Gilded Lily (6 page)

Once he asked a friend if he could borrow his Volkswagen camper van to transport a painting that he had bought in London. The painting, which would be arriving at the international airport in Rio, wouldn't fit in his own car. It was only when they arrived at the customs counter of the Rio airport that the friend realized that he would be driving back to the city with a priceless Van Gogh in the back of his clunky Volkswagen.

Despite his whimsy, Alfredo was a self-confessed workaholic who typically began his workday at seven in the morning and ended at eight in the evening. “I do not get tired, as I work with great pleasure—the pleasure of creation and because I love Globex as I would love my son,” he wrote in a letter to his sister a few years after he founded Globex.

“Do not think if I work twelve hours a day it is to make more money,” he continued in the letter. “I do this because I get so much satisfaction out of my work.”

Alfredo had no qualms about rolling up his shirtsleeves and changing places with one of his sales staff on the Ponto Frio sales floor at the Rua Uruguaiana store. This way he could anticipate any problems experienced on the sales floor and deal directly with his customers. “Let's change for the day,” he was fond of telling his bemused staff.
“You pretend you're me in the corporate offices, and I'll pretend to be you and deal with customers.”

Most of his friends and business associates described Alfredo as a visionary. “He was talking about computers when no one talked about computers,” said Sztern, who looked upon Alfredo as a substitute father after his own parents died while he was still in his teens. “He wanted to do things like recycle paper, and he wanted to create a popular bank for the poor because he sensed that Brazil was missing a popular instrument of credit.”

While many of Alfredo's early clients were prosperous consumers like himself, it was among the ranks of the impoverished masses that his company was to have its greatest success. Alfredo made huge sums of money creating a system of credit for Brazil's working classes, who could not afford to buy appliances or other big-money items outright. The scheme led to a consumer revolution across the country in the days before credit cards were commonplace. It was a risk, to be sure. How could he be sure that the country's poor would ever pay off a refrigerator, which for many was as monumental as the purchase of a house or a car? It was a risk he was willing to take, for he fervently believed that the poor, so grateful to obtain credit on favorable terms, would rarely default on a payment. The poor, he was fond of saying, are better at managing credit than most people with money. Credit at Ponto Frio was easier to arrange than at banks, which charged enormous interest rates. When buyers fell behind on a payment at Ponto Frio, Alfredo simply lowered their monthly payments to an amount they could afford.

“Sometimes we had people who would come into the office and say they couldn't pay the monthly installment,” said Maria Consuelo Ayres, Alfredo's first and most trusted employee, who began working for him in 1946. “He would lower the rate, and before you knew it the buyer would bring in a friend who also wanted to buy something on credit.”

The installment system Alfredo pioneered in the 1950s is now commonplace in a country where the minimum wage hovers at just under $200 per month. In Brazil, prices are displayed in shop windows in multiples of the actual price, and the consumer can buy everything from clothing to appliances and cars in installments, the payment terms of which can range from five months to two years.

Laurinda Soares Navarro, Alfredo's housekeeper, was an early beneficiary of this new system of credit. Laurinda lived with her two young sons in the Parque da Cidade favela—a jumble of half-finished brick and stucco houses connected by a warren of steep stairs and concrete alleyways in the hills above Rio where hundreds of slaves had worked the coffee plantations of the Marquis de São Vicente in the nineteenth century. Like most of her impoverished neighbors—all of them squatters who had built ramshackle houses on the marquis's former estate—Laurinda had no refrigerator. Alfredo arranged for Ponto Frio to deliver a gleaming new Coldspot refrigerator to her home, and discounted the monthly payments from her salary until it was completely paid off.

Alfredo's success in business came with a well-honed sense of social responsibility. If the poor were his best customers, then Alfredo was determined to be their best friend, and give back to the community in a country with one of the world's biggest disparities between rich and poor, and an abysmal lack of government-financed social services. Shortly after founding Ponto Frio, Alfredo teamed up in Rio with a local priest who did charitable work among the city's poor, and paid to restore the Rosario Church next to his offices in downtown Rio. In one of his more memorable moments, Alfredo managed to block one of the city's main thoroughfares after he bought all the produce and livestock from a local farmers' market, and started to give it all away to the poor.

“People came from the favelas, blocking traffic and turning the day into a festive occasion,” said one observer, who also recalled that law enforcement officials were not amused by the gesture. “Fred de
cided that the government wasn't giving the people enough holiday time, so he created his own national holiday. That was Fred.”

He was also a hero to many. He was the first to step forward in August 1954 when the assassination attempt against journalist and opposition politician Carlos Lacerda resulted in the death of his bodyguard, the air force major Rubens Florentino Vaz. Although he was generally apolitical, Alfredo had a great deal of admiration for Lacerda, who was the most outspoken critic of the government of Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas. Alfredo insisted upon paying for the education of the young daughter Vaz had left behind.

The assassination attempt against Lacerda, on a residential street in Copacabana, had deep political ramifications for the Vargas government. A few weeks later, an independent commission of inquiry implicated Vargas's chief bodyguard in the death of Vaz, which eventually signaled the end of the dictator's twenty-four-year reign and drove Vargas himself to commit suicide. In his blue and white striped pajamas, the country's president shot himself in the chest in his bedroom at the presidential palace on August 24, 1954. Alfredo promptly stepped in again, this time to buy the dictator's Rolls-Royce.

There were other grand gestures. In 1961, Alfredo set up a fund to help the families whose loved ones had been killed when an arsonist set fire to a circus, resulting in more than four hundred deaths. Three years later, he bailed out Garrincha (Manuel Francisco dos Santos), one of Brazil's greatest soccer heroes, who helped lead Brazil to two World Cup victories in 1958 and 1962. Garrincha, who was in serious debt, was in danger of losing his home on Governador Island, on the outskirts of Rio. Alfredo paid off his debts, in recognition, he said, of Garrincha's contribution to Brazilian soccer.

He also created a private foundation to assist his workers, who grew from a handful of employees in the late 1940s to several hundred twenty years later.

At the Millfield School, his posh alma mater, in Somerset, England, Alfredo's generosity even made the local papers when, on a
visit to the school, he bought £2,500 worth of tickets for a student production of the Sammy Davis Jr. musical
Golden Boy
. Funds from the sale of tickets were earmarked for the school's building fund. “Up rushed…Alfredo Monteverde, the Brazilian millionaire, who said he proposed to distribute the tickets among ‘French students, Kenyan emigrants, nurses and the doorman at the Dorchester,'” said one report. “But really you didn't know whether to take the man seriously or not. Asked where he lived, he said ‘The Moon.'”

Alfredo could be excused for his lunar preoccupations, especially after he was diagnosed with manic depression as a young adult. From the time he was in his twenties, his periods of whimsy and sheer euphoria alternated with periods of deep, dark depression. During one euphoric state, Alfredo tried to convince his accountant to allow Globex to buy forty homes for Ponto Frio workers. Maria Consuelo, his savvy secretary who was by then used to her boss's sudden acts of extravagance with company money, did not allow the deal to go through. However, other more costly ones did.

“I spent a lot of time undoing Fred's whims,” said Ademar Trotte, the Ponto Frio accountant Alfredo hired in 1946 when he started the company. “When he went on a shopping spree, we had to convince people to give us his money back, or we had to re-sell the things Fred bought.”

Alfredo went on mad shopping sprees for things like mills, warehouses, and large plots of land when he was in his euphoric states, and then would sink into a soul-crushing depression when he realized what he had done. On many occasions, when the deals became too complicated for his secretary or accountant to fix, Geraldo Mattos, the director of Ponto Frio, would be called in to try to clean up the mess. At one point, in an act of extreme folly, Alfredo handed over all of his own shares in his company to Geraldo.

“Geraldo had a difficult time trying to fix things up when Fred went shopping,” recalled Lourdes Mattos, Geraldo's widow. “I think
Geraldo spent an awful lot of time just repairing the damage from those flights of euphoria.”

But as bad as his depressions became, observers say they never seriously affected his ability to do business. “There was no one like him in business,” said Marcelo Steinfeld. “Nobody could have ever put together the fortune he did so fast, even with all his psychological problems.” Indeed, in just over twenty years, Alfredo built a sizable empire, with property and assets spread around the world.

By the late 1960s, Alfredo Monteverde had a staggering net worth of nearly $300 million. Although he had a long list of business interests in Rio, his most successful enterprise remained Ponto Frio.

But when his depressions became overwhelming, Alfredo was indeed forced to retreat temporarily from the daily responsibilities of running his businesses. Friends say that during one of those early bouts of depression, he tried to commit suicide. Regina knew that her son suffered from the same malady that had plagued his father, and she often told Alfredo that she feared he would end up killing himself if he didn't get the proper treatment.

During his worst crises, Alfredo checked himself into a luxurious suite at the beachfront Excelsior hotel or the nearby Copacabana Palace where a steady stream of specialists were admitted by his majordomo Caruso, who was dispatched to the local pharmacy with a small stack of prescriptions for antidepressants, vitamins, and sleeping pills, hastily scrawled on hotel stationery. In the early days, Rosy would fly into Rio from wherever she happened to be in the world, to help her beloved brother through his darkest hours. But later, when she was preoccupied with her own business and demands on her time, Alfredo was left pretty much to the mercy of his various psychiatrists and closest business associates when a depression struck. On occasion, a nurse would visit to give him regular injections of vitamins B
₁₂
and C, which were considered an early form of therapy for manic-depressives.

For despite his phenomenal success in business, there was always something missing in Alfredo's life—something money could never buy. In a letter to his sister written in the summer of 1956, Alfredo tried to come to grips with his depression when he wrote, “we really make little progress in finding our happiness. When I came back from [a trip to] the States I did everything to fill my life—worked hard, played hard, but of no use for I was unhappy inside of myself. I thought that it was my old spring disease that came again.”

Perhaps it was the “spring disease”—a deep dissatisfaction with himself and those around him—that was to blame for the string of wives and girlfriends he seemed to collect over the years, like the mills and factories and plots of land he recklessly snapped up for Globex. The patterns rarely changed—the manic womanizing seeming to coincide with his periods of utter euphoria. He would fall madly in love with a beautiful woman, live with her for anywhere from a few months to a few years, and then send her packing.

“The women arrived at Fred's house with a suitcase, but they always left with an apartment, a car, whatever they needed,” recalled his sister. “He always took care of them.”

While still in his twenties, he became involved with Sylvia Bastos Tigre, a woman from one of Rio's most important legal families, who was nearly double his own age. Typically, he was enamored with her during the first several months of their courtship. Unlike the two others, who would come later, Alfredo did not marry Sylvia.

“Sylvia is wonderful,” he noted in an undated letter to Rosy. “She does all to please me and help me. What she possesses, and nowadays is a rare jewel, is goodness [sic].”

Sylvia, who was extremely well connected in Rio society, encouraged him to behave like the important Brazilian entrepreneur he was on his way to becoming. She convinced him to buy a yacht and a vacation home at Aguas Lindas and join the important clubs in the city.

But the relationship didn't withstand the “spring disease,” and Al
fredo impetuously ended everything in a moment of depression. “We never understood Fred's attraction to Sylvia,” said his friend and former employee Maria Luisa Goldschmid. “We thought it was some kind of strange mother complex because Sylvia was old enough to be his mother.”

Aviva Pe'er, who had been crowned Miss Israel in June 1954, seemed more like the type of woman for Alfredo. At least she seemed to be willing to put up with Alfredo's zanier moments. On New Year's Eve, he invited Aviva and his friend Maria Luisa to a hotel bar in downtown Rio following the annual Ponto Frio party. It was three in the morning, and instead of leaving his car outside, he decided to drive it through the wide open doors of the hotel lobby. Alfredo parked the car, calmly gave the keys to the startled concierge, and headed in the direction of the bar with his shocked entourage.