The Mansions of Limbo (29 page)

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 space 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 Vigée-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 button, 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 space 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 associate 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 Institute, 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 substitute 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 hell 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 peacock, 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 acumen, 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 associate, 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 passed over for assistant 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 titans 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-class 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 circumstances 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 Nassau 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 nobiliary title came to her as the oldest child in her family through her grandmother; I inherited this title, 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 classified 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 embassy in Washington in 1963, under Ambassador Enriquillo Del Rosario, who is now an ambassador 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 embassy 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 class.”

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-Athénée 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.