From the VFArchve: The murder of Edouard Stern, one of Europe's wealthiest men, stunned the global financial elite. But the story took a sharp swerve toward the kinky when it was revealed that he was killed while encased in a latex bodysuit.
he story out of Switzerland that Tuesday in early March was startling, yet oddly familiar. The financier Edouard Stern, one of Europe's richest men, confidant to any number of French politicians, the man who had once been heir apparent at the elite AngloFrench investment-banking firm of Lazard Frères & Co., had been found dead in Geneva, in his locked penthouse apartment.
"People are just in shock," William Cohan tells me the next day. Cohan is a one-time Lazard banker who has recently been interviewing David-Weill, Felix Rohatyn, and other current and former Lazard partners for a forthcoming book on the firm to be calledhe was to interview Stern the week after the murder."Look," Cohan says,"a lot of people didn't like this guy. Some feel, at a visceral level, you know, 'I'm not going to shed tears for this guy.
At first I didn't understand."Hold on," I said."You were calling me about Stern before he was murdered?" Forty-eight hours later, I find myself staring down at the rooftop of the main branch of the New York Public Library from a perch inside Keil's spartan Fifth Avenue offices. Keil informs me he had been running the New York office of Stern's main investment vehicle, Investments Real Returns , off and on for the last seven years. With Stern, he had helped to broker the sale of the Republic National Bank to the HSBC conglomerate in the weeks after Safra's death.
However far-fetched it sounded, Keil believed the murder might have been linked to the Rhodia litigation. This had been a subject of some debate within Stern's inner circle the day of the memorial service, he says. When he arrived in Paris for the service, Keil found Stern's number-two man, Michel Garbolino, irate."I told him not to bring this suit!" Garbolino seethed."I told him!"Suddenly calmer, Garbolino replied,"No, I don't.
"What I found remarkable was that, though in the interim he had been enormously successful, he was unchanged—the continuity between the teenager and the accomplished businessman, I found that so interesting," Braunschvig says."The way he stood out, both in his youth and as a mature man, I would characterize it as dashing. He had a dashing personality in both senses of the word. Everything he did, he did with speed and brilliance. He was like that at 15.
Stern not only saved the bank from bankruptcy, he returned it to profitability, eventually realizing a surprising $335 million for its sale to a Swiss group in 1987. Overnight, speculation spread: What would he do next? His 1984 marriage to Béatrice gave Stern entree to the powerful David-Weill family and made him a candidate to run something big. At 32 he already had a C.E.O.'s presence. Almost everyone I spoke to talked of how Stern dominated any room he entered.
Koifman cites the time that Stern, at I.R.R., hired a new stock analyst and a new trader. One day, when the analyst was on vacation, Stern asked the trader to do a bit of analytical work."He gave it to Edouard, who then called him a fucking moron and fired him on the spot. I said, 'Why, Edouard? He's not trained to do that.' But that was Edouard. A month later, he fired the analyst, who did a bit of bad trading. Well, he wasn't a trader! He was always so impatient.
The number of complaints about Stern had been rising for some time when, in mid1997, he engaged in a hot dispute with one of Lazard's partners in Paris over which of them should accept a seat on the board of a leading French aluminum company. For David-Weill, it appears to have been the last straw. Stern's severance package was generous, to say the least.
As word of the new fund spread, opportunities began flowing across Stern's desk. I.R.R.'s first investment was the $50 million purchase of Maille, the condiment company whose Dijon mustard has been a feature of French meals since 1747. Its second move was a $20 million investment in Chrysalis, an India-based fond that sank money into dozens of companies springing up across the subcontinent to serve American outsourcing. Unlike some funds, I.R.R. had no special focus.
Sometime in mid-2004, as the legal wrangling intensified, Keil says, Stern had a strange conversation with a judge in France, in which the judge suggested that Stern get a concealed-weapons permit. Stern later secured a similar permit for Switzerland. But he made no effort to increase his personal security, and he did not use a bodyguard. Still, he was openly worried, and that concerned his partners.
Then, at 11, Stern missed an appointment with his friend William Browder, who ran the Hermitage Fund. Stern's secretary telephoned Koifman."Is he up there with you?" she asked.Koifman telephoned Stern's apartment. No answer. He called his cell phone. No answer. He called twice more before heading to Hashimoto at 12:30. Checking with Stern's secretary at 1:45, he was surprised to learn that Stern still had not appeared.
"I couldn't see the face, the head. If I'd seen that same body in a Manhattan subway station, it would never have occurred to me it was Edouard Stern. You couldn't see anything." There was a thin white rope draped over the body. Beside it was a chair. More ropes lay on the chair."It was really a nasty scene," he says."You know that movie? That kind of scene. It was just, you know, I don't mean to be dramatic, but it was ...
Koifman, who insists he knew nothing of Stern's sex life, described the latex suit and explained that it made identifying the body impossible without disturbing the scene."Kristen said, 'That's Edouard,'" Koifman says. He takes a long drag on his dying Marlboro, then stubs it out."That's when I realized Kristen knew about the latex suits and of these issues in Edouard's life. He knew.
The family adviser confirms a story that circulated at the time: Julia, now 32, became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy in 1999. She told Stern it was his, and he accepted responsibility, visiting the infant daily and paying for an Eastern European nanny. When Stern told van Riel what had happened, van Riel suggested they administer a paternity test.
Though few outside their immediate family were aware of it, Edouard and Béatrice had divorced in 1998, the year after he left Lazard. They remained close, however, sometimes talking several times a day; Béatrice even managed to keep loose track of Stern's new girlfriends. In the weeks before his death, a family adviser says, there were at least three of them, scattered around Geneva and Paris.
Throughout, Brossard appears to have worked for escort services, often sliding into Geneva hotel rooms as"Alice," a leather-clad dominatrix. By some accounts, this is how she met Stern. Their relationship, which her attorney dates to 2001, seems to have begun on a purely professional basis.
What is known about that night is all second- and thirdhand, related by attorneys and local reporters who fielded a leak or two from the police."Only two people know what happened in that bedroom," Koifman says,"and one is dead." Given his attire, Stern was apparently expecting a sexual rendezvous.
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