By the end of the week, Safra’s murder remained a bizarre mystery. When the attack began, the 67-year-old banker, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, was locked into a bathroom with a nurse, Viviane Torrente, 52. They stayed there for more than two hours, long after the fire began and the masked intruders disappeared. As rescuers poked through the smoky apartment, Safra and his nurse died in the bathroom.
The attack was first reported by another of Safra’s nurses, a 41-year-old American man whose name was withheld by authorities. He said the intruders entered the apartment through an infirmary next to Safra’s top-floor bedroom. The American said he struggled with the intruders, who were armed only with knives. He escaped and fled downstairs, alerting Torrente to the attack on the way. She took Safra into the bath-room and locked the door. When the male nurse reached the lobby, he had superficial knife wounds on his abdomen and left leg. Later, police found a bloodstained knife (there was no word yet on fingerprints).
But except for the male nurse, no one saw the two intruders. They weren’t picked up by any of Monaco’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras. The nurse never mentioned a fire until much later that day, when police interviewed him at a hospital. (Back at the apartment, authorities had already discovered the blaze.) Asked if the nurse was a suspect, prosecutor Daniel Serdet replied, “He is a privileged witness.”
Who wanted Safra dead? Early speculation centered on the Russian mafia. Safra’s Republic National Bank–New York City’s third largest–had for years been a major player in the Russian market. Taken advantage of years ago by reputed money launderers, Republic kept an especially sharp eye out for suspicious transactions. Last year it helped alert U.S. authorities to an alleged laundering pipeline through the Bank of New York. Then, last October, Republic closed many of its Russian accounts as the ailing and childless Safra prepared to sell his banking businesses to a British holding company for $9.85 billion. One American expert on money laundering suggests Safra may have been murdered in order to delay the sale, allowing time for some shady Russian deal to be completed.
That was only one theory. Starting a fire is not a reliable way to kill someone, especially in a home equipped with elaborate security systems. That suggests the attack could have been an amateurish robbery or kidnapping attempt, with the fire as a ploy to cover up a botched crime.
Safra came from a long line of Jewish bankers who were used to doing business in precarious conditions. His father, Jacob, was born in Aleppo, Syria, where he worked in a family bank that financed camel caravans and traded gold (the family name means “yellow” in Arabic) in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. After World War I, Jacob moved his family and his bank to more cosmopolitan Beirut, where Edmond was born in 1932. The son left school at 16 to work in the bank and learned English on the job by translating cables from overseas. After Israel’s creation in 1948, many Jews, including the Safras, fled the Arab world. The family went first to Italy, then to Brazil, where Edmond helped to found a bank at the age of 21.
A few years later, he started the Trade Development Bank in Switzerland. Like Safra, his customers were financially conservative, more interested in preserving their assets than in chasing high yields. In 1966 Safra founded Republic National Bank, attracting depositors with what looked like a flashy gimmick: giving away color television sets. But he required customers to buy certificates of deposit that paid low interest rates, more than making up for the cost of the TVs. Safra continued to make money the old-fashioned way: by earning more on his customers’ deposits than he paid them in interest.
Safra married late, in 1976; he and Lily, a Brazilian widow, had no children of their own. He liked to say his banks were “my children, my life.” He had other homes in Paris, New York and Geneva, but he did not flaunt his wealth. He gave money to Jewish charities around the world, especially those assisting Sephardic Jews–emigrants, like himself, from Arab countries. His only “hobbies,” he said, were his banks.
In 1983, Safra sold his Trade Development Bank to American Express for $550 million in stock, agreeing to stay on and run the bank. But he never fit in with AmEx’s hard-charging management team, and walked out in 1984, selling his AmEx stock at a $135 million loss. Then, in 1988, he started a competing bank, Safra Republic Holdings. Soon, news leaks originating at AmEx accused Safra of dealing with money launderers, drug traffickers and illicit arms dealers. When Safra sued for slander, AmEx settled out of court, paying $8 million to charities chosen by Safra. AmEx’s top management blamed the smears on lower-level employees.
At about the same time, however, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration picked up allegations that a depositor was laundering money through a Republic account. A DEA report obtained by NEWSWEEK in 1989 said the agency’s investigators had turned up information that a Zurich-based currency-trading firm was laundering money for drug and arms traffickers in the Middle East through a Republic account. Neither Safra nor his bank was ever charged with money laundering. Safra’s New York lawyer at the time, Stanley S. Arkin, said last week the laundering allegations were “part of a put-up job to defame Edmond.” But after that episode, Safra went out of his way to avoid handling questionable money. To protect his reputation, he installed an elaborate system to detect suspicious transactions and report them to the authorities.
The cooperation included informing U.S. officials about Russian customers moving money through Republic and the Bank of New York. So far, three people have been indicted on charges of laundering money through the Bank of New York, and last week a former employee was arrested on charges of lying to investigators. The bank itself has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
By last year, Safra was thoroughly disenchanted with Russia. When the Kremlin defaulted on much of its debt, Republic wrote off a loss of $191 million. Then Safra decided to sell his businesses to HSBC Holdings, Britain’s largest banker. Last October, Republic closed many of its Russian accounts.
Safra had been warned about a contract on his life, according to a French news-agency report. The source of the threat wasn’t identified. His chief bodyguard, Samuel Cohen, was off duty at the time of the attack because the family seemed to be safely buttoned up in the Belle Epoque. But Safra’s fortress became his death chamber as smoke filled the apartment and flames broke through the roof.
One thing seemed clear: he didn’t have to die. Safra and his nurse both had cellular phones and made repeated calls from the bathroom. Lily Safra, who had taken refuge in her own bedroom at the other end of the apartment, assured her husband on the phone that help had arrived. But, hearing noise outside the bathroom and apparently terrified by the thought that the attackers might still be in the apartment, Safra refused to come out. Police and firemen didn’t know he was in the bathroom until they broke down the door and found the two bodies. Amid all the confusion, Edmond Safra never got the message that the threat from the intruders was over–and that the real danger was blazing over his head.
