Gilded Lily (31 page)

This at any rate was the first version of the story that Ted told the authorities. The second was far more sinister and warped, and it's the one that Monegasque authorities decided to stick with at all costs. In this version of events, an eager Ted set the fire to impress his boss—to create a situation where he would be seen as a savior, like the heroic American military men and women buried at West Point. If the loyal nurse came to his rescue, Edmond would reward him handsomely and elevate him to his rightful place—as the head of the billionaire's nursing detail. Ted was a quick judge of character, and in the few short weeks that he worked in Monaco, he observed Edmond's weak
ness: He knew that Edmond was obsessed with security and terrified of an attack. So he played on Edmond's fears to get what he wanted. It would be a harmless little charade, and it couldn't help but yield large returns. But in the early hours of December 3, 1999, things went badly awry.

Still, no one in the Safra household could have imagined what Ted had in store. Perhaps Ted himself didn't quite know. In any case, no one seems to have suspected that anything was amiss. On December 2, Lily returned from a trip to London, where she had gone for the opening of the Royal Opera House. Edmond had paid to restore it, and Lily attended the lavish party on December 1 with Adriana and her granddaughter Lily. She returned to Monte Carlo the following evening in time to have dinner with her husband, who eagerly awaited her arrival. “We kissed each other,” recalled Lily of the last time she saw her husband alive. “We said a prayer together, as we did every evening, and I went to my apartment.”

On the way back to Lily's suite of rooms, which comprised a separate wing in the apartment, Lily nearly collided with Ted in the hallway outside her husband's room. “This evening,” he told her, “you are going to sleep very well.” If the comment disturbed her, she decided not to say. She just chalked it up to Ted's strange sense of humor and wasn't to remember it again until hours later, as she sat shivering in the lobby of the building, waiting for her daughter and son-in-law to arrive.

According to the original indictment, Ted waited until he was well into his night shift before putting his bizarre plan in motion. He took a knife he had brought with him and stabbed himself in the abdomen after applying a local anesthetic. He then alerted Edmond and the Filipino night nurse Vivian Torrente that there were hooded intruders in the penthouse, and that they needed to barricade themselves in Edmond's room. No doubt, Vivian and Edmond saw the frantic nurse bleeding from his self-inflicted wound and were terrified. Vivian urged him to sound the alarm, but Ted claimed he didn't know
how the elaborate security system worked. In an effort to summon the authorities and increase the air of danger, Ted lit a fire in a Lucite wastebasket at the nursing station next to Edmond's bedroom, and Vivian tried to calm a groggy Edmond, who had been so medicated before he fell asleep that he had trouble waking up.

It's unclear whether Ted was aware of the irony of using one of Harry Slatkin's perfumed candles to light the fire. After all, it was Slatkin's camera that had resulted in the best job in his life. Perhaps now it would be the dripping wax from Slatkin's candle that would seal his success. Or his doom.

It's also not clear what went through his head as he raced towards the fifth-floor service elevator and down to the lobby of the building, where he dripped blood on the marble floor and alerted the night watchman Patrick Picquenot that the Safras were in grave danger. Upstairs, a terrified Edmond and Vivian locked themselves into Edmond's bathroom bunker to wait for help, which would come too late.

But while Ted may have put the tragic events in motion, it was the bungling of the Monaco police and fire departments that would seal Edmond and Vivian's fates. Police and firefighters acted like a bunch of Keystone cops in a silent film comedy. Before heading to the penthouse where a fire was raging, authorities dispatched emergency workers to comb the several floors of parking that lay under the beaux-arts building to make sure the suspects were not waiting to attack again. The fire department, which sent fifty-five men to contain the blaze, did not communicate with the police department; each spoke on different radio channels, and there was little effort to coordinate their activities. At one point, a group of firefighters were ordered to tackle the fire from the nearby Hermitage, a luxury five-star hotel. They dragged their dusty hoses through the lobby and one of the restaurants of the magnificent hotel, startling a group of late-night revelers as they returned to their rooms. Later, when a different group of firefighters finally arrived in Edmond's bedroom, they
couldn't find Edmond and Vivian because the bathroom door was invisible, designed to be part of the decoration of the room. One of the firefighters refused to help extinguish the blaze when he was ordered to the roof of the Hermitage: “I'm not going over there,” he said. “I have a fear of heights.”

Ironically, Monaco's reputation for safety ended up killing one of its most security-obsessed residents. Unaccustomed to dealing with a violent emergency, the authorities stumbled through a bizarre real-life farce that in the end proved deadly serious.

The moment they received the emergency call at 4:50 a.m., the concern of law enforcement officials became the safety of their own members, not saving those trapped inside the penthouse. As Maurice Albertin, Monaco's chief of police, noted, “It must be kept in mind that Ted Maher had specified to the first police officer on the scene that there were masked men,” he said. “With this description, we knew we were confronted with an aggression. We can understand why they [the police] had to make the apartment secure before enabling the firemen to tackle the fire.”

Jean-Yves Gambarini, another officer on the scene, remarked that his men had to bar the exits and “collect as much information as possible” before intervening. “I think the operation was carried out correctly in the circumstances,” he said. “Unfortunately, what happened happened, but that's not our fault.” Another police officer noted that it was the first time in his career that he had arrived on a job armed with three weapons, ammunition, and a bulletproof vest. “It was the first time in my life I've come so heavily armed. I thought there was an aggression.”

On the surface, everything appeared to be stacked up against the would-be saviors of Edmond Safra and Vivian Torrente, including the elaborate interior design of the apartment. “Aesthetics were more important than safety arrangements,” said Henri Viellard, a fire safety expert who testified at Ted's trial. “Once the fire got going it was totally impossible to operate the blinds.” Moreover, fire alarms
were not working, emergency doors were locked tight, and the apartment had no emergency sprinklers. In the end, it took security forces three hours to cover the thirty-foot distance between the fire and the bodies.

“The duration of the intervention of the emergency services was abnormally long for a limited-scale fire,” noted Viellard and fellow expert Ghislaine Reiss. “The police and fire brigade had delayed taking into account the information provided by the two fire protection services, the police having favored the implausible scenario of attack.”

The apartment had been clearly designed to keep people out, but not for escape. Authorities sent to save one of the world's most important bankers were confronted with a double bunker outfitted with bulletproof doors and state-of-the-art locks.

Strangely, none of the Safra bodyguards were on duty in Monaco. Lily testified that she had dispensed with the bodyguards in September, almost immediately after construction was completed on the apartment's new security system. The improved security measures were based on Edmond's system in Geneva, and installed under consultation with HSBC's security experts. “The Safras felt very secure in Monaco,” said Samuel Cohen. “They often said, ‘What can happen here? It's the most secure place in the world.'”

But sources close to Edmond dispute this version of events. They say that guards continued to be posted at the apartment despite the enhanced security system. On the morning of the fire all the guards were at La Leopolda.

At Ted's trial, Cohen complained about interference with his security arrangements. “Any system of security cannot defend or protect from an inside problem,” he said. “If there was a guard in the apartment, Ted Maher would not have had the courage to do what he did.”

Perhaps the Safras regretted their decision to rely solely on their state-of-the-art electronic security system. Did this decision cross her mind when she was startled awake by the ringing telephone just
before 5:00 a.m.? “
Chérie
, there are aggressors in the house,” said Edmond, in a state of panic. “They have injured Ted. Close yourself in and call the police.”

Lily immediately dialed Cohen, who had been stationed at La Leopolda since September, and who was already speeding towards Monaco after receiving an earlier call from the police. It was when she got out of bed and rushed to her dressing room that she noticed the smoke under the lampshades for the first time. “Then suddenly, the blinds opened by themselves but only to the level of the railing,” she said. Lily tried to pry the shutters upward but it was of little use; they were stuck. The phone rang again. “Have you closed yourself in?” asked Edmond. “Have you called the police and Cohen?”

In the pitch darkness before dawn, Lily peered through the opening of the blinds and noticed the policeman on the roof of the Hermitage across the way. “Get out, Madame, get out straight away,” he shouted. Lily struggled to open the shutters wider, but eventually ended up crawling through the small opening to reach the balcony outside her room.

“I don't know how I got out but I did it,” she said. “I walked a bit and found myself on a large terrace which was part of the apartment.” Lily gingerly made her way along the balcony and hurried down the back stairs of the apartment. “Flames were coming out of the window of the nurses' station,” she said. “Police told me go down please. I was taken to the service staircase. They said ‘hurry up' but nobody came with me.”

Moments after Edmond called Lily on the phone Ted had left with him, Vivian called her boss Sonia. She told her that Ted was bleeding and there were intruders in the apartment. Sonia immediately called the police. Jean-Marc Farca, brigadier chief of police in Monaco, spoke to Edmond forty minutes later. “He was in quite a panicky state,” the police chief recalled. “He said someone had been attacked with an axe and they were in trouble. I told him the police were there. I asked him to go out on to the staircase, that there were police there.
He wanted to go out but he was very frightened. Then he spoke to me about the smoke.”

The smoke seeped through under the bathroom door. Edmond, shaking uncontrollably from the effects of his disease and utter fear, urged Vivian to continue calling for help, but he refused to leave the bathroom, still fearing the shadowy intruders—sinister men he imagined to be Muslim terrorists or Russian mobsters bent on revenge after Edmond had given evidence about Russian money laundering. Farca again spoke to Edmond to convince him to open the door, but “Mr. Safra's fear was obvious and took away part of his reasoning.”

Vivian repeatedly called Sonia, who at one point instructed her to place wet towels on the ground to absorb the smoke. In the background, Sonia could hear Edmond coughing incessantly, and worried they were near the end. “Sonia, it's so dark in here,” said Vivian. “I'm feeling dizzy.”

In the lobby, where dozens of police and firemen were milling about, waiting for orders, the Safras' butler, Raul Manjate, rushed into the melee waving a set of keys to the apartment. He rushed up and down the stairs several times offering authorities his keys, but no one paid attention to him. At one point, police detained him. “I kept asking if I could go in,” he said. “I had the keys. I knew exactly where he was. I said I was willing to die for my boss. They said I wasn't there to die and that there were two armed people in there who could come out and shoot.”

Cohen instinctively felt there were no intruders in the apartment when he received the frantic call from Monaco police. But it was enough that his boss was in danger, and he rushed over from La Leopolda to help the authorities. But as soon as he arrived, he was detained by police. It would take him a desperate twenty minutes to explain himself to the authorities, who did not want to let him upstairs.

“Before I showed them my passport,
rien à faire
, I'm sitting on the floor, handcuffed,” recalled Cohen. “Nothing happened. Nothing moved.”

Police officer Bruno Bouery was the gatekeeper, and he had orders to prevent anyone from going into the apartment until police were certain it was safe. Which is why he later admitted that he detained Cohen and refused to listen to what he was saying.

“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.”