Gilded Lily (28 page)

According to Fairchild, Nouvelles, a category in which he included the Safras, the Trumps, the Gettys, the Kravises, and the Taubmans, among others, were fond of “elaborate decorations and period furniture in gargantuan apartments, regal entertaining with flowers flown in from England, travel by private jet or on the Concorde, and couture clothes at prices high enough to build a small summer cottage.”

As Edmond himself noted in an exchange with Fairchild, “When I give Lily a dollar, Lily spends two dollars,” he said. “That's our one big problem in the world today. We are all spending money we don't really have.” In
Chic Savages
, Fairchild describes dining in Rome
with the Safras at an elegant dinner hosted by the designer Valentino in his extravagantly decorated palazzo on the Appian Way—itself a prime example of the decadent 1980s with its pool “grand enough for an Esther Williams production number” and its garden “straight out of Ben Hur.” Lily had just finished buying her wardrobe for the season from Valentino, and told Fairchild that she was heading back to New York—“my favorite place,” she confided. “It is the capital of the world.” Or, as Fairchild puts it, “the capital of Nouvelle Society.”

Fairchild recalled other Safra soirees in their many homes. “When Nouvelles eat, it's a formal affair,” he recalled. “Petrus, one of the most expensive of the French Bordeaux, flows like water, and the caviar is heaped up. Banker Edmond Safra and his wife, Lily, served so much caviar at one of their dinners that a guest—who shall remain nameless—dispensed with the toast points altogether and called for a spoon, to go after double helpings of the ‘Iranian gold.' At leave-taking, each guest was presented with an exquisite ivory picture frame.”

At another party, Lily, ever generous with her friends, gave each of the women a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes, which typically retail for more than $500 a pair.

Others recalled absurd conversations between Edmond and Lily.

“Darling, I bought you an airplane today,” said Edmond, in a conversation overheard by one of their good friends in Rio. According to the friend, Lily then went on to question whether Edmond had made the right choice in his airplane purchase, enumerating the attributes of the latest model Gulfstream that had just come on the market.

According to Fairchild, the old money families “disparage the Nouvelles behind their backs but never turn down one of their invitations”—especially when the party favors are so luxurious.

But at times the experience of dining with the Safras could be unnerving, especially after Edmond decided that the family needed a small army of bodyguards to protect them. “The number of bodyguards probably outnumbers the guests,” quipped one Riviera resi
dent when describing a flurry of “intimate” dinners—no more than forty guests at a time—that the couple hosted shortly after buying and renovating La Leopolda.

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 confi
dence 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.”