Gilded Lily (36 page)

Ted says he is determined to bury the past and to try to get on with his life. “Why should I stick a knife in my heart by telling the truth about what happened to me?” he said. “I've already been stabbed enough.”

When he was interviewed for this book, Ted Maher was living in a trailer and having trouble holding onto his job at the Fountainview Care Center, a nursing home in Waterford, Connecticut, after staff members got wind that he was the American nurse at the center of the Safra scandal. After a few days of working at the Waterford facility, where he was managing seventy-five people, his bosses saw his story on NBC. Ted's protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears in an emergency meeting with upper management at the nursing home. How could they have a convicted arsonist on the staff of a long-term care facility for the elderly? A few days after the meeting at the Fountainview, Ted was fired, despite Griffith's entreaties with the man
agers of the facility. Although he was a convicted felon in Monaco, Ted's record was relatively clean in the United States.

“America has turned out to be another prison,” said Ted, his deep blue eyes flashing in anger. During his first few months in the United States, Ted was convinced that he was being followed by shadowy figures.

Following his return, Ted was prevented by court order from seeing his children in Stormville, whose names had been changed after the divorce from Heidi was finalized in 2006 while he was still in jail. He was arrested by Poughkeepsie police in August 2007 when he ignored a restraining order and tried to see his children. “I came by the area that I knew to be my life,” he said. “I was pulled over and put in jail for twenty-four hours because of the restraining order against me.” The bail was set at $5,000, which was paid for by Ted's sister Tammy, who remains close to him.

Still, despite the difficulties, he seemed optimistic, quoting his hero Teddy Roosevelt—“You do what you can with what you have where you are”—and working on completing his pilot's license.

“Things aren't so bad in my life,” said Ted. “I'm not working at Burger King. I'm not fearful of anything in my life after what I've been through. I can do anything that I put my mind to.”

Still, he lives for the day when he can clear his name and get revenge against authorities in Monaco, who “robbed me of 2,886 days of my life.”

But the more Ted spoke, the more his stories sounded like fantasy. Which was a good thing for both Lily Safra and the authorities in her new country of citizenship, Monaco.

R
IO DE JANEIRO'S
most prestigious Jewish cemetery is located off Avenida Brasil, a potholed stretch of highway that passes through myriad shantytowns and decaying suburban warehouses. It's a large, sunbaked plot of concrete where the graves are arranged in orderly rows. The tropical heat and torrential afternoon downpours in summer have dislodged the concrete in many places, and tough weeds—some of them dotted with colorful flowers—shoot through the cracks.

Except for Edmond Safra, who is buried in Geneva, many of the most important people in Lily Safra's life are buried here at the cemetery everyone calls Caju, after the cashew trees that used to grow in the outlying district where the cemetery is located.

There is Wolf White Watkins, Lily's father, whose remains occupy plot number 40. Wolf died in Montevideo in 1962, but he is buried in the Rio suburbs—an appropriate choice, perhaps, because it was in those same suburbs that he finally made at least part of the fortune he had dreamed about as a young man in London. What he didn't know was that the fame and fortune he so craved in his own life would be the legacy taken up by his youngest child—the beloved daughter he
had named after his favorite opera star and pushed to marry a rich man. Lily married two rich men, and in the end she amassed a fortune beyond her father's wildest dreams.

Lily's mother, Annita Watkins, managed to get a glimpse of what her very able daughter was capable of doing. She died in 1971 in Rio de Janeiro, two years after Lily inherited Alfredo Monteverde's fabulous fortune and moved to London to protect her interests. Annita is buried nearby, in plot number 424. There are several stones on her grave—no doubt remembrances from “her children, son-in-law, daughters-in-law, cousins and nieces and nephews,” who are mentioned in the inscription carved into the stone.

A short way away lie the remains of Wolf and Annita's second son, Daniel. He died of a heart attack in March 2002, unable to enjoy the new apartment he had just bought with his wife, Malvina, across the street from the imperial palace—the summer home of the Brazilian royal family—in Petropolis, a picturesque town nestled in the mountains outside Rio. Malvina lives alone in the apartment overlooking the palace. She refused repeated requests to be interviewed for this book.

Daniel, who was born in 1921, had always been close to Lily even though he was thirteen years older. It was Daniel who was designated as Lily's caretaker. He signed her school reports at the Colegio Anglo-Americano in Rio de Janeiro and pledged that the family would take care of the school's tuition fees. Later, when Lily was an adult, Daniel was charged with all those unpleasant tasks that Lily was perhaps too sensitive to handle on her own. He identified Alfredo Monteverde's body at the Rio morgue and signed the death certificate. It was Daniel who was an important witness when Alfredo made his last will and testament in 1966, and it was Daniel who was named trustee and guardian of Carlinhos in the event of the deaths of both Alfredo and Lily.

Artigas Watkins is also buried at Caju. Artigas, who was six years older than Lily, died in Teresopolis, a mountain town outside Rio
where he had a condo, on November 14, 2006. Everyone knew he was close to Alfredo—especially Alfredo's accountants, who were regularly asked to set aside envelopes stuffed with cash for him. To be sure, he was a bona fide employee of Ponto Frio, working as a security guard at one of the company's warehouses in the industrial outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. But Artigas may have made far more than any other security guard in the city. He was constantly at the Ponto Frio offices in downtown Rio or at the house on Rua Icatu. Like his younger sister, Artigas had an appetite for money that seemed insatiable, and he stuck close to Alfredo, who never denied him cash. Lily's imminent divorce from his benefactor no doubt gave him pause. Was he worried about his own future when he heard that Alfredo was planning to divorce his sister? What would happen to him and the rest of the Watkins family without the regular cash infusions from Ponto Frio?

“Artigas practically lived at the office asking Fred for money,” said Vera Chvidchenko, Alfredo's secretary from 1960 to 1969. “He was very able when he needed money.”

Was it by accident or design that Artigas was at his brother-in-law's home on August 25, 1969, the day he died? According to one of the servants, nobody quite knows what he was doing there that day. Perhaps he needed cash. In any case, he seems to have slipped out before someone fired the two gunshots that killed Alfredo and shattered the stillness of that August afternoon.

Near the entrance of the cemetery, Lily's eldest son, Claudio Cohen, is buried with little Raphael Cohen, her grandson, who died in the car crash on the highway to Angra dos Reis. There are a handful of rocks on the white headstone, perhaps indicating the regular visits of mourners.

Nearby is the grave of Claudio's wife, Evelyne Sigelmann Cohen, whose young son Gabriel effectively became Lily's charge after his mother's death. Evelyne, who worked so diligently to ensure the best for her little boy before her own death, would surely be proud of the young man who is now enrolled in a good East Coast university. Per
haps she would even have found it in her heart to forgive Lily for taking him away from Antonio Negreiros, the man who had become the most important person in her life following Claudio and Raphael's deaths in 1989.

 

IN THE END
, Lily managed to obtain a measure of revenge for the tragedy that befell her eldest son and his family when she fired Simon Alouan from Ponto Frio. Alouan, who is today one of the most successful businessmen in São Paulo, refused to sell his shares in Ponto Frio, and for many years after he left the company, he remained an important fixture in the appliance empire that Alfredo created—a thorn in Lily's side when she tried to sell the company with Carlos in 1998.

At the time, Lily approached Carlos, who was recovering from his terrible accident in Italy, to convince him to join her in the sale. Carlos had endured a difficult relationship with Lily after the death of Alfredo. In an interview at his five-story townhouse in South Kensington, he recently admitted for the first time that he blamed himself for Alfredo's death. It was nine-year-old Carlos who first discovered the body on the afternoon of August 25, 1969, and the event clearly left him traumatized.

“I thought his [Alfredo's] death was my fault, and I thought I was being punished by being sent to boarding school,” said Carlos. “I spent my adolescence with psychologists.”

He was also extremely upset by Edmond's death, thirty years later. “Since I was thirteen years old, he was my second father,” said Carlos, whose relationship with Edmond effectively ended after he married a Muslim in the late 1980s.

Despite Carlos's rather dangerous hobby of collecting and racing vintage Ferraris, the Monteverdes lead a fairly quiet life with their two daughters in London. Isis, a former model, lives the life of a moneyed socialite. She takes art and exercise classes and attends fabulous
parties. Every New Year's Eve, the family heads to Mauritius to celebrate with their society friends Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, famed interior designer Nicky Haswell, and the Picassos.

According to Isis, Lily, whom she refers to formally as Madame Safra, has been a very good grandmother to her two girls. “I respect her,” said Isis about her mother-in-law. “But my family is me, Carlos, the girls and that's it.”

But there's nothing like a business opportunity to bring families back together. Since Alouan sold his minority shares in Ponto Frio two years ago, Lily has been eager to sell her part in the company. In March 2009, she again teamed up with her stepson to sell their combined interests in the company. Despite a worldwide recession, Lily and Carlos managed to sell Ponto Frio in June 2009 to Brazilian supermarket magnate Abilio dos Santos Diniz for just over $400 million.

Perhaps it wasn't the best deal they could have made for Alfredo's old company, but they must have felt a sense of relief to see it go. For years, Carlos admitted he had only a passing interest in his father's old company. “Sometimes I call to find out about the business, but my big preoccupation is to strengthen the foundation, extending the primary education component,” he said in an interview. “It's my way of contributing to my country.”

Maria Consuelo Ayres, the first employee Alfredo hired when he started Globex in 1946, managed that foundation until her death in February 2009. The nonagenarian secretary was in charge of the Alfredo João Monteverde Foundation, the philanthropic organization he set up for the company's workers, providing them with health care, educational opportunities, and recreation for their families. Today, the foundation helps more than nine thousand of the company's employees spread out over 370 stores throughout Brazil.

Maria Consuelo was extremely loyal to Alfredo, but she was a corporate survivor, and after his death, when she saw that Lily was firmly in charge of the company, Maria Consuelo toed the line. She
helped organize Alfredo's funeral, looking the other way when Geraldo Mattos was forced to make certain financial “contributions” to avoid undue scrutiny and publicity. Still, Maria Consuelo was clearly conflicted in her old age. She never believed that Alfredo really would have killed himself, but she could not contemplate any other scenario.

So she continued to show her devotion to Alfredo by working diligently at the foundation. She also sought to protect Carlos's interests in Brazil. She held his power of attorney in the country and represented him at Ponto Frio board meetings that he was too busy to attend. For years, she tried to track down information about Carlos's birth family in Rio.

“Maybe if you find them, I can help them in some way,” Carlos had told her. But the task was simply too complicated even for the very able Maria Consuelo. By the end of the custody trials in Brazil and England in the early 1970s, Maria Consuelo had tracked down several birth certificates for Carlos.

To show their respect for her loyal services, Ponto Frio executives provided Maria Consuelo with a company car and driver, who would pick her up every day from her apartment in northern Rio and take her to Ponto Frio's suburban offices. Maria Consuelo, a heavyset woman whose girth caused her to take pained, deliberate steps, worked at the company until her death at ninety-two. She needed the job, she said, because she was the sole support of her younger sister, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

Today, Maria Consuelo lies in the Catholic cemetery adjacent to the old Jewish burial ground at Caju. Her remains lie in a vault in a high-rise tower, an ingenious effort on the part of cemetery directors to accommodate as many people as possible.

Despite all her hard work for Ponto Frio, few of the company's top executives attended her funeral or memorial mass in Rio de Janeiro. Only the old Ponto Frio accountant, Ademar Trotte, now an elderly man who manages his own firm on gritty Avenida Venezuela across
from the federal police building in downtown Rio, attended the funeral along with Conrado Gruenbaum, Alfredo's old attorney.

With Maria Consuelo's passing, Conrado is the last of the old guard at Ponto Frio. Alfredo brought him into the company in 1957. Now well into his seventies, Conrado is a thin, wiry, and elegant man, who is bronzed from all the time he spends walking on the beach near his home in Rio. He is the director of the Rio Association of Store Owners, a powerful local business group located a few blocks from Ponto Frio's first store on Rua Uruguaiana, which today occupies nearly a whole city block next to the teeming old Arab market.

When I interviewed him in 2008, Conrado refused to answer any questions about Alfredo or Ponto Frio, where he still worked a few days a week. When I asked him about Alfredo's death and the version of events that he related to police on August 25, 1969, Conrado smiled and answered every question the same way: “It's off the record,” he repeated. “I can't say.”

By contrast, Vera Chvidchenko, Alfredo's secretary in the 1960s, had a great deal to say. For the first time in more than four decades, she spoke about her visit to the coroner's office the day after Alfredo died. “I never believed that Fred committed suicide,” said Vera in an interview at her office in Rio. Neither, it seems, did the coroner, who did not find gunpowder residue on his hands, and who told Vera that if Alfredo did commit suicide, the shots that entered his thorax could only have been fired with his left hand. But somewhere along the way to the police station or the coroner's office or both, money changed hands, Vera said.

Shortly after Alfredo died, Vera left Ponto Frio to study law. She said she soured on the company after its director Geraldo Mattos forced her to sign over a building that she had purchased on Alfredo's behalf in downtown Rio. Alfredo, who put up the cash, asked her to put the deed in her name for tax reasons. “Of course, I could have demanded a great deal of money to surrender the building after he died, but I didn't ask for anything,” said Vera, who still works as a se
nior partner in a downtown law firm. “I was just completely disgusted with everything they did with the company after Fred died. I didn't want to be a part of it anymore.”

But Vera holds no grudge against Lily and is grateful for the bottles of perfume that Lily gives her every time she comes to Brazil on a visit, which is not often anymore.

In the end, even Geraldo Mattos didn't have the stomach for the new Ponto Frio. Geraldo, who was summoned to meetings in Geneva with Edmond after Alfredo died, didn't like what he was seeing. The meetings were held in a boardroom of Edmond Safra's Trade Development Bank. Edmond sat next to a shredder and regularly destroyed his memos to the Brazilian company in Geraldo's presence.

Although he once promised Alfredo that he would stay with the company until Carlos turned twenty-one, Geraldo tendered his resignation to Lily and Edmond in Geneva in March 1974, less than five years after Alfredo died. “This is the last trip that I make to Geneva,” he wrote on an airline menu, which his daughter Sonia found amongst his old papers when he died. “This is a decisive moment in my life. I believe that what I should have done, I did. I want to continue to be successful and to create something for my children.”