Murder In Monaco
When billionaire banker Edmond Safra died in a fire, an American ex-Green Beret was charged with setting the blaze. Is he guilty? Erin Moriarty reports.
On a recent Saturday morning in her parents' home in rural Stormville, N.Y., Heidi Maher anxiously waited by the phone. For three years, the phone has been her lifeline, the only way she can talk to her husband Ted.
Their children - Ian, 7, Chris, 13, and Amber, 5 - haven't seen their father, Ted Maher, since the fall of 1999. He is in prison in Monaco.
From the moment she met Ted in 1989, when they were both nursing students, Heidi says she knew the ex-Green Beret was something special. They were married in 1993.
He loved kids, and worked in the neonatal unit of New York's Columbia Presbytarian hospital. One patient was so grateful to Ted, he helped him land a job taking care of reclusive billionaire Edmond Safra.
Safra and his wife Lily had homes in New York, London, Geneva, an estate in France, and a sumptuous 20-room penthouse in Monaco. According to Heidi, Safra had Parkinson's Disease, and the Safras liked that Ted was an ex-Green Beret. So they thought he could be both a bodyguard and a nurse.
The Safras offered Ted a contract at more money than he had ever made: $600 per day, But he'd have to leave for Monaco right away.
Then Safra died. A raging fire that started in a wastebasket, apparently set by two intruders, tore through the penthouse apartment, killing Edmond Safra and a nurse named Vivian Torrente.
Heidi was told by a Safra assistant that her husband, trying to fight off the intruders, had been knifed.
Heidi and her brother rushed to Monaco to be by Ted's side. What happened next was a bizarre series of events, designed, says Heidi, to make her husband look like a killer.
When she arrived, Heidi and her brother were picked up by a Safra driver and taken to the police station, where Heidi was interrogated about her husband for hours.
She asked for a break. When she went outside, she was grabbed by two men and put into a car. She and her brother were taken to Ted's hotel. The men took their passports. "They had us up against the wall and I thought we were going to die," she says.
Her abductors turned out to be Monaco police officers. Shortly afterwards, Heidi says, they pressured Ted by showing him her passport. "He was told then that I was stripped & tortured," she says.
Just days after being hailed as a hero, Ted confessed to the crime. "I know he didn't do this," Heidi says.
Heidi believes Ted signed a confession only because he feared for her safety. In it, Ted says he stabbed himself and then set the fire. The idea, he said, was to appear as if he were saving his boss.
After three years in a Monaco prison, Ted went on trial for arson. If convicted, he faced life in prison.
Some say he is innocent. Among them is writer Dominick Dunne, who usually takes the prosecution's side.
Days before his death, Safra finalized the sale of his Republic bank for billions. He was a jet-setter who hung around with heavyweights like Shimon Peres, the former prime minister of Israel.
His business made him some potent enemies as well. "He did business with the Russians, and he turned in the Russian mafia to the FBI. He did business with the Palestinians," says Dunne. "He became very paranoid about his safety."
Safra employed a personal army of security guards, said to be trained in Israel by secret police.
Like many rich people concerned with security, Safra spent a great deal of time in Monaco. It's a small country, not even the size of Central Park. But while there are only 6,000 citizens, there are nearly 400,000 bank accounts. Monaco goes to great lengths to protect the rich and their money.
Journalist Patrick Middleton, a writer for the Riviera Reporter in nearby France, says Monaco is a police state. Precisely because the Monaco police are so vigilant, many question whether Ted Maher alone could kill a man as connected as Safra.
What was the motive, asks Peres: "Just to show himself as a hero? I mean the man must be a little bit disturbed to do it for that reason."
Heidi Maher believes her husband is the victim of a cover-up: Why, with so many cops, and so little crime, did it take more than two hours to reach Safra and his nurse, who were by that time dead from smoke inhalation?
Where were Safra's private guards on the night he died? None were on duty that night, says Dunne.
There were rumors that Safra was the victim of a Russian mob hit, or Palestinian terrorists, Dunne says.
What also caught his attention were the stories about Edmond's widow, Lily.
"She was a glamorous woman, a witty woman, spoke four languages. They say her caviar bills were $100,000 per year," he says.
Lily Safra has been a source of gossip in high society circles for years. Married four times, she became a very rich woman when her second husband Freddy Monteverde died under tragic and unusual circumstances. Lily Monteverde inherited $230 million from her second marriage.
More unusual than the fortune Monteverde left her is the way he died. Official reports called it a suicide, but Dunne spoke to a family member. "And she said, 'Well, 'If you can call shooting yourself in the heart, twice, suicide,'" Dunne recalls.
But documents obtained by 48 Hours – a death certificate and police report — don't confirm two shots.
Still, 30 years later, when Edmond died, tongues began to wag once more -especially when it became known that two months before his death, he changed his will, cutting out his two brothers, and leaving control of most of his estimated $4 billion fortune to Lily.
What about the speculation that Mrs. Safra herself assisted in his death or stood by?
"It is more than scandalous. Not only is it not true, it is totally scandalous!" says Lily Safra's lawyer, Mark Bonnant. "When you put together what their life was, what their love was, what her behavior was during the fire, how can you dare, for one minute, suggest that it could be Lily?" On the contrary, says Bonnant, Lily Safra, who was in the apartment that night, did what she could to help her husband.
"Madame Safra, when she hears about this, the first thing she does is call the police. The first thing she does then is try desperately to go and save her husband," says Bonnant.
And Bonnant brushes off suggestions of any international conspiracy: "If a mafia or whatever enemy wanted the death of Edmond Safra, the way to do it is not to ask a nurse to put a fire in a wastepaper basket.
Bonnant says there's only one person responsible for Edmond Safra's death: Ted Maher. And under Monaco's court system, he is allowed to help prosecutors prove that.