A male nurse who admitted lighting the fire that killed the billionaire banker Edmond Safra was yesterday sentenced to 10 years in prison, bringing to an end an extraordinary tragedy of errors that rocked the wealthy Mediterranean enclave of Monaco to its foundations.
Ted Maher (44) a former US army Green Beret, was found guilty by the Monte Carlo court of arson leading to the death of Safra, one of the world’s richest men, and another nurse, Vivian Torrent. Maher, who faced life imprisonment, sat in silence as the verdict was delivered, but his distraught wife Heidi suggested he would appeal.
”Let us thank God for this moment when justice has been done,” Safra’s widow, Lily, said in a written statement after the ruling. ”The guilty man has been punished and the full facts of that dreadful night exactly three years ago, which claimed the lives of my dear husband and his devoted nurse, have been laid bare for all to see.”
Safra, founder and main shareholder of the Republic National Bank of New York, suffocated in the bathroom of his luxurious 3 000sq ft Monaco penthouse after barricading himself in to escape what he clearly thought were armed intruders.
But Maher admitted to the court earlier in the trial that he had started the fire in a wastepaper basket, stabbed himself, and then rushed his employer into the bathroom as part of a tragically misfired plot that was supposed to end with him rescuing his boss and emerging as a hero.
In a brief and tearful statement before the verdict was delivered yesterday, Maher called Safra ”the best employer I ever had,” and said he did not mean to cause his death or the death of the nurse. ”What’s happened is and always will be a terrible accident,” he said.
The story began shortly before 5.30am on December 3, 1999, when Maher alerted the concierge of the palatial Belle Epoque mansion block on Monte Carlo’s Avenue d’Ostende that housed both the Monaco branch of Republican National and the vast apartment that was one of the international financier’s half-dozen homes.
Bleeding from knife wounds in the stomach and thigh, the apparently distraught nurse told the surprised concierge of a struggle with two hooded attackers at large in the building, and of grave and imminent danger to Safra and his Brazilian-born wife.
He told the police, who were on the scene within minutes, the same story. The bodies of Safra and Torrente were finally recovered at 7.15am, half an hour after firemen smashed their way into the apartment through the roof.
Investigators at first aired the theory that the attackers, unable to get at their intended victims, had started the fire and made good their escape. In New York and the City of London, rumours began circulating of a contract killing related either to Republic National’s cooperation with the FBI over a Russian money-laundering inquiry, or to the recently finalised -billion sale of the bank to HSBC, from which Safra was due to pocket nearly -billion.
But the nurse’s account soon began to raise more questions than it answered. Obsessively security-conscious, Safra (67) who suffered from Parkinson’s disease and needed 24-hour nursing care, had stuffed the Belle Epoque with state of the art alarms and surveillance systems — and none of the tapes analysed by police showed any sign of intruders.
After four days in hospital and under questioning, Maher cracked. He would later tell the court that despite being paid a day and being in ”the most beautiful job I ever had”, he felt that Safra’s chief nurse, Sonia Herkrath, belittled him and he feared he might lose his job.
Six weeks after arriving in Monaco, he hatched the idea of lighting the fire to ingratiate himself with his boss and earn a promotion. A defence lawyer, Sandrine Setton, insisted the deaths were not intentional.
”He admired, even loved his employer,” Setton said in her closing statement. ”Stupidity is reprehensible, but it is not a crime”. She argued that the charge should be reduced to involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum of six years.
But the prosecution said that rather than extinguish the fire, Maher had let it spread, leading to the two deaths. The state prosecutor, Daniel Serdet, also argued that Maher’s tale of armed intruders had delayed the rescue. ”He directly caused the deaths of Torrente and Safra,” Serdet said. ”He trapped the victims.”
Police and firemen admitted during the trial that Safra could possibly have been saved if firemen had been allowed into the apartment sooner. ”We had to secure the building first,” a senior police officer said. ”As far as we knew, there were still two armed men inside.”
A psychiatrist told the court that Maher, twice married and a father of three, was a complex character, cautious, immature, ambitious and distrustful. ”He just wanted to prove his attachment to Edmond Safra by an ultimate sacrifice,” Elisabeth de Franceschi said. ”He was desperate for recognition, he functioned on competition and jealousy.”
In her statement, Lily Safra, who inherited her husband’s -billion fortune, attacked the argument of Maher’s defence lawyers that her husband had contributed to his own death by refusing to emerge from the bathroom even after repeated assurances that it was safe to do so.
”Edmond did not suffer with paranoia, nor was he obsessed with his personal security,” she said, adding that another defence suggestion that Safra killed the nurse himself because she wanted to get out of the bathroom was simply ”abhorrent”.
Safra, born into a wealthy Jewish banking family in Beirut in 1932, had been building his global financial empire for more than 30 years. He was also a philanthropist who helped to build synagogues, schools and community centres in half a dozen countries.
Among the mourners at his funeral were the Nobel laureate and Holocaust historian Elie Wiesel, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the former UN secretary general Javier Perez de Cuellar, and dozens of leading figures from the world of international finance.
His death paralysed Monaco, the chic playground for the super-rich whose 30 000-odd inhabitants are rarely troubled by crime. The tiny principality averages one violent death a decade. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001