A Deadly Cry For Attention

At least Ted Maher can't complain about the view. From a room near his cell, he can look out over the Mediterranean where sailboats heel with the wind and seagulls circle overhead. Gazing downward, he can see a public garden with pine trees, flower bushes and manicured lawns. It's the kind of vista he dreamed of when he accepted what he called the "best job" of his life and came to the Riviera six weeks ago. Trouble is, the window is located in the Monaco prison and Maher may spend the rest of his days behind bars.

His life took an irrevocable turn at 5 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 3, when what he later described as "dark ideas" propelled him into a bizarre charade that led to the death of his employer, Lebanese-born banker and philanthropist Edmond Safra, 67, one of the world's wealthiest men.

Maher, 41, an American nurse, had sought to win his boss's gratitude and emerge as a hero by staging an attack on Safra's bunker-like two-story penthouse. According to the Monaco police officials, Maher had stabbed himself twice with his own knife then shouted out that he was being attacked by two masked intruders. Safra, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, fled into a bathroom with another nurse and locked the steel-reinforced door. Maher then lit a fire in a wastebasket and rushed to the ground floor to alert the night watchman and call the police. But the blaze got out of hand and firemen were unable to persuade the terrified Safra to open the door--even though his wife, Lily, had allegedly told him by cell phone that the coast was clear. By the time firemen broke into the bathroom, more than two hours after the fire started, Safra and nurse Viviane Torrente, 52, had died of smoke inhalation. The fumes, ironically, reached the room through the fire detection system.

Following the initial reports of masked assailants, news of Safra's death set off a flurry of speculation. The favorite theory was that he had been assassinated by the Russian Mafia because his Republic National Bank of New York had last year alerted the FBI to money laundering operations emanating from Moscow. Another hypothesis was that the hit was somehow linked to the pending sale of the Republic National and the affiliated Safra Republic Holdings to Britain's HSBC Holdings for $9.85 billion, a deal that had nearly been derailed by the fraudulent operations of an agent working with Safra's bank. (The sale was approved last week, generating $2.8 billion for Safra's heirs.) Still other theories saw Safra, a Sephardic Jew who served as a key financial link between Israel and the Arab world, as a victim of Middle Eastern terrorists. None of the theories was any good for Monaco's proud image as high-security haven for the rich and famous.

From the beginning, Monaco police were mystified as to how two intruders could have got past a battery of security cameras and alarms. Videotapes showed no one going into or out of the elegant six-story Belle Epoque building, which also houses three banks. Maher, a heavy user of sedatives and described by prosecutors as "psychologically fragile," did not help matters by frequently changing his story. So two days after the tragedy, police entered Maher's room at Princess Grace Hospital and arrested him as the prime suspect.

Within hours, Maher cracked and told them the whole story. He had run afoul of a nurse named Sonia, a leading member of Safra's 12-strong medical staff, and decided to avenge himself by winning a promotion from the banker. He admitted staging the break-in and setting the fire--"accidentally," his lawyer says--but denied that he had ever intended to kill anyone. Officials believed him on that point. Said Monaco prosecutor Daniel Serdet: "If he had wanted to kill Safra, he would have had 10,000 chances a day." Maher said he was sorry about the deaths, but not the least of his regrets was that he had "spoiled the best job I ever had." He was charged with arson resulting in deaths and faces a possible life sentence.

Maher's Monegasque lawyer, Georges Blot, told Time that his client was motivated by his "affection" for Safra. "The first words Ted said to me when I met him were, 'This is horrible. I loved him. I admired him. I respected him. I don't understand why I did it.' He adored his boss and simply wanted to send him a signal and get his attention." As for Maher's frictions with head nurse Sonia, Blot says: "He was frustrated that she prevented a closer relationship between Ted and his boss."

If the inside-job scenario appeared to vindicate Monaco's security image, it raised a welter of unanswered questions. Maher spoke of setting only one fire, but investigators identified two separate sources for the blaze. The official version says Safra spoke to his wife twice on his cell phone but was too paranoid to open the door; other unconfirmed reports, however, say that Safra also phoned the police directly and begged them to liberate him from the bathroom. Though the police were first alerted shortly after 5 a.m., they did not call in the firemen for nearly half an hour. Safra's entire Israeli security force had remained at his villa in nearby Villefranche-sur-Mer that night; Safra was said to have wanted it that way, but it seemed a glaring security lapse to leave him without a single guard. According to a bank spokeswoman, security chief Shmule Cohen rushed to the apartment after the blaze started, but police initially blocked his access because he lacked the proper keys and ID. Had Cohen gotten in quickly, this source suggests, he may have been able to open the bathroom door or convince Safra to come out.

Troubled by the inconsistencies, Lily Safra's attorney, Geneva-based Marc Bonnant, last week formally requested access to the police files. "We would like to have all the details of the nurse's confession," he explains. "Was it credible and complete, what exactly pushed him to do what he did, how many fires did he set, are there any inconsistencies in his confession? A thousand questions come to mind which need answers to make any sense out of this tragic and absurd death."

Not the least of those questions involves Safra's own protection force. Widely reported to have obsessive fears for his life--though Bonnant, a longtime friend, strongly denies this--Safra recruited his security guards from among veterans of Israeli army special units. Yet some experts question the efficiency of his security operation. Says Jean-Louis Caniac, director of a U.S.-based security firm : "You do not leave a paranoid person with Parkinson's disease without physical security, even if an agent is simply acting as a baby-sitter. You do not put a steel door in front of a bathroom without having camera contact from the inside to the outside world. Most of all, you do not hire a nurse who has problems with depression and substance abuse."

In retrospect, the decision to bring Ted Maher into the intimacy of Safra's household was the biggest blunder of all. The New York Times reported that he was offered the job five months ago as a reward after finding an expensive camera at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and returning it to a man who turned out to be a close Safra associate. Safra attorney Bonnant says Maher may have been recommended as a result of that good deed, but he insists that the nurse had been carefully vetted through "in-depth background checks" and a personal interview with Mrs. Safra. "The fact that Maher is unstable became apparent to us only after the accident," Bonnant told Time. "Nothing in Maher's files showed the slightest trace of mental instability."

Maher must have provided the files. Tall, slender and blond-haired, the former U.S. Army medic was by most accounts a likable but headstrong man who would explode into fits of rage when challenged. Co-workers at Columbia-Presbyterian, where he worked for nine years, describe him as a caring professional. But his former landlord in Auburn, Maine, Colby Dill, remembers Maher mostly for his aggressive behavior. "When you were in the apartment, you wanted to make sure the door was between you and him," says Dill. "He made threats."

Maher's closest neighbor in East Fishkill, New York, his most recent U.S. residence, describes him as "a miserable bastard" who turned a property-line dispute into an open feud. "Maher and his wife would stand outside my house and scream curses and give me the finger," says Leonard Levelle, 70, recalling that the police had to be called in to mediate several times. On one occasion, says Levelle, "Maher knocked me down, started hitting me with his forearm and told me he would get a gun and kill me." Maher's first wife, Marla, who divorced him in 1991 alleging spousal abuse and drug use, told friends he had threatened to kill her and liked to play Russian roulette with a loaded pistol. He enrolled in the Las Vegas police academy in 1979, but dropped out less than three months later for unexplained reasons.

Clearly, Ted Maher was not the kind of guy you'd trust with your life. But Safra's people offered him $600 a day to help care for the ailing banker. Maher, who was reportedly making $60,000 a year at Columbia-Presbyterian, leapt at the chance to beef up his finances and live in luxury on the Riviera. He took a leave of absence from the hospital, bade farewell to his second wife, Heidi, and his three sons and joined Safra's staff five months ago. In that short time, he learned to love his boss and, in what his lawyer calls "the sad gesture of a sick man," sent him to a smoky death.

With reporting by Helena Bachmann/Geneva, Ed Barnes/East Fishkill, Joel Stratte-McClure/ Monte Carlo and Tom Witkowski/Boston