Via NY Times: *Leona Helmsley, the hotel operator and real estate developer whose conviction on federal tax evasion charges in 1989 became an emblem of the greedy excesses of the 1980s, died today at her summer house in Greenwich, Conn. She was 87. The cause of death was heart failure, her longtime spokesman, Howard J. Rubenstein, said in a statement. An obituary will be published on NYTimes.com shortly. Mrs. Helmsley, who became known as the “Queen of Mean” in a twist on the hotel ad slogan that had made her famous, served a prison sentence for tax fraud from '92 - '93 and was released from home confinement in '94. In the most celebrated moment of her 2-month trial in '89, a former housekeeper testified that Mrs. Helmsley had once told her, “Only the little people pay taxes.”Mrs. Helmsley, already a millionaire and a successful condo broker and twice divorced, met the real estate magnate Harry B. Helmsley in 1968. He divorced his wife of 33 years to marry her, in 1972. Together, they built a real estate empire that included landmark buildings like 230 Park Ave & the Empire State Building, the Tudor City apartment complex on the East Side of Manhattan, and Helmsley-Spear, their management and leasing business. The couple developed properties that included the Park Lane Hotel, the New York Helmsley Hotel and the Helmsley Palace Hotel, and hotels in Florida & other states. Hotel employees throughout the Helmsley empire were aware of Mrs. Helmsley’s trigger temper and had arranged a warning system when she left her apartment en route to one of the hotels. But it was not until she starred in glossy advertisements for the hotels that she became a household name. The first ads, for the Harley, showed a smiling Mrs. Helmsley proclaiming that she wouldn’t settle for skimpy towels and couldn’t get along without a phone in the bath. She asked, “Why should you?” Occupancy rates skyrocketed.
In '86, court documents and law enforcement officials stated she had failed to pay sales taxes in New York on hundreds of thousands of dollars of jewelry she purchased at Van Cleef & Arpels, the exclusive NYC store. Two senior store officers were indicted on charges that they operated a scheme by which customers with addresses outside New York could have their purchases recorded as being mailed to them, thus avoiding city and state taxes. Records showed that Mrs. Helmsley made 10 such jewelry purchases, totaling $485,000, which would have required taxes of $40,000. Mrs. Helmsley’s lawyers said she had believed that the price she was paying included the sales tax, but in '90, a judge revealed that she had admitted before grand juries in '85 that she had “actively participated from a fraudulent sales-tax scheme.” The two Van Cleef officials later pleaded guilty in the case, but Mrs. Helmsley had received a grant of immunity and could not be charged.*
Read more about loathsome Leona here.
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