referring to Cohen. “We were in a situation of believing there were intruders. I wanted to make sure who he was. I asked him to lie down. He refused. He just put his hand in his pocket. It was a very risky gesture.”
Cohen seems to have been too aggressive for his own good. “In front of us there was a man, tall, Mediterranean, he spoke good French,” recalled Jean-Luc Belny, another officer who refused to admit Cohen to the apartment. “He kept saying, ‘I’m head of Safra’s security.’ As far as I’m concerned I don’t know this person. We therefore took necessary precautions to get this person out. We put handcuffs on him.”
When he finally convinced the police to let him go, Cohen rushed up towards the top floor, where he found Lily making her way down the stairs. “The firemen arrived and I told them exactly how and where they needed to go—do ten steps to the right, they find a staircase, go up two flights and they find a door,” recalled Cohen. “After fifteen minutes they came back and said they didn’t find it. I asked for a mask. The second time they said I had no authority. There was total chaos. People were going up and down the stairs. I saw firemen with a ladder. I shouted which window to go to. They looked at me with the same arrogance. I ran up. I asked them to follow me. I ran up and down—that’s what we did. Nobody listened to what I said and they all refused my help.”
Lily, who was growing increasingly desperate, used the phone in the lobby to call her daughter, Adriana, and son-in-law, Michel, who lived nearby. But she did not call her frightened husband to urge him to leave the bathroom.
“My mother woke me up shortly before six a.m.,” said Adriana. “I could see the fire from avenue des Beaux Arts. My mother was desperate. I saw Cohen, I asked him to do something. He said he had tried but nobody wanted to listen to him.”
Adriana, blonde and petite, decided to take charge, and promptly informed the several police officers assembled in the lobby that Cohen was the only person who could save Edmond. “That was his role, to die if necessary,” she said. “They didn’t understand. It was like an oath.”
She also begged police to allow her mother to call Edmond, to try to convince him to open the door of the bathroom. “It was awful that the police didn’t give the telephone to my mother so she could speak to him,” recalled Adriana years later. “It was important for him to know she was outside. He was always anxious.” It’s not clear why Lily did not seek out another telephone to communicate with her husband once she was safely out of danger.
By the time Cohen was finally allowed to climb the back stairs to the apartment where Edmond and Vivian were trapped it was too late. They had already succumbed to the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning and died at approximately 6:00 a.m., fifteen minutes before firefighters made their way into the bedroom.
When they extinguished the raging fire in the nurses’ station, firefighters made their way to the bathroom where they found the bodies of the petite Filipino nurse and the corpulent banker. Edmond was slumped in an armchair facing the window, his silk pajamas streaked with black, his body covered with soot, his eyes bulging out of his face.
Vivian, neatly dressed in a gray sweater, blouse, and black trousers, was lying on the floor behind the chair. An autopsy would later find “smoke exposure affecting all of the uncovered parts of the body, particularly the face, with soot marks on the lips and mouth. Significant soot deposits around the nasal apertures of the orbital regions.” The cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning, although medical examiners were puzzled by Vivian’s autopsy. In their report, they noted the recent bruises on Vivian’s stomach and thigh. On dissecting her neck, medical examiners found that the thyroid gland was full of blood which resembled “a moderate blow” like those given in a combat sport, the autopsy concluded.
Later, the question of whether Edmond came to blows with Vivian, perhaps in an effort to prevent her from leaving the bathroom, became the subject of much legal debate as the nurse’s surviving family filed a wrongful death suit against the Safras. Lily would later comment that this was absurd: “He was incapable of killing a fly. It hurt me a lot to hear such terrible things, written by journalists who have nothing better to do.”
Shortly after finding the bodies, firefighters summoned Lily, who had just become a widow for the second time in her life. “I went up the stairs to where my husband’s office was, on the same floor as the apartments,” she recalled. “I was told that he was dead and Vivian Torrente, and you can imagine what state I was in at that time.”
Rescuers hauled Edmond’s heavy lifeless body from the bathroom where the smoke had streaked the leopard-skin rug, the wood-paneled walls, and the metal handrails on either side of the toilet Edmond used to help him sit up. A group of firefighters gently placed his body on the bed. Although most of his corpse was covered in soot, strangely there was none on the necklace that medical examiners later found around his neck. The amulets that he wore as protection against the evil eye emerged intact and gleaming from the fire that killed their owner. They were supposed to ward against the envy and greed that superstitious Jews and Muslims believe to be at the root of evil. But in the end, they proved ineffective.
As she cleaned the soot from his face with the help of her daughter, Lily may have recalled a similar scene thirty years earlier, as she confronted another husband lying on their bed, his blood staining the satin bedspread. But if she remembered Alfredo Monteverde in those terrible moments, she said nothing to anyone.
“He was covered in soot but very calm, his face looked as if he was sleeping. I touched his hand and it was still warm,” said Lily, describing Edmond’s lifeless body. “I started to clean his face and my daughter helped me. It was horrible. Then I think I was taken to my daughter’s home.”
AS THE DRAMA was unfolding at the Belle Epoque, across town at the Princess Grace Hospital a young police captain named Olivier Jude, the only member of the Monaco police force who could speak fluent English and had undergone training with the FBI, was sent to interview the first “victim” of the morning’s bizarre events. Ted Maher lay in a hospital bed, recovering from his wounds. One of them took one hundred staples to close.
Ted told Jude what he thought he wanted to hear—that two intruders had entered looking for the billionaire banker. In trying to defend himself, Ted had been wounded. But Jude didn’t believe the story, especially as it kept changing with each telling. At first, he spoke about two intruders, and then in a subsequent interview he spoke of only one, and then in another interview returned to two. Moreover, during the first interview with Jude, “he seemed too sure of what he was saying,” said Jude, who would take five different statements from Maher in the course of the next few days. Jude also suspected that there was something not quite right about Ted’s wounds. “The wounds seemed strange and superficial and done with a knife that was the sort of knife used to do odd jobs, not an attack weapon.” Still, Ted needed one hundred staples to close the wounds.
It was during Jude’s fourth interrogation of Ted, which took place at the police station after Ted was released from the hospital, that Ted finally admitted that he had lied about what had really taken place at the Belle Epoque on December 3. During the four-hour interview, which was duly translated into French by another officer taking notes on a laptop, Ted learned that Edmond and Vivian had died in the fire. At his fifth and final interrogation, Ted signed a long confession in French, a language he barely understood. He claims now that police told him that his wife was in custody and would not be allowed to return to the United States if he did not confess. They also said that Vivian had likely been strangled in the bathroom, and that he was going to be charged with her death unless he signed. Ted signed on the dotted line. Among other things, he confessed to starting the fire, lying about the intruders, and stabbing himself.
Ted later claimed his confession came under duress, after police showed him his wife’s passport and threatened him.
After the events of December 3
, one of the Safras’ staff had contacted Heidi Maher in Stormville and offered to fly her to Monaco to see her husband, who at that time was still considered the glorious hero.
“Upon hearing of the frightening news in Monaco, I called Michelle St. Bernard, Lily Safra’s personal secretary, in New York,” said Heidi. “She told me that Ted ‘was a hero’ for trying to save Mr. Safra. However, the suspects in the crime were still at large. I was very concerned about my husband.”
St. Bernard made the arrangements for Heidi to travel to Monaco to visit her husband in the hospital. Heidi boarded a Delta Air Lines flight with her brother Todd Wustrau, bound for Nice where they were met at the airport by one of the Safra drivers, a member of the support staff, and head nurse Sonia. Heidi and Todd believed they were on their way to the hospital to visit Ted. While they were in the car, the driver abruptly changed plans and drove them at breakneck speed to the Hotel Balmoral, where Ted and the other nurses lived.
Later, they were summoned to the police station, where they were questioned by authorities. As they prepared to return to the hotel, Heidi and her brother claim, they were violently abducted.
“I was taken off the streets by three people without any identification,” recalled Heidi. “They were dressed in black. I was taken by two people, my head between my knees. I was taken in a car to the Hotel Balmoral. I pleaded [to know] who they were and where we were going. They pushed me up the stairs to my husband’s room and they were speaking French. They were very upset and went through the luggage and my husband’s things.”
Heidi said that her kidnappers rifled through her husband’s belongings. “They had Ted’s small tape recorder on which he stored one of our children’s ‘I love you Dad’ telephone conversations. They played it for me; the emotion was overwhelming. They also took our passports.”
When the search was over, Heidi and Todd were left at the Balmoral. A rattled Heidi sought out Sonia and Anthony Brittain, the Safra staff member who had picked her up at the airport. They were “apologetic.”
“I learned later that Ted had been shown my passport, which was taken from me during the abduction from the police station, and told that I had been strip-searched and tortured,” she said in court papers filed at a courthouse in Dutchess County, near her home in Stormville. “At the time this all happened, his legs and arms were tied to his hospital bed and he was connected to a urinary catheter. Ted neither reads nor writes French. Nevertheless, he was handed a French confession by the Monaco police. He signed it to spare me from what he thought would be further abuse by the Monaco authorities.”
When she retrieved her passport from police on December 5, Heidi asked the Safra secretaries to make arrangements for her return to the United States. She had had enough of Monaco and decided to return to New York, even though she had not been able to see Ted. When Heidi and her brother arrived at the Nice airport, Delta Air Lines demanded $2,400 for their return tickets. Heidi charged the return portion of her tickets to her credit card, clearly relieved to leave the scene of her surreal adventures, even if it was on her own dime.
Less than twenty-four hours after his wife’s departure, Ted signed a confession. “There was never any pressure on Mr. Maher,” recalled Jude, who denied ever having used Heidi’s passport to put pressure on Ted. “I would never have had such results if I hadn’t established a climate of confidence. I didn’t put any pressure on him at any time. I told him if he didn’t want to sign, he didn’t have to.”
Gerard Tiberti, the officer who assisted Jude with Ted’s interrogation, confirmed that no pressure was put on Ted. “He is someone who can be considered changeable,” said Tiberti, in reference to Ted. “He was extremely nervous. We saw he could change one minute to the next. He could go from extreme kindness to extreme aggression. It was difficult to read him.”
Jude said that Ted showed him a photograph of his wife and children, and at no time did Jude have a copy of Heidi’s passport. “He was showing me a photo of his wife and children,” said Jude.
The official investigation into the death of one of the world’s wealthiest men did not proceed much further than this. The authorities felt that they had captured the culprit—an emotionally unstable American nurse who created an elaborate heroic plot that went badly awry. Monaco authorities breathed a sigh of relief. They could now blame the terrible scandale on a deranged outsider and preserve the veneer of respectability, discretion, and security that was the preserve of the world’s wealthiest. They were determined that l’affaire Safra was not going to affect Monaco’s reputation.
LILY ORGANIZED EDMOND’S funeral in Geneva in the same way she would organize one of her sumptuous parties at La Leopolda. She completely ignored the fact that Edmond’s family had long wished the entire Safra family to be buried at Mount Herzl in Israel and owned a communal plot there. Together with Jeffrey Keil, who had worked so hard on the HSBC deal and was the first of Lily’s friends to fly to Monaco after Edmond’s death, she compiled a list of the couple’s friends. It read like a who’s who of international society and finance. Former UN secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and his wife were on the list, as was Israel’s foreign minister David Levy, the Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, and Sir John Bond, the CEO of HSBC, who had agreed to deliver the eulogy. Never mind that Bond had barely known Edmond. What stood out at the funeral was the importance of the multibillion-dollar deal that Edmond had brokered with HSBC. And this was clearly signaled in Lily’s choice of Bond to bid an official farewell to the great banker whose empire he had just acquired.
More than seven hundred guests crowded into the Hekhal Haness, Geneva’s largest synagogue. Edmond’s brothers Moise and Joseph were among them, although they had not been officially invited and indeed had to strong-arm their way into the house of worship. In what would prove one of the most socially difficult moments for Lily, the Safra brothers had to push their way to the front of the synagogue in order to help carry Edmond’s coffin.
“She [Lily] didn’t want anyone from the family at the funeral,” said one Safra family member who did not want to be identified. “But everyone from our family went anyway. We were not going to stay away from Edmond’s funeral because of her.”
Joseph, Moise, and their families returned to Brazil immediately following Edmond’s funeral. It must have been one of the only times in their lives that these deeply religious Jews decided to dispense with their own mourning rituals by not sitting shiva as a family. They would have their own shiva far away from the widow they despised—at their home in São Paulo.
“You have brought together people from different backgrounds, cultures, religions and social horizons, just as you always have,” noted Elie Wiesel in his own speech at Edmond’s funeral. “Each of us is dealing with our own memories of you, our own questions of what happened last Friday.”
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 internat
ional 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.
NINE
“Years of Sorrow and Days of Despair”
JAY 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…”
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