Leona Helmsley Is Dead at 87
Leona Helmsley, the hotel operator and real estate developer whose conviction on federal tax evasion charges in 1989 became an emblem of the excesses of the 1980s, died today at her summer house in Greenwich, Conn., according to Howard J. Rubenstein, her longtime spokesman. She was 87.
The cause of death was heart failure, Mr. Rubenstein said in a statement. A complete obituary will be published on NYTimes.com shortly.
Mrs. Helmsley, already a millionaire and a successful condominium broker, 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 Avenue and 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 and 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.
The hotel empire came under the scrutiny of regulators. In 1988, a federal grand jury accused the Helmsleys of fraudulently avoiding taxes. They denied all wrongdoing and vowed to fight the charges.
Mr. Helmsley was found unfit to stand trial. On Aug. 30, 1989, after a two-month trial whose every maneuver was covered in the New York tabloids, Mrs. Helmsley was convicted of evading $1.2 million in federal income taxes. Mrs. Helmsley, who was portrayed by former employees and other witnesses during the trial as greedy, pompous and abrasive, was acquitted of the most serious charge against her, scheming to extort kickbacks from contractors and suppliers.
On Dec. 30, 1989, Mrs. Helmsley was sentenced to four years in prison and fined $7.1 million for tax fraud. She started her sentence on April 1, 1992, and served 18 months in federal prison.
Mrs. Helmsley had become for many a symbol of unbridled arrogance and a philosophy of entitlement. She was the subject of an unflattering television special; a 1990 television film, “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean”; and at least three books, “The Queen of Mean,” by Ransdell Pierson; “Palace Coup,” by Michael Moss, and “Unreal Estate: the Rise and Fall of Harry & Leona Helmsley” by Richard Hammer. Reviewing “Palace Coup” for The New York Times Book Review in 1989, Andrew Feinberg called it “scrupulously venomous” and wrote that Mrs. Helmsley had emerged as “the Lady Macbeth of the lodging industry.”
In “Palace Coup” (1989), by Michael Moss, an advertising executive, George Lois, is quoted as saying, “The employees in the photos look at her as if they’re scared to death. Her attitude fit right in with the mood of the Reagan administration: It’s O.K. to chew out the little guy.'’
Mr. Rubenstein, her longtime publicist, made no mention of Mrs. Helmsley’s legal troubled in his statement announcing her death. “Leona was a great businesswoman in her own right who created a tremendous brand and success with Helmsley Hotels and was a wonderful partner and wife to Harry Helmsley,” he said. “She was extremely generous as a philanthropist and she gave tens of millions of dollars to charity right up until the last months of her life. I was very proud to represent her for so many years. Her family and many friends and business associates are deeply saddened by her death and will miss her greatly.”
Mr. Helmsley, who died in 1997, got his start in the 1920s as a broker and rent collector in rough Manhattan neighborhoods like Hell’s Kitchen, scavenging properties at tax sales and buying foreclosed properties from distressed banks during the Depression. His leap in fortunes occurred in the 1950s after he met Lawrence A. Wien, a lawyer who had pioneered the use of syndicates to buy and hold properties while protecting them from high corporate tax rates.
By the late 1960s, Mr. Helmsley had ventured out on his own, building new office towers and acquiring some of the biggest residential developments in the region. Thinking that rent control would be phased out eventually, he and other investors bought Tudor City on the East River at 41st Street and the Parkchester complex in the Bronx. But by the mid-1980s he had grown weary of fighting with tenants. He sold Tudor City and converted the Parkchester project into cooperatives and, at the urging of Mrs. Helmsley, switched his attention to hotels and industrial properties.
After Mr. Helmsley’s death in 1997, she became chief executive officer of Helmsley Enterprises and managed the family’s real estate and hotel portfolio.
“At her death she owned a significant commercial and residential real estate and hotel portfolio, including interests in the Empire State Building and the Lincoln Building, the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, the Helmsley Hotel on 42nd Street and other significant holdings in New York and Florida,” according to Mr. Rubenstein.
Mrs. Helmsley was born Leona Mindy Rosenthal in Ulster County, N.Y., on July 4, 1920, and raised in Brooklyn. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School, she began calling herself Leona Roberts and had changed her name legally well before her marriage to Mr. Helmsley.
As a teenager, she worked as a model and held other part-time jobs before being a secretary at a real estate company. She became a broker at the firm of Brown Harris Stevens, specializing in residential sales, and in particular on condominiums.
Mrs. Helmsley devoted much of her recent years to burnishing her tarnished reputation. She contributed $25 million to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, $5 million to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and $5 million to help the families of firefighters after 9/11, according to Mr. Rubenstein. She also gave money in the late 1990s to help rebuild African-American churches that had been burned down in the South. Buildings at New York University Medical Center and Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut are among those that were renamed to honor the Helmsleys’ generosity.
Mrs. Helmsley is survived by her brother, Alvin Rosenthal, and his wife Susan; four grandchildren, David Panzirer, Craig Panzirer, Walter Panzirer and Megan Wesolko; and 12 great-grandchildren.
