On St. Barth’s, the chic-est Caribbean island, Christmas and New Year’s are the mad season. “During Christmas the energy is incredible,” says a longtime resident, who describes the island then as a “summer camp for wealthy, well-known New Yorkers,” business tycoons, music stars, and Hollywood celebrities. “It’s like the whole island is Studio 54 at [...]

December 11, 2008, began much like any other day for Walter Noel: the tall, silver-haired, 78-year-old businessman strolled into the headquarters of his Fairfield Greenwich Group, on Manhattan’s East 52nd Street. Then employing around 140 people, the company was a (supposedly) diversified alternative investment fund with $14.1 billion under management. Despite the recent turmoil of [...]

On June 16 royal photographers waiting to capture Britain’s Prince William, 26, in flowing velvet robes outside St. George’s Chapel, in Windsor, were caught by surprise. Just before the start of the 660-year-old ceremony, in which the Prince was to be made a Royal Knight of the Garter, a car containing his younger brother, Prince [...]

Just a few hours ago, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the former owner of the Pamela Martin escort agency, was found dead in a shed near her mother’s house in Tampa, Florida. The authorities said she had hanged herself. And while the news was shocking, I cannot say I was surprised. The 52-year-old, known in the press [...]

Settling down didn’t come naturally to Simon Sebag Montefiore, the English banking scion with a playboy reputation who gave up finance for war reporting. Then he met the woman he knew he couldn’t let slip away, and started producing a series of acclaimed histories. Our correspondent drops in on the toast of London as he [...]

With a triumphant second exhibition at his Venice Museum, Francois Pinault, the self-made french tycoon whose holdings include Gucci, Christie’s, and the Chateau Latour Vineyard, has found a new role: Champion of Contemporary Art. On Friday, June 8, 2007, the thousands of art aficionados who had made the pilgrimage to the 52nd Venice Biennale experienced [...]

This year marks the 21st anniversary of the death of Frances Elizabeth Kent, more widely known as Sister Corita, the Andy Warhol of Hollywood. Sister Corita was a nun, a member of the West Coast’s Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, under whose progressive roof Corita developed and taught her art, a cutting-edge populist [...]

Since Brooke Astor’s grandson, her powerful friends, and her longtime staff alleged that the 104-year-old philanthropist’s son, Anthony Marshall, and his wife, Charlene, were taking advantage of her failing health, a New York court has removed her from the Marshalls’ care. The Embattled couple tell their side of the scandal. On Friday, September 29, early [...]

At 81, Leila Hadley Luce, widow of TIME Inc. heir Henry Luce III, is being sued for sexual abuse. In exclusive interviews, Luce, her daughters, and her granddaughter chart the disintergration of a family, in which money, madness, and drugs led to charges of attempted rape, incest, and betrayal. Leila Hadley Luce enters, leaning on [...]

The president of the world’s richest art institution, the $9 billion J. Paul Getty Trust, Barry Munitz is on the ropes, with the press lambasting his tenure, California’s attorney general investigating, and former Getty antiquities curator Marion True on trial. In a tearful interview, Munitz tries to set the record straight On an unusually hot [...]

To some very wealthy architecture-lovers, including Calvin Klein, Nicole Kidman, and Martha Stewart, the idea was a dream come true-a customized apartment in one of two glass towers designed by the renowned Richard Meier. Four years later, the buildings have generated more nightmares than far less glamorous New York addresses: leaks, heating problems, security lapses, [...]

Richard Clarke’s apology to America for 9/11, and his best-selling book, Against All Enemies, which criticizes the White House’s obsession with invading Iraq, have made him famous, wealthy, and a hero to many. But the former “counterterrorism czar,” who went into government three decades ago to help prevent another Vietnam, is still grappling with a [...]

When Sita White, 43-year-old daughter of the late British industrialist Lord Gordon White, dropped dead in her Santa Monica yoga class last May, her life was in complete disarray. There were the drugs she used and her questionable “nancial advisers.” There was her child with Pakistani politician Imran Khan (now divorced from heiress Jemima Goldsmith). [...]

After London’s Daily Mirror ran front-page photos of Uber-model Kate Moss doing cocaine, the 31-year-old style icon lost contracts with Burberry, Chanel, and H&M reportedly totaling close to $4 million. But while the tabloids screeched about her decadent image and damaged career, the fashion elite rallied to her defense. Was she the victim of overzealous [...]

London society is up in arms over a threat to civilization as they know it: the civilization embodied in Mark Birley’s exclusive clubs-Annabel’s, Harry’s Bar, Mark’s Club, George, and the Bath & Racquets-which the ailing 75-year-old perfectionist wants to hand over to his son Robin and daughter, India Jane. The menace: American shipping-and-luxury-hotel tycoon James [...]

No one denies that Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim’s controversial director, has put the museum on the map-literally, guratively, and, some say, dangerously. His global expansion began in Bilbao, included branches in Berlin, Lower Manhattan, and Las Vegas, and continues with talk of a mammoth building in Singapore. But he’s clashed with two powerful donors, Ronald [...]

Eager to seal their $10 billion merger, Morgan Stanley C.E.O. John Mack handed Dean Witter’s Philip Purcell the reins of the combined nancial behemoth in 1997. A few years later, or so the plan went, Purcell would hand them back. Instead, he tightened his grip, while the company hemorrhaged top talent, saw its stock plummet, [...]

One of the world’s oldest and most prestigious private investment banks, Lazard Freres has been gripped by a clash of civilizations. In one corner is the aristocratic chairman, Michel David-Weill, who regards Lazard as his patrimony; in the other is the brashly brilliant American C.E.O., Bruce Wasserstein, who wants to take the bank public. Probing [...]

Lately, Jeffrey Epstein’s high-flying style has been drawing oohs and aahs: the bachelor financier lives in New York’s largest private residence, claims to take only billionaires as clients, and flies celebrities including Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey on his Boeing 727. But pierce his air of mystery and the picture changes. VICKY WARD explores Epstein’s [...]

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and his wife, C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame, are at the center of controversy over President Bush’s bogus claim, in last year’s State of the Union address, that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa. The Justice Department is investigating who leaked Plame’s covert status—a federal crime—to columnist Robert Novak, [...]

When Simon de Pury needed a C.E.O. for his struggling Phillips auction house, he hired his millionaire girlfriend, Louise MacBain. Ten months later, after she warred with his partner, she had to leave. But MacBain, now owner of Art & Auction magazine, hasn’t gone quietly. There were those who pronounced the first weekend of August [...]