American Green Beret Vet TED MAHER Held HOSTAGE by Monaco for 629 Days (Thread 10)

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.")

Dominick Dunne's Diary (January 2002 issue - just the excerpt about Safra Case pg. 56)

Of Claridge's and Clues

Following his latest Chandra Levy lead to England, the author went to the Dubai Champion Stakes horse race with an assist from British intelligence. In London, after a face-off with lily Safra's decorator at Claridge's, he found the Safra case breaking open with new hostilities over the late financier's will - - - - -

By the time I checked into Claridge's, it was nearly 10. The grand old hotel, where I have been staying for 30 years or so, was bustling. The foyer-lounge and the tea room, which has been renamed the Reading Room, have been so handsomely decorated in the Art Deco style that you could easily imagine Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence sitting there drinking champagne beneath the new Dale Chihuly chandelier. The old dining room is gone, and my arrival coincided with the opening-night party for a restaurant that has taken its place, named Gordon Ramsay, after the 34-year-old Michelin three-star chef, who has a large London following. I was invited by the manager to look in before I went upstairs to my room, so I took a quick turn around the elegantly redone establishment. All the upper-crust people I would read about in the Evening Standard the next afternoon as having been there had already left. I found myself among the crowd that stays on after a party is over. As I was heading out, an American I didn't know told me that he had almost bought a penthouse apartment in New York more or less adjacent to mine, but that he had chosen a place downtown instead. He said he was sure that the architect-decorator of the restaurant we were celebrating, Thierry Despont, for whom he worked, would like to meet me. Passing through the crowd, he mentioned that they had also done Lily Safra's much-praised new London house.

Thierry Despont is a tall, slender, well-dressed, classy-looking man, but almost immediately our meeting became unpleasant. After accepting my compliments on his work and half heartedly returning his on mine, he said he found me to be mean. That is certainly not how I characterize myself either in life or in my writing, but I refrained from saying so. He repeated his remark.

"I'm not mean," I said. "Yes, you are," he replied. He was not to be dissuaded, and by then I had ceased to care what he thought.

"You're getting all your information from one source," I told him, referring to the very rich widow whose house he had just beautified.

His voice suddenly took on a decidedly superior tone. "What you don't know is that there were terrorists there that night, and Prince Rainier had Prince Albert helicoptered out of Monaco at six o'clock in the morning."

"I not only knew that, I printed it," I replied. I did so in an article that appeared in the December 2000 issue of this magazine. My source on Prince Albert's helicopter exit from the principality in the early morning hours following Edmond Safra's death had been a Washington figure who knows about such things. The fact that Despont was saying it suggested to me that he had gotten it right from the horse's mouth. By then I'd had enough of Despont, who at that moment was whisked off by the manager to meet someone else. I couldn't wait to get to my room and call the family of Edmond Safra's jailed nurse, Ted Maher, in Stormville, New York, to repeat Despont's words. What was especially heartening about Despont's information was that it coincided with Ted Maher's original story, that there had been two hooded intruders, one of whom had stabbed him. Within three days the story had changed completely, and Ted the hero became Ted the villain. The attorney general of Monaco announced that Maher had set the fire, that the stab wounds in his abdomen were self-inflicted, and that there had been no hooded intruders. Maher posited the ludicrous fiction that he had set the fire to win favor with Safra. Prosecutor Daniel Serdet announced, "From the moment on we can exclude with certainty all [conjectures] of any international conspiracy." Marc Bonnant, a lawyer for Safra's widow, said to Time magazine, "The fact that Maher is unstable became apparent to us only after the accident." As I wrote at the time, "The damnation of Ted Maher, the low man on the nursing staff's totem pole, had begun." But I certainly don't think the trial of Ted Maher, whenever it comes, is going to be the slam-dunk send-Ted-up-the-river affair that Monaco society expects it to be. - - - - -

- - -

Soon after returning to America, I was sitting at the computer in my house in Connecticut, working on my new novel, when the phone rang. It was a well-known author, about a catch a plane somewhere, who said, "There's a big story on Safra's will that's going to break within 10 days. Call this guy and he'll tell you the whole story." He then asked me the name of a man I had talked to once a year or so before. I can't understand why, when a will is changed in the last months of a person's life - especially a heavily medicated person, especially when billions of dollars are involved - and everything is suddenly left to one individual, the lawyers don't advise all involved that someone, who finds that he has been cut out is sure to contest the will. That's rather what has happened in the Safra case. The three sisters of Edmond Safra, who are nowhere near as rich as their brothers, had each been left $20 million in his will, but in the end they did not receive a cent. They are furious that Lily won't pay them, and they are prepared for a nasty battle. This fight has been simmering for a long time. There is deep hatred between Lily and her late husband's family.

The story broke in the business sections of the New York Post and the Financial Times of London. The Financial Times wrote, "Edmond Safra is understood to have changed his will shortly before he died. His decision to leave his brothers out of the will, and his decision to sell his two banks, Safra Republic Holdings and Republic New York Corporation, to HSBC Holdings, was completely out of character says one adviser who had worked with the Safra family for years." What caught my eye was the second paragraph of the story in the Post's early-bird edition, which I get in Connecticut. It read, "Sources close to the case say new revelations may emerge that could show Safra was indeed murdered in a broad conspiracy." I promptly called my brother in New York and told him to turn to page 41 of the Post, but he discovered that that paragraph was not in the edition he had. I then called Paul Tharp, the author of the piece, and he was not aware that the paragraph had been cut. An article in the Mail on Sunday in London said that the Safra brothers are demanding that the case be reopened. The Mail went on to say, "There are others who, despite the confession, doubt Maher's guilt." All of this was followed up with a public relations release on "Page Six" of the New York Post, headlined IN DEFENSE OF A WIDOW. The article closed by saying that Lily Safra had given $1 million to the World Trade Center relief effort and - after consulting with Christiane Amanpour of CNN - had donated $400,000 to buy tents and blankets for Afghan refugee children. This story is not going to go away.

In the latest development, the Monaco Court of Appeals has turned down all but one of the requests made by the lawyers for the Safra brothers and Ted Maher for further investigation, granting them only access for the videotape of the re-enactment of the events of December 3, 1999. Maher's lawyers are determined to appeal the court's decision not to have the fire chief heard on the basis that the judge is not investigating the fire department's role in the affair. One lawyer reassured Heidi Maher that "under no circumstances will we allow the police and fire departments' responsibility in the tragedy to be ignored."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.