Heir Mail #22
I attempt to do crime statistics and it's probably wrong. Also, puff pastry and murder.
Hello! You’re reading Heir Mail, the only newsletter to come from me (hi) setting a Google Alert for the word “heiress” and then just writing about whatever pops up.
Hello, do you want to drive me from New York to the Breakers, former home of the Vanderbilts in Newport, RI? PlutoTV has been showing me ads for the house non stop and now it’s all I can think about.
(This isn’t exactly the ad but, I can’t find that and this is close and wild.)
No? Fine, let’s move on.
CTRL + F:
A Citizen bravely speaks out against the scourge of New York City crime
The glamorous life of a lady inheritor; hiding in a garden shed, waiting for your boyfriend to kill his wife.
Are you an Executive Still Water, or a Life Still Water?
From the rest of the alert: Juno Temple’s next role, a 100 pound gown, Chinese Restaurant: the TV show, rich Libras, British couches, “Stop Being Desperate,” cows heiress to wed, Churchill’s biggest defender
“Andrea Catsimatidis tweets about gunpoint robbery in Central Park,” New York Post
“This never used to happen, this is not the NYC I grew up in,” grocery heiress and New York Republican party chair Andrea Catsimatidis told the New York Post, about reportedly being near a robbery she did not witness.
According to the Post, Andrea sent the above tweet after learning a crime had taken place via Citizen, an app that allows citizens (there it is) to get alerts from local police scanners and react with angry face emoji. The alleged robbery-at-gunpoint took place near Swan Lake in Central Park.
It’s true that crime has changed from when Andrea, who is 30, was a child. In 2000, for example, when Andrea was about 9, there were 32,562 robberies in NYC, according to NYC.gov. In 2004, when she was 13ish and I first moved here, there were 24,373 robberies. And last year, in 2020, there were 13,106. Things are in fact not the same as they once were! And what happened to Andrea never used to happen. Citizen only launched in 2017.
This year, from what I can tell, there have been 1,831 robbery arrests in the city through March 2021, which — if I’m reading things correctly and they stay steady through summer, two big, unlikely ifs — would put us on track for about 7,300 robbery arrests this year. Seems low even if you double it, but what do I know! I’m sure Andrea doesn’t have an issue with how the police are handling crime; her father John is a devoted donor to the Police Athletic League, or PAL.
Here’s Andrea on Inauguration Day 2020, looking hinged | @AJCats’ Instagram
John is a Greek immigrant who became a billionaire by owning a chain of overpriced and frankly unspecial New York City markets called Gristedes1 (look, they’re no Zabar’s or even Fairway), and then investing in real estate, airplanes, and gas. He’s also on the radio and owns WABC. His own father worked in a lighthouse, which buys some small purchase with me. His wife, Andrea’s mother Margot, was once both an aspiring dancer and John’s own secretary, which at this point just feels throwback-y and kicky, why not, sure, seems right.
John ran for mayor as a Republican in 2013, and he’s been compared to friend of the family Donald Trump in taste, offspring aesthetics, and approach, but as recently as January he was thinking about throwing in with Andrew Yang and the rest as a Democrat for this year’s race, telling Politico, “I’m a middle-of-the-road guy. I can be a conservative Democrat, or I can be a liberal Republican.”
Since then, however, he’s thrown his support behind Republican candidate, loud-talking NY1 icon, and beret standard bearer Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and one-time friend of Bernard Goetz. Andrea, meanwhile, has backed Fernando Mateo, who thinks we need more cops and that “landlords should have the same rights as tenants,” according to NY1.
This isn’t the first time Andrea — about whom I feel like we are barely skirting the surface2, so here’s an Olivia Nuzzi profile of her from 2019 wherein she calls herself a “business bombshell” — has been the near-witness to a crime. We encountered her a few weeks back when one of the guests of her group the Liberty Club was overserved at a GOP event at Bice Cucina and got thrown out in a headlock. No word what Citizen app emoji Andrea used to react to that event.
Estimated Net Worth: John’s at $3.3 billion according to BI, according to Forbes.
“West Lothian husband's secret notes that gave away murder and hidden affair,” Edinburgh Live
If a real woman, Carol Jarvis, hadn’t been killed, I’d say it’s almost a win for an heiress to be part of a murder plot as opposed to the object of one. But a real woman was killed, so let’s not say that at all, that’s horrid!
Carol was 47 in 2009 when her husband Harry, a former bus driver, murdered her and buried her in their basement in West Lothian, Scotland. His accomplice was Rita Heyster, who had already “squandered” the £2.5million fortune ($3.49 million) she’d inherited from her family’s line of frozen puff pastries when she took up with the married man.
The UK sure does love its pies | Jus Rol’s Facebook page
Rita was living/hiding in the family’s garden shed when she helped with the cover-up — which, I for one would bury my wife in the gardening shed and keep my mistress in the basement, but I’m a neat freak like that. The pair were discovered by writing down evidence, with Harry putting pen to paper to say, “Drugs are doing job. Just took longer than I thought but going fast now. See you in Paradise soon.”
Rita and Harry were going to get married in prison in 2015, but she called off the wedding the month prior; he died in 2017.
Estimated net worth: Well, not $3.49 million.
“Anerlisa Muigai hints at divorce with Ben Pol,” Nairobi News
“Ben Pol and Keroche Heiress Anerlisa confirm divorce rumors,” The Citizen
“Anerlisa confirms she is divorcing Ben Pol,” The Star Kenya
“Tanzanian Singer Ben Pol Confirms Filing for Divorce from Keroche Heiress Anerlisa Muigai,” Mwakilishi.com
“Keroche's Anerlisa pays tribute to kin on first anniversary,” Nairobi News
“Ommy Dimpoz dragged into Ben Pol, Anerlisa divorce drama,” Nairobi News
Keroche beer scion Anerlisa Muigai is officially done with her possibly-no-good husband, singer Ben Pol, for real this time. The pair married just under a year ago.
On Instagram stories, Nairobi News says that Anerlisa posted, “I would like to make it clear that I signed whatever was needed to be signed and I do not wish to be associated with anyone.” This wording is fantastic. Recognize that marriage is just paperwork and treat it as such!! We know money can’t protect you from lots of stuff, from heartbreak to murder, but it can protect you from having to read the fine print.
In March, Anerlisa seemed to be hinting at a pregnancy, but now, she says she wants to focus on her career. Anerlisa’s mom made it big in beer, but she’s looking to water, through her company Nero Water. She’s promoting two products on her ‘gram: Executive Still Water, and Life Still Water.
Sound ON for this video of a bottle being put into an ice bucket in a luxury vehicle set to dramatic music | @anerlisa’s Instagram
Ben Pol always seemed a little messy for the CEO-vibed heiress. For his part, he posted something cryptic aimed at another Tanzanian singer Ommy Dimpoz, that Google Translate says reads, “Your goal for the year is to collaborate with Fally Ipupa and produce her ‘A’. The Generation You Have?” People — netizens, actually — think this has to do with Anerlisa but the confusion is not just the lousy translation; even Ommy was like, uh, I’ll look into this? saying, “I too didn’t understand what he meant by his post.”
The marriage took place shortly after the murder of Tecra Muigai on May 2nd, 2020, and this week the remaining heiress paid tribute to her sister on the anniversary, laying flowers at her gravesite and asking for good energy emoji.3 The inquest into Tecra’s death, the main suspect for which is Tecra’s boyfriend of the fuck course, continues.
Estimated net worth: One billion Kenyan shillings, or ~$9,440,084 U.S., according to Eafeed.com.
From the rest of the Alert
Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple is going to be playing an heiress who moves to Tangier in 1955 with her possibly gay husband (played by Hugh Skinner, the actor who played young, closeted Colin Firth in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again) in an adaptation of Anais Nin erotic short stories, Little Birds.
Apparently Victoria Swarovski, crystal heiress, had a song on the soundtrack for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Now she hosts a celebrity dance show in Germany (one she won in 2016), after marrying a German. At the wedding, she wore a 100 pound gown covered in… no, you guess what.
Huawei also-ran Annabel Yao is once again less popular than her sister (and just sort of generally unpopular). This time, everyone in China thinks it sucks that she’s going to be on a celeb reality show called Chinese Restaurant, but they’re happy some actor’s doing the same thing.
According to the Scottish Sun, “According to Forbes magazine, the zodiac signs of Forbes top 250 billionaires showed at least 27 of them are Libras, including Walmart heiress Alice Walton.” You know who else is a Libra? Ahem. (Also: Kim K.) Just FYI: Bezos is a Capricorn and Elon’s a Cancer, not a joke.
Boris Johnson’s has been in trouble for reportedly spending as much as £200,000 ($279,000) to redo the hot couches of Downing Street, and apparently it was all paid to some Brexit-loving design firm leader, William Hobhouse, with an heiress wife, Kate. Her family money comes from Associated British Foods, which owns So invested back into the community, really!
Thinking of starting a recurring Paris Hilton feature called “Heir Mail-y in Paris” (it works if you say it out loud and kind of French), but until then she: wore a dress, used chilling internet language to refer to her fiancé Carter Reum (but I’m gonna go ahead and guess didn’t know), and dropped the bombshell that her “Stop Being Poor” shirt was photoshopped. (It actually said “Stop Being Desperate,” she says.)
This week’s regrets-for-time comes from this great New Zealand headline: “Spy: Has Harry Hart jumped the Ditch to propose?” The New Zealand heir is engaged to Aussie heiress Cartier Lee, whose parents are in cows.
A horribly sad story about the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten and his German publishing heiress wife Nora Forster, who has Alzheimer’s. He’s her main caretaker, and she doesn’t remember much, but does remember him. In the same interview, originally in the Times of London, Johnny also describes his hatred of wokeness and support for Trump — he says, Churchill saved England, and “Whatever he got up to in South Africa or India beforehand is utterly irrelevant to the major issue in hand.” I had sort of planned to devoting a whole section to railing on about him — a rich elderly one-time punk who married into money and doesn’t give a shit about anyone who doesn’t look like him — but it’s all just too depressing and you get it; succinctly racist old man politics mixed with the suicidal ideation that comes when you watch someone you love waste away up close. Anyways, it does matter what Churchill “got up to!”
I went down a Gristedes rabbit hole that doesn’t even fit here, but the chain was founded by two German brothers of the same surname in 1891, one of whom was called Diedrich, which is a funny name for our purposes, if you think about it.
Also she was married to and is now divorced from Richard Nixon’s grandson. Just like, an aside!
I fear this sounds sarcastic, but it’s just what happened. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Anerlisa, struggling on a national scale with body image and marital issues following the murder of her sister, and subsequently sublimating her public and private agonies into the trap of girlbosshood, has a good deal of my sympathies — even if bottled water is a scourge and we’ve long proven in America that capitalism is a middling-at-best, destructive-at-the-root replacement for the similarly diseased fantasy lie of heterosexual marriage. She’s a woman on whom you can see the social and cultural pressures of global capitalism and local tradition working in real time, which is incredibly human.
Or I just kind of like her!