Few men have been as generous as Alberto Vilar, even though his desire to give
away his fabulous wealth was equalled by his craving for adulation. Not
content with having his name engraved in London’s Royal Opera House, the
multi-millionaire believed he was entitled to curtain calls, too. “What
makes me less important than Placido Domingo?” he demanded.
The music stopped last week when the 68-year-old financial wizard was
convicted on multiple counts of fraud. He now faces the possibility of
exchanging his marbled New York apartment for 20 years in prison. And all
because he could never say no. “Asking Alberto for money was like offering
an alcoholic a drink,” said a friend.
Accustomed to a limousine, dining out and travelling first class to 100 opera
performances a year around the world, Vilar did not like his taste of jail
when he was arrested in 2005. “It was a cage,” he recalled. “I felt like an
animal about to be shipped on a plane.”
The arts world was equally shocked. Ranked by Forbes magazine as 256th on its
rich list, with a personal fortune of nearly $1 billion, Vilar had reputedly
given away close to $300m and was courted as one of the biggest benefactors
in the world. Even in 2001, when he lacked the cash to pay his laundry bill
or housekeeper, he gave away more than $100m to causes from the Kennedy
Center in Washington to the Vienna State Opera.
He traced his obsession with opera to London. “I came to Europe as a student,
and it was one of those infatuations. London in the late 1960s and early
1970s had some of the best music. So I have been coming to Covent Garden all
my life.”
It is humiliating enough that his name has been erased from the Floral Hall at
the Royal Opera House - rechristened the Paul Hamlyn Hall after he failed to
honour his pledged donation – and the Vilar Grand Tier at New York’s
Metropolitan Opera, to which he had promised $20m. What really hurts is that
his opera friends, among whom he counted the Prince of Wales, have deserted
him – although before his disgrace a colleague cast doubt on this claim
after seeing Prince Charles pass by without acknowledging him.
Vilar’s affair with Covent Garden began in October 1998, at a Savoy dinner
given by Gilbert Kaplan, the financier-conductor, when he sat next to Lady
Rothschild, who urged him to help the cash-starved Royal Opera House.
Michael Kaiser, the opera house’s former executive director, offered to put
his name on the Floral Hall for £10m.
Covent Garden seems to have coped more tactfully with Vilar’s desire to have
his name writ larger than the Met, which agreed to his moniker being
displayed prominently in the lifts and the restaurant (not to mention its
menus), but balked when he wanted his photograph and his name blown up in
the programme. “Who cares who wrote the libretto?” he declared. “What about
the guy who wrote the cheque?”
Vilar, a tall, smartly dressed and soft spoken man, cut a sorry figure as a
jury in New York found him guilty of a scheme to steal $20m from clients.
The money was used, prosecutors said, to honour donations, fund his personal
expenses and keep his investment firm, Amerindo, afloat after its
shareholdings plunged in value.
He was convicted on 12 counts, including money laundering, wire fraud and
lying to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. His business partner,
Gary Tanaka, 65, was convicted on three counts of conspiracy, securities
fraud and investment adviser fraud.
Initially, both men operated in London, the base of some of their early
investors and Tanaka’s permanent home. In Vilar’s view, he was the visionary
and the strategist who brought in clients, while the more cerebral Tanaka
did the business and looked after the back office.
The case against the pair was built around allegations by Lily Cates, a
70-year-old heiress and former model, best known as the mother of the
actress Phoebe Cates, star of Gremlins. Cates Sr claimed she had invested
$5m in an Amerindo fund with the promise of high fixed-rate returns, but
when she tried to get her cash out, Vilar give her “the run-around” and
blocked her.
Other private clients claimed Vilar had defrauded them, although private work
represented only 1% of his business, the rest comprising large corporations
and endowment funds. Once the “feds” took Cates’s claims seriously, the
defendants contended, “bad mouthing” made the company collapse.
Vilar delivered on many of his promises until the well ran dry. At Covent
Garden he funded the training of young artists and the installation of
seat-back text screens. At Glyndebourne he underwrote Simon Rattle
conducting Fidelio.
So is Vilar a villain or an overzealous philanthropist? “I’m a born giver,” he
once said. “Even in college, I gave money away and lent it to my friends.”
Acquaintances describe him as a “socially awkward” man, often reserved and
formal, but personable and gentle in private. “I don’t want to emblazon my
name on anything,” he told The Sunday Times in 2000, contending that
recognition was important to encourage other donors.
However, some believe he has embroidered his life story. It has been reported
that he grew up in Cuba, where his father owned a sugar plantation, and that
the family fled Fidel Castro’s revolution as penniless refugees. This was
challenged by his girlfriend, Karen Painter, a musicologist, who noticed
that the given name in his passport was Albert, not Alberto, and that his
birthplace was East Orange, New Jersey, not Havana.
It turned out that although his father was indeed Cuban, his mother was
Irish-American and the family had never lived in Cuba. Painter returned
Vilar’s engagement ring.
Vilar claimed to be a “shy, shy boy with girls” and “a lifelong bachelor”,
although he was seen with a string of women friends, some of whom he called
SMCs – “serious marriage candidates”. In fact, he has been married twice,
once briefly to an unidentified woman and then to a woman named Maria
Dichov, from whom he separated after 10 years in 1990.
In Vilar’s version of his childhood, his artistic temperament clashed with his
father’s macho outlook: “I asked for violin lessons. My father said, ‘Cuban
men don’t play the violin’.” Whereas his father wanted him to play soccer,
marry and go into the sugar business, the boy hated sport. “I locked myself
in and read books and listened to classical music.”
He claimed his interest in music was nurtured by his Cuban grandmother, who
brought up Vilar and his two sisters after their parents divorced. The old
woman, a conservatory student, played him Mario Lanza recordings.
He had to borrow money to pay for his tuition at Washington & Jefferson
College, Pennsylvania, graduating with a degree in economics. Then he moved
to Wall Street – “a marriage made in heaven” – before latching on to
high-tech and founding Amerindo in 1979 with Tanaka, a Japanese-American
born in an internment camp in Idaho.
As one of the first investors in Microsoft and Cisco, Vilar seemed to have hit
pay dirt. His most spectacular returns were in the technology-led boom of
the late 1990s, when he bet heavily on internet firms such as Yahoo!,
Amazon, eBay and Ariba. At the peak of the bull market, Amerindo was worth
$9 billion, allowing Vilar to indulge a passion for skiing in Colorado and
the renovation of his New York apartment in UN Plaza. Workmen spent two
years creating a replica of a wall at the Mozarteum, the concert hall in
Salzburg.
Meanwhile, his sponsorship of the Met was increasing by leaps and bounds from
a relatively modest $1,500 in the mid-1980s to millions. Assiduously courted
by the opera house’s executives and invited to join its board of managing
directors, an honour reserved for large donors, Vilar promised to give $3m every
year for five years, investing the funds so they would grow to $20m.
Edgar Vincent, Domingo’s former manager, who died in June, was quoted as
saying: “My whole feeling is that this man was insecure and wanted to have
the love and respect of as many people as possible. He was constantly
thinking of new donations, new pledges. He spread himself so thin. He needed
the adulation.”
Then in 2000 the Nasdaq index of high-tech shares went into free fall, a drop
that was exacerbated by the terrorist attacks of 2001, and by August 2002 it
had plummeted by 90% from its peak. Vilar claimed that he advised the Met
how to respond but, “appalled” that it continued to spend the endowment
“recklessly”, he resigned from the board.
Vilar maintained that he was poised for a financial comeback as the year’s “No
1 money manager” when he was arrested. Once a master of the universe, his
options have narrowed to a judge’s ruling this Wednesday on whether he will
remain free on bail until sentencing. He will appeal the verdict and, ever
the optimist, is looking further ahead: “I have already determined that in
my next life I am coming back as a conductor.” He may have lots of time to
practise.
