Inside Leona’s Mean machine
How Helmsley lived like a Queen – until her luxe ran out
There she stood, draped in an evening gown and dripping in jewels, standing on the staircase of New York’s opulent Helmsley Palace Hotel. The advertisement’s tagline: “It’s the only Palace in the world where the Queen stands guard.”
And what a Queen of Mean she was. Leona Helmsley, who married hotel mogul Harry Helmsley in 1972, was the epitome of the “greed is good” ’80s, living high while abusing the staff.
As for paying her fair share?
“We don’t pay taxes,” a housekeeper once heard her say. “Only the little people pay taxes.”
Enter Sandor Frankel, the lawyer who had to defend her in a massive tax case and eventually handled her $5 billion estate after Helmsley died.
In Frankel’s new book, “The Accidental Philanthropist: From a Bronx Stickball Lot to Manhattan Courtrooms and Steering Leona Helmsley’s Billions” (Skyhorse, out July 27), he describes being fired and rehired multiple times in fits of pique.
“She was basically a lonely lady surrounded by household help and a dying husband,” he writes. “She had everything. She had nothing. I met very few people she referred to as friends — and seemed to regard everyone with whom she interacted as interested in her only as a means to possible access to some of her money.”
Frankel did what he could to mitigate Helmsley’s legal trouble, but in the end her behavior was just too blatant.
Phony invoices and a “raft of felonies” got her convicted in 1989 on 33 counts and sentenced to a four-year prison term, three years’ probation, in addition to fines and restitution totaling $9 million.
Here are some tales from Frankel’s 18 years of working for the Queen:
SHAMELESS LEONA
Helmsley was using company monies and phony invoices to charge Helmsley Hotels for the renovation of Dunnellen Hall, the couple’s sprawling 28-room Jacobean hilltop man- sion on 40 acres in the ritzy back country of Greenwich, Conn. The estate overlooked Long Island Sound and had German shepherds tethered to the security fence.
Trumped-up charges billed to the company as business expenses included a $1 million marble dance floor installed above the swimming pool, a $45,000 silver clock, a $500,000 jade figure and a $210,000 mahogany card table.
Nothing was too personal or too small for Leona to bill it to Helmsley Hotels: a $12.99 girdle, bras and a white lace and pink satin dress and jacket ensemble were all bogusly charged to the Park Lane Hotel as “uniforms for the staff.”
HELMSLEY VS. TRUMP
As two largerthan-life real-estate personalities, Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump loathed each other.
Trump called her “a disgrace to the industry and a disgrace to humanity in general.”
Leona said of Trump: “I wouldn’t trust him if his tongue was notarized.”
KNEW YOU WERE TROUBLE
With time off for good behavior, Helmsley was behind bars for just 21 months and 11 days.
Free but disgraced, she had few friends. Into this vacuum, John Codey, who had worked in real estate swooped in and befriended Leona, joining her daily for long lunches, drinking wine and sex.
It was Codey who gifted her the infamous Trouble, a Maltese who was fond of biting people indiscriminately and eating from the menu.
“She often said that she could trust nobody but Trouble,” Frankel writes.
She ran a full-page ad in The New York Times for the Park Lane Hotel that featured Trouble seated in a chairman-like chair behind a big desk. Trouble’s mouth was open and the caption read: “Let’s get down to business.”
But Trouble lived up to her name. A housekeeper sued Helmsley claiming Trouble had ferociously attacked her causing severe injuries.
She charged Leona with acting “maliciously” because she knew Trouble was “fierce and dangerous.”
The dog had bitten a long list of people — other employees, corporate officers, outside professional advisors and even Frankel.
Frankel defended Helmsley, learning that the housekeeper had already filed a claim under workers’ compensation law, which barred her from suing in court. The case was dismissed.
When she died, Leona Helmsley gave her grandchildren nothing but left a $12 million trust “to provide for the maintenance and welfare of Trouble at the highest standards of care.”
Leona had wanted to give the dog to her brother Alvin, but he didn’t want it. Letters poured into Frankel offering the dog a warm and loving home. He gave it to a longtime Helmsley employee instead.
But Frankel was furious that this “vicious, nondiscriminatory peoplebiter” got so much money. He argued in court that the dog wouldn’t live long enough to require that amount, and the trust was lowered to $2 million. Trouble, aged 12, died in 2011.
QUEEN BEHIND BARS
Frankel’s defense failed and Leona, at age 71, was ordered to surrender on Tax Day, April 15, 1992. She headed for a maximum-security prison in Lexington, Ky.
After one day behind bars, she phoned Frankel. Speaking Yiddish for fear of being eavesdropped on by the guards, she begged Frankel to visit. He was there the following day.
Wearing a gray oversized prison sweatshirt and sweatpants, she flashed a broad smile and struck the same arrogant “Queen of the Palace” advertisement pose, arms thrown back in glory, Frankel writes.
She vented about prison and asked for a dollar to buy a bag of popcorn from the vending machine. Wolfing that down, she asked if her credit was good enough for a second bag.
. . . AND SUCH SMALL PORTIONS
In the last days of her life, at age 87 in August 2007, Leona was resting quietly in a private room in a Greenwich hospital.
Frankel adjusted her head on the pillow, asking her, “Are you comfortable?”
“I make a living,” she answered. Those were the last words she said to him.
THE TRUST
After Leona’s death in 2007, Frankel became one of the executors of the Helmsley estate, worth $5 billion.
Harry, a real-estate genius, had holdings in 84 properties, including the Empire State Building and other iconic NYC buildings; municipal bonds worth over $2 billion; jewelry, furniture, artwork and assorted tchotchkes.
Two safe-deposit boxes contained wads of cash and diamonds along with 299 gold coins in rolls of twenties. A safe near Harry’s den had stacks of $100-dollar bills and jewelry.
Frankel says he gives away about $350 million a year, including to health and energy issues in Israel, along with advancement in understanding and hoping to end Crohn’s disease.
For this work, the executors received $100 million.
As Frankel writes in the last line of the book, “All in all, in the good luck lottery that floats unpredictable in the cosmos, I hit the jackpot.”