![]() A head-to-toe flesh-colored bodysuit? A latex suit? That kind of speaks for itself. The Russian/ Eastern European Mafia vein. It was evil"Īsked what theories were circulating at Lazard, Cohan says, "There are two veins of thinking at the moment. I mean, people just don't know what to think." "It took a moment for it to sink in that I was looking at a dead body. Some feel, at a visceral level, you know, 'I'm not going to shed tears for this guy.' But when you get past that, it's pretty damn shocking. "Look," Cohan says, "a lot of people didn't like this guy. 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 called The Last Tycoons he was to interview Stern the week after the murder. "People are just in shock," William Cohan tells me the next day. A murder mystery that had first appeared laden with political and corporate intrigue suddenly took a sharp swerve toward the kinky. ![]() But the even more jaw-dropping disclosure was that he had been found encased in a flesh-colored latex bodysuit. Then, 48 hours after the body was found, a Swiss newspaper, the Tribune de Genève, dropped a bomb: Stern had in fact been murdered, shot four times. Within hours of Stern's death, bizarre theories were thrumming through Geneva, Paris, and New York, many dealing with investments he was rumored to have made in Russia, others having to do with a vicious lawsuit he was fighting with a French company in which he had invested. After his death, all the old stories of how he had supposedly booted his own father from his family's vaunted Banque Stern were exhumed and examined in detail. He was renowned for shouting down subordinates- a favorite form of address was "you fucking moron"-and roiling dinner parties with inappropriate confrontations, usually triggered by the conviction that a dinner companion's I.Q. Few disputed Stern's brilliance, but even fewer defended his abrasive personality. Since 1998, he had run a $600 million investment fund out of Geneva and quietly lent his advice on some of Europe's largest mergers of recent years. On Wall Street, where he was ousted from Lazard in 1997, the 50-year-old Stern was considered-there's no way to sugarcoat this-an arrogant prick. Edouard and Béatrice, who works at Sotheby's in Manhattan, had three children (two are college-age, and the other is much younger).īéatrice has a wide circle of friends in New York and Europe who describe her as lovely, soft-spoken, and, as one put it, "remarkably unspoiled, considering her background." Everyone loves Béatrice. Scion of one of France's oldest banking families, he had been married until 1998 to Béatrice David-Weill, the daughter of Lazard's chairman, Michel David-Weill. In Paris his death was tantamount to that of a Rockefeller. Everyone knew Edouard Stern, or at least knew of him. The news swept the high social and financial circles of New York and Paris like a monsoon. At least one used the word "assassination." Details were scanty, other than a Swiss magistrate's cryptic announcement that the death had been "a crime." Bold headlines in the European papers speculated it was murder. 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. Plus, after a grueling two months of chemotherapy, Navratilova explained, she doesn’t have the “energy” to pursue an adoption, adding that the process would be “too complicated” given her recent health scare.The story out of Switzerland that Tuesday in early March was startling, yet oddly familiar. “I’m not really the youngest anymore and I don’t want to be the grandmother on the playground,” the tennis ace, 66, said. The prospect of adopting, she told Morgan, was a “nice thought for a while” but the recent cancer scare, she said, has “brought it into sharp focus.” ![]() “We were thinking about adopting,” an emotional Navratilova told the TV host, but “I don’t think it’s going to happen.” A post shared by Julia Lemigova Tennis legend Martina Navratilova opens up about cancer scareĮarlier this week, Navratilova opened up about her cancer battle in an interview with Piers Morgan, explaining that after months of radiation, her doctors have pronounced her as “good to go.”īut on a less happy note, the tennis champ also revealed that her and Lemigova’s plans for adoption have since been “put on hold.”
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