Eliot Osrin: Lawyer who made rich give to charities

1932-2017

ELIOT Osrin, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 84, was a philanthropist and lawyer who defended notorious wife murderer Ronald Cohen in a sensational murder trial, and became his lifelong friend.

Cohen was a 41-year-old multimillionaire property developer who battered his 25-year-old wife to death with a statue at their luxurious Constantia home in 1970. He told the court his wife had been killed by an intruder.

Death was mandatory for first-degree murder but Cohen got away with 12 years.

The fact that his wife had just told him she’d had an affair and insulted his sexuality was treated by the judge as a mitigating circumstance.

He was released on parole after serving five years.

He and Osrin became friends during the trial.

After his release, Cohen emigrated to London and asked Osrin to run his property company for him. They remained friends until Cohen died in 2002 at the age of 73.

Osrin also defended Sue Rabkin and her husband, David, who were charged under the Terrorism Act in 1976 along with Jeremy Cronin. Sue Rabkin was sentenced to 12 months, her husband, who died in a car accident in Angola in the mid-1980s, got 10 years and Cronin, who he did not represent, got seven.

Osrin was born in Mossel Bay on September 23 1932. He obtained a first-class matric at Point High School in Mossel Bay.

His parents couldn’t afford to send him to university so he completed a two-year legal diploma through Rapid Results College in Cape Town while articled to the prominent Cape Town law firm Sonnenberg Hoffmann & Galombik. He was made a partner in 1958.

Osrin encouraged his wealthy clients to set up charitable trusts. He believed people who had money should leave a legacy and support those who didn’t.

By the time he died he was running about 27 charitable trusts, many of them for families who had emigrated. He was the HE DID GOOD: Cape Town lawyer-philanthropist Eliot Osrin chief fundraiser and the money he collected went to schools, old-age homes, hospitals and the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, which his wife, Myra, established in 1999. It was the first Holocaust centre in Africa.

Osrin had a genius for fundraising and devoted much of his life to it.

The world was not short of givers, he said. It was short of askers, because people didn’t like to ask other people for money.

He, on the other hand, was never happier than when asking people for their money. He said he could do more good with it than they could.

He used a variety of tactics. If someone refused to see him, he’d say the least they could in that case was to phone five rich people and get money from them because there were charities out there that needed it. Faced with this awful prospect they’d invite him over.

If he thought somebody was giving less than they should, he would say so and hand them a list of people they knew and he showed how much more they were giving. He knew from experience that, if they looked at the list, pride would force them to at least match the others.

Osrin knew from his work as a lawyer that there were many organisations doing good deeds. He decided early on that his contribution would be to raise money for them. He loved the challenge and was never more fulfilled than when getting donors to up their original offers, sometimes by five times or more.

If someone he knew was loaded and had given too little, Osrin would give it back.

“You obviously need it more than we do,” he’d say. They were either insulted or, more often, stung into giving much more.

Through his law work Osrin was exposed to wealthy families who ran big businesses. His clients included the Goldin family who owned Clicks and the Lewis family who owned Foschini. When he retired from the law in 1982 both families asked him to sit on their boards.

When they emigrated, they asked him to be the chairman of their groups.

He was chairman of Foschini, Melbro, Atlas Properties and Gerber Goldschmidt, and a director of Clicks and the Board of Executors.

Osrin is survived by his wife, Myra, and three children. — Chris Barron

He loved getting donors to up their original offers