Leona Helmsley, the billionaire property owner who became New York's "Queen of mean" when she was imprisoned for tax evasion in the early Nineties, has died aged 87.

A week after the city grieved for Brooke Astor, the stylish and much-loved philanthropist, Mrs Helmsley's death of heart failure was announced by Howard Rubenstein, her publicist.

Mrs Helmsley, a former model and real estate agent, sprang to notoriety in 1985 when the New York Post reported that she and her third husband, Harry Helmsley, a millionaire property investor, were systematically refusing to pay the builders and contractors working on their substantial estate in Greenwich, Connecticut.

A subsequent investigation showed that the couple were writing off the expenses as business costs for other properties and they were charged with tax evasion. Mr Helmsley was later declared unfit to stand trial, while his wife was buffetted by eight weeks of testimony depicting her as a vicious, miserly, sharp-tongued employer.

"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes," became the quote -- always denied by Mrs Helmsley -- that defined her.

Prosecuted by Rudolph Giuliani, then a District Attorney, Mrs Helmsley was sentenced to four years in prison, of which she served 21 months. On the day she was flown by private jet to prison in Kentucky, Mrs Helmsley's husband ordered the lights switched off on the Empire State Building, which he managed.

Mrs Helmsley inherited an estate worth more than $3 billion when her husband died in 1997 and chipped away at her reputation with donations to charities. But she could not escape the bad press for long. In 2001 she fired Patrick Ward, her chief executive and close friend, a former optician, who said that he had been dismissed because he was gay.

Two years later, one of her hotel managers also alleged that he had been fired because he was gay, a case that further damaged her reputation. A jury awarded $11 million in damages against her, a decision to which Mrs Helmsley responded: "What am I going to lose next, my virginity?"

The same year, the Daily News declared Mrs Helmsley the most hated woman in New York after it emerged that lawyers for the Empire State Building, in which she still owned a considerable stake, had asked for a court case to be moved out of the state because of her personal unpopularity.

In a poll of 400 New Yorkers commissioned by the lawyers, 75 per cent of people identified Mrs Helmsley as "the Queen of mean" and had nothing nice to say about her. "Many New York City jurors, especially gay jurors, harbour extreme hostility toward Leona Helmsley," they wrote in their submission.

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