Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  Later, when the dates were carved into his marble tombstone, Lily would make her own public statement: Merci d’être né, Puchi. (“Thanks for being born, Puchi.”) It was typical of Lily, of the playful notes that she left in several languages for her loved ones, and contrasted sharply with the more somber “Eternal remembrances from your wife, son, mother, sister and niece” engraved just below it.

  Many saved their remembrances of Alfredo for the lavish reception Lily threw at the house on Rua Icatu. On August 27, the day that Rosy and her husband arrived from Italy, Lily was preoccupied with organizing a luncheon for twenty-four friends and family, to honor Alfredo’s memory. Of course, Rosy and her husband were welcome to stay.

  As usual with Lily, every detail was carefully attended to, down to the long-stemmed yellow roses that filled the house. A few years earlier, Lily had singlehandedly organized the renovations of the Icatu house, redoing the bathrooms, the sitting rooms, and sprucing up the terraced garden.

  Now, on the day after her husband’s funeral, the grief-stricken widow had organized an elegant luncheon and had even thoughtfully sent a car to pick up Rosy and her husband at the airport and drive them to the house on Rua Icatu.

  “I don’t know how she managed to do anything, really,” recalled Laurinda. “Dona Lily just shriveled up after Seu Alfredo’s death. She got thinner and thinner until she was nothing more than a twig. From that day forward, she never took off her mourning clothes.”

  But in Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, the twig was famous for throwing a good party, even if Rosy and her husband arrived to what appeared to be a disorganized scene at the house on Rua Icatu. The house seemed filled with Lily’s friends and relatives from Argentina and Uruguay—people Rosy had never met and would never see again. Everyone seemed to be speaking Spanish at once, and although it was a somber occasion that had brought them all together, the air was definitely festive. Had it not been for the preponderance of black suits and dresses, Rosy might be forgiven for thinking she had walked into a reception for a wedding or a family reunion rather than the aftermath of a funeral.

  Despite Lily’s ordeal of the last forty-eight hours, Rosy thought her sister-in-law looked stunning in a simple dark dress, her hair perfectly coiffed. After exchanging hugs and condolences, Lily escorted Rosy to the master bedroom to show her where her brother had died. There were no bedclothes on the bed. Laurinda and the other servants had stripped them off and buried the satin-and-brocade bedspread in the back garden since there was no way to remove the bloodstains completely.

  Earlier, the servants had removed the bloodstained mattress, and scrubbed every inch of the room with strong smelling disinfectant, which assaulted the visitors’ nostrils as they made their way inside. Rosy was vaguely aware of Lily speaking in the background. Was she talking to her? It was a slightly apologetic tone, informing Rosy that all of the other bedrooms in the house were already occupied with her many guests, but if Rosy and her husband wished to stay, she could ask the servants to make up this one—the master bedroom—for them. Rosy never dreamed of staying at the house, and she was surely not going to sleep in the bed where her brother had died two days before. Lily, however, had thought of everything, which was probably why the driver didn’t bother to remove Rosy’s luggage from the car when they arrived at Icatu. It would probably be more comfortable at this point to stay in a hotel, Lily told her sister-in-law. Which is why Lily had taken the liberty of making a reservation for them at the Copacabana Palace.

  The consummate hostess, Lily asked them to stay to luncheon. As Rosy recalled years later, the food and wine were perfect, and it was Lily herself who organized the waiters brought in for the occasion.

  “It was the day after her husband’s funeral, and she behaved beautifully, receiving people and organizing everything like the bloody undersecretary of state,” recalled Rosy.

  But Rosy had other things on her mind besides the food and the people she didn’t recognize—were they really Fred’s friends?—at her brother’s home. How would she break the news to Regina Monteverde, her mother, who was arriving September 1—in four days’ time—from her cruise?

  In the end, Rosy arranged with Lily and Maria Consuelo, Alfredo’s faithful secretary, to have a physician present to sedate her mother when they finally broke the news that Regina’s beloved son was dead. Maria Consuelo would take a launch to meet the ship at the port of Rio, and speed Regina through customs and then into a suite of rooms at the Copacabana Palace so that she could have a day to rest before facing the grim news. They would tell Regina the following day, when she was comfortably ensconced in her own apartment.

  On the day Regina arrived, Maria Consuelo picked her up as planned. “Why didn’t Fred come to meet me?” asked the heavyset matriarch as she moved rather unsteadily onto the motor launch, Maria Consuelo holding her cherished lap dog. “Where’s Fred? He’s always here when I return from a trip.” A tense Maria Consuelo mumbled something about work and ferried Regina to the port. Regina’s own chauffeur was waiting to take her to the Copacabana Palace. The following day, Rosy, her husband, and Alfredo’s widow were already waiting at Regina’s well-appointed Copacabana apartment to break the news. A physician and his assistant waited in the servants’ quarters for their cue to administer the sedatives.

  Regina seemed well rested and calm when she entered her own apartment, although she must have immediately found it strange to see her family sitting in the living room. Just what could have brought her daughter back to Rio? And just where was Fred? But the questions barely had time to register. Immediately, she sensed something was very wrong, which is why she might not have seemed all that surprised to hear the news that her beloved son was dead.

  Regina let out a long, piercing animal scream that echoed throughout the ten floors of her apartment building. That was when the physician moved in with the injection to ease the shock.

  But Regina, who loved Alfredo above everything else, including her own daughter, would never recover.

  “She had a passion for her son,” said her friend Masha. “When Fred died, it was the end of Regina.”

  In some ways, Regina had been bracing herself for her youngest child’s death for years. Regina was well acquainted with manic depression and suicide. Her own husband had jumped off the roof of the sanatorium in Vienna where he was undergoing treatment for his own depression before the war. On several occasions, she told Alfredo that like his father, he wouldn’t survive into his mid-forties, that he would do exactly what Iancu had done. Just like your father, she would say.

  Perhaps it was an internal defense mechanism. For Regina recognized all the signs—the mood swings, the euphoria, the withdrawal, the blinding headaches. Maybe she was so afraid that her precious son would end up taking his own life that she felt she had to speak out about it. Maybe by acknowledging the problem, Alfredo might be so frightened into imagining the consequences of suicide that he wouldn’t have the courage to go through with it. Still, over the years she had reassured herself that he might be getting better. Alfredo had seemed to be so much better when he had married Lily in 1965. Of course, that was short-lived. In the last year, she had seen a steady decline. He seemed constantly glassy-eyed and weak. What kind of medications was he taking? Did he need to take so many pills? Alfredo was clearly not well.

  But like so many others who questioned the circumstances of Alfredo’s death, in the end his mother simply did not accept that he had taken his own life.

  After Alfredo’s death, friends urged his mother and sister to conduct their own independent investigation.

  A few months after Alfredo’s death, Regina and Rosy hired a team of lawyers and demanded that they do everything possible to reopen the investigation into Alfredo’s death, even if it meant disinterring Alfredo. It was their intention to force authorities in Rio de Janeiro to reopen the case as a murder investigation.

  But as the investigating lawyers would find, re-examining the facts of Alfredo Monteverde’s death prov
ed difficult. They were hit full force with the weight of Brazilian bureaucracy and came face-to-face with cynical homicide detectives who refused to help. Was this a cover-up or just the usual Byzantine bureaucracy and negligence associated with most official matters in Brazil?

  No one would ever find out.

  Yet the lawyers commissioned by Regina and Rosy seemed to think that there was some merit to the case, and in a letter dated March 18, 1970, they wrote: “Considering the story that [Regina’s son-in-law] presented to us concerning the personality of Mr. Alfredo João Monteverde, of his wife, his business partners and some friends, as well as the multiplicity of his commercial interests and in relation to the events that took place at the time of his death, we understood from the beginning that the case really did have aspects that needed to be better understood.”

  But the truth was elusive. For instance, it was impossible to find the ownership of the weapon, even though the revolver appears to have been a fixture in the Monteverde residence. “Although we tried with great diligence to obtain the ownership of the weapon at the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS), it was not possible to obtain this information,” the investigators note, referring to a branch of Rio de Janeiro’s military police that normally dealt with political prisoners during the military period.

  But if the weapon wasn’t registered in Alfredo or Lily’s name, whom did it belong to? Why keep a gun in the house of a well-known manic depressive who had tried to commit suicide in the past?

  “There could have been inducement by possible third party beneficiaries in his death,” said the investigators. “The proof of inducement, however, is always one of the most difficult based on its complexity. In this particular case, considering the people, the circumstances, the inheritance issues and the lapse of time since the event, it will be difficult and doubtful to see convincing proof to justify any judicial initiative.”

  In the end, much surrounding the death of Alfredo Monteverde remained a mystery. The report commissioned by Regina and Rosy did almost nothing to clear up the unanswered questions surrounding Alfredo’s death, even though all the investigations completed by police, medical examiners, and ballistics experts were submitted to an independent medical examiner for what was to be a grand reassessment.

  “Although the initial police report conducted by a competent officer states that there were two bullets fired, there was only one bullet found,” writes Alexandrino Silva Ramos Filho, the medical examiner hired by Regina and Rosy’s husband to analyze the police and autopsy reports, months after the fact. “Only one bullet fired from a firearm was observed at the scene, lodged in the mattress where the victim was lying.” He went further to note that “it left a circular wound with a dark deposit (gunpowder) that had all the characteristics of the entry of a bullet at short distance. On the dorsal [part of the victim], in the left dorsal region next to the line of the vertebrae, a wound was found with irregular borders that characterized the exit of the bullet.”

  Finally, Silva Ramos Filho closed his own report with the following observation: “[I]t is extremely rare in a process of auto-elimination that two bullets should be fired into the same orifice of entry. Given the above, we also conclude that in this case we are dealing with a process of auto-elimination.”

  But why was the first officer who entered the master bedroom on Rua Icatu so certain that two bullets had been fired into the body? “On or about three o’clock in the afternoon, he locked himself in his bedroom, and committed suicide with two shots to his chest on the left side, with both of the two shots entering the same orifice and exiting in different directions.”

  The police officer went on to write, “I put away the revolver, the two spent cartridges, the four bullets left in the chamber and the bullet that came out of his back.”

  Presumably, the second bullet must have stayed in Alfredo’s body, but it wasn’t noted in any of the autopsy reports. Where was the second bullet? Unfortunately, this important disparity, which could have changed the course of the Monteverde family history, was never properly investigated.

  “Our conclusions, based on the information we have, is that there was in fact a suicide,” wrote the lawyers.

  But Regina refused to accept the conclusions. She would spend the rest of her life trying to prove that her son was murdered, and trying to recoup Globex, which had started out as a family business, financed by the Grunberg-Monteverde fortune.

  Regina, who was unaware of Alfredo’s 1966 will until its contents were revealed after his death, wanted to know why he had not made his sister Rosy a beneficiary, as well as Rosy’s daughter Christina, his beloved niece. After all, Globex and Alfredo’s other business interests had all been considered family enterprises, controlled by Alfredo, Regina, and Rosy since their founding in 1946. Maria Consuelo, his closest business associate, who was by his side when he founded the company in 1946, was also surprised her boss had not included her in his will.

  “I was completely shocked,” she admitted shortly before her own death nearly four decades later.

  Could Alfredo, known for his goodwill and generosity, have been so ungenerous to his own family in his last will and testament, leaving nearly everything to his most recent wife? Although the will was signed by five witnesses, among them Conrado, Alfredo’s good friend Paulinho, and some of Alfredo’s most trusted associates, there was something not right about it, at least for Alfredo’s closely knit family.

  For Regina, Alfredo’s death would dominate the rest of her life, and she would use every available legal means to try to thwart Lily’s efforts to take over her son’s business and inheritance.

  For Lily, Alfredo’s death marked the beginning of a new life. Two months shy of her thirty-fifth birthday, she began her transformation into one of the world’s richest and most glamorous women.

  “After Fred’s death, she wanted to remake her life,” said her former schoolmate, Ana Bentes Bloch. “And she clearly transformed herself into a major high-society figure.”

  Remarkably for someone unschooled in the ways of international finance, Lily acted swiftly and with great efficiency in the hours after Alfredo’s death to secure the Monteverde family fortune.

  But the speed and alacrity with which this grieving widow set the next phase of her life in motion surprised even her closest friends. Shortly after Alfredo’s death, Ponto Frio executives canceled the powers of attorney that Rosy and her husband held on Alfredo’s accounts at banks in Switzerland and Lily began making arrangements to leave Brazil.

  She was in such a hurry to leave the country that she didn’t bother to pack any of her clothes. When Lily’s friends Marcelo and Klara Steinfeld bought the Icatu house from Lily in January 1973, they found everything intact—her clothes were still hanging in the closets and the family’s furniture was still in place. Everything, except a few valuable paintings, was left at the house on Rua Icatu under the watchful eye of Waldomiro Alves and the Irish wolfhounds. Lily took the four children, moved into a suite of rooms at the Copacabana Palace, and began the mad preparations to settle in London.

  At one point, Lily asked Laurinda if she wanted to accompany her to England. Laurinda declined, saying that she needed to remain in Rio to look after her two boys, Ademir and Adilson.

  “That’s when I told her about my dream, and the macumba on Seu Alfredo’s shirt,” said Laurinda. “I felt it was important for her to know what might have happened to Seu Alfredo.” Laurinda also told her that a recent tarot card reading had shown her that Lily would end her life as a widow in mourning.

  Laurinda thought she was imparting important information to her employer at what must surely have been the most difficult moment of her life. Lily smiled weakly and thanked the housekeeper for her concern. But she wasn’t superstitious, she informed Laurinda. She didn’t believe in dreams, in tarot cards, and certainly not in macumba curses, she told Laurinda.

  But Laurinda’s warning—that she would be doomed to wear mourning for the rest of her life
—would come back to haunt her.

  “I tried to warn her because I saw that she was really suffering, and she just kept losing weight,” said Laurinda. “You could tell that Seu Alfredo’s death had really knocked her out.”

  Or pushed her forward. On September 15, less than a month after Alfredo’s death, the grieving widow was on her way to London, where she would move quickly to ensure by every legal means available to her that she was in complete control of the entire Monteverde family fortune.

  In England, she executed several brilliant tactical, legal, and investment strategies that would duly catapult her into the exclusive billionaires’ club. There would be other strategies too, of a much more personal kind, all of them engineered by a short Lebanese-Brazilian banker.

  Edmond Safra was one of Alfredo’s most trusted bankers, and, after his untimely death, he would become the most important man in his widow’s new life.

  FOUR

  “Edmond Said He Would Fix Everything”

  EDMOND WAS, OF course, well known to Alfredo. Like other wealthy Jews who had fled to Brazil during the war years, Alfredo had entrusted a large part of his assets to the Safra bank in São Paulo, which Edmond founded shortly after immigrating to Brazil in 1954. Later, when Edmond’s Trade Development Bank in Geneva officially began to accept deposits, Alfredo was among the largest account holders. Fearing endemic corruption and political instability in Brazil, Alfredo had also scattered his assets in other Swiss banks and invested in property abroad.

  “Every Jew had money outside the country because we were a generation of refugees, and you never knew when we would need to leave in a hurry,” said Marcelo Steinfeld, whose father had the distinction of being one of Edmond’s early depositors after he started building the Swiss arm of his banking operations in 1956.

  “For years, Fred was Edmond Safra’s biggest account, and I know that they worked together for many years while Edmond was in São Paulo,” said Maria Luisa Goldschmid, who worked as Alfredo’s assistant between 1954 and 1957.