Madness Under the Royal Palms (17 page)

Dora gave birth to Marvin’s son, Matthew Henry Schur. His father was not very interested in the child and rarely spent much time with him, but agreed to send him to preschool at the Academy of the Palm Beaches, where many of the leading Palm Beach families sent their children. The little boy used Schur’s last name, and either this never got back to Edie Schur, or else she chose to ignore her husband’s second family.

One day in April 2002, a hysterical Chong called her lover, saying that she could not find Matthew. The two-year-old had been sleeping in his bedroom when she had left to drive over the bridge to Worth Avenue to shop. She had purchased a suitcase for four hundred dollars, and when she got back, the boy was nowhere to be seen. Schur told Chong to look in the pool, and there she found Matthew’s drowned body. Chong called Schur back and told him what had happened. He went to Good Samaritan Hospital, where an ambulance had taken the body and where he had served on the board. Schur wanted to know if there was some way to keep this quiet, but he was told this was impossible.

Marvin had not made tens of millions of dollars as a commodities trader by making slow decisions. He picked up the phone and told his wife that he had a mistress and a son, and the son had just drowned. Schur attended the funeral, and the day before the police came to arrest Dora and take her to county jail, she says that he called to tell her their affair was at an end and he was getting on with his life.

Chong was tried for aggravated manslaughter, and she was given ten years’ probation for a crime in which a poor woman likely would have spent months in prison. Even that was too onerous for Chong, who fled the country.

The Schurs hung their heads for about a year, and then reestablished themselves in the cultural elite. Edie was much admired by the women in the Jewish community. They understood her decision to stay with her husband of five decades. To divorce him would have left Edie to live a lonely existence, an unwanted accessory to the social life of the island.

If the women of the club importuned their husbands to shun Marvin, they would be punishing Edie, and that they did not want to do. So instead they embraced the Schurs, inviting them to the most exclusive of parties, greeting them effusively at the club. It is doubtful that Schur had the sensitivity to realize that he was still part of the establishment only due to his wife’s loyalty and honored position.

Shannon soon was featuring the Schurs more than ever in the Shiny Sheet. Marvin and Edie at a private party with Senator Hillary Clinton. Marvin surprising Edie by flying a group of friends to Paris for her birthday. Marvin and Edie at Club Colette for a Planned Parenthood benefit.

The Schurs continued as honored members of the Palm Beach Country Club. It had by far the most onerous, complicated admission processions of any of the clubs in Palm Beach. Marvin’s misconduct did not change in any way the members’ pride that their club had only the most morally exemplary of members, and everything was done to keep it that way. Widows were not appreciated in the club. Once due obeisance had been paid to the memory of the deceased, what was left was a potential predator. Thus, the country club was a version of Noah’s Ark, with wives eternally bonded to their husbands.

The incident with the Schurs had been profoundly troubling, particularly to women in the club. That was why it was so gratifying when, that same year, two long-term members, Leonard and Sandy Heine Jr., sponsored a charming, vivacious couple from Pittsburgh, Reid and Abby Ruttenberg. The Ruttenbergs were a popular new addition, though there was a little discussion when fifty-nine-year-old Abby Ruttenberg was seen in overlong, intimate discussions with seventy-nine-year-old Leonard Heine. But the members assumed that this was merely a little innocent flirtation.

In January 2004, Abby Ruttenberg called 911 to say that Leonard Heine was lying not breathing in the bedroom of her home. When the police arrived and found him dead, the officers asked her what had happened. “He’s a friend of my husband, and had come to look at improvements in our rented house,” she told the police.

Officer Michele Pagan observantly noticed that Heine was not dressed in the usual wardrobe for discussions of home improvements.

“Why is he undressed from the waist down?” the officer asked.

“I took off his shorts because 911 advised me to loosen his clothing.”

Abby Ruttenberg later admitted that “she and Heine Jr. were in the bedroom kissing and fondling when he collapsed.” For the members of the country club, here was a sickening moral conundrum. Unlike the Schur incident, where the women of the club perceived Edie as the aggrieved victim, in this instance, Abby Ruttenberg was considered by some a temptress who had lured poor Heine to his death. From that day on, both Ruttenbergs were shunned at the club. Many members would not play golf with them. They would not eat with them. Shannon did not write about the couple. But the Ruttenbergs kept coming back year after year, and nothing could be done about it.

One woman summed it up concisely: “If we threw everyone out for adultery, we wouldn’t have any members.”

W
omen ruled Palm Beach’s social life, but male wealth and power were the high cards, often slapped down with such force that they trumped everything else. When Shannon had written about relatively young and very attractive Angela Koch at the 1997 dinner dance honoring Prince Edward, the thirty-eight-year-old wife of William Koch had only been on the island for several months. Her fifty-six-year-old husband, however, had long been one of its major players.

Koch was an overlarge figure, and his six-foot-four-inch height was the least of it. He had a PhD from MIT in chemical engineering, where he had played varsity basketball. He had his own successful energy trading company. Intellect aside, he had all the sensitivities, passions, distractions, and self-indulgent whims of a teenager.

Koch sold his shares in the Wichita-based family business, Koch Industries, in 1983 for $470 million. He decided soon afterward that his two brothers, Charles and David, had cheated him out of his fair share of the largest or second-largest privately held company in America. And he set out on a two-decades-long lawsuit against his two brothers. When the
Boston Globe
reported that he also sued his “invalid mother,” who died during the epic battle, Koch’s lawyers demanded a retraction, insisting that she was not an invalid. The brutal dispute involved savage recriminations, investigators posing as journalists, and allegations of corruption. Koch and his fraternal twin brother, David, did not talk to each other, although they ended up living within a mile of each other in Palm Beach.

Koch came to national prominence as the skipper of an America’s Cup–winning yacht in 1992. It was a triumph as much for the technological savvy of his MIT team as old-fashioned sailing ability. And the aftermath was a triumph for his accountants, who turned one of the organizations in the racing syndicate into a tax-exempt foundation so their boss could save millions of dollars in tax write-offs.

A single man of Koch’s stature—now a billionaire twice over—did not go out looking for the ladies; the ladies came looking for him. In 1992, he recalled that he was having dinner with some friends when one of the women at the party, Catherine de Castelbajac, started kissing him passionately. “I must admit I did not resist,” Koch reflected, as if he was not strong enough to avoid the clutches of this Delilah. Catherine was a sensuous woman who, when she was not in his arms, sent him scores of faxes that burned the wires. “Your X-rated Protestant princess,” she signed one. In another missive, she called him “the greatest lover this side of the Rockies.”

Several years later, when Koch was suffering from a leg injury, the couple was at a fancy event in London. Instead of watching out for him, he claimed that Catherine strutted around the room in a sexy, revealing dress. That rankled him so much that he ended the affair and asked her to vacate the luxury $2.5-million Boston condominium where he had installed her. When she refused, saying that he had promised to support her, he took the case to Boston Housing Court, a venue unused to gentlemen who frequent the Forbes 400. When the jury ruled in his favor on November 28, 1995, Koch told the
Boston Globe
that he wanted her gone in a month, not a particularly harsh demand. “I want to have a Christmas party there,” he said, sounding more Scrooge-like than he intended.

While Koch was going through this unseemly ending with his long-term lover, he flew down to New Orleans for a blind date with Angela Browder Gauntt, a gorgeous blond divorcée living with her two children. After presenting Angela with an America’s Cup scarf, he took her to dinner at the exclusive Commander’s Palace.

Koch saw Angela only a couple of times in the next nine months, in part probably because he had another romantic crisis on his hands. Another former girlfriend, Marie Beard, was pregnant with his daughter, of whom he later took custody. In the end, Angela says that after only five dates, Koch asked her to marry him. That may have been the height of romanticism, but the prenuptial was the depths of realism.

Here was the emotional dichotomy of the man, the flamboyant, daring, generous romantic ready to fly into marriage on little more than a whim, whose instincts were quickly contained and controlled by a legion of advisers. The forty-four-page document was a shield to protect him from any assault. Koch’s fiancée agreed to forego any rights to his estate. In exchange, in a divorce she would receive “one percent (1%) of the value of Bill’s net worth, multiplied by the number of full years and pro-rated monthly for a year of less than 12 months” minus “cash or property paid, transferred and conveyed by Bill to Angela” but not including jewelry, cash, or property up to one hundred thousand dollars in value, and any living expenses. If they had any children, not only were the child support payments spelled out, but also his visiting rights. The prenuptial even had a literary clause that envisioned a day far in the future when Koch’s former wife might be a grandmother: “Bill is permitted to provide information to any biographer, but he shall make no negative comments therein about Angela, her children, or children’s children.”

In Palm Beach, a prenuptial is as much a part of marriage as a wedding ring. The richer the man, the bigger the ring, the longer the document, and the more cynical its view of the dark possibilities within the human psyche. The Koch prenuptial was conceived by his attorneys as a realistic and savvy attempt to protect their client’s wealth. But its lawyerly pessimism was so extreme that it would set any woman on edge, and made it less likely that love would stay alive.

After three and a half years of marriage and two children, Angela and William were staying at their summer home in Osterville, Massachusetts, when one evening in July 2000 Angela called 911, alleging that her husband had punched her in the stomach as she stood with their one-year-old daughter, Robin, in her arms. When the police arrived, she told them that Koch had also threatened “to beat his whole family to death with his belt.”

The police arrested Koch and charged him with domestic assault and battery, as well as threatened murder. In November, Angela amended her statement to the police and said that her husband had not threatened to beat the family to death. Instead, in a conversation over dinner that evening, Koch had said how his father had beaten him with a belt, and mused that perhaps corporal punishment should be used today.

Although he denied the charges, Koch’s initial response was not a belligerent verbal attack on his wife, but a conciliatory statement to the press. “Every marriage has its problems, and my marriage to Angela is no exception,” he said. “I love my wife and have every confidence that with the help of competent professionals, we will be able to work out our problems and enjoy a long and happy marriage,” he said.

This was a marriage overwhelmed by the excesses of wealth. Angela’s lawyer, Jeffrey Fisher, tried to obtain documents to portray Koch as a deeply troubled man who had a pattern of abuse to women. He sought to open up records of Koch’s previous divorce, which Angela believed would show “prior incident of domestic violence.” Koch’s spokesperson Brad Goldstein replied in outraged rebuttal, calling the charge false and “absolutely scurrilous.”

In court filings, Angela presented a portrait of a husband who after drinking, might well have lost control and struck his wife. He was one of the world’s greatest wine collectors. “The husband enjoys drinking these rare wines, frequently to excess,” Angela alleged in court documents. Her lawyer charged in court that Koch had “an alcohol abuse problem, and he recently completed a thirty-day, inpatient program.”

Koch replied by saying that it was not he who had an alcohol problem, but his estranged wife, and it involved even her children. He said that there needed to be nannies present when Angela was with the children “to preclude the wife from giving any alcohol beverages or medications that are not designed for children’s use, to the minor children.” Although Koch said that to protect their children he did not want to go into Angela’s alcoholic problems, if pushed, he was prepared with a salvo of detail.

The prenuptial theoretically set out the parameters of the divorce in every detail, and yet Angela said that Koch had “private investigators flying all around the country interviewing anyone that has ever known [Angela].” Angela was temporarily staying in the Palm Beach home. The staff in the house chose sides, and as she saw it, inevitably their loyalty was to the master of the house and the controller of the wealth.

The prenuptial covered almost all the details of the divorce, and within a few months, everything was settled. The assault case was dropped after Angela refused to testify against her husband, leaving the district attorney with a lack of evidence. Her attorney said she backed away from testifying because “the resolution of the criminal charges is consistent with Angela’s desire for the best interests of her two small children.” Angela walked away with sixteen million dollars and $21,800 a month in child support payments for their children. That money allowed Angela to buy an 8,986-square-foot mansion for $5.3 million near her ex-husband’s home. There she lived with her own staff, eventually including Shannon Donnelly’s son, Ian.

During her first months as a divorcée, Angela dated Palm Beach Police Chief Frank Croft. The forty-six-year-old retiring chief had been born with nothing but desire. He came to South Florida because he liked to surf, and he had ended up a patrolman on the island. He had a flatboat that he sailed through the Everglades pursuing snook and bonefish.

Initially attractive to Angela, the relationship with the chief did not last. On her first New Year’s Eve as a single woman, she showed up alone at a party wearing an outfit that Robert Janjigian of the Shiny Sheet wrote “caused some jaws to drop, others to rattle off how fab she looked. Her lacy black Sweet Pea top and embroidered Le Jealous denims from Eye of The Needle were the talk of the tony black-tie-clad assemblage.” In 2007, forty-nine-year-old Angela married fifty-one-year-old Doug Stockham, a retiring, laidback commercial real estate developer from Alabama, a man unlike Koch or other powerful, outgoing men of the island.

In the wake of the divorce, Koch began a relationship with a woman who was in some ways a daring step outside the expected. Bridget Rooney was from the Pittsburgh Rooneys, who owned the Pittsburgh Steelers and were one of the leading Catholic families in Palm Beach. Bridget had been coming to the island for most of her life. In 1991, she and two of her friends arrived at the Kennedy estate on Good Friday evening. They went out to a nightclub with three of the young Kennedys, including William Kennedy Smith. Later that evening, Smith went out again with his uncle Senator Ted Kennedy, and was accused of raping a woman he brought back to their estate. Rooney received her own full measure of notoriety when in 1996 she gave birth to a son fathered by movie star Kevin Costner.

Rooney had a lean, graceful body and dark-haired Irish good looks, and the couple was a public item in Palm Beach by December 2001. In May 2002, William and Bridget gave a dual birthday bash celebrating his sixty-second birthday and her thirty-ninth. At Koch’s level of affluence, one did not simply give a dinner but a theme party developed by a professional planner with every detail scripted. This evening was a 1970s costume party on his terrace overlooking the massive sweep of lawn to the Intracoastal Waterway. The dance floor was full of disco wannabes and women in bouffant hairdos that looked like radar antennae. The party planner set up a tent where an elaborate gourmet dinner was served, including potatoes stuffed with caviar, greens enhanced with walnuts and gorgonzola, and lamb neatly wrapped up in phyllo and garnished with potatoes. After dessert, the Boogie Wonderband blasted off on a professional stage with first-rate light and sound equipment.

This was an event worthy of Shannon’s presence. Although she appeared to be just another boogieing partygoer, she carefully recorded a list of all the notables in attendance, including Koch’s once estranged brother David.

Also on the premises was Jeffrey Epstein, an intense, mysterious bachelor from New York, who in 1990 had purchased a mansion on the Intracoastal Waterway in the estate section. Unbeknownst to his neighbors, the wealthy financier was using several of his aides as pimps, soliciting high school students, including one purportedly fourteen years old, to give him massages. Once in his private quarters, the teenagers learned that “massage” had a special meaning here. The teenagers were often asked to undress and provide a variety of services.

The parents of a fifteen-year-old victim came to see Police Chief Michael Reiter. Reiter authorized a secret surveillance or the multimillionaire could have gone on amusing himself. As it was, he was indicted and immediately hired several of the top defense attorneys in America, including Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr, who had gone from attacking President Bill Clinton for lying about having sex with a young woman to defending a man who had sex with children.

In 2008 Epstein negotiated a plea that sent him to the Palm Beach County Jail for eighteen months, for a crime that would have sent a poor man to a state prison for a far longer term. “The slow, dissatisfying resolution of the case sends a message to the public that there’s a different system of justice for the wealthy who hire high-powered lawyers,” the
Palm Beach Post
editorialized.

K
OCH’S
35,000-
SQUARE-FOOT RESIDENCE WAS
in an area on the island where the homes ran the whole width of the island from the South Country Road on the ocean west to the Intracoastal Waterway. No one had created a more splendid expanse of garden than Koch’s, with its wondrous lush plantings and Botero sculptures.

One evening, I attended a large cocktail party there. Many hosts on the island are so worried about their décor that they do not serve red wine, so I was happily surprised when the waiter brought an ample glass of pinot noir. Almost never did I enter a mansion where the owner had created a home in his own style, as opposed to that of an impersonal interior decorator. I found that so strange. These people had great fortunes and had incomparable places to live. I could not understand why they rarely imposed something of themselves and their own aesthetic values, no matter how ill-formed, upon their dwellings. However, Koch’s home was different.