Alberto Vilar maybe the greatest arts benefactor in history

Upstaged by the dot.com crash of 2000, the world-famous donor to opera companies ended up a convicted criminal and in jail.

Alberto Vilar was an American investment manager who became a famous of the world’s opera houses and arts festivals. Picture: Fred Conrad/The New York Times

OBITUARY

Alberto Vilar

Philanthropist and disgraced financier. Born New Jersey, US, October 4, 1940; died in New York City, September 4, aged 80.

Opera is the most expensive sound in the world. No opera house – not New York’s Metropolitan, or London’s Covent Garden, or Milan’s La Scala – has ever made money. There is a full-time orchestra of 90 musicians at Covent Garden – and that’s before you talk of the costs of building sets, paying opera’s big-name stars and administrative staff, and venue hire. More than 1000 people are employed by the Metropolitan Opera.

Were opera not subsidised by taxpayers, sponsorship and donors, it wouldn’t just be elite, no fat lady would ever sing.

The world’s opera houses are always on the lookout for patrons with deep pockets. And for many years the deepest pockets were in pants worn by Alberto Vilar. For the decade up to 2000, Vilar is believed to have donated $US150m to opera houses, arts festivals and programs around the globe. He was almost certainly the world’s most generous patron of the arts.

Not that the arts were what his father had planned for him; Vilar grew up in Cuba where his dad owned banana plantations. But it was an unstable era of corruption and crime, so the family moved to Puerto Rico. Vilar became fascinated by the violin, but his father forbade him to have lessons. The boy covertly studied music, becoming familiar with the melodies of Bach, Verdi, Puccini and others.

To satisfy his father he studied maths and finance and – after national service with the army in Germany, where he was a regular at its grand concert halls – earned a degree in business, joined Citicorp and wound up in London, where he brokered then unfashionable telecommunications stocks.

Life in London completed his music education, with Covent Garden then being a magnet for the era’s great stars of opera, including Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and our own Joan Sutherland.

By 1980 Vilar was back in New York, having founded his own venture capital and investment advisory outfit, Amerindo. He stuck with what he knew best: technology stocks. He was an early investor in eBay and made his clients many hundred of millions of dollars. Amerindo became a corporate darling worth $US9bn as the Nasdaq index rose 400 per cent in five years.

At this stage Vilar was touring the world’s opera capitals to see their premiere performances while directing his great wealth to various arts enterprises: he promised the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden £10m and agreed to fund a young artists program there, and one of its halls was named after him. He also became the third biggest donor to his hometown Metropolitan Opera, pledging $US45m. He gave $US14m to St Petersburg’s Kirov Opera, and $US10m each to Washington and Los Angeles companies. He made a historic donation to the Salzburg Festival, its biggest. He also supported various distinguished artist programs. The Americans for the Arts awarded Vilar the National Arts Award and he was described as “the biggest benefactor in musical history”.

At that moment the dotcom bubble burst and Vilar was fully committed in the stocks the world now shunned. Global Crossing, despite never posting a profit, was valued at $US47bn one year and filed for bankruptcy the next. Vilar could not keep up with promised returns that he had until then reached effortlessly. Nor could he make good on many of his pledged donations. One client, Lily Cates, mother of Gremlins and Drop Dead Fred actor Phoebe Cates, believed her funds had been misused and US authorities charged Vilar and a business partner with securities fraud. Vilar was always confident he would be found not guilty, but he was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to nine years’ prison. He was released briefly on appeal, but returned to jail with an additional year to serve after being found guilty of preventing victims from recouping their funds.

Towards the end of his sentence, when, wearing an ankle bracelet, he was confined to his luxury United Nations Plaza apartment with its marble floors, Met-like chandelier, Steinway piano and larger-than-life-sized bronze statue of Mozart as a child, Vilar twice successfully applied to have his curfew hours extended so he could attend the opera. By then his name had been stripped from venues across the opera world.

In the end Amerindo refunded all its clients and, when Vilar was released, it had about $US60m in the bank. But the years behind bars hurt: “Look at all the bull markets I missed. Look at all the operas I missed,” he said.