The death of banker Edmond Safra in the penthouse fire
Monte Carlo, Monaco, 1999
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Edmond Safra, a banker born in Lebanon and naturalized Brazilian, founder of the Republic National Bank of New York, was 67 and suffered from Parkinson's disease. He needed nursing care day and night and lived with his wife in a penthouse in the La Belle Epoque building in Monte Carlo. In August 1999 he hired the American nurse Ted Maher, who claimed to have served in the Army's special forces. In the early hours of December 3, 1999, Maher was on the night shift with the nurse Vivian Torrente, and none of the family's security staff was on duty in the apartment.
Maher came down to the lobby wounded, saying that two masked men had broken into the penthouse and stabbed him. Earlier, he had told his colleague to take their employer to the armored dressing room, and the two had locked themselves in there. There was fire in the apartment. The police treated it as an armed break-in and spent more than two hours trying to secure the scene; Safra and Vivian Torrente did not open the steel door and, when the firefighters finally reached them, they were dead, suffocated by smoke. On December 7 the prosecutor general of Monaco announced that Maher had confessed: the wounds were self-inflicted, made with his own pocketknife, and the fire had started in a wastebasket where he lit paper to set off the alarm.
Sources
In the game
Panic Room
Monte Carlo, Friday, December 10, 1999, 10 am. In the security room on the ground floor of the Résidence Les Aloès, the alarm panel is still blinking red. Upstairs, the 7th-floor penthouse smells of smoke.
At the trial in 2002, Maher admitted setting the fire but said he never meant to kill anyone: he wanted to save his employer as a hero and secure his job, which he feared losing after clashes with the head nurse. The prosecution argued that the story of the intruders delayed the rescue. In December 2002 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for arson causing two deaths. He escaped from the Monaco jail in January 2003 and was recaptured in Nice hours later; he was released in 2007 after serving about eight years, and began saying that the confession had been forced. Safra's death, he having warned American authorities about Russian money laundering, fed theories of a contract killing for years, never proven.
