Seth Tobias was a financial whizz kid who played as hard as he worked. Then his body was found floating in the pool at his Palm Beach mansion. Florida police say his glamorous wife is no longer a suspect. His brothers are not as convinced of her innocence
BACK IN THE 1980s Sherman McCoy, the hero of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, became a metaphor for the reckless excesses of Reagan-era Wall Street. Twenty years later Wolfe's fictional master of the universe has been usurped by the real-life crash-and-burn tale of Seth Tobias. McCoy's downward spiral ended with social ignominy and financial ruin. Tobias's went a twist further: his ended face down in his swimming pool and provided the catalyst for a legal brawl between his widow and his brothers.
The mystery surrounding Tobias's death and the legal actions that have followed it have turned the case into an explosive stranger-than-fiction parable for New York's second Gilded Age. His death - and the life of fast money and faster living that led to it - reads like an especially lurid piece of financial pulp fiction.
Tobias was a hedge-fund manager, one of the many who have ridden the crest of the Wall Street tsunami. Energetic, bespectacled and boyish for his 44 years, he gave the impression of being an endearing, enthusiastic whizz kid.
To his Wall Street associates and the superwealthy set he partied with in Florida, Tobias seemed to have it well and truly made. He had founded an investment company, Circle T, with just $4 million and quickly turned it into a $300 million fund.
He was a bona-fide celebrity in the financial world. In this era when success equates a slot - or indeed a series - on television, he was also something of a media celebrity on CNBC, the NBC network's financial-news affiliate, with his own slot on the hit show Mad Money.
Tobias counted the billionaire Samuel Zell among his clients and Donald Trump among his friends. During the week he conjured multimillion-dollar deals from his Park Avenue office; at weekends he shuttled between Trump's Mar-a-Lago retreat, in Palm Beach, black-tie balls, horse races at Kentucky and Saratoga and lavish parties at his own Palm Beach mansion.
His glamorous wife, Filomena, was always by his side. The pair were reputed to be world-class shoppers, dropping tens of thousands of dollars on sprees in New York, Las Vegas and Palm Beach. One afternoon Filomena bought a Porsche on her credit card; she had tired of her three-month-old convertible.
But the Tobiases' lifestyle also burrowed beneath the society pages. They regularly visited gay sex clubs, and Seth Tobias became infatuated with a male go-go dancer at Cupids, one of their favourite gay haunts.
He was also consumed by a cocaine addiction that would cause him to go missing from work for days, sometimes weeks, while he caroused with members of New York and Florida's gay underworlds.
His relationship with his wife of less than two years, always volatile, turned violent. Tobias appeared in police files in New York and West Palm Beach noting officers' visits to his homes for "domestic disturbances". He had filed for divorce shortly before his death; his wife responded with a lurid counter-claim of drug and gambling addictions, gay sex and violence.
But all this remained hidden beneath the surface of a life that seemed to come from the pages of a society lifestyle magazine - until last September, when his wife made a frantic 911 call from their Palm Beach mansion, saying her husband had stopped breathing.
Paramedics who arrived at the scene believed his death was a result of a heart attack triggered by his high-stress lifestyle. The abrasions they found on his forehead, nose and back were put down to death-throe flailings and high jinks, earlier that day, following a drinking binge at the elite Breakers hotel that segued into a party at a gay outdoor bar.
It seemed like a classic case of living fast and dying young, Wall Street-style. But two weeks after Tobias's death his former assistant Bill Ash claimed Filomena confessed to him that she had murdered her husband by feeding him an overdose of drugs in his pasta, before luring him to their pool with the promise of kinky sex games with a male go-go dancer with whom Tobias had become obsessed.
Ash has a varied, if unimpressive, CV; West Palm Beach Police Department records show that, besides working as an executive assistant to an allegedly bisexual, cocaine-snorting hedge-fund dealer, he worked as a gay pimp and drug dealer before taking up the more spiritual profession of internet psychic.
Ash's story was given some credence by a police search of Tobias's mansion, where they found a large quantity of cocaine and drug paraphernalia, as well as two empty bottles for prescription painkillers. It also transpired that within a few days of his death his widow had their pool drained and completely resurfaced.
But Ash, who has a rap sheet for sex- and drug-related offences, was nobody's idea of a reliable witness, and Filomena was a society figure with some powerful friends, including one of her three ex-husbands, who is also her lawyer. If the police didn't take Ash's claims seriously, Tobias's four brothers did. They immediately launched a civil action, accusing Filomena of murdering her husband by "drowning and asphyxiation".
Tobias's will, which he had not updated after his marriage, stipulated that his $25 million-plus estate be divided among his brothers. In any case, they claimed, she was barred from inheriting by Florida's "slayer statute", which it seems was designed with gold-digging spouses and offspring in mind. The law bars inheritance by anyone who murders a person from whom they stand to inherit. A trawl through its criminal-court records suggests that Florida's large population of rich elderly people is especially vulnerable to euthanasia by impatient benefactors.
The go-go dancer - a 31-year-old known as Tiger; real name Christopher Dauenhauer - disappeared, only to resurface in Las Vegas. His stage name was inspired by the stripes he had tattooed over his entire Florida-tanned body - which made hiding in urban jungles more complicated, particularly when police regarded him as a person of interest in the investigation. Now he has been hawking tales of a decadent menage à trois with the Tobiases to the supermarket tabloids.
A probate hearing scheduled for January 7th was postponed until this month at the request of Filomena Tobias's lawyer and ex-husband, Jay Jacknin, who cited her psychiatric condition.
Last month police announced that, after a five-month investigation into his death, his wife would face no charges and would become eligible to inherit Seth's $25 million estate.
But being cleared of criminal charges is no bar to an OJ Simpson-style civil action that would seek to declare her responsible for his death and trigger the provisions of the slayer statute. The Tobias brothers are determined to prove Filomena guilty. A closed criminal investigation is not the same as an acquittal by a jury, they say. Among the evidence they'll present at the civil trial are 2007 police records in which Seth Tobias claims, after one of many altercations, that Filomena was "out to kill him".
They also claim that her ex-husband filed a restraining order against her. Whether Filomena Tobias walks away with the lion's share of her husband's $25 million or ends up serving 25 years to life is now the favourite topic of conversation for social and financial speculators, from Wall Street to West Palm Beach.