Gilded Lily Read online

  Others remember her differently. “She was a social alpinist,” said one acquaintance from the 1950s. “Her parents prepared her from a very early age to marry a rich man.”

  Although she may not have always known exactly how to get the things that were most important to her, she knew instinctively how to take advantage of those around her who did. She has surrounded herself with an extremely loyal group of lawyers, financiers, and public relations advisers whom she rewards handsomely. But while they manage her financial and legal affairs on three continents, it is Madame who is clearly in charge.

  On her own, Lily didn’t achieve the wild success in business and finance that distinguished two of her four husbands. But like them she is largely self-made—a middle-class arriviste from the far-flung reaches of South America who built her own impressive empire in elite society. She is a skilled and much admired hostess and an important philanthropist in her own right. She is also a canny survivor, a street-smart society princess who knew how to use her relationships with men to get ahead.

  “She didn’t exactly lie around the house all day eating chocolates,” recalled one of her acquaintances from the 1960s. “In many ways, I am completely repelled by her, but I also admire her greatly. She knows exactly how to take advantage of a situation.”

  And she lets nothing and nobody stand in her way. Her vindictiveness can be swift and precise. She has been known to change the seating of guests at her elaborate dinner parties when one of them has made the slightest faux pas. A guest could easily be removed from the place of honor at her table and be relegated to the outer reaches of the “children’s table” if he had done something to offend Lily.

  She hates Safra’s brothers in São Paulo, who have never accepted her—someone they view as a lapsed Ashkenazi Jew with a past. Although they were very close to Edmond, for years they resisted allowing Lily into their tight-knit Sephardic clan. But in the end she got her revenge. According to the Safra family, in the final months of Safra’s life, Lily convinced Safra to distance himself from his siblings even though he had pledged to honor a long-standing Safra family tradition to turn over his banks for them to run. Edmond, who had no children of his own, had made the decision long ago that his younger brothers would take care of his banks when he was gone.

  Few details have emerged about her personal life, largely because most of her former employees are forced to sign strict confidentiality agreements. Ted Maher’s agreement, which is dated August 16, 1999, reads in part: “You agree that during any period of the retention of your services and thereafter you will not disclose or cause or permit to be disclosed any confidential or non-public information…relating in any way to Mr. or Mrs. Edmond Safra, any member of their family, or any company owned or controlled by them or any member of their family…” The agreement goes on to say that “a breach of this confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement” will result in “immediate termination” and “the Safras shall have all additional rights and remedies available at law or in equity in the event of such breach.” Many former employees reacted with silence when approached for interviews for this book; others passed on their regrets through their attorneys. Others agreed to speak only under the strictest confidentiality.

  Many were afraid of potential lawsuits, and described Lily and her elite group of aides as ruthless when it came to protecting her reputation—the carefully edited biography that stresses only her generous philanthropy and her relationship to one of the century’s greatest bankers. In many ways, she has decorated her own life’s story in the same way that she has decorated her sumptuous residences around the world.

  “Lily Safra litigates with a bottomless pit,” said Lady Colin Campbell, a best-selling author and biographer of Diana, Princess of Wales. In 2005 Lily threatened to sue Lady Colin over her novel, Empress Bianca, which she felt was a thinly veiled roman a clef about her life.

  “She’s a narcissist who hungers for attention,” said Lady Colin, who turned the tables on Lily and sued her for lost revenues when Lily’s lawyers managed to pressure her publisher to remove Empress Bianca from stores in England and destroy any copies remaining in their warehouse. The lawsuit ended in “a Mexican standoff,” said Lady Colin.

  Still, Lily has attracted an extremely loyal following among her friends, although she has also managed to strike deep fear in the hearts of those who have fallen out of favor with her. Indeed, some of her friends not only refused repeated interview requests during the research of this book, they claimed they had never met her. “I didn’t know her at all,” said Carmen Sirotsky, a friend from Rio de Janeiro, who is listed as a witness at her wedding to Alfredo Monteverde in 1966—the second of the three times that they officially registered their marriage. On a trip to Rio de Janeiro in 1972, Lily introduced Carmen Sirotsky to Samuel Bendahan as “my best friend from Rio.”

  For all the column inches devoted to descriptions of her exquisite clothes, fabled parties, and philanthropy, little is actually known about Lily Safra. Strangely, more is known about her husband, who made it his life’s mission to stay out of the media spotlight. Safra almost never gave interviews, largely because his business was built on utter discretion and loyalty to his ultrarich clientele, most of them Sephardic Jews and Arabs who had entrusted their money to generations of Safra bankers in the Middle East.

  “He was one of the smartest people I had ever met,” recalled Attia, who designed Safra residences around the world as well as the modern addition to the Republic National Bank of New York on Fifth Avenue. Attia met Safra at his offices in Geneva in 1978. During an epic meeting that lasted twelve hours and saw Edmond’s dark-suited aides rushing into his office with breaking financial news on bits of white paper, Safra took dozens of calls from around the world as panic began to hit global markets, presaging one of history’s worst recessions two years later.

  “Milton Friedman called him on the phone to ask his advice,” recalled Attia, referring to the Nobel laureate and leader of the Chicago School of economists. “It was amazing. It seemed like he was at the center of the world.”

  Safra unwittingly stepped back onto center stage as dawn broke over Monaco on December 3, 1999. As the fire raged inside the beaux-arts penthouse, the Safras found themselves thrust into an increasingly harsh media spotlight. Overnight, Lily went from being a glamorous hostess and a boldface name in the society columns to front-page international news. But the instant fame came with a price. It invited intense scrutiny—the kind of publicity that she could surely do without.

  Marc Bonnant, Lily’s longtime lawyer, asked her point-blank on the witness stand at Ted Maher’s trial in Monaco in 2002, “What do you think about people saying you were the cause of the tragedy?”

  “It is awful,” replied Lily, impeccably dressed in a black business suit, her blonde hair cut stylishly short, her demeanor stoic. “I adored my husband. We were so united. Everyone around us knew that. We lived for each other.”

  Following several days of testimony from fifty-eight witnesses, Maher was convicted of starting the fire that led to the two deaths and later sentenced to ten years in prison.

  In a public statement after Maher’s conviction in December 2002, Lily’s public relations team rushed out a press release that attempted to put the terrible events behind her, “Let us thank God for this moment when justice has been done: the guilty man has been punished and the full facts of that dreadful night exactly three years ago, which claimed the lives of my dear husband and his devoted nurse, have been laid bare for all to see.”

  But years after the end of the trial “the full facts” still remain elusive. Maher’s defense team recently called for a full investigation after the French press reported that the trial may have been fixed and that legal authorities had met beforehand to work out Maher’s conviction and sentencing.

  In itself, Maher’s trial raised more troubling questions than it answered: Why had the police and firefighters acted with such incompetence? Why had the servants and bodyguards
been given the night off? Why did none of the servants have keys to the apartment? Why had Safra decided to sell his bank a month before his death? Who had made the decision to hire Maher? Why did Monaco authorities refuse to conduct a thorough investigation of the events leading up to Safra’s death? Did Maher act alone?

  As the São Paulo branch of Safra’s family noted in their own competing and rather cryptic press statement following the verdict: “Those who were there at the scene on that fateful morning each know what they did and did not do. They must now live the rest of their lives with that knowledge.”

  The events of December 3, 1999, proved so intriguing that the legendary Vanity Fair magazine columnist Dominick Dunne noted six years later, “Some crime stories simply refuse to die, even after a trial and a guilty verdict.”

  But perhaps it was Ted Maher himself who would put it best: “This story is all about money, power, and corruption.”

  Just after six a.m. on that fateful Friday morning, Safra’s night nurse Vivian Torrente made what would be her final call to her boss Sonia Casiano Herkrath. By then the bathroom was filled with inky black smoke. Herkrath would recall that Torrente’s voice sounded strangely sleepy, her words garbled. Herkrath later told authorities that she knew that the nurse was on the verge of losing consciousness. She could also hear Safra coughing incessantly in the background. “I knew she was near the end,” Herkrath told Monagesque authorities. “The line went dead.”

  It would take firefighters another hour and a half to put out the blaze that had already killed Safra and his night nurse. When they finally managed to gain access to the fortress-like bathroom, they found Safra seated in an armchair and Torrente slumped on the floor behind him. Their nostrils were filled with soot which was as black as the trousers that Torrente was wearing. Their skin had turned greasy gray.

  Workers from the coroner’s office began to remove the bodies at 10:00 a.m. for transfer to the medical examiners’ office in Nice for the autopsies.

  In the drafty lobby of the Belle Epoque, a police officer sought out Lily to break the terrible news. Leaning on her daughter, Adriana, and son-in-law, Michel Elia, who had arrived moments earlier from their apartment nearby, she made her way to the penthouse. The firefighters and police officers who had fumbled for hours in their efforts to save Edmond could now do little more than bow their heads: Desolé, madame. Nos sinceres condoléances.

  A few weeks before her sixty-fifth birthday, Lily found herself a widow for the second time in her life. Like the first time, thirty years earlier, she also found herself in a uniquely privileged position. This time, the stakes were significantly higher and she would be described in the headlines that dogged her for years after Safra’s death as one of the richest widows in the world. Days after the untimely death of Edmond Safra, Lily, an heir to her husband’s immense banking fortune, received $3 billion from the sale of his bank. Coincidentally, a day before the fire, Monaco’s Prince Rainier had signed the papers making the Safra couple citizens of Monaco. Acquiring citizenship in the principality is a long and complicated affair unless you are personally invited by the Prince, as was the case with Lily and Edmond, who had wined and dined the Grimaldis for years with this specific end in sight. Citizenship ensured that the couple’s immense fortune would not be subject to any tax in the principality.

  In the more fashionable capitals of Europe and in New York, there was shock and sadness at the horrible turn of events in Monaco. Initially, there was also a great deal of sympathy for Lily.

  “I don’t know how she has coped with so many things that have happened in her life,” said Carlos Monteverde, Lily’s adopted son, who considered Safra “a second father.”

  How would she cope?

  Perhaps it was a question posed in the immediate aftermath of Safra’s death. Perhaps it occurred to the Monegasque police and firefighters as they glanced at Madame, forlorn and shivering in the lobby.

  “She is really the prettiest of women,” a society columnist had noted about Lily some years earlier. “In a land of giants it’s a pleasure to see someone who looks as though she’s made of porcelain.”

  But Lily Safra is made of much stronger stuff.

  In Rio de Janeiro, where family friends and acquaintances could still recall Lily as an upwardly mobile young woman in the 1950s with the single-minded goal of marrying a rich man, few people had any doubts about how she would cope without Safra.

  “I have always believed that Lily is a woman of great luck and fortune,” said Gastão Veiga, a family friend who had known Lily as a teenager and young adult in Rio de Janeiro. “Her life has always struck me as the plot of a great novel.”

  ONE

  “The Most Elegant Girl”

  GASTÃO VEIGA, WHO knew Lily as a teenager before her first marriage, said he wasn’t surprised that she had landed one of the richest men in Brazil before her thirtieth birthday. It was clear to him that the only daughter of Wolf White Watkins had been trained from an early age to marry up in the world. In the end, it didn’t seem to matter how many times she needed to walk down the aisle.

  “Lily was a social climber, it’s true,” said Veiga. “The Watkins family lived around the prospects of Lily marrying a wealthy man.”

  The Watkinses were well off by most standards, but they had fallen short of the wealth dreamed of by Wolf White Watkins, who had left his native London in his early twenties to seek his fortune in the wilds of South America. Wolf, an engineer by profession, settled first in Uruguay, where he met his future wife, Annita Noudelman de Castro. Annita, an Uruguayan of Russian-Jewish descent, was still a teenager when she married Wolf and became pregnant with the couple’s first child.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Jews escaping hardship and persecution in Europe had moved to the southern reaches of South America, most of them aided by the Jewish Colonization Association. The organization was founded by the Baron Maurice de Hirsch in 1891 to help Jews who were in danger of being targeted in anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe. The baron’s organization gave the mostly Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland a plot of land and helped each settler buy livestock and a horse in agricultural colonies in South America where they could practice their religion without fear of persecution.

  It’s not clear if the Noudelman family arrived in Uruguay under the Baron de Hirsch scheme, but for many Jews fleeing persecution in Europe, Uruguay was not a destination but merely a stopover on the way to more prosperous communities in Brazil or Argentina. Although there are records of Jewish settlement in the country dating back to the 1770s, the Jewish presence in Uruguay in the early twentieth century was negligible. There were fewer than two hundred Jews in the capital Montevideo in the early 1900s and the first synagogue in the country was only established there in 1917. Still, the government of the day seems to have been extremely tolerant of Jews. At the San Remo Conference in April 1920, a post–World War I meeting of the Allied Supreme Council to divide up the former Ottoman-controlled lands of the Middle East, Uruguay boldly supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

  Most of the Jews who decided to stay in Uruguay eventually gravitated to Montevideo, where they opened small businesses. The Noudelmans appear to have gone against the grain, settling in Rivera, a small frontier town in the northern part of the country, near the Brazilian border, where the small Jewish community worked as traders, gauchos, or farmers.

  It’s not clear how Wolf White Watkins ended up in Rivera, but it certainly wasn’t religion that drove him there. The twenty-three-year-old dreamer headed to the New World after the First World War because he wanted to strike it rich.

  “Watkins was a controversial figure,” said Veiga, a business associate in the 1940s and 1950s, who, in later years, imported luxury vehicles, such as Rolls Royce and MG, to Brazil. “He was mixed up with everything and he was determined to earn money. Whether it was clean or dirty, he didn’t care. The line in business that he followed was never straight.”

&nb
sp; Despite his fierce-sounding name, Wolf White Watkins was a slight, balding, and bespectacled man. The photo on his Brazilian identity card shows a rather mousy middle-aged man in a smart business suit who looks more like a mild-mannered accountant or school-teacher than a tough, enterprising businessman who traveled across the world to seek his fortune.

  In February 1919, Wolf and Annita, who were living in Rivera close to Annita’s family, decided to move to Sant’Ana do Livramento in Brazil. It’s not clear that they actually crossed a border since both Rivera and Sant’Ana do Livramento are twin cities with an undefined crossing. One could easily get lost in the outskirts of Rivera, only to find that he had unwittingly crossed the border into Brazil. In the early twentieth century, the region, marked by rolling hills, lush vineyards, and fruit trees, was a haven for smugglers, who could easily move contraband goods, such as petrol, tobacco, machinery, salted beef, leather, and precious metals, into Brazil and Argentina, where tariff barriers on imported goods were extremely high. Although Wolf’s expertise lay in the construction of railway carriages, like most enterprising frontier residents, he also tried his hand at smuggling, says Veiga.

  At some point, Wolf and his wife must have made the conscious decision to move to Brazil to start their family. Compared to rural Uruguay, which was at the time a sleepy agricultural backwoods, Brazil was turning into an economic powerhouse where the booming coffee trade was fueling rapid industrialization and attracting a steady stream of European immigrants who came in search of economic opportunities.

  Less than a year after the couple established themselves on the Brazilian side of the border in Sant’Ana, nineteen-year-old Annita gave birth to the first of the couple’s four children. Rodolpho Watkins was born in Sant’Ana do Livramento on January 1, 1920. His brother Daniel was born a year later.

  The Watkins family’s next move, in 1922, was to Porto Alegre, a relatively prosperous city of German and Italian immigrants where most afternoons gauchos in capes and faded cowboy hats gathered around the central plaza to share a gourd of maté, the strong herbal tea which is a staple in the Southern Cone. Porto Alegre, which was 250 miles away from Sant’Ana, was also becoming an important center of Jewish settlement, and by the time Annita and Wolf moved to the city, Ashkenazi Jews were beginning to settle in the Bom Fim neighborhood, a middle-class enclave dotted by kosher slaughterhouses and other Jewish businesses. In 1928, their third son, Artigas, was born in Porto Alegre. He may have been named in honor of General Jose Gervasio Artigas, the nineteenth-century hero of Uruguay’s independence movement. Wolf must have felt a special bond with the long-deceased general because both of them began their professional lives as smugglers on the Brazilian border.