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.