Gilded Lily (35 page)

With her imperious manner and drawling upper-class Jamaican accent, Lady Colin is a towering and rather intimidating society blonde who is afraid of no one. Born with a genital disfigurement to a wealthy Jamaican family in 1949, Lady Colin was christened George William Ziadie and raised a boy. When she was twenty-one, she had corrective surgery. She married Lord Colin Campbell, a brother of the Duke of Argyll, in 1974 and divorced him a year later, but held on to the title.

Empress Bianca
, Lady Colin's first novel, was not supposed to garner any of the worldwide publicity that it received when it was quietly released in Britain in June 2005, but that was before Lily's society friends read the book and were convinced that it was a thinly disguised roman à clef about her life. Lady Colin is best known for her best-selling tell-all biographies of Diana, Princess of Wales. Known as Georgie to her friends, she argued that
Empress Bianca
was based on one of her cousins and had little or nothing to do with Lily. But the
argument may have seemed unconvincing to Lily, especially as Lady Colin's book was dedicated to the memory of Rosy's daughter Christina Fanto, Lily's niece during her marriage to Alfredo Monteverde.

In
Empress Bianca
, the central character, Bianca Barnett, is “a veritable monster of vanity and pretension” and “the most ambitious and mercenary person.” She hails from South America, has three children by her first husband, and loses her beloved first son in a tragic car crash. Her second husband, Ferdy Piedraplata, is shot by a hitman who makes the death look like a suicide. The hit is organized by Bianca's lover, a Middle Eastern banker named Philippe Mahfoud, who eventually becomes her fourth husband.

“In life, circumstances sometimes force people to do things they normally wouldn't do,” says Philippe to Bianca as he outlines the plan to kill Ferdy soon after Ferdy threatens to divorce her. Philippe enlists a member of the Gambino crime family to carry out the murder in the victim's home in a luxe suburb of the Venezuelan capital Caracas.

The murder further unites Bianca and Philippe, who eventually marry after Bianca divorces her third husband—an interior designer—whom she marries to make Philippe jealous. But years after the murder, relations sour between Philippe and Bianca. Philippe and one of his nurses die in a mysterious blaze in his apartment in Andorra, a tax haven nestled in the Pyrenees between Spain and France. “When police finally managed to cut through, they found Philippe and Agatha sitting on the floor…Both were dead. Asphyxiated.”

In the novel, police and investigators are paid off by Bianca's highly organized team of lawyers and financiers. Frustrated at the complete absence of justice for her crimes, Bianca's enemies decide to fight her where they know it will hurt the most—in the court of high society. “Wherever she goes and whatever she does, she will know that a healthy proportion of the people around her will either despise her or laugh at her,” writes Lady Colin. “All her money, all the influence she has so avidly courted, the people she has just as avidly cultivated and all the manipulations to which she will resort in the future are
powerless to bring this punishment to an end. As long as she exists, Bianca now clearly understands, so will it. And the thought of it starts tearing slowly away at her insides.”

On July 3, 2005, the
Sunday Telegraph
published an account of
Empress Bianca
. A day later, Lily hired high-powered London lawyer Anthony Julius of the prestigious London firm Mischon de Reya. Julius, who had previously represented Princess Diana in her divorce from Prince Charles, demanded a retraction and apology from the editors of the
Sunday Telegraph
.

The apology was swift, appearing soon after the article. “It was never our intention to suggest that the actions attributed to the fictional character had been carried out by Mrs. Safra in reality,” read the newspaper's groveling apology. “We understand that our linking of Mrs. Safra's name with that of the novel's central character has greatly upset her. We very much regret this and apologize unreservedly to Mrs. Safra for any embarrassment caused.”

Had Lily read the book?

“I believe that Mrs. Safra read part of the book,” said Mark Bolland, Lily's public relations consultant, in a sworn statement. “I understand that she was unable to read any further because she was so distressed by the contents. I believe her advisers also read part of the book.”

Bolland, a former public relations adviser to the Prince of Wales, noted that it was his job to promote Lily's charities, protect her privacy, and “keep her out of the papers.” Presumably, Bolland meant only the newspapers that refused to kowtow to Lily, and not the society press where she loved to appear.

But not content to focus on the newspapers, Lily turned against the book's London publisher. On July 12, 2005, Lady Colin Campbell's publisher Bliss Books, a subsidiary of Arcadia Books, received a stern letter from Julius. The letter said that “Mrs. Safra regarded the book as defamatory” and wanted it removed from distribution and pulped. It spelled out seventeen direct parallels between the lives of the char
acter Bianca Barnett and herself. Julius gave Arcadia Books five days to respond.

Gary Pulsifer, the publisher of Arcadia Books, moved quickly to withdraw all unsold copies of the book and destroy them. “Our investors want us to settle now, which we'll do,” said Pulsifer. “If Georgie takes it further—sounds like she will—it will be interesting to see who steps into what witness box.” Lily settled with Arcadia on July 25, 2005, after the publisher agreed to destroy all copies of the book.

Lady Colin turned the tables on Lily, suing her on the grounds that she was depriving the author of her income and foreign sales of the book, which she defended as a work of fiction based on a distant relative of her own.

“Lily tried to misuse the laws and then I used them against her,” said Lady Colin. “I'm an experienced litigant, so I sued her when Arcadia shut down.”

In the early days of the controversy, when the book was released in London, Lily's friends and foes snapped it up before the ban. A Brazilian woman close to the story ordered eighty copies of the book and had them anonymously distributed to Lily's highly placed society friends, including Nancy Reagan. A handful of copies that survived the pulping were available on eBay for nearly $1,000 a copy.

The lawsuit against Lily turned into a Mexican standoff, but Lady Colin did win back the right to rerelease her book in the U.S., provided that she make the seventeen changes demanded by Lily. These proved to be relatively minor.

“She objected to the fact that Bianca's fourth husband was Lebanese, so I have made him Iraqi,” said Lady Colin. “In fact, the character was partly based on my own father, who was Lebanese. On the advice of my lawyer, I changed everything that Mrs. Safra objected to.”

In late summer 2008, Lady Colin, impeccably coiffed and elegantly dressed, hosted a group of friends and fans who sipped white wine
and munched on hors d'oeuvres at her Manhattan book launch, which took place at a tony Upper East Side bookshop.

One of Lady Colin's biggest fans turned out to be Ted Maher himself, who read a copy of her book during his last year in prison. He also maintained a correspondence with the grande dame, who publicly stated that she felt he was made a scapegoat by the Monaco authorities, that he was wrongly convicted, and that the real story behind the events of December 3, 1999, has never been properly investigated.

Her claims were unexpectedly bolstered by one of the investigating judges in the Maher case. Jean Christophe Hullin told the French newspaper
Le Figaro
in June 2007 that before Ted's trial in Monaco he had attended a meeting with other high-ranking Monaco officials to discuss Ted. Hullin told a journalist that he had met with Monaco's chief prosecutor and that they had allegedly agreed that Maher would get ten years in jail. His comments have led to an investigation in Monaco, but there is no word on when and if any report will ever be released.

In a rare outburst, Lily lashed out at the allegations that the trial had been fixed. For her, the whole ordeal had come to an end when Ted was convicted and sent to jail. Why did everything need to be rehashed now, some five years later? No doubt this was just more nonsense from “journalists who have nothing better to do,” as she had noted in her testimony at Ted's trial when she was confronted by the results of the autopsy report that seemed to suggest Edmond might have caused Vivian's death.

“To say the trial of the one who murdered her husband was fixed, it's totally unbearable to her,” said Marc Bonnant, in an interview with the
New York Post
. “Monaco is not a barbarian country. You can't fix trials in Europe.”

According to Bonnant, Lily had suffered “years of sorrow and days of despair” since Edmond's death. “Her life is not only made of roses. When you love somebody, the money doesn't make up for
their loss. Nothing will heal her wounds. Nothing will take away her pain.”

The pain must have returned with a vengeance when Ted Maher was released from jail in the summer of 2007, returning to the United States in the fall. He had spent more than eight years in jail (he was incarcerated shortly after Edmond's funeral) for a crime that he claims he did not commit, and he was angry. Once he stepped onto American soil, Ted told reporters that he had been nothing more than a scapegoat—he had been convicted in order to keep up Monaco's appearance as a safe playground for the rich and famous. He still insisted that two intruders broke into the apartment the night that Edmond died, but there were new elements to his story. Now he spoke about being accosted in Nice a week before the penthouse fire. He now claimed that two gun-toting thugs abducted him off a street in Nice and showed him photographs of his wife in Stormville and his children leaving school.

“He was threatened, and pictures were shown to him by these people of his children coming out of school, and his wife coming out of work,” said Michael Griffith, the American lawyer for Ted, who had originally been appointed to the case through Amnesty International. Griffith, a fast-talking Southhampton-based attorney, rose to fame in the 1970s when he represented Billy Hayes, an American student convicted of smuggling hashish out of Turkey in 1970 and the subject of the Hollywood film
Midnight Express
. Since then, he has specialized in helping Americans who find themselves in legal difficulties abroad through his firm, International Legal Defense Counsel.

On December 3, 1999, those same thugs penetrated the Safra penthouse through an open window, said Ted. He tried to fight them, whacking one of the assailants in the head with a barbell that he used for workouts with Edmond. The second one sliced Ted in the left calf and in the stomach.

As the intruders fled through the open window, Ted frantically warned Edmond and Vivian, who told him to set off the alarm. Ted
didn't know how, and so he lit a fire with one of Harry Slatkin's scented candles in the Lucite wastebasket in the nurses' station to set off the fire alarm.

“The only alarm that I knew of was a smoke alarm,” said Ted.

Although Ted had four lawyers defending him in Monaco, there seemed little coordination or perceptible strategy in his legal defense, especially as Griffith was denied access to his client two weeks before the trial began in late November 2002. Ted's defense was also hampered by profound disagreements among his legal team. One of his attorneys, Donald Manasse, didn't want Michael Baden, the U.S. forensics expert, to testify at the trial because he thought his testimony would not benefit Ted. “Accusing the victim of having murdered someone would not play favorably on the defense,” said Manasse, citing the autopsy report that showed Vivian Torrente had bruises on her body. Manasse also said that Griffith did not appreciate the complexities of the Monaco legal system.

Although Griffith concedes that there are “problems” with Ted's multiple versions of events on December 3, 1999, he still maintains that Ted did not stab himself and that he was indeed the victim of armed intruders.

Griffith, who is used to being at the center of gripping international cases involving socialites, murder, and intrigue, confided that Monaco was a difficult place to be a lawyer. His phones, he says, were constantly tapped, and the legal system is overly complex and Byzantine. He sees Ted's predicament as a violation of human rights, and was planning to take his case to the International Court of Justice.

But the press was no longer interested in the story of Ted Maher's innocence or guilt, even as NBC's
Inside Edition
devoted an hour of prime time in the spring of 2008 to Ted's latest version of events, which now involved high-stakes intrigue with mobsters who wanted Edmond Safra dead.

Following his ordeal in Monaco, Maher's return to the U.S. was a lot less glamorous, a lot less remarkable, even though there were mo
ments of some excitement. Ted spoke of his ordeal to his American legal team, literary agents, and, surprisingly, a representative from the Monaco tourist authority, who all gathered at an upscale Midtown Chinese eatery off Park Avenue to welcome Ted back to the United States in the spring of 2008. Ted was hoping to write a book about his adventures in Monaco, and had even floated the idea to a well-placed literary agent in New York. But in the end, no one was interested in his story, which strained belief and had already been exhaustively told by much of the world's media.

Despite his experience as a nurse, Ted was finding it difficult to find a job. “I went to interviews where they said I had more experience than ten nurses, but then I would get a letter saying I needed more experience, which is why I stopped telling people what happened to me in Monaco.”

But even a decade after the fact, it's difficult to hide your identity if you were at the center of the mysterious death of one of the world's wealthiest bankers. A simple Google search of Ted's name provides instant information about his involvement with Edmond Safra.