Friday, December 28, 2007

Louis J Sheehan 63437 H18

In November 2003, an American socialite living in Hong Kong served her millionaire banker husband a drugged milkshake, bludgeoned him to death, wrapped him in a carpet, dumped him in a storage closet and then rang up a moving company.


Most commentators turn it into a parable about the evils of wealth.

The Kissels certainly had a lot of it. As a fresh New York University business school grad, he started off with a small investment house but soon jumped to Lazard Frères, where he made his name in "distressed debt," the business of buying up bankrupt companies, revamping them and reselling them. Later he landed a job at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. His timing was perfect. The Kissels moved to Asia just as a massive financial crisis hit and Rob's talents were most needed. He made a small mint.

Rob became "an investment banker, not a mere man," whose wealth was "never enough" -- hence the book's title. Rob enjoyed luxuries like single-malt scotches and fancy cigars. He took long business trips that kept him away from home which may have pushed Nancy away.

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Still, Rob was a loving father (the Kissels had three children) and apparently devoted to his marriage despite its increasingly dysfunctional character. Perhaps Rob was simply blinded by his passions -- hardly the first time that's happened to an overachiever. He met his wife on a nude beach at Club Med in the Turks and Caicos Islands and quipped: "I bet you'd look great with your clothes on." Nancy wa a "knock-out" blonde, a "full-breasted five foot four" woman with "shapely legs" and a "provocatively dirty mouth" who had dropped out of two colleges and ended up working at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Manhattan. They married in 1989.

In Hong Kong, Nancy let her Filipina maid do most of the parenting while she spent her days shopping at glitzy malls. When Rob asked her to stay in Hong Kong for another three years, she threatened to divorce him and badgered him into buying her a $2 million vacation home in Vermont. There she started an affair with a local television repairman, Michael Del Priore.

When Rob's marriage started to disintegrate and he found out about her affair, he bought spyware, hired a private detective, consulted friends and wrote poems. It was only just before his murder that he started to contemplate divorce seriously. Nancy, by contrast, didn't seem to enjoy any productive passions. Devoid of a steady career and uninterested in her children, she seems to have been corroded less by her wealth than by a chronic lack of purpose. Murdering Rob may have finally given her a project of sorts.

She carefully stockpiled milkshake-enhancing depressants such as Stilnox (also known as Ambien) and Rohypnol (the date-rape drug) from various doctors. And she ordered up the objects she would need once the job was done -- bleach powder to clean up; packing cartons, rope, packing tape, and polyethylene sheeting to wrap the body; and peppermint oil to cover the smell of domestic carnage.

Even after her arrest, Nancy remained obsessed with Mr. Del Priore and wrote to him regularly. For example: "Just got back from court . . . wow . . . what a day . . . [prosecutor Peter] Chapman's closing took only 3 hours . . . pretty pathetic . . . 75% of his closing was about you! . . . he based his entire closing on you and I premeditating to do . . . well . . . you know . . . I can't even write it it's so absurd." She has continued to write him from her jail cell at Hong Kong's Tai Lam Center for Women, where she is serving a life sentence.
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In an interview after the murder, Mr. Del Priore was described as "a not terribly bright, not terribly appealing human being." Sounds like a good description of Nancy, as rich as she was -- or as poor as she is now, and alone.

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