AS MISSING persons go, this one should not be too difficult to find. He is a
muscular, blond go-go dancer with tattooed stripes over much of his body,
earning him the nickname “Tiger”. He once appeared in a pornographic film
called Dreams Cum True.
He is also at the centre of a bizarre murder mystery that has shaken the
millionaire enclaves of Palm Beach, Florida, and stirred scandal and dismay
on Wall Street.
No one knows the dancer’s real name. He continues to elude lawyers keen to
establish his role in the life of Seth Tobias, a brilliant 44-year-old hedge
fund tycoon who died in September and whose family is now at loggerheads
over a fortune that may have been severely diminished by years of
extravagant spending.
When Tobias was found floating face down in the swimming pool of his $3m
mansion in Jupiter, a few miles north of Palm Beach, his family believed he
had suffered a heart attack and drowned. Police found nothing suspicious.
On Wall Street, several of Tobias’s former colleagues noted that he had a
reputation for wild living — “I’d have to [guess] he died in the saddle with
a high-priced hooker while doing cocaine,” one anonymous trader wrote — but
most people mourned the loss of a dynamic and generous financial wizard who
had become well known as a television analyst.
Tobias was one of Wall Street’s gilded elite — the founder of a $300m hedge
fund.
He seemed to be living a dream life with a beautiful socialite wife and all
the trappings of extreme wealth, from the luxury cars in his Florida garage
to his Cayman Islands bank account, his private box at the Philadelphia
Eagles football stadium and his home on a private golf course behind the
Ritz-Carlton hotel.
Yet a painfully public falling-out between Tobias’s wife, Filomena, and four
of his brothers who are beneficiaries of his will has transfixed Wall Street
and dumbfounded the rest of his family. They have had to endure salacious
allegations that Tobias was squandering at least part of his fortune on
rampant cocaine abuse and male prostitutes.
“His death was a terrible thing,” said Joel Chakov, Tobias’s stepfather, last
week. “And all those things that are being said about him now are doing no
good to anyone.”
Earlier on the day Tobias died, he visited the bar of the Breakers hotel, the
stately Palm Beach institution that for more than 100 years has played host
to Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors and Kennedys.
Yet it was at a very different Palm Beach bar that, according to court
documents filed by his brothers, Tobias began to spend his evenings. Far
from the oceanfront palaces of the moneyed elite, the Cupids gay sports bar
sits in a seedy strip mall between a Burger King and Tuffy’s Auto Service
Center.
It was there, according to one of Tobias’s former assistants, that the
financier first became enamoured of Tiger the go-go dancer. Although a sign
outside the bar mentions only darts and billiards, a Cupids website promises
something different: “Partying like rock stars, spending like movie stars,
f****** like porn stars.”
The Tobias brothers claim that not only was Filomena aware of her husband’s
gay proclivities, but she actively encouraged them and occasionally
accompanied him to Cupids. Last week the club manager confirmed seeing the
couple there together.
Yet it was not so much the sex and drugs that astounded Wall Street last week
— it was the sensational allegation by Samuel, Spence, Scott and Joshua
Tobias that Filomena had waited until her husband was all but comatose from
a cocaine binge, then lured him into the pool with a promise of sex with
Tiger.
Probate court documents allege that Filomena “killed [her husband] by
asphyxiation and drowning”. She had “caused him to ingest one or more
controlled substances that induced loss of consciousness and capacity to
breathe . . . she then caused him to enter the swimming pool in a stuporous
and helpless condition”.
The source of these allegations is Billy Ash, also known as William Ashe, a
former gay pimp who claims to have been working for two years as an
assistant to Tobias and as a “spiritual adviser” to his wife. Ash has
claimed that Filomena “confessed to me on tape” but he has yet to produce
the evidence.
Ash, who used to call himself “Mr Madam”, has been arrested 11 times for male
prostitution and other offences. He left for San Diego after Tobias’s death,
but was interviewed by police, who have been sceptical about his
allegations.
A spokesman said investigators were still waiting for toxicology results that
may show how much cocaine — if any — Tobias had taken before he died. Police
continue to treat the case as an accident.
Yet the Tobias brothers are taking Ash seriously, not least because they also
accuse Filomena of hiding a will in which they were named as beneficiaries.
Under a Florida law known as the “slayer statute”, a wife cannot benefit from
her husband’s estate if it is proved that she “intentionally or unlawfully”
caused his death.
Ash failed to turn up for a scheduled deposition of his evidence in the case,
which is likely to be tried before a probate judge in February. Filomena’s
lawyers dismissed his allegations as malicious fantasies and noted that the
Tobias brothers had “failed to provide a scintilla of evidence”.
One of her lawyers, Gary Dunkel, declared in court: “In my 25 years of
practising law, this is the most reckless allegation I have ever seen.”
Whatever the outcome of the murder allegations, the lives of Seth and Filomena
Tobias have been laid bare. Interest in the probate case led to the
discovery of divorce papers filed in a different Florida court last year.
Married in March 2005, the couple survived only a year before Seth claimed the
relationship was “irretrievably broken”. He filed a divorce petition,
accusing his wife of incurring “a substantial debt without the husband’s
knowledge . . . in one instance by forging the husband’s signature”.
Filomena, who has three children from previous relationships, responded that
she had caught her husband “engaging in an adulterous affair and other
improper conduct . . . he gambled away tens of thousands of dollars and used
other funds on illicit habits”.
Listing her assets for the court, Filomena claimed that she needed £22,000 a
month — or £265,000 a year — to maintain her living standards. She demanded
£2,200 a month for clothing, £200 a month for massages, almost £5,000 a
month for “vacations” and £12 a month for books.
After six months of trading insults in court, the couple were somehow
reconciled. Yet it began to appear that even a master of the hedge fund
universe was struggling to pay for a lifestyle that, at the time of his
death, included bills for £60,000 worth of electronic gadgetry for his
Jupiter home and £34,000 worth of kitchen cabinets.
A list of the couple’s monthly outgoings shows that Tobias was spending
£295,000 a year on mortgages and property-related expenses and £42,000 a
year on car leases. A month before he died he borrowed £123,000 in cash from
a close friend.
At one point he forced his wife to return a Porsche she had bought with a
no-limit credit card. His Circle T hedge fund reportedly lost 5.9% in 2005,
and the past two years of investment turmoil have not been easy for smaller
Wall Street players.
It hardly seems likely that Tobias was broke — the month before he died he had
the chandeliers in his mansion rewired — yet some of his friends were
reported last week as saying that the couple “fought constantly” over money.
Filomena is due to give her own evidence to the probate court next week.
Lawyers for the Tobias brothers are still looking for the missing go-go
dancer — they delivered a summons addressed to “Tiger of Cupids”, so
far without response.
All of which has left Tobias’s parents in shock and many of his friends
appalled. “He was like a son to me,” said one of his oldest business
associates.
“He was a very bright, caring and philanthropic young man who did a great deal
for a charity I run. But it’s what they are saying now in the media that
people will remember.”
