The accusation was later withdrawn, but until his death Safra was the inspiration for countless unsubstantiated rumours that linked him to drug, gold and currency trafficking, money laundering and organised crime. But, as it was, Maher left his wife and three children in Stormville, New York, and his secure post at Columbia-Presbyterian, and flew to the French Riviera and a $600-a-day ringside view of the life of one of the world's richest and most mysterious men.Īs far back as 1957, Edmond Safra was named as a drug trafficker in a US Bureau of Narcotics report. In any other circumstances, the closest Maher might have come to Safra would have been to cash a cheque in one of his banks.

He also possessed homes in Paris, Geneva, London, New York and Brazil. Safra owned a vast penthouse in Monaco and La Leopolda, the magnificent villa in Villefranche built on the estate that once belonged to Belgium's genocidal King Leopold II. Maher had an ongoing property dispute with his next-door neighbour in upper New York State. Maher was a tall, slender man with an open manner. Safra, a Lebanese Jew with Brazilian nationality who lived mostly in the south of France, was fluent in French, English, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic and Hebrew. The unworldly Maher spoke not a word of French.

The photographer mentioned the story to an associate, Safra, who was sufficiently impressed to offer Maher a position as part of his 12-strong medical team - the banker suffered from Parkinson's Disease. Working at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, where he had qualified as a licensed nurse, Maher found an expensive camera which he promptly returned to its owner.

How he came to be in Monaco was a result of unforeseeable happenstance. And, equally, Maher, a smalltown American who never travelled beyond US borders in his three years in the army, appeared to be someone who was a total stranger to both drug cartels and the Moscow mafia. It seemed that Safra, 67, who was renowned for his protective shield of Israeli bodyguards, was a man with no shortage of enemies. Those who were, suggested one newspaper, 'range from the Russian mafia to Japanese investors, through drug cartels and Middle Eastern trading companies'. Last December, Maher was arrested following the deaths of billionaire banker Edmond Safra and his nurse in circumstances that remain oblique and subject to a multitude of speculative theories. The only clues to its true purpose are the bars on the windows and the battery of security cameras on the roof - hardly an atypical sight in Monaco.Īmong the inmates, most of whom are imprisoned for fraud or other white-collar crime, is Ted Maher, a 42-year-old former Green Beret in the US Army. There are no signboards nor, indeed, any apparent entrance. Of the thousands of tour- ists who file past the old fort on the rocky promontory of Monaco Ville, between the Oceanographic Museum and a cheesy celebration of the Grimaldi family called the Monte Carlo Story, very few realise that incarcerated within its walls are the principality's 20 or so prisoners. The authorities in the world's wealthiest state have dealt with the problem by locating the local jail on the very extremity of its tiny landmass. Amid such stainless perfection, a prison could look embarrassingly conspicuous. And each morning a platoon of gardeners removes dying petals from the immaculate flowerbeds. Each night in Monte Carlo, it is said, a recording of predatory birds is transmitted through hidden loudspeakers in the main square to prevent sparrows from soiling the famous casino's pristine lawn.

Scarlet blade vendetta