President Bush: Please Bring Ted Maher Home From Banana-Republic Monaco!

American Green Beret veteran and accomplished neonatal nurse Ted Maher has now been held 537 days without trial in Monaco's prison on trumped-up and false charges -- charges of causing the deaths of billionaire banker Edmond Safra and Ted's fellow nurse, Vivian Torrente on December 3, 1999. In truth, Ted fought valiantly against two armed, masked intruders to defend Edmond and Vivian and save their lives. During the struggle, Ted suffered severe knife wounds that required one hundred staples to close.

Billionaire banker Edmond Safra was cooperating with the FBI, who was investigating the IMF/Russian loans. Needing a convenient scapegoat for the murder of Safra, Monaco police subjected Ted to three days of grueling torture designed to extort a false confession from him. (see description in "BASIC TIMELINE" in Thread 1 - http://206.112.97.70/forum/a3ad8b097272d.htm ).

Monaco continues to hold Ted incommunicado, preventing him from sending or receiving mail. In fact, they restrict his communication with his family to one telephone call a week. This call is only allowed to last a few minutes and is always monitored closely to prevent any discussion of the case. Ted is forced by his jailers to take a psychotropic medication and is regularly "interrogated" by the Monaco judge -- Patricia Richet. Reports have been received that Judge Richet is a violent person who has displayed unstable behavior in the past. She allegedly has a history of assaulting a fellow judge, putting him in the hospital for a week. She also tears up letters from Ted's children in front of Ted rather than let him read them.

Hundreds of family, friends, work associates, parents of patients, and Army veterans who served with Ted have vouched for him as being a loyal husband, loving father, and an exemplary professional of great skill and compassion. Ted has also been defended by then-chairman of the House International Relations Committee Ben Gilman and Ted's congresswoman Sue Kelly, who have written Prince Rainier III of Monaco on Ted's behalf. Monaco has no evidence of any crime by Ted; they have no witnesses and no credible case against him. Even worse, Monaco has planted false evidence and suppressed vast amounts of exculpatory evidence -- even passing a special Monaco law that enables them to hold Ted four years without trial.

The Geneva prosecutor has said that Safra was killed for his cooperation with the FBI regarding the laundering through Safra's Republic National Bank of $4.8 billion in IMF loans to Russia.

Regardless of the reason "why," it is obvious that Ted Maher is a scapegoat for a murder by others. We are working to obtain his release and to correct the grave injustice being done to an American Green beret veteran and medical professional.

To read the "BASIC TIMELINE" that describes the events surrounding the night of December 3, 1999, click here:

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 PennsylvaniaAvenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

E-mail: President George W. Bush - president@whitehouse.gov
V.P. Dick Cheney - vice.president@whitehouse.gov
First Lady Laura Bush - first.lady@whitehouse.gov
Mrs. Lynne Cheney - mrs.cheney@whitehouse.gov

Congresswoman Sue Kelly
1127 Longworth House office Building
Washington, DC 20515-3219
Phone: 1(202)225-5441
E-mail: dearsue@mail.house.gov
Assistant - Phyllis Coleman - phyllis.coleman@mail.house.gov

Amnesty International
322 8th Ave.
New York, NY 10001
Phone: 1(212)807-8400
FAX: 12124639193 or 12126271451
E-mail: admin-us@aiusa.org

House on International Relations Committee
Phone: 1(202)225-4561
Assistant: Aaron Blaine - blaine.aaron@mail.house.gov
Europe - Kelly McDonald - kelly.mcdonald@mail.house.gov

Senator George Allen (he helped obtain the release of Chinese scholar Gao Zhan)
website - "http://allen.senate.gov/"
FAX: 12022245432

His Serene Highness
Prince Rainier III
Palais Princier
Place du Palais
B.P.518
MC 98015 Monaco Ville
Principality of Monaco

Consulate General of Monaco
565 Fifth Avenue -23rd Floor
New York, NY 10017
Phone: 1(212)286-0500
FAX12122861574
E-mail: info@monaco-consulate.com
Hon. Maguy Maccario-Doyle, Consul General

Monaco Guest Book
(You can write in English on the French page and scroll down to read. Please note they have a tendency to delete messages regarding Ted - not "fairytale-correct.")

The Sunday Times - World October 27, 2002

Fire-death billionaire ‘killed nurse’ Matthew Campbell, Monaco

SMOKE poured into the “panic room”. Edmond Safra, one of the richest men in the world, was choking to death along with one of his nurses. He could have opened the door and escaped, but he did not. When his nurse tried to flee, he fought her into submission. Together they succumbed to the noxious fumes. This hitherto untold — and disputed — version of what happened in the fire at Safra’s Monaco penthouse three years ago is about to be aired in court by lawyers defending Ted Maher, an American nurse. Maher goes on trial next month, accused of starting the blaze in which Safra was killed with Vivian Torrente, another nurse.

According to the defence, Safra stopped Torrente fleeing because he was convinced that hitmen were waiting outside to kill him. Whatever the truth of his final minutes, however, the trial is unlikely to satisfy conspiracy theorists.

Safra’s business empire, worth between £1.5 billion and £2.8 billion at his death, had its roots in the Middle East. Some have speculated that the Lebanese-born Jew who was said to know “all the secrets of the financial planet” — and whose speciality was private banking for the extremely wealthy — was a victim of the Russian mafia or a Palestinian hit squad.

The trial will explore the suggestion — based on disputed forensic evidence — that Safra himself could be guilty of homicide for holding Torrente in the apartment against her will. This would diminish Maher’s culpability in her death.

Witnesses will include Lily Safra, the victim’s widow, who inherited much of his fortune and has since moved to Britain. The court will ponder a number of mysteries: why were the bodyguards who followed the security-obsessed Safra everywhere absent on the morning of his death? Why was videotape from a closed-circuit television camera missing? And why did Safra refuse to come out, even when his wife called him on a mobile phone to tell him there was no sign of intruders?

For Monaco there is only one suspect. Maher, 42, has been held in the principality’s hilltop jail overlooking the Mediterranean since he confessed to starting the fire that engulfed the apartment on top of Safra’s bank on December 3, 1999.

Maher will tell the court of a bizarre scheme in which he hoped to be credited with “saving” Safra from attackers and rewarded as a hero by the billionaire. But it all went horribly wrong.

Maher had stabbed himself in the leg and chest, using medical skills to produce wounds that looked serious but were not life-threatening. He then told Torrente, one of several nurses providing Safra with round-the-clock medical care for Parkinson’s disease, that he had been attacked by intruders.

While Safra, who was known to be paranoid and needed little convincing of danger, took refuge with Torrente in a specially fortified bathroom bunker, Maher lit a fire in a wastepaper bin under a smoke detector in an adjacent room to sound the alarm and summon the police and fire brigade. He then went downstairs and was taken to hospital.

What followed was a tragicomedy of errors in which the police, concerned that gunmen might be hiding in the penthouse, took at least two hours to reach Safra’s hideout. The head of Safra’s protection unit tried twice to go to his boss’s aid but was restrained and handcuffed by suspicious officers.

By the time police entered the bathroom it was too late. The banker was dead in an armchair covered in soot. The body of Torrente lay at his feet.

Although Maher is standing trial for arson with intent to harm, which carries a penalty of 20 years or life, his lawyers argue that he is guilty of involuntary manslaughter. They will try to persuade a jury of three that Safra’s stubborn refusal to leave the room made Maher less culpable.

“Ted did something really stupid but he had absolutely no intention of killing anyone,” said Michael Griffith, an American lawyer famous for defending fellow countrymen who get into trouble abroad. His most renowned client was William Hayes, the subject of the Hollywood film Midnight Express, about an American’s horrendous experiences in a Turkish jail.

“It’s not a whodunnit,” he said of the Maher case, adding that his job was to protect “a little nobody who’s really been dumped on. It is us against the Monaco authorities and some of the richest people in the world”.

He claimed that Monaco had botched the investigation and that a magistrate had inexplicably refused to look into evidence that Torrente, 50, had suffered “combat-style” injuries prior to her death.

A mark on her neck mentioned in the autopsy was consistent, a forensic expert for the defence will argue, with an attempt to strangle her. There were also unexplained bruises on her knees and Safra’s DNA was found in her fingernails.

“There’s been a monstrous cover-up. The nurse tries to open the door to escape,” said Griffith, trying to piece together the puzzle. “He (Safra) then grabs her and prevents her leaving. That’s how you explain those injuries. Safra is responsible for homicide, and he chose asphyxiation rather than the blows from assailants that he imagined to be outside.”

Marc Bonnant, representing the Safra estate, dismissed this as “totally absurd” and denied that the bruising was evidence of violence. Safra, he ventured, would not have been strong enough to restrain Torrente. “This was a tired, sick, elderly man,” he said. He claimed that it was not surprising if Safra’s DNA was found on Torrente: “She was touching him all the time. She was his nurse.”

Bonnant acknowledged that the Safra estate had made a payment to Irineo Torrente, the nurse’s husband, who lives in New Jersey, and described this as “a gesture of generosity and sympathy” towards a grieving, hard-up family.

Griffith wonders why the payment was not made by Safra’s insurers and alleges that it was intended to settle a potentially far more costly wrongful death lawsuit brought against the Safra estate by Torrente’s husband. Michael Maggiano, a New Jersey lawyer, confirmed that he had initiated a lawsuit for Torrente. He is now suing his former client for a share of the payment, which he estimates at about $1m. Griffith will also make an issue out of the antics of the police and judicial authorities in Monaco, once described by Somerset Maugham, the writer, as a “sunny place for shady people”.

Maher’s wife Heidi claims that she was “kidnapped” and interrogated by Monaco police when she flew over from America after the fire. She says the police confiscated her passport and used it to pressurise her husband into signing a confession.

Well looked after in a prison that is home to only 10 other inmates, Maher spends his days watching luxury yachts sailing across the bay. But he is angry about the time it has taken to bring his case to trial.

“They messsed up the investigation,” said Griffith. “They abducted his wife. They’ve kept him in prison for three years. He deserves a fair shot and a fair trial. But he is worried that he is not going to get any justice out of Monaco.”

Griffith hopes to prove his client wrong.

Maher will tell the court of a bizarre scheme in which he hoped to be credited with “saving” Safra from attackers and rewarded as a hero by the billionaire. But it all went horribly wrong.
Maher had stabbed himself in the leg and chest, using medical skills to produce wounds that looked serious but were not life-threatening. He then told Torrente, one of several nurses providing Safra with round-the-clock medical care for Parkinson’s disease, that he had been attacked by intruders.
While Safra, who was known to be paranoid and needed little convincing of danger, took refuge with Torrente in a specially fortified bathroom bunker, Maher lit a fire in a wastepaper bin under a smoke detector in an adjacent room to sound the alarm and summon the police and fire brigade. He then went downstairs and was taken to hospital.
What followed was a tragicomedy of errors in which the police, concerned that gunmen might be hiding in the penthouse, took at least two hours to reach Safra’s hideout. The head of Safra’s protection unit tried twice to go to his boss’s aid but was restrained and handcuffed by suspicious officers.
By the time police entered the bathroom it was too late. The banker was dead in an armchair covered in soot. The body of Torrente lay at his feet.

Interesting...I posted this information about Ted's statements months ago on this forum, and was attacked as as being a media shill for just posting the article... Thank you for posting this, Mrs. Maher.

The illegal maneuver of the presiding judge to bar Michael Griffith from representing Ted Maher is being reviewed.

The attention of the relevant congressional leaders and State Department officials has been focused on this outrage.

Monaco has kept Ted muzzled and forced to parrot its extorted false confession for three years--

And risks letting the truth escape unless it can continue its gagging.

Even the dead are gagged--

There's no tape of the frantic calls to the police--the police destroyed the tape.

There's not a single cell phone record to support Sonia's supposed calls--

Even poor Edmond was cremated by Lily--

Who had sent his security away, disconnected the burglar alarm and "redecorated" with impenetrable glass and shutters.

Monaco is a police state in which its own laws do not restrain it--

It extorted a false confession by duress and threats on Ted's wife and children--

It planted false evidence including an unopened vial of lidocaine (never tested for prints or provenance as Ted requested)--

It seized and destroyed Ted's correspondence to his attorney--

It interrogated Ted without attorney present--

It now seeks to bar Ted's attorney in violation of Article 286 of the Monegasque Code of Criminal Procedure.

MONACO VIOLATES ITS OWN LAW AND PUTS LIES IN TED'S MOUTH

Monaco dare not allow Ted a moment alone with someone outside the police state.

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