The Mansions Of Limbo Part 8

The Fall of Roberto Polo

In retrospect it's always easy to say, "Oh, yes, I knew, I always knew," about this one or that one, when this one or that one comes to a bad end or winds up in disgrace. Any number of people who knew Roberto Polo have told me that when they first heard that disaster was about to befall him, they said to the person who informed them, "I'm not surprised, are you?" and the informant invariably replied that he or she was not surprised either.

Polo, a thirty-seven-year-old Guban-born American citizen with residences in Paris, New York, Monte Carlo, and Santo Domingo, is currently in prison in Italy, where he was arrested in June. He is wanted for questioning in Switzerland, France, and the United States concerning the alleged misappropriation of $110 million of his investors' money. At the time of his arrest, he had been a fugitive from the law for five weeks, and had been rumored either to have sought and bought refuge in Latin America or to have been murdered by the very people he was said to have swindled, on the theory that, if caught, he might reveal their ident.i.ties.

"Roberto had so many personas it was hard to know which was the real person," one of his former employees said to me in describing him. A middle-cla.s.s Cuban with dreams of glory, Polo appeared to be many things to many people, from family man to philanderer, from elegant boulevardier to preposterous phony, from fantasizer to f.u.c.kup of the American Dream. A man with the capacity to endear himself to many with his likability and charm and to enrage others with his grandiosity and pomposity, he provided uniformity of opinion among those who knew him in one thing only: He had exquisite taste.

I first met Roberto and his extremely attractive wife, Rosa, a Dominican by birth, the daughter of a diplomat and the cousin of a former president of that country, in 1984, at a small dinner for eight or ten people in New York, at the home of John Loring, senior vice president of Tiffany & Co. They were the youngest couple in the group, known to all the guests but me.

It was not until we sat down to dinner that I noticed the extraordinary ring Rosa Polo was wearing, a diamond so huge it would have been impossible not to comment on it. As one who has held up the hands and stared at the ice-skating-rink-size diamonds of Elizabeth Taylor, Candy Spelling, and Imelda Marcos, I realized that the young woman across from me was wearing one bigger and perhaps better than all of them. I asked her about it, and before she could reply Roberto called down from his end of the table and gave me the whole history of the jewel. It was the Ashoka diamond, a 41.37-carat D-flawless stone named after Ashoka Maurya, the third-century B.C. Buddhist warrior-emperor. Polo had bought it for his wife from the Mexican movie star Maria Felix.

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 a.s.set Management Group. He handled the monetary affairs of a select group of very rich foreign investors with a.s.sets 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sociate, 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 ill.u.s.trious prisoner, visiting hours were restricted to one hour a week, on either Sat.u.r.day 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 circ.u.mstances.

"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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sociate 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 princ.i.p.al witness in the suit brought against Polo by Rostuca Holdings, Ltd., an offsh.o.r.e 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.dmother 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 grat.i.tude 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 cla.s.sy. My brother is the cla.s.siest 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 Ca.s.satt 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 G.o.dfather 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 a.s.sistant 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 a.s.sistant] 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."

The redecorating of the new house from top to bottom-a job that would have normally taken anywhere from a year to two years-was done in six weeks, and Roberto was his own decorator. His men worked seven days a week, at the same frantic pace that his near neighbor Imelda Marcos had set when she did over her new town house on East Sixty-sixth Street in time to give a party for the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. He brought special upholsterers from England to install the green damask on the library walls. People who watched Polo during this period said that he worked like a man possessed in creating the perfect setting, as if he knew that his good fortune couldn't last. The dark-paneled dining room on the first floor was large enough to seat thirty-six comfortably, and the living room on the floor above was the size of a small ballroom, with a white damask banquette along one wall and ample s.p.a.ce to hang the young couple's astonishing and ever-growing art collection. He sold his Impressionist art to make room for his new and even more impressive collection of eighteenth-century French paintings, Fragonards and Bouchers and Vigee-Lebruns, mostly purchased through the Wildenstein gallery in New York. In order to get insurance for the paintings, he had to have steel shutters installed on all the windows; at the push of a b.u.t.ton, these dropped and plunged the interior of the house into total darkness.

He also moved his offices. He had started PAMG in the bedroom of his apartment. Then he had shared a small office with several other people. Next he had taken s.p.a.ce at 101 Park Avenue. Now he rented grand offices on the forty-third floor of the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue.

More and more, Roberto Polo began to be talked about. His antiques buying at auctions and in shops in New York and Paris was nonstop, and he always paid the top prices. A former a.s.sociate of his described Roberto on a spree in Paris, going from shop to shop, buying $3 million worth of antiques to stock Jacob Freres. On one occasion Rosa wore $6 million in emeralds. On another, she pushed her baby's stroller through Central Park wearing a T-shirt and jeans, the Ashoka diamond, and a million-dollar strand of pearls. Roberto, no slouch in the jewelry department himself, wore a ring with a 10.5-carat Burmese ruby worth over $1 million. He was so meticulous that when he bought a picture for his office he would have a picture hanger come from Wildenstein to install it. He was a terror at home; one out-of-place ashtray or a table not dusted properly could drive him into a rage. On the other hand, when he had people to lunch at the town house, in the midst of all that grandeur he might serve his guests grilled-cheese sandwiches on paper plates, which a servant would pick up from a nearby luncheonette. He could not stand to be alone; he even took people on the Concorde with him so that he would not have to fly alone. He ran his multimillion-dollar business mainly from his house, on one rotary telephone without even call waiting, and held meetings there in darkened rooms.

My second encounter with the glamorous Polos was at a charity ball for Casita Maria, the oldest Hispanic settlement house in New York. Apart from the ball for the Spanish Inst.i.tute, the Casita Maria Fiesta is considered to be the Latin party of the year in New York. A new and interesting way for rich social aspirants to get their name known in smart circles is to underwrite charity parties, and in 1985 Polo underwrote the Casita Maria ball. It was the custom of Casita Maria to present three prominent people with gold medals, and in previous years honored guests had included Placido Domingo and Dame Margot Fonteyn. That year the honorees were the Colombian painter Fernando Botero, former secretary of the treasury William Simon, and the film star Maria Felix, who was enormously popular in Mexico but, unlike her sister star Dolores Del Rio, little known in the United States. People say that Polo had an obsession with this septuagenarian actress, whom he had met through his mother, and from whom he had purchased the Ashoka diamond as well as a diamond snake necklace of extraordinary workmanship made by Cartier, both of which adorned Rosa Polo that night.

At the last minute, Maria Felix canceled, informing the committee that she had broken her ankle. So Polo and his brother-in-law, Federico Suro, put together an eleven-minute montage of Felix's film clips as a subst.i.tute for the no-show star. He had promised the glittering crowd a celebrity, and he delivered instead badly edited clips, far too long and in Spanish. Soon the audience in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel grew bored, and began to talk and laugh as if the film were not going on. Polo became petulant, then furious, and at the end of the film he went up to the microphone and berated the audience for their bad manners. He said he was glad Maria Felix was not there.

At this outburst, looks were exchanged across the tables, the kind of looks that clearly said, Who the h.e.l.l is this little upstart to lecture us on manners? To make matters worse, Roberto's mother, who he had told people had once been an opera singer at La Scala, rose and applauded her son's speech.

"That night Roberto was finished in New York," said a Venezuelan society woman who resides in the city. Actually, he wasn't finished in New York that night. People with vast sums of money are never finished in social life as long as they keep picking up the checks, and Roberto Polo continued to pick up the checks for large dinners at Le Cirque and other fashionable restaurants, where he would sometimes order wine that cost a thousand dollars a bottle and take only a sip or two of it.

Some people are mesmerized by money. It covers all defects. Even people who suspected that something was not quite right about Polo overlooked his flaws and listened to him with rapt attention. Like a peac.o.c.k, as soon as he met someone he wanted to impress, he would spread his feathers and show off all his colors, telling of his paintings, his furniture, his wife's jewels, his financial ac.u.men, his social achievements. Often he would close this self-congratulatory catalog with the words "and only thirty-six"-his age at the time.

These same people, however, were beginning to speculate about who Roberto Polo was and where all his money came from. "We manage money for wealthy individuals," he would say. But talk was rampant that some of the money he managed was dirty money, meaning that he was laundering money, or drug-trafficking, or running arms. One former a.s.sociate, however, who subsequently broke with him, told me he firmly believes that the clients' money was clean. The company served as financial adviser to a group of Mexicans, Latin Americans, and Europeans who happened to have money-often a great deal of money-in the United States. In most cases, however, it was illegal for these clients to have money invested secretly outside of their own country. In Spain, for instance, the government can confiscate all the Spanish holdings of an individual who has undeclared investments in the United States. At Citibank, where Polo had worked before founding PAMG, he became an account executive, but several times he was pa.s.sed over for a.s.sistant vice president even though he attracted business to the bank. In 1981 he left to found his own company, which would serve the same function as the bank but with more personalized attention given to clients than the bank gave. PAMG arranged financial transactions for investors, and most of the money was in time deposits.

Although some former clients-Pablo Aramburuzabala, for one-say that they did not authorize Polo, or PAMG, to invest their money in art, Polo did entice new business to PAMG with a glossy brochure picturing his specialty in investments: paintings, jewels, and real estate. "Otherwise, his clients could have gone to Morgan Guaranty," said his lawyer Jacques Kam.

One of the great t.i.tans of Wall Street, who later refused to comment on his statement, is reported to have said about Roberto Polo, after meeting him at a small dinner party and listening to him talk, "There's something wrong. If there's that much money, I would have heard about him." He was echoing the old saying, "If they have the right kind of money, they're known at the bank."

"All of us, we may not know each other, but we know who each other is," said a New York social figure from a prominent Latin-American family, "and no one, not a single soul, knew anything about Roberto Polo or his family. Ask any of the Cubans we know. Never beard of Roberto Polo."

A New York fashion designer who was thinking of bringing out a fragrance backed by Polo was warned, "Do not touch him with the end of a barge pole."

Shortly after completing the town house, Polo gave a dinner for Amalita Fortabat, who is said to be the richest woman in Argentina. Many New York social figures attended. "Where did you get that fabulous Fragonard, Roberto?" someone asked him. "My parents brought it with them out of Cuba," he replied. People knew that wasn't the truth, but no one called him on it. "He bought the Fragonard at Wildenstein's, but he liked the old-money, old-family sound of his version of the acquisition," said a person who was present. Often he would point out a piece of his furniture by saying, "The twin to that is in Versailles."

Upper-cla.s.s Cubans in New York and Florida are amazed by the stories Roberto Polo would tell of his family's background. "There is no mention of the Polo family in the old Social Registers from the days before Castro," said a Cuban lady in New York. Another said, "We know our own. The Polos were not in the clubs, and the boys did not go to either of the two schools everyone we know went to." Still another said, "He learned everything so fast. Just seven years ago, he was wearing black shoes and white socks." She paused and added, "He was always polite, very well mannered. I think he is to be admired for the myth he has created about himself. He really does think his family built all the oil refineries in Cuba. His family was perfectly nice-an engineer, or something like that, his father was-but they were certainly not a family that went about in social circles.

Like Imelda Marcos, who has spent a lifetime upgrading the circ.u.mstances of her birth, Polo had a tendency to paint a more aristocratic picture of his family than the truth would bear out. Even in stir, facing a long incarceration and sharing a cell and a toilet that doesn't work with two other prisoners, he issued a press release emphasizing the grandeur of his background. He quotes from early magazine articles written about him in which he was described as "the darkly handsome, wealthy Cuban refugee, son of Countess Celis de Maceda." He describes his father as having been, "like his father before him," a "very rich playboy" in Cuba, as if-even if it were true, which it appears not to be-it were an admirable thing to be the son and grandson of wealthy playboys. He also says, "On my father's side of the family the wealth came from the construction business; they built various oil refineries and industrial plants for Standard Oil Company, the Bacardi plants in Na.s.sau and Puerto Rico, and parts of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica.... My mother's family was wealthy, but less than my father's. However, whatever wealth they missed (compared to my father's family) they made up in a more aristocratic, artistic, and generally more socially prominent background.... My mother's n.o.biliary t.i.tle came to her as the oldest child in her family through her grandmother; I inherited this t.i.tle, which I have never used nor pretend to (even though there are those who want to make me a social climber, hardly necessary given my higher education, refinement, and family upbringing relative to my American counterparts), because I am the oldest child in my family."

Roberto Polo was born in Havana on August 20, 1951, the older of two sons of Roberto Polo, an engineer, and his wife, Maria Teresa. The family fled Cuba in the wake of Castro and moved to Peru, where they suffered serious financial losses when the government nationalized their business. They then moved to Miami, where Roberto and Marco went to school. Their mother, a trained opera singer, became a hospital nutritionist after they left Cuba. An aspiring artist, Roberto attended the Corcoran School in Washington on a scholarship from age fourteen to eighteen, and then graduated from the American University in Washington, where he met his future wife's brother, Federico Suro. He studied philosophy and art. He moved to Montreal in order to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War, but he was later cla.s.sified 4-F due to curvature of the spine and flat feet. He then got a master's degree in painting and sculpture at Columbia University, and while he was there he took his first job, at Rizzoli. After Columbia, he joined Citibank.

In an article in Women's Wear Daily this year, he said of his wife's family, "My in-laws are very wealthy. My wife's uncle was the president of the Dominican Republic. His name was Antonio Guzman. His brother died of cancer and left a huge fortune. I left Citibank to oversee that money." In fact, the Suro family is intellectually prominent and highly respected, but it is not a rich family. Dario Suro, Rosa Polo's father, is considered to be one of the greatest Dominican painters. He became the cultural attache at the emba.s.sy in Washington in 1963, under Amba.s.sador Enriquillo Del Rosario, who is now an amba.s.sador to the United Nations. Rosa Polo's mother, Maruxa Suro, was the first cousin of the late president Antonio Guzman, but since the pay at the emba.s.sy was low, Mrs. Suro, in order to provide her children with a good education, worked for a time in the dress department of Lord & Taylor in Washington. Rosa, after moving to New York, studied first at the Harkness School of Ballet and then at the Joffrey Ballet school until she married Roberto in 1972.

Soon after Polo started in business for himself, old friends began to notice a change in him. A grand Spanish lady who had been one of his investors said, "Several times I saw Roberto Polo in Le Cirque. A kid like that showing off at Le Cirque, pretending he was rich. Uh-uh." She withdrew her money from his management. An old friend of his wife's family, who had thought of himself as a friend of Roberto's as well, found that Roberto stopped speaking to him. "I often saw him in the company of the flashy type of Latin, wealthy but not of the top social cla.s.s."

People began to say that the bubble was going to burst. Roberto was traveling more and more, leaving Rosa and the baby behind. Beneath the bravado was a man very unsure of himself. His look changed constantly. He didn't seem to know who he was. His hair was short, then it was long. One week he wore English clothes, the next week he wore Italian. I ran into him in the lobby of the Plaza-Athenee Hotel in Paris in 1986 and didn't recognize him when he spoke to me. He was wearing his hair in a ponytail, and either he was in the process of growing a beard or he was affecting an exaggerated version of the Don Johnson-Miami Vice look. Even his eyes looked different, and later I learned that he had taken to wearing blue contact lenses. He appeared at one evening party in a sort of bolero jacket, and people told me he had hoped to start a trend for bolero jackets in the evening. Close friends of Rosa said that she never looked happy. She complained that Roberto was constantly entertaining people from Mexico. She was always on call.

In May 1986, Polo moved his firm to Geneva and his family to Paris, so abruptly that it seemed as if he were leaving New York in a hurry. A Cuban lady who had followed his activities for several years said, "Roberto was disappointed with New York. You see, he was never really accepted by either the Latins or the Anglos. No matter how hard you try, very few Latins are really accepted in New York. He thought that that would not be true in Europe."

Polo claimed that the United States had cooperated with the governments of Haiti and the Philippines in revealing what a.s.sets were held in this country by the recently deposed Baby Doc Duvalier and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. He stated publicly that he thought President Reagan was throwing Duvalier and the Marcoses to the lions, and that PAMG investors deserved more discreet treatment than the U.S. government was offering. He sent a letter to his clients saying that Swiss banks offered them greater secrecy than other banks.

Several former a.s.sociates have different views of Polo's quick move to Europe: "If you have more than fifteen clients that you are giving advice to, you need a license with the SEC. If the SEC had come to investigate after he bought the house on East Sixty-fourth Street, they would have known." Or: "He may have thought that by moving to Switzerland he could hide under the Swiss secrecy laws." Or: "He had placed some time deposits in savings and loans in Maryland that went bankrupt. Jumbo CDs. The SEC was investigating those S&Ls."

Before leaving New York, Polo presented a Marisol sculpture to the Metropolitan Museum. He also did what had been in the cards for him to do for years: He entered the world of fashion. The dress designer Polo had always admired most was the brilliant and ill-fated British-American Charles James, whose dresses he thought of as pieces of sculpture. In James's declining years, when he was living in near dest.i.tution in the Chelsea Hotel, Polo had sent him $200 a week.

In December 1985 he purchased the fashion house of a designer named Miguel Cruz, a fellow Cuban whom he had met through Maria Felix. A second-echelon but respected designer with a faithful following, Cruz had been established in Rome since the 1960s. When he approached Polo to borrow money from him for his business, Polo is supposed to have said, "I don't lend money. I'll buy you." Fashion had always been a business that fascinated him. Now it became the business that would destroy him.

In Paris, he bought a fourteen-room apartment at 27 Quai Anatole-France which surpa.s.sed in elegance and grandeur the house on East Sixty-fourth Street. A Marisol sculpture of Rosa and Marina stood in the hallway. A Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Dongens, Fragonards, and Bouchers lined the walls. Following in the steps of such other Latin American collectors who had lived in Paris as Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, Antenor Patino, and Carlos de Beistegui, Polo filled his apartment with the rarest of rare furniture, including pieces that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. He tried to charm his way into French society with gifts and flowers, and he took tables in restaurants for fifteen or twenty people. Rosa became best friends with the wife of the antiques dealer Jean-Marie Rossi, who is the grand-daughter of the late General Franco of Spain.

Polo hired the fashion consultant Eleanor Lambert to advise him on the buyout of the Miguel Cruz company. Cruz was paid a salary of $120,000 a year and a royalty on gross sales, although Polo claimed in an interview with Women's Wear Daily that he paid Cruz a minimum annual salary of $500,000. His intention was to vault Cruz into the ranks of the elite international designers of expensive ready-to-wear and to rival the houses of Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace.

To launch the venture, Polo made an agreement with a retailer named Scarpa to turn her shops in Venice and Milan into Miguel Cruz boutiques. Scarpa received merchandise on consignment. Polo made a similar deal with a boutique owner on the island of Capri, and he paid $300,000 for the renovation of the shop. By the time the business opened, Polo had three boutiques, an office in the General Motors Building in New York with a rent of approximately $12,000 a month, and a showroom and warehouse in Milan. In spite of this huge overhead, Polo decided to launch an enormous advertising campaign. In the first season he spent $700,000 for media (media means buying s.p.a.ce) and $30,000 on production. For the spring 1986 collection, there was an $800,000 advertising budget. For the fall 1986 collection, Polo spent $900,000 on advertising.

Consider, now, PAMG's contract with its investors: PAMG received a fee of one-half of 1 percent for managing an account. So on a $1 million account the annual fee would be $5,000. On a $100 million account, the fee would be $500,000. Therefore, people who worked for PAMG naturally began to wonder where the money was coming from to run the Miguel Cruz dress business as well as to cover Polo's continued buying of art and jewelry.

From the beginning, Polo played an active part in advertising and promotion, hiring the models, flying them to New York to be photographed, even staging the fashion shows. Fashion experts say that the campaign didn't work commercially, even if the photography was sometimes great. Like so much about Roberto Polo, his advertising sent out mixed signals; there was confusion as to whether he was selling his wares or his models. He claimed that he would make the name of Miguel Cruz known through the shock value of the ads. "We're living in a society that wants to be shocked," he told one interviewer. A Robert Mapplethorpe photograph for the Miguel Cruz men's line showed the back of a seated naked man removing a sweater over his head. For the women's line, a two-page ad showed a dimly lit female model in a black jeweled evening dress with one fully lit naked man behind her and another sitting on the floor in front of her.

It enraged Polo that while no one questioned the propriety of Calvin Klein's ma.s.sively nude advertising campaign, which was going on at the same time, his own campaign was labeled prurient and offensive. "They object to my ads but not to Calvin Klein's." The advertis.e.m.e.nt showing the bull's-eye picture with the male rump may have offended one segment of the public, but a more lurid segment bombarded the New York office for copies of it.

Polo always knew more about everything than the experts. Soon he started directing Mapplethorpe's photo sessions, and Mapplethorpe, a bit of a prima donna himself, resented the interference. Eventually there was a falling-out, and Mapplethorpe resigned the account. Not to be topped, Polo wrote the photographer a letter firing him, and sent copies to several prominent people in New York.

Despite all the fanfare and hype, the Miguel Cruz line was a disaster almost from the beginning. The clothes were often badly made, delivery dates were missed, and orders were canceled. "I don't care about your four pages in Vogue-the clothes are not in my store" became a common complaint. It got to the point where the company was doing $1 million in advertising and only $100,000 in sales. In the fall of 1987, when all the collections of all the designers in Paris, New York, and Milan were showing skirts above the knee, Miguel Cruz was showing skirts down to the ankle. At that point Polo stepped in to give Cruz artistic advice on how the clothes should look, and he began writing memos telling him what colors and fabrics to use.

Unlike Polo's art acquisitions, which could be sold at a profit, the Miguel Cruz fashion venture was a bottomless pit. It is estimated that Polo lost between $12 million and $15 million on it, but he remained adamant in his belief that the clothes were beautiful and that the company was going to be a big success. He didn't want anyone to tell him the truth. He had a blind spot about Miguel Cruz, and he could not accept criticism. He thought that if he spent an enormous amount of money on advertising he should be rewarded with good reviews. He wrote irate letters to Polly Mellen of Vogue and Carrie Donovan of the New York Times threatening to pull his ads when they criticized the collections, and he had to be restrained from mailing a mocking letter to Hebe Dorsey, the late beloved fashion editor, demanding a retraction because she had mistakenly said Miguel Cruz designed in Rome in the fifties when she meant the sixties. He had the idea that American editors could be bought. One of the most powerful women in fashion, who asked that she not be identified, told me that on the morning after one of the collections was shown in Milan she received in her hotel room a box containing a full-length black coat lined in sable. She tried it on, modeled it in front of a mirror, wrapped it up again, and returned it to Roberto Polo at the Miguel Cruz office. A former employee told me that Hebe Dorsey had returned many such gifts.

Peter Dubow, the owner of a company called European Collections Inc., was hired by Polo as a consultant to use his retailing contacts to penetrate the American stores. Dubow, who, like a lot of Roberto Polo's employees, is still owed a great deal of money in salary and expenses, says, "The easy speculation is that Roberto didn't care if the collections weren't good, that he was simply getting dirty money back into circulation. But he did care. He cared pa.s.sionately."

One day in Paris, in the magnificent apartment on Quai Anatole-France, Dubow said to Polo, "We need someone to stage the fashion shows. We need an art director for the advertising."

"That's what I do," replied Roberto quietly.

Trying another tack, Dubow said about the latest collection, "It's not good enough. It's totally lacking in commerciality." He even went a step further. "It is ugly, Roberto."

Polo said, "How many Fragonards do you own?"

"None," replied Dubow.

With a gesture, Polo indicated his possessions in the drawing room where they were seated. "Do you own furniture like this?"

"No," said Dubow.

"Well, I think Miguel's collection is beautiful," said Polo, in his superiority, settling the matter. "I cannot imagine how ready-to-wear can be any more beautiful than this."

It is a curious quirk of Roberto's business sense that he gave priority to the evening dresses he presented as free gifts to society women in New York to wear to publicized social functions at a time when stores he depended on for business were not getting their shipments on time and orders were being canceled. To set things right, Roberto hired his brother, Marco, to be chief of production for the fashion house. There had always been a rivalry between the two brothers, particularly for the affection of their mother, and it was she who asked Roberto to take Marco into the company. Marco had wanted to go into the investment side of Roberto's business, not the fashion side, because he thought he knew more about banking than Roberto did. "When I was a kid, I used to beat the s.h.i.t out of my brother, and now he's this big man ordering me around," Marco complained to an American employee of the business. At Miguel Cruz, Marco did a good job of putting the business in order, but the quality of the workmanship remained poor and orders were rarely delivered on time.

Late in 1987, at a party in Milan for the opening of a collection, Polo met Fabrizio Bagaglini. A sometime actor, sometime model, the twenty-five-year-old Bagaglini became a dominant figure in the life of Roberto Polo over the next seven months, right up until Polo's actual arrest in Viareggio. Shortly after meeting Fabrizio, Polo hired him to do his public-relations work, although Bagaglini was not known to have any experience or skill in that field.

In an interview conducted before the warrant went out for Polo's arrest, but published after, Nadine Frey of WWD wrote, "As a last gesture, [Polo] gave a mini-tour of his apartment, as Barry White blared out of a speaker somewhere and a handsome Roman aide de camp hustled out to make a lunch reservation." Roberto showed off Fabrizio as if he were a painting. He told people that he wanted to make Fabrizio the vice president of the perfume company he was planning to start, to be called Le Parfum de Miguel Cruz. Bagaglini began wearing Roberto's wrist.w.a.tch, an eighteen-karat-gold Breitling, and Polo gave him a Ferrari Testarossa, worth $134,000, at a time when the unpaid bills and salaries at the Miguel Cruz office in New York amounted to $600,000. On several occasions, Polo said to his friends, "I have had three pa.s.sions in my life: my wife, Rosa, my daughter, Marina, and Fabrizio." However, he persistently claimed that the friendship with Fabrizio was no more than a friendship.

Glamorous pictures of the glamorous Polos began appearing in all the fashionable magazines in France, usually showing them elegantly posed amid their museum-quality possessions. Elsewhere in the world, meanwhile, Mexican, Latin American, and European investors in PAMG were demanding to know where all the Polo money was coming from. "Roberto took too high a profile. He was too much in the papers, lived on far too grand a scale. His investors didn't like it, especially as he was living on a far grander scale than they," said Alfredo Ortiz-Murias, Polo's a.s.sociate. Ortiz-Murias had at one time been Roberto's superior at Citibank. He had left the bank to form his own money-management firm, but, according to Polo, it had not done well, and he later joined PAMG, bringing his own clients with him. Ortiz-Murias claims to have introduced Roberto Polo to everyone in New York, but Polo says otherwise. The former a.s.sociates are now bitter enemies.

Polo's behavior became more and more extreme. According to an employee of Miguel Cruz's men's wear in Milan, "The stories he told about himself became more and more fantastic, brilliant strokes of genius-how he had bought things at one price and sold them a short time later at enormous profits, like a pearl he bought for half a million dollars and resold for a million. He said, 'I always have $10 million in cash on hand.' "

Once, he showed up in the lobby of the Hotel Palace in Milan and requested twenty-five rooms for important people he was flying in to see the Miguel Cruz collection. The hotel, part of the CIGA hotel group, owned by the Aga Khan, was totally booked for the fashion week of the Milan collections and therefore unable to provide these accommodations. Polo made a loud scene. "Get the Aga Khan on the telephone!" he screamed indignantly.

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, a.s.suring 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 a.s.sociate, 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 G.o.dmother 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 embarra.s.sing for him."