The Mansions of Limbo (31 page)

He met Grace Jones and signed her up as a runway
model for three shows. At a time when the company was in serious trouble, he offered her $50,000 for each appearance. Jones wisely insisted on being paid in advance before each show.

He became a confider of intimate secrets, assuring each confidant that he or she was the only person he could trust. “I find that I wake up in a different bed each morning,” he told an associate, who later discovered he had shared the same intimacy with his publicist and a number of friends. In October 1987, during the collections, he called several people, some he didn’t even know very well, sobbing, saying he was getting a divorce. Rosa was said to be jealous of the female models in the shows, and at one point she packed and left Milan for Paris. There she remembered she had left her jewelry behind in the hotel safe, so she returned, and everything was all right between them again.

One observer told me that Polo got “weirder and weirder.” He dieted down to 145 pounds and began to dye the hair on his chest.

Last February, amid persistent widespread rumors of imminent financial troubles, he appeared at a sale in Monte Carlo with Fabrizio Bagaglini and a whippet dog and paid $500,000 for a pair of chairs by the French furniture-maker Sene, chairs so rare that they could not be taken out of France.

That same month, Pablo Aramburuzabala, who had been Roberto Polo’s first major client and who had a sort of father-son relationship with him, flew from Mexico to Paris to confront him about all the rumors. “The investors were nervous and not happy hearing all the publicity he was getting, being described as a Cuban-American millionaire,” he told me. “He didn’t have time to make that kind of money unless he was doing something wrong. People start to do little things and get away with it, and then start
to take more and more. I gave him his chance. My wife is the godmother of his daughter. I met Roberto at Citibank. Then he started being money manager with me. It was just a matter of calling several banks to see which bank gave the best interest. I would see him four times a year, and he would tell me how my portfolio was. In February I asked him, ‘Do you have financial problems?’ He said no. He said that Mr. Ortiz-Murias was making trouble. I said to him, ‘I don’t think you have that kind of money.’ I never authorized him to deal with art. He said that he had a syndicate of people for buying art. He told me he was managing a billion dollars. When I commented on Rosa’s jewels, I was told that some of her jewels were lent by jewelers as a way of advertising. I said to him, ‘I need some money. You have to give me some money back.’ After a while I received part of it, not even 30 percent of the amount. Later, another small part, even smaller than the previous payment. I realized that things were in terrible shape. He promised to come to Mexico to straighten things out, but he never came.”

The New York office of Miguel Cruz was run on money that was sent each month from Geneva. It took approximately $200,000 a month to keep the New York end of the business going, and more often then not only half that amount was sent. Salaries and bills went unpaid. By the end of 1987 there were bills in excess of $1 million. “A lot of people have been hurt by the unpaid bills, including Miguel Cruz himself,” said Peter Dubow. “Miguel always paid his bills, and the matter was highly embarrassing for him.”

In the fall of 1987, Roberto Polo made his biggest play for social recognition, as well as a last-ditch bid to promote the flailing fashion line, by underwriting two famous balls, the Save Venice ball in Venice to help restore the Church of
Santa Maria dei Miracoli, followed seventeen days later by the Chantilly Ball in France to benefit the Institute of France. They attracted the crème de la crème of international society. With rumors everywhere that he was financially strapped, Polo spent over $600,000—some say closer to a million—on the two events. In addition, it was reported in society columns that he flew guests from ail over the world by private jet to attend the parties. The talk of the Save Venice ball was Rosa Polo’s jewels, in all the colors. She swam each day in the swimming pool of the Hotel Cipriani in a different bathing suit with a necklace of precious stones to match. Meanwhile, the people in the warehouse in Milan had to pass the hat to pay for the gasoline to get the collection to the Chantilly Ball. After that they sent the collection to New York for the fashion week there, but the New York office didn’t have the money to get it out of customs.

Polo’s hope, apparently, was that his new perfume company would rescue his collapsing empire. At a cost of nearly $1 million, he built a new office for Le Parfum de Miguel Cruz on Avenue Marceau in Paris. He hired as the president of the company Jacques Bergerac, the fifties movie star, who had been married to Ginger Rogers and Dorothy Malone, and who had more recently—before the takeover by Ronald Perelman—been a high-ranking executive at Revlon. He also hired the New York architectural and design firm of de Marsillac Plunkett to design the bottles and packaging. He himself played an important part in choosing the scents for the perfume. The perfume business, however, is considered a seven-to-one shot for success, and it usually takes two to three years before profits begin to show. To finance Le Parfum and perhaps to settle with his disgruntled investors, who were beginning
to demand their money back, Polo is reported to have sold $22 million in jewels between February and May.

He drew more international press by announcing that he had donated to the Louvre the Empress Eugenie crown, valued at $2.5 million, and Fragonard’s
The Adoration of the Shepherds
, valued at between $2.5 million and $5 million. At a well-publicized ceremony attended by sixty guests in evening clothes, the French government expressed its gratitude by making him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Next Polo announced that he was putting his famous collection of eighteenth-century French paintings up for sale. In what is thought to have been an I’ll-pat-your-back-if-you-pat-mine gesture, Pierre Rosenberg, the distinguished curator of paintings at the Louvre, wrote the preface to the catalog for the sale, even though it is frowned on in museum circles for museum people to become involved in such commercial enterprises. To counteract the speculation that he was selling his collection to meet the demands of his investors, or to save his failing dress business, or to finance his perfume business, Roberto Polo wrote the foreword to the beautiful catalog, in which he said, “Collectors can be divided into two groups: those who satisfy their appetite by the endless accumulation of things and those who are most excited by the ‘hunt,’ the search and research of things. The latter kind of collector satisfies his appetite and curiosity for the collectible once he has it and squeezes out of it, as from a ripe fruit, all the juice that it has to give, then moves on to a different collectible … I am one of those collectors.” Polo said he expected the sale to bring in between $18 million and $20 million.

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When Alfredo Ortiz-Murias returned home from the Venice and Chantilly balls, he observed to Ramona Colón that he had seen a change in Roberto’s personality. Ramona Colón told him that she thought Roberto had been transferring clients’ money to “third parties.” Ortiz-Murias claims that that was his first knowledge of malfeasance on the part of Polo. Colón stated in her affidavit that Polo would direct her to transfer a client’s time deposit to the PAMG-NY account and then to the ITKA account. “I noticed that some client time deposit cards were marked ‘PAMG’ in Roberto’s handwriting. Although these time deposit cards were regularly updated and statements sent to the clients continued to report these time deposits, I believe that the entries and statements were fraudulent and that the time deposits no longer existed.… Sometime in mid-1984, I calculated the total shown on all cards marked ‘PAMG’ and the total was about $37 million.” Colón also stated in her affidavit, “I saw Roberto take home shopping bags full of client transfer records and other client information. Since I worked with the files on a daily basis, I know he never brought the records or information back. On one occasion, when Alfredo Ortiz-Murias requested some information on one of his clients and the record could not be found, Roberto explained that he had probably burned it in his fireplace by mistake. Also, during that time, Roberto instructed me to erase all the time deposit computer records. He told me that if they could not be erased, he would throw the computers into the river. Following Roberto’s instructions, I contacted a man at Commercial Software, Inc., and he instructed me on how to erase the computer records, which I did.”

Alfredo Ortiz-Murias began to notify his own clients and others that there was trouble, and the clients began to place calls on their assets, meaning, in layman’s terms, they
wanted their money back, immediately. In one of his letters from prison, Polo has said, “Rostuca advised PAMG in December 1987 that it wished to terminate its relationship; the other clients did the same in April and May of 1988; this means that PAMG was in the obligation to repay its clients between December of 1988 and June of 1989, at the earliest. Now as before this scandal, PAMG is prepared to pre-pay, but Alfredo is not interested, because as he said, ‘I hate Roberto. I only want his blood.’ ”

When too many of Polo’s investors demanded their money at the same time, it was like a run on the bank. He could not meet their demands. But that, his defenders say, did not make him a crook.

A Swiss arrest warrant was issued on April 30. The Swiss were expecting Polo to appear at the opening of the exhibition of twenty-six paintings that were to be auctioned on May 30, but he didn’t show up. In the meantime the Swiss judge got in touch with the French police, and an international arrest warrant was issued. At that time Polo made a call from Paris to Milan from a street telephone. “Don’t call me at home,” he said. “The telephones are tapped.”

On May 8, Roberto Polo and Fabrizio Bagaglini were in Haiti. Polo intended to start a new collection of pictures to replace his collection of French masterpieces. An American friend, Kurt Thometz, and his wife were in Paris at the time. They visited the Polo apartment and said there were already between thirty-five and forty Haitian paintings in one room. Roberto was also buying Dominican art, including some new works by his father-in-law.

On May 11, Polo was seen at a jewel auction in Geneva, selling.

On May 12, he was seen in the South of France with Rosa, Fabrizio, the child, the nanny, and Julio Cordero,
Rosa’s cousin, who was the manager of the Geneva office, and his wife.

On May 15, the group was in Monte Carlo, and Polo’s life seemed out of control. With an international warrant out for his arrest, he arrived that afternoon at the Hôtel de Paris apartment of Baby Monteiro de Carvalho, the richest man in Brazil, to watch the Grand Prix, which raced by in the square below. He was accompanied by Rosa, Marina, and Fabrizio, and other guests commented that he seemed harassed.

On May 16, police entered the office of the Miguel Cruz perfume company in Paris and told the staff that Roberto Polo was under arrest. The feeling, according to Ortiz-Murias, is that perhaps the employees alerted Polo. He and his family returned from the South of France that night. Rosa and the child went to the apartment, but Roberto did not. Instead he went to a hotel.

On May 17, Roberto disappeared.

On May 18, at nine o’clock in the morning, the police and detectives walked into the Polo apartment. Rosa was there. The police seized $26 million in furniture and paintings, leaving her with only two mattresses on the floor. Rosa asked the police if she could keep her engagement ring, and they let her.

The Ferrari Testarossa was seized in Monte Carlo.

In the days that followed, several people in New York had direct-dial overseas calls from Polo. Eleanor Lambert told me, “He didn’t give his name. He simply said, ‘You know who this is, don’t you?’ I said yes, and he went on to say that all the stories about him were lies spread by Alfredo Ortiz-Murias, and that in time his name would be cleared.” People who knew him best said that he would not allow the police to catch him, that he would take sleeping pills.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he was dead,” said an antiques dealer in New York.

“A suicide?” I asked.

“No, murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“You must understand that there are a lot of people who don’t want him to be found, because he could incriminate them.”

In addition to the investors who did not want to be identified, several of the antiques dealers Polo did business with in Europe were said to have been paid partially in their own country and partially in Switzerland, a practice not only frowned upon but considered criminal in some countries.

The whereabouts of Roberto Polo and Fabrizio Bagaglini between May 16 and the end of June, when they turned up in Viareggio, remains a mystery, although the most persistent speculation at the time, later proved incorrect, was that they were in Peru, Chile, or Brazil. Alfredo Ortiz-Murias believes that Polo was hiding out in an apartment in Paris, because Rosa Polo, who was then under surveillance, left her apartment each afternoon and went to the Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme to use the public telephone, presumably to call her husband. In one of the press releases Polo wrote from the prison in Lucca, he says about this period, “Prior to going to Viareggio, I had been in my apartment in Monte Carlo, at the Hôtel de Paris (also in Monte Carlo), at the Hôtel Hermitage (also in Monte Carlo), at Hôtel Le Richemond in Geneva (registered in my name), and before that in Port-au-Prince in Haiti with friends and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, with family.” There is no doubt that he was in all those places, but earlier than May 16. There is further speculation that the French police did not want to make the arrest
in France because a nephew of President Mitterand, Maxime Mitterand, was an employee in the Geneva office of PAMG, Ltd.

On May 30, the auction of Polo’s French masterpieces went on in Paris as scheduled. Five days earlier, Ader Picard Tajan, the auctioneer, had called a press conference to explain that the sale would be a “forced one” and that he would be the “receiver” for the courts. Surprisingly, the highly publicized sale did not draw crowds. The $14 million realized from it was $3.4 million less than had been expected. There was talk in art circles that if the works donated to the Louvre by Polo had been purchased with money that was not his own the Louvre would have to return them.