Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  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.”

  Although the autopsy report was concluded on December 5, 1999—two days after the fire at the penthouse—the results were not made public until Ted’s trial some three years later. In the year following their mother’s death, the Torrente children claimed that they were “fraudulently deceived and misled into signing a so-called settlement agreement with the named defendants wherein critical information, including the autopsy report was intentionally withheld from them.”

  Like the Heidi Maher and Safra family lawsuits, the Torrente suit was quietly settled out of court. For while Edmond might have come to blows with his nurse in order to prevent her from leaving the bathroom, the autopsy makes clear that both died of smoke inhalation.

  “The reason they died was because they waited too long,” said Michael Baden, an expert witness for the defense at the trial. “There were certain marks on her neck, but there wasn’t enough evidence to reach the conclusion that she had died because of Edmond.”

  But if at the end of the trial Lily thought she could finally breathe a sigh of relief, she was deeply mistaken. Following the end of the trial, there was the matter of Alfredo’s company, Ponto Frio, which Lily now had to oversee without Edmond’s expert guidance. It was no secret that she hated Simon Alouan, Ponto Frio’s chief executive and Edmond’s protégé. Now that she was effectively in charge of the company again as its majority shareholder along with Alfredo’s son, Carlos, Alouan knew his days were numbered. She would seek her revenge. Without Edmond there to act as a buffer between Alouan and Lily, the relationship was simply not going to work, and so it was no surprise to him when Lily informed him of her decision to fire him at a board meeting. Lily promptly replaced the hot-headed Lebanese businessman she had despised for so many years with someone over whom she could have complete control—her son-in-law, Michel Elia, who had limited experience running a company of Ponto Frio’s size and complexity.

  Then, just as the flurry of fittings, lunches, and society functions began again in earnest for Lily, Ted Maher stunned the world with a daring escape from his cell in an old fortress that doubles as Monaco’s prison, overlooking the azure waters of the Mediterranean.

  On a frigid night in January 2003 and less than a month after his trial, Ted and his Italian cellmate, Luigi Ciardelli, sawed through the metal bars on their window and somehow lowered themselves down the thirty-three-foot drop of the old fortress wall using a rope they had fashioned from forty-six garbage bags. Ciardelli headed to San Remo, Italy. Ted went to the Hotel Artemis near Nice, hoping that he could convince the American consulate there to grant him some sort of safe haven. He called his estranged wife, asking for her credit card number as he attempted to check into the hotel. He also called one of his Monaco lawyers, Donald Manasse. “I’ve escaped!” he told Manasse. “You can drop the appeal now.”

  Manasse called the prison to report the escape, and Heidi immediately contacted CBS, which was making a 48 Hours special on the Safra case, and CBS called the segment producer, who happened to be in Monte Carlo staying at the Hotel de Paris. The Monaco authorities didn’t know about the escape until an Anglican priest who had become close to Ted called them to tell them Ted was gone. Ted was rounded up a few hours later. Authorities eventually sentenced him to an extra year in jail, and suspended the director of the prison. No one is quite sure why he tried to escape to Nice, where he spent so many of his free weekends prior to Edmond’s death. Did he have some mysterious underworld contact in the French resort city? Were these the dreaded Russian mobsters Edmond had feared so much after he gave evidence to the FBI shortly before his death? Why did Ted return to Nice? Like so much of the story of Ted’s involvement in l’affaire Safra, the facts remain murky.

  A FEW MONTHS after Ted’s escape and eventual return to prison, Preston Bailey, the noted New York event designer, was assigned the task of stage-managing Lily’s triumphant return to Manhattan society. Just as with the double-header parties at La Leopolda to celebrate the end of Edmond’s troubles with American Express, Lily was determined to throw herself an unforgettable return to high society in Manhattan.

  It’s not that she had ever really left. Even during the drama of Edmond’s death, the lawsuits, and Ted’s trial and escape, Lily still managed a regular presence at parties on both sides of the Atlantic. With her new super wealth, she bought herself a lavish home in London—“one of the most staggeringly beautiful houses in London,” g
ushed Women’s Wear Daily, and continued to maintain homes in New York, Paris and the south of France.

  In May 2000, five months after Edmond’s death, she flew to New York to attend a special United Nations gala in honor of Edmond’s work for Israel. In August, she donated a fountain and garden in Edmond’s name for Somerset House in London. The spectacular Edmond J. Safra Court, which was the first major public fountain to be commissioned in London since the ones in Trafalgar Square in 1845, has fifty-five jets of water that rise out of the granite-covered ground. The number five was Edmond’s favorite number; he believed that it warded off evil spirits.

  A month later, Lily was spotted in “the chicest of black dresses” at a benefit for the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. That summer, she was back in London attending a gala at Buckingham Palace, where she was seated to the right of the Prince of Wales, the host of the evening. She also attended her friend Lynn Wyatt’s tropical paradise-themed birthday party in the south of France. There were also the flurry of dinner parties she threw for friends in London and New York and at La Leopolda during the summer season on the Riviera.