The Mansions of Limbo (28 page)

Clearly the Polos were a young couple of consequence, but it was hard to get a line on them. Rosa was quiet,
almost shy, a Latin wife who lived in the shadow of her husband, and Roberto sent out mixed signals. He was said to be a financial wizard, and he had his own company called PAMG, for Private Asset Management Group. He handled the monetary affairs of a select group of very rich foreign investors with assets in the United States.

He reclined in languid positions that first evening, and his talk was decidedly nonfinancial, about jewelry and fashion and Jacob Freres, Ltd., an antiques shop that had recently opened on Madison Avenue at Seventy-eighth Street, which was run by Rosa’s brother, Federico Suro. They sold ormolu-encrusted furniture fit for palaces, and massive porcelain urns, all at prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Roberto was obviously a genuine aesthete, mad about beautiful things, and his interest in fashion, which would become obsessive in the years ahead, was already evident. As a graduate student at Columbia in the early seventies, he had worked at Rizzoli, the art bookstore, and had come up with the idea of doing a show called “Fashion As Fantasy,” with fashion designers showing clothes as art objects.

They were a couple in a hurry, or rather Roberto was in a hurry, and Rosa was swept along in his vortex. He had reportedly created his wife, turning her from a sweet Latin girl into a sleek and glamorous international figure. He picked out her clothes, told her what jewels to wear, chose their dinner guests, did the seating, and ordered the flowers and menu. He went to the collections in Paris with her, and in one season spent half a million dollars on clothes for her. He had a passion for jewelry and a knowledge of gemology. His role model, according to the interior designer and socialite Suzie Frankfurt, was Cosimo de’ Medici.

“I didn’t want it said I was just a rich boy,” he said in
an early interview, before his woes, as if he were the heir to a great fortune instead of an alleged usurper of other people’s money. Like a Cuban Gatsby, an outsider with his nose pressed to the window, Roberto Polo wanted it all and he wanted it quick, and he saw, in the money-mad New York of the eighties, the way to achieve his ambitions.

July 1988. The picture was improbable. A young blond girl of extraordinary loveliness, wearing a light summer dress, was leaning against the pay-telephone booth in the courtyard of the prison in Lucca, an Italian walled town between Pisa and Florence. She was reading an English novel and occasionally taking sips of Pelligrino water from a green bottle. On the roof above her, a guard with a submachine gun paced back and forth on a catwalk in the scorching Tuscan sun. There was about the girl a sense of a person waiting.

I was waiting too, reading a day-old English newspaper and leaning against the fender of a dented red Fiat. I had been waiting for a week for a permit that was never to come, from the Procura Generale in Florence, to visit the most famous detainee in the prison. Roberto Polo had been arrested by the Italian police the week before in the nearby seaside village of Viareggio, after an alleged attempt, by wrist slashing, to commit suicide. Bleeding, believing himself to be dying, Polo had made farewell telephone calls proclaiming his innocence to one of his investors in Mexico, to members of his family, and to a former associate, the man who had set the case against him in motion.

It occurred to me, watching the young girl, that we were there for the same reason. I offered her my
Daily Mail,
and she said that she hadn’t seen an English paper for days. She knew a girl whose name was in Nigel Dempster’s column.
“She’s always in the papers,” she said. We exchanged names, and it turned out that I knew the mother of her stepsisters in New York.

“Why are you here?” I asked. We had stepped through rope curtains into the shade of the Caffe la Patria, a bar and tobacco shop adjacent to the prison.

“I’m with people who are seeing someone inside,” she said cautiously.

“Roberto Polo?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

“I supposed you were,” she replied.

The previous week I had made my presence and purpose known to Gaetano Berni, the Florentine lawyer retained by Polo’s family. Berni had explained to me that Polo was frighting extradition to Switzerland. “It is better for him to remain in Italy,” he had said. “The Swiss will be harder on him. Besides, there is insufficient evidence to extradite him. He didn’t kill. He didn’t deal drugs. He’s not Mafia. As the judge pointed out, he was not escaping when he was arrested.”

My new friend, Chantal Carr by name, was the girlfriend of Roberto Polo’s brother, Marco, a banker in Milan, where she also lived. Early that morning she had driven Marco and his father, Roberto Polo, Sr., to Lucca in her tiny Italian car. Even for the family of such an illustrious prisoner, visiting hours were restricted to one hour a week, on either Saturday or Sunday.

When Chantal Carr saw Marco Polo come out of the prison, she joined him, and I could see her telling him that I was in the bar, hoping to talk to him. Marco Polo is thirty-three, younger than his brother by four years, and handsome. His hair is black and curly, combed straight back. He has the look of the rich Italian and Latin American
playboys who disco at Regine’s. Standing in the hot sun, he was weeping almost uncontrollably while Chantal Carr patted him comfortingly on the back. Behind him stood his father, a smaller man with wounded eyes. Roberto Polo, Sr., seemed desolated by the disgrace that had befallen his family, as well as by the shock of having just seen his son in such awful circumstances.

“My brother is devastated. He is destroyed,” said Marco when he came into the cafe. The prison was filthy, he told me, the food inedible. Prisoners with money could purchase food and sundries in the prison store, but they were not allowed to spend more than 450,000 lire, or $350, a month. Roberto Polo, one of the few prisoners to have that kind of money, had spent his whole month’s allowance in the first few days of his imprisonment. During the time I was in Lucca, he could not even buy stamps.

“I am living in subhuman conditions … with murderers, thieves, drug traffickers, etc.,” Polo wrote in a press release from his cell. For two hours each morning, they were allowed to pace back and forth in an enclosed patio for exercise. “He is totally incommunicado. He does not know that people have come to see him,” said Marco. The only visitors he was allowed to have were his lawyers and members of his immediate family, but even they were not allowed to bring him a prescription he needed or a brand of toothpaste he requested—only food.

Marco expressed shock at the newspaper coverage of his brother’s dilemma. “They have convicted him without a trial,” he said.

The family was hoping to obtain Roberto’s release on bail. That afternoon the lawyers were due, Gaetano Berni from Florence and Jacques Kam from Paris. It seemed in keeping with the glamorous aspects of Roberto Polo’s recent life that Makre Kam, the principal lawyer he had
picked to defend his interests at the time the warrant for his arrest was issued, was also the lawyer of Marlene Dietrich, the late Orson Welles, Dior, and Van Cleef & Arpels. “Speed is of the essence,” said Marco. “Everything comes to a standstill in August. The judicial system closes down. Of course, even if bail is granted, all his money has been frozen.”

All around us in the cafe, waiting for the afternoon visiting hours to start, were prisoners’ relatives, many with small children. Looking at them, Marco said, “Roberto wants to see Marina, his daughter. But Rosa and he have decided that it is best she not come. She is five. She would remember.”

I asked about Rosa, who was expected in Lucca the following day from Paris, and whom I had spoken with a few days earlier. “Rosa has not cried once,” replied Marco, and there was an implied criticism in his voice. It is a known fact among all their friends that Rosa Polo and her husband’s mother have never gotten along. Rosa, however, who had every reason to be outraged at the position she found herself in, had been staunchly loyal to her beleaguered husband when I spoke with her. She is, after all, the daughter of a diplomat. Shortly after her husband’s disappearance five weeks before his arrest, the French police confiscated $26 million in paintings and furnishings from the couple’s Paris apartment, leaving Rosa and her daughter only mattresses on the floor to sleep on. “This whole thing has been a double cross,” she had told me. “We know who has been feeding everything to the press. When the press destroys you, it is hard for anyone to ever believe you.” The person who she believed had double-crossed her husband was Alfredo Ortiz-Murias, the former associate of Roberto Polo who had received one of his farewell calls. “We are united,” she had said to me about Roberto and her.

Marco and his father were also scornful about Alfredo Ortiz-Murias. “He was always jealous of my brother,” Marco said. Ortiz-Murias was the principal witness in the suit brought against Polo by Rostuca Holdings, Ltd., an offshore company operating out of the Cayman Islands, whose money was managed by Polo’s company, PAMG. It came out in the conversation that the man behind the company known as Rostuca was the governor of one of the poorest states in Mexico. I remembered Gaetano Berni saying to me a few days earlier, about this same man, “What kind of person has $20 million in U.S. dollars
in cash
outside his own country? Even Mr. Agnelli or Mr. Henry Ford, when he was alive, did not have $20 million in cash.” He had grimaced and shaken his head. The implication was clear.

“Will you tell me the circumstances of Roberto’s arrest?” I asked Marco.

“I have heard three stories. I do not know which one is the truth,” he replied, dismissing the subject.

I had heard several stories too, the first from Alfredo Ortiz-Murias in New York, about his farewell call from Roberto. According to Ortiz-Murias, who had blown the whistle on Polo, Roberto had said to him, “Good-bye, Alfredo. It’s 6:30
A.M.
in Europe. I am sorry you felt that way about me. Good-bye.” When I asked Ortiz-Murias what his reaction to the call was, he said, “He was trying to make me feel guilty.”

I had also heard from Pablo Aramburuzabala, one of Polo’s investors, a well-to-do Mexican businessman whose wife is the godmother of the Polos’ daughter, that Roberto had called his house four times to say that he was going to commit suicide. “The first three times I was out, but my wife spoke to him. He was calling from a public telephone. When I talked with him, he said he had never done anything
wrong. He gave me the address in Viareggio and said that I could call Interpol if I wanted. He said he was full of blood and didn’t have too much time. Then he must have called his mother. She called me to say that Roberto was dead. She said she didn’t know where to go to claim his body. I gave her the address in Viareggio. Then the brother, Marco, called from Tokyo. Marco said that Roberto had been picked up by an ambulance and was in the hospital in Viareggio.”

Roberto Polo gave his own version of his arrest in a press release: “I ate some fish which apparently made me very sick, because early in the morning, I called my brother (who lives in Milan), who speaks Italian, in order to ask him to call the police station to have them send a doctor because I felt like I was dying. My brother, who has a friend in Viareggio, asked his friend to call the police in order that they send a doctor to see me. By the time the doctor arrived, I had already vomited and had some tea: I felt much better. However, the doctor took my blood pressure, stated that it was a bit high, then left. A few hours later (I was already dressed to go to the beach on my bicycle), the police returned without the doctor and asked me to go with them to the station.… I was interrogated.… After that I was taken, handcuffed, to the prison where I am in Lucca.”

It seems odd that a person wanted by the police in three countries would call his brother in Milan to call the police in Viareggio to get a doctor for an attack of food poisoning. According to Gaetano Berni, the Florentine lawyer, Roberto himself called for an ambulance. It seems odd also that nowhere in Polo’s account of the events in Viareggio does he mention Fabrizio Bagaglini. Only Gaetano Berni would speak about Bagaglini when I brought
up the name. He said, “Fabrizio stayed until the arrest.” We will come to Fabrizio Bagaglini.

“Were you separated by a screen when you saw your brother?” I asked Marco Polo.

“No, we were able to embrace him.”

“Was he wearing the ribbon?” Chantal Carr asked Marco.

“Yes,” he replied.

Three weeks before Polo vanished, the French government had made him a Commander of the Order of the Arts and Letters in gratitude for his having donated to the Louvre Museum Fragonard’s painting
The Adoration of the Shepherds
and a crown of gold, emeralds, and diamonds that had belonged to the Empress Eugenie.

“Does he wear a prison uniform?” I asked.

“No, he wears his own clothes. His body is clean. His clothes are clean. The place is filthy and horrible, but my brother looks classy. My brother is the classiest person I know.”

In 1982 the Polos moved from a one-bedroom apartment on Lexington Avenue to a large Park Avenue apartment, for which they spent $450,000. That move signaled the beginning of their rise. They had a Botero in the dining room and a picture by Mary Cassatt of a woman reading
Le Figaro,
which Roberto later sold at Christie’s for $1 million. “He took to buying paintings and then selling them a year later,” said Alfredo Ortiz-Murias. “He had no attachment to anything. Everything he bought was for sale.” Their only child, Marina, was born in 1983, while they were living in the Park Avenue apartment. The child’s godfather was the Count of Odiel, whose wife is a cousin of the King of Spain. Early in 1984, Roberto bought a fivestory
town house on East Sixty-fourth Street for $2.7 million. Four years later, Ramona Colon, Polo’s administrative assistant and office manager at the time of this purchase, stated in an affidavit filed with a New York civil suit, “I first became suspicious that not all of the clients’ money was being invested as required. At that time Roberto directly or indirectly purchased a town house … and directed [an assistant] to transfer money, in the approximate amount of the purchase price of the town house, from clients’ time deposits maturing at that time to an account at European American Bank on 41st Street, New York, and then to an account in the name of ITKA, at Credit Suisse in the Bahamas. I believe that the ITKA account was Roberto Polo’s personal account.”