Leona Helmsley achieved notoriety in the 1980s through her tyrannical management of her husband’s many hotels. Her reputation was endorsed by several witnesses at the trial which ended in her conviction for income tax evasion and other offences in 1989. She faced the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison but eventually served 18 months, being released in January 1994.

Publicly, she refused to talk about her early life. She was born Lena Rosenthol in Marbletown, north of New York City, in 1920, the daughter of poor Polish Jews who had just arrived in America. She was brought up in Brooklyn and claimed to have attended college and been a successful model, though neither achievement could be verified by records.

She changed her last name to Roberts and had unsuccessful marriages, once to a lawyer, Leo E. Panzirer, and twice to Joseph Lubin, who was in the fashion industry. Her ambition was evident from the start. In 1964, after working as a secretary at a New York real estate agency, she became a broker. By the end of the 1960s the woman recalled by acquaintances as a gravel-voiced, 60-a-day smoker and workaholic, had made her fortune through the conversion of apartment buildings from rentals to condominiums.

She climbed much further up the ladder when she was hired by one of America’s richest men, Harry Helmsley. In due course she began a relationship with Helmsley, who divorced his wife of 33 years and married Leona in 1972.

A year later, a knife-wielding burglar broke into the couple’s Florida home and in the attack punctured one of Leona Helmsley’s lungs. But the frightening incident did nothing to curb her energy. Supposedly under her influence, Helmsley, previously known as a reserved man, adopted an increasingly flamboyant lifestyle, buying a 28-room Connecticut estate and a private jet for the purposes of entertaining New York society.

But when Harry Helmsley was persuaded by his wife to appoint her president of his 26-hotel empire in 1980, it proved ultimately to be his most unwise decision. She boosted business through an advertising campaign in which she played the Queen of the Helmsley Palace hotel, New York, but her behaviour also fed the resentment of Helmsley employees who suffered maltreatment at her hands.

She became known as “the Queen of Mean” as more stories emerged about her unreasonable demands and her insults. It led to her eventual downfall when an investigation was launched by an ambitious prosecutor, Rudolph Giuliani, who later was elected Mayor of New York. Acting on information from a disgruntled Helmsley employee, Giuliani discovered that $4 million of personal spending by the Helmsleys had been disguised as business expenditure.

In court, the evidence of Helmsley’s former housekeeper, Elizabeth Baum, proved devastating. She testified that her employer had once told her: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” Helmsley denied having said this but the words became indelibly associated with her.

Helmsley’s own lawyer described her as “a tough bitch” but told the jury: “We don’t put people in jail for being unpopular.” Nevertheless, she was found guilty on 30 counts. Harry Helmsley was found to be unfit to stand trial after a series of slight strokes. He died in 1997, leaving Leona Helmsley his estate worth several billion dollars.

Leona Helmsley, hotelier, was born on July 4, 1920. She died on August 20, 2007, aged 87