multimillionaire dog cant buy a friend

[alocispepraluger102]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/nyregion...agewanted=print

eptember 3, 2007

Multimillionaire Dog Can’t Buy Herself a Friend

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

She has a thing for cream cheese and long walks in the park. Like many New Yorkers, she is well fed, well groomed and well medicated (for her thyroid and kidney troubles). At the age of 8, she has already been the star of a national advertising campaign and the subject of at least one messy lawsuit.

She has spent most of her days in pampered luxury, in a penthouse apartment at the top of the Park Lane Hotel, at the southern edge of Central Park. A hotel pianist once wrote a tune for her. A hotel chef cooked her meals, and a housekeeper served them, hand-feeding her steamed carrots and other vegetables with grilled chicken.

Life, in fact, got to be so good that some people had to watch what they said around her. They didn’t want to offend her — or her owner and best friend, Leona Helmsley — by calling her, of all things, a dog.

“Nobody could say ‘the dog,’ ” said Zamfira Sfara, 48, a former housekeeper for Mrs. Helmsley, who Ms. Sfara said preferred a more regal term for her beloved pet:

Princess.

But she is a canine — the richest, most talked about and most controversial dog in a city of dogs. Mrs. Helmsley, the hotel magnate who died last month at age 87, showed her enduring love for her dog, whose actual name is Trouble, by leaving the dog $12 million in her will. Mrs. Helmsley was not as generous to her chauffeur, who was awarded $100,000, or to two of her grandchildren, who received nothing, the 14-page will states, “for reasons which are known to them.”

The $12 million gift has sparked outrage and fascination, and supplied the headline writers of the world with once-in-a-lifetime material. “Trouble in paradise, but heirs in disgrace,” said The Australian. The New York Post and England’s Sun were in agreement: “Rich bitch.”

A friend of Mrs. Helmsley’s recently received two calls from dog owners who were interested in having their pets mate with Trouble. One of the callers was joking; the other was serious.

With her owner gone, Trouble has become an easy stand-in for New Yorkers’ less than generous feelings about Mrs. Helmsley, whose reputation for mistreating workers earned her a seat in the tabloid nobility as the “Queen of Mean.” The agitation over the dog’s fortune has overshadowed the fact that Mrs. Helmsley actually left the bulk of her billions to a charitable trust.

A cute-as-pie Maltese with white stringy hair and button eyes, Trouble is not easily embraced in a city of grinders, and her defenders are few. Much of what is publicly known about her comes from Ms. Sfara, who worked for Mrs. Helmsley for three months and sued her after she said she was bitten by the dog.

Trouble’s whereabouts remain unknown. Mrs. Helmsley’s longtime spokesman, Howard J. Rubenstein, declined to comment for this article.

The dog came into Mrs. Helmsley’s life as a puppy. Ms. Sfara said Mrs. Helmsley had told her that John Codey, a friend and adviser, went on a walk with Mrs. Helmsley one day, and they ended up at a pet store. Trouble approached Mrs. Helmsley, and they made an immediate connection. Mr. Codey bought the dog for her as a present. Mr. Codey did not return a phone call seeking comment.

The dog was featured in ads for the Park Lane, and in one she wears pink bows over her ears and puts on a pout next to the words: “It’s a sad day when you leave a Helmsley Hotel.”

Ms. Sfara, who said Mrs. Helmsley gave Trouble her name, recalled a day when Mrs. Helmsley had an eye appointment at the NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in Manhattan. Trouble was refused entry. “She was making so much fuss and arguing with people,” Ms. Sfara said of Mrs. Helmsley, “that they let us go upstairs.” With Trouble.

One afternoon in 2003, Mrs. Helmsley went to Bravo Gianni, an Italian restaurant on East 63rd Street, for a lunch date. She brought Trouble with her, but she was told the dog would have to wait outside. She and her guest had lunch elsewhere. In February that same year, the former general manager of the Park Lane won a sexual discrimination suit against Mrs. Helmsley, after a jury found that she had fired him because he was gay. She sat down for an interview with The New York Post to discuss the case, with Trouble resting in her arms.

“But when I reached over to pet the pooch,” The Post’s Andrea Peyser wrote, “Trouble bared her teeth and threatened to rip off my finger.”

Trouble, despite her size, seemed to earn the name.

Ms. Sfara said Trouble bit her dozens of times during the three months she worked for Mrs. Helmsley in 2004. Once, when Mrs. Helmsley was returning from a trip to her home in Greenwich, Conn., Trouble rested on Ms. Sfara’s lap in the limousine. When she moved her right arm to get a tissue, Trouble lunged and bit her hand, drawing blood, she said. Ms. Sfara said Trouble had also bitten Mrs. Helmsley’s bodyguards, a dog groomer, a nurse and at least one hotel guest.

“Trouble didn’t let people get close to her,” Ms. Sfara said of Mrs. Helmsley. “She says, ‘She’s my first bodyguard.’ ”

Ms. Sfara sued her former boss over one of the dog bites. In 2005, a judge dismissed the case, agreeing with Mrs. Helmsley’s lawyers that she was insulated from liability under the Workers’ Compensation Law. Ms. Sfara said she still suffers pain from nerve damage from the bites and wears a brace on her right hand.

As would any New Yorker who comes into a ton of money, Trouble is going to need expert legal representation. Ms. Sfara’s son, Remus Pop, 27, said he and his mother were talking to a law firm about taking up their case again and going after Trouble’s inheritance. “That is the next step,” Mr. Pop said. “That dog got money. That money is going to be taken away from that dog.”

Besides the money, Mrs. Helmsley’s will has other clues about how fond she was of her pet. It says that Trouble is to be cared for by her brother, Alvin Rosenthal. The will further stipulates that when Trouble dies, “her remains shall be buried next to my remains” at the Helmsley mausoleum at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester County.

But Mrs. Helmsley may not get her wish. A spokesman for the Department of State’s Division of Cemeteries said that state law has been widely interpreted to forbid the interment of non-human remains at human cemeteries. The superintendent of Sleepy Hollow said it would abide by the regulations, and any questions about the law would need to be settled by the Division of Cemeteries.

Ms. Sfara said she did not think Trouble could survive long without her companion. “They were too close,” she said. When Mrs. Helmsley would leave her penthouse at the hotel and head down to the restaurant, Trouble would patiently wait. “Leona would be out for three hours,” Ms. Sfara said. “The dog would stay by the door, lying on the floor for three hours, waiting for her to come. It never moved.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Edited September 4, 2007 by alocispepraluger102