When Lily Watkins was 19, she moved to Montevideo, Uruguay, where she married Mario Cohen, a hosiery magnate. He became a town elder, and even today the town’s main street, Rua Mister Watkins, bears his name.
Watkins owned a rail car factory in Mesquita, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where he soon moved with his young family. Her mother, Annita (Noudelman) Watkins, a homemaker, had fled her native Ukraine in the face of antisemitic pogroms. Her father, Wolf Watkins, was a British engineer who had moved to Latin America in search of business opportunities and found them while servicing the region’s booming rail industry. But she came close to filing a lawsuit in 2005 when Lady Colin Campbell, a biographer, wrote a novel about a woman who murders her way to great fortune several details from the plot mapped closely onto Mrs. Safra was not an especially litigious person, and she seemed content to let the yellow press do its job. One newspaper, The Independent, blamed her for single-handedly making London’s elite social scene more like that of New York, where, quelle horreur, “social position is defined not by what you have, but by how much you can afford to give away to worthy causes.” They were especially suspicious of her charitable work. Some reporters dragged up unfounded hearsay about her second husband’s suicide others recycled conspiracy theories about Mr. In 2001, Vanity Fair photographed her sitting beside Prince Charles at a dinner at Buckingham Palace a year later, she and Jacob Rothschild co-sponsored a 5,000-pounds-a-plate charity event they called “An Evening With Elton John.”Īlthough (or perhaps because) she was welcomed by London’s elite, she became an irresistible target for the city’s tabloid press. She bought a six-floor belle époque townhouse in Belgravia, one of London’s most exclusive neighborhoods, and began to make a name in the city’s social circles. Safra’s nurses, in the stomach and thigh along the way. When they failed to break through the bathroom door, it was said, they set fire to the house and escaped, stabbing Ted Maher, another of Mr. British tabloids were filled with stories about two knife-wielding assailants, masked in balaclavas, who had come in through a skylight to kill him. The rumor mill began again after his death. Safra was the subject of constant baseless rumors about the Russian mafia, Colombian drug dealers and other people said to be clients, and about the services he might have provided them. Safra, who was in another wing of the apartment, escaped unharmed.Īs a private banker for some of the world’s richest people, and as a very private person himself, Mr.
Safra had locked himself and a nurse - he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and needed care - in a bathroom that doubled as a safe room, and refused to come out. The worst came in 1999 when her husband, the founder of Republic National Bank, died during a fire in their penthouse apartment in Monaco. Her second husband died by suicide in 1969 her son Claudio was killed in a car accident, along with her grandson, in 1989. But the glamour was offset by heartbreak.
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