Lily Safra’s life of extraordinary wealth often checked by tragedy

Lily Safra was an art-collecting socialite who became one of the wealthiest women in the world when her fourth husband died in a fire.

Lily Safra arriving at court in Monaco in 2002 for the trial of the man accused of killing her husband Edmond.

Lily Safra (nee Watkins) Socialite, art collector.
Born Porto Alegre, Brazil, December 30, 1934. Died Geneva, July 9, aged 87.

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Lily Watkins was destined for a life of opulent entitlement. Friends looked on hardly surprised as her years unreeled and she married her way to affluence and influence – always astounded by her serial luck, good and often very bad. Lily had never been anyone else, so she appeared not to notice.

She married four men, the first in 1952 and the last 24 years later with whom she spent the last 24 years of his life.

Safra was the last child of a Czechoslovak father who grew up in Britain at the end of England’s golden age of the trains. A railway engineer, he saw opportunities as Brazil expanded and electrified its railways systems after World War I and moved there under the name of Wolf White Watkins.

He married Annita Noudelman de Castro, a Uruguayan of Russian descent, and they had three boys in the 1920s. Lily was born six years later. One brother, Rodolpho, survives her at age 102.

Always her father’s chosen one, she was showered with expensive toys and designer clothes. Hers was a fragile beauty as she went dancing in the fashionable clubs of Rio de Janeiro. Her father decided the men there were of too-modest means, so he moved his princess to Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital where, in September 1952, and not quite 17, she married hosiery business owner Mario Cohen with whom she had three children. She found Montevideo dull and Cohen resistant to the high-profile extravagance she preferred.

By 1960 she was divorced and looking for another husband. In 1965 she found him: Romanian-born Brazilian Alfredo Monteverde. He came with a son, a love of culture high and low – his friends included artists Salvador Dali and Yves Klein, actor-director Orson Welles and cartoonist Al Capp – and, possibly just as important, a white goods conglomerate that made him wealthy indeed.

He’d had two wives and was charismatic, clever and witty.

Nonetheless, by 1969 it was over. Monteverde and Lily went to lunch to discuss their separation. Later that day he was found dead at home, having shot himself in the chest. Twice, just to make sure.

Monteverde’s mother and sister reportedly doubted it was suicide – there was no gunpowder residue on his hands and local police lost the weapon while collating evidence.

Lily received the bulk of his wealth, secured for her by their friend, banker Edmond Safra. She moved to London, dated Safra and they discussed marriage, but he was reluctant. Then Lily suddenly eloped to glamorous Acapulco – years before that city became Mexico’s ungovernable murder capital – marrying mid-table businessman Samuel Bendahan. She would ditch him within a year before finally marrying the billionaire Safra in 1976.

They moved to Monaco, where she became known as The Gilded Lily, and she oversaw the comprehensive philanthropic investments of her husband’s enterprises that spanned more than 50 countries. She also expanded their art collection, famously adding in 2010 one of Alberto Giacometti’s anorexically thin L’homme qui marche (Walking Man) sculptures for $155m – five times its forecast price. She just couldn’t stop putting her hand up. She became friends with Prince Charles and Elton John. In 1989, fate delivered another blow: one of her sons and a grandson were killed in a car accident back in Brazil.

Edmond Safra launched a successful private bank in 1956, then founded the Republic National Bank of New York, a peer of Chase Manhattan and Citigroup. In 1996 he launched Hermitage Capital Management with financier Bill Browder and they involved themselves in the early years of Russia’s oligarch empire when state-owned enterprises somehow ended up in the hands of little-known businessmen with close but volatile links to the Kremlin.

They were wild, risky years as extraordinary fortunes changed hands and more than a few politicians were compromised in the rush for wealth, including tipsy president Boris Yeltsin. Not every outside bank joined in, and soon Hermitage wanted out.

In 1999, Safra hurriedly sold his vast banking interests on the cheap to HSBC for about $15bn. On December 2 he and Lily gained Monegasque citizenship. The following day his Mossad-trained guards were unaccountably parked at his other address when his palatial apartment – with its bulletproof windows and steel doors – caught fire and he died with his nurse, suffocated in a safe room. It left Lily one of the world’s richest women.

In a complex, contradictory case filled with holes, an employee – former Green Beret Ted Maher – was charged and convicted of the murder he has always denied.

Then, 28 days later, an old adversary of Safra was abruptly elevated to the leadership of Russia: Vladimir Putin, many of whose enemies from then on would die just as unexpectedly.