“I’ve got a story idea for you. The rebuilding of Indonesia. Or New Orleans. Or both. Go there. I’ve just been. You will never think the same way about anything again.” So spoke not Bill or Melinda Gates, but Ghislaine Maxwell, the 48-year-old woman being written up everywhere at the moment as the alleged “procurer” [...]

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 [...]

Excerpted from The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers, by Vicky Ward, to be published this month by Wiley; © 2010 by the author. On Wall Street, they pay you so much that they own you. You know? So it’s different. They have your soul. You gave it [...]

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 [...]

Among the articles in Vanity Fair’s April issue is a report I did on the Noels, the infamously good-looking, gregarious family of Walter Noel, founder of the investment group Fairfield Greenwich, which had $6.9 billion—almost half of its assets under management—invested with Bernie Madoff. Now that that money is all gone, Fairfield Greenwich is being [...]

I n January 1995, Veronica DeGruyter Beracasa de Uribe Hearst gave an intimate lunch for Diana, Princess of Wales, in her opulent apartment on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 66th Street. The Princess was in New York to give an award to the then editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine and fellow Englishwoman, Liz Tilberis. [...]

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 [...]

A few months ago I went to a luncheon on New York’s Upper East Side and saw Michelle Obama speak, without notes, without hesitation. Her husband was at that point still the underdog in the Democratic primary race, but the excitement in that room was palpable–and his wife lifted it further. She talked for almost [...]

As Angelina Jolie bravely brings twins into this world, she has my good wishes—and encouragement, since raising twins, as any parent of multiples knows, is something completely different from raising siblings one at a time. Before I gave birth—somewhat dramatically and very prematurely—to my twin sons, one cold February morning five years ago, I thought [...]

I know what it’s like to face a birthday and ponder the meaning of life. This Thursday is my birthday, and thinking about turning a year older has been keeping me up at night. Someone once said to me, “You’d better know where you are going when you reach your mid- to late-30s—otherwise it’s a [...]

I returned from London last week after a whirlwind trip of reporting for Vanity Fair and seeing old friends. It’s funny how the very second you get off the plane at Heathrow, life seems to slow down compared to Manhattan’s frenetic pace. (Unless, of course, you are Naomi Campbell and Heathrow baggage-handlers have lost your [...]

Critics in the mainstream media scoffed, for the most part, at John Cusack’s low-budget didactic satire, War Inc., calling it heavy-handed and five years too late. The film struggled to get into festivals, finally making it into Tribeca this year. But on the Web, voices sang a different tune, calling War Inc. “prescient” and groundbreaking [...]

Jeffrey Epstein, the mysterious financier, absconded to Israel to escape charges of soliciting prostitutes? That was the rumor circulating at the Plaza last night, during the dinner that followed HBO’s premiere of its fabulous documentary about Roman Polanski. The whispers went that Epstein had followed in the footsteps of Polanski, who decamped to France in [...]

“D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey played a risky game in catering to Washington’s power brokers with her upscale escort service. Her suicide, this month, marked a tragic—and not unexpected—end for a complicated woman who believed she was unfairly victimized. Having talked to Palfrey for months and spoken with her mother after her death, Vicky Ward [...]

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 [...]

A botched coup by mercenaries last year against the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea ensnared Sir Mark Thatcher, son of Britain’s former prime minister, whose business dealings have made him controversial before. Though he denies involvement, he was arrested by the South African government, and faces charges of having helped finance the plot. Reporting from [...]

As Neil Bush went from one venture to another, tarnished by his role in the 1990 Silverado S&L scandal, his wife, Sharon, couldn’t understand why she had to worry about the grocery bills. Wasn’t he the son of America’s 41st president and brother of two governors? Then Neil divorced her last April to marry Maria [...]

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 [...]