Heir Mail #33
When your dad keeps a picture of Putin on your desk, and you still have to live in Trump Tower.
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.
So, sommmmething that came up in the alert this week was by me, for Town & Country, about the return of the heiress. In my own alert! I’d tell you more but go read it there. Or buy the physical magazine! Because it’s in there! It’s fun to buy a magazine! Pretend you’re at the beach, etc. Plus, Julia Garner’s on the cover, because she’s in Inventing Anna, about our girl Anna Delvey. Synergy! More on that way below.
Command + Shift + F for:
Former store clerk hits it big
Diamonds (and apartments and banking loopholes) are a girl’s best friend. (But I definitely shouldn’t buy the housedress, right?)
Ecclezone: ex-husband edition
From the rest of the alert: “sick,” select rich people beg to be taxed out of income inequality, Tiffany Li settles, Chess in Slums, money in gas, Glendora watch, a strangled cry for help, Joan Rivers’ ghost, Oh Sandy (you came and you gave without taking).
“Is Zara heiress Marta Ortega Pérez the ‘most powerful woman in fashion’? From sales clerk to taking over the multibillion-dollar Inditex fashion empire from dad Amancio Ortega, Spain’s richest man” South China Morning Post
“The Rise of A Female Leader: Marta Ortega Pérez, Heiress Of The Zara Empire,” The Richest
In December, Marta Ortega Perez was appointed to the head of Inditex, the company that owns global fast fashion behemoth Zara. Zara sells 450 million articles of clothing a year. Wow! That’s going to keep Wall-E awful busy in a few short years!
Marta’s father, founder Amancio Ortega, was briefly the richest man in the world in 2015, thanks to his 60% stake in the company, but now Bloomberg ranks him #17, under Carlos Slim like some kind of chump, while Forbes has him at #11. (He’s still the richest guy in Spain.)
Now with her new job, it’s time for some random, seemingly unsourced hagiographies. The South China Morning Post insists “Marta’s CV starts off just like yours” because she once worked retail in the normal sense, checking out customers in a London store. I’m going to wager how she got the job was a little different? (I for one had to convince my first employer, the owner of a hippie dress store, that I was active in Amnesty International so I could get a job. In fact, I’d only ever gone to one meeting.)
Anyways, she was a clerk, and then took some Inditex jobs in branding and sales merch, at some point married and divorced a “fellow equestrian,” and then boom, 15 years later, non-executive chairperson. The Richest calls her “the secret to Zara’s success,” giving her credit for developing the brand’s super fast supply chain. I would have assumed that was… literally the thing her dad did, but congrats?!?
Of all the companies we could talk about, I know the most that Zara perpetuates an infuriating cycle of waste and worker abuse. That said, I don’t know where y’all are at mentally and emotionally this January, but for me? personally? on this weekend morning? I am ready to pretend I don’t know all that. I’m ready to just disappear into this picture of Marta and her hot-Wambsgansy 1 second husband Carlos Toretta doing what I believe is legally referred to as “canoodling” at Madrid Horse Week.
It’s kind of calming just to say Madrid Horse Week (“Madrid Horse Week”)! It’s calming to imagine being so blond and European and Gwyneth-boned that you could wear cheap, evil clothes and have them look chic, to picture being a person who hangs around with Naomi Campbell, to pretend you live in a girlboss world where it’s a compliment to apocryphally have developed a system for efficiently creating pre-trash and underpaying employees.
Ahh, no, this is all still so bad and sucks so hard. Nice sweater though! Gonna guess it didn’t come from Zara.
Estimated net worth: Amazingly, Marta’s broken out net worth isn’t something The Sites are on, but Forbes puts her dad at $74.2 billion.
“Russian diamond heiress nabs Trump Tower spread for $1.4 million,” New York Post,
Here’s the Street Easy listing for the $1.42 million one bedroom apartment Chagit Leviev-Sofiev bought in Trump Tower. It’s pretty bleh, and I thought for a little too long about how much money someone has to shell out for space in a demon building in midtown with no room for non-sexual overnight visitors. To be fair, you are close to the park, though!
Maybe she was stuck. I’ve been wanting to look for an apartment to buy myself and the inventory is dismal, so I can’t even get to the part where I’m sad I can’t afford it. Cockblocked from my own shame by the market! When you can afford it, I guess you just have to buy like, whatever’s out there. Blehhh, January’s the worst.
For some reason, none of this week’s heiresses want the plausible deniability of not going into bad, bad business with dad. Chagit is the president and CEO of Leviev Group USA and heads Leviev Diamonds USA. Here’s a video of her talking to Batsheva — which is an organization that serves its mission of empowering Jewish women leaders “by engaging a select world-class roster of impactful female C-level executives,” and not the prairie dress designer like you wrongly first assumed — about how women can be good bosses. Not all women, she stresses!
I think it’d be easier to buy a $225 housedress or this $300 wetdress than whatever it’s supposed to be that Chagit is selling here.
Along with her dad Lev — who keeps a picture of Putin on his desk and who once had cops shut down the Lincoln Tunnel to give a police escort, which honestly seems like it would take longer — Chagit was the “subject of some suspicious activity reports submitted by JPMorgan Chase to the US Treasury, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which analyzed the reports, as part of the so-called FinCEN leaks.” JPMorgan thought the family was “layering” which Shomrim explains is when someone obscures the shady provenance of their money “by progressively adding legitimacy to it.” In this case, they claimed $60 million dollars was “a loan” for “a home.” Man, that’s a lot more than $1.42million!
Chagit’s brother’s been arrested for diamond smuggling and one of their employees committed suicide after authorities talked to them. I’m sure these people doing business with the Trumps is fine and good though.
Estimated net worth: Okay, when I googled this her LinkedIn came up, which was a first, but Forbes puts her dad at a $1 billion and she’s an active part of the business, so, do the family math to the best of our collectively limited abilities.
The Ecclezone (TM)
“Petra Ecclestone's ex-husband James Stunt, 39, pleads not guilty to money laundering and forgery charges,” The Daily Mail
“James Stunt: Petra Ecclestone's ex-husband denies money laundering,” BBC
Petra Ecclestone’s ex says he didn’t money launder OR forge. His name is James Stunt, which is fun to say.
On Instagram, James Stunt wrote “'I hope this goes to trial and you can explain how James Stunt, the biggest clueless guy ever, is not a money launderer.” Air tight defense, James Stunt! James Stunt also said, “I have to now prove my innocence, and I won't just use my photographic memory.” I would think that would provide some clues but just me! James Stunt’ day job was gold dealer.
His ex-wife Petra seemingly gave up on her podcast with her new man, but continues to post pictures without her children’s faces, which is good.
Estimated net worth: Petra’s at $400 million, as per Celebrity Net Worth dot com.
From the rest of the alert
Speaking of my costar on the pages of Town & Country Magazine, Julia Garner described in that interview with Chloe Malle how she went to jail to visit pretend heiress Anna Delvey, and the Post picked it up, among others. TLDR, Anna was like, “ugh, I have to take cooking classes in prison, like I’d ever cook for myself” and Julia, who calls her own response “sick,” was like, “lol.” Which: totally same, Julia. Never change, Anna!
Abigail Disney and a bunch of other rich people wrote a letter saying Davos was for assholes and the thing to do isn’t meet up and hang out, but to just freaking tax them more. Which, yes, thank you, would love to! They’re pleading not just for the future but a little for their own lives, writing “it’s taxes or pitchforks. Let’s listen to history and choose wisely.” Fast Company notes that this follows an OxFam report describing income inequality, which said that it leads “to the deaths of 21,000 people each day–one every four seconds.” Haha, I want to throw up!!
Tiffany Li, the Chinese construction and real estate heiress who was not convicted in 2019 of the 2016 murder of the father of her two children, settled out of court with Keith Green’s family on January 12th of this year for an undisclosed sum. She took her kids and moved to China.
Paris is still on her honeymoon, which I can now say is actually what her publicist told me she was doing when I contacted them about the T&C piece back around Thanksgiving (yes, I did reporting!). She also tweeted some nice stuff about Tunde Onakoya, the founder of a Nigerian charity called Chess in Slums that does what it sounds like, and it was picked up in a couple of Nigerian outlets. It would be shallow to point out that Tunde is hot, so I am just going to leave that link there.
Tennis player Jessica Pegula is unusually rich, even for a tennis player. Her dad Terry made his money in gas, and now he buys up Buffalo sports teams.
In-N-Out of LUCK, more like — because the fast food chain’s scion and current president, Lynsi Snyder, lost money selling her $16.25 million dollar mansion in Bradbury, CA. She bought it for $17.4 back in 2012. Bradbury, Google Maps tells me, is just north of Duarte, which means Jenny Lewis would have driven right underneath on New Years Eve it in “Glendora.” There is an In-N-Out on the way.
Caught double in our web but… not something I felt like digging deeply into: a juror in the Ghislaine Maxwell case hired Anna Delvey’s lawyer. Why? Because her defense is arguing they should get a new trial because he didn’t tell the court he’d been the victim of sexual assault as a child (but then he did tell some newspapers). Here just imagine me emitting strangled cry that means both “hurtle me off this mortal coil” and “welp!”
Joan Rivers UES apartment was supposedly haunted by an heiress, and no one is buying it. It costs $38 million dollars, but what if now it’s haunted by an heiress and the ghost of Joan Rivers? The StreetEasy listing doesn’t mention either! Can we get a collection going? Details on the heiress admittedly a little vague, because I was not willing to do more than click through this slideshow: The ghost is only referred to as “Mrs. Spencer, the niece of financier J.P. Morgan.” Mrs. Spencer supposedly calmed down when Joan put her painting up. I would be happy to have paintings of Mrs. Spencer and Joan.
A 76-year-old self-described heiress known only as “Sandy” raises 50 cats in Greece. She tells the BBC, her family was rich but she hated the British class system, so 40 years ago she bought a 300 year old farm where she could tend to animals and just be Sandy. The words “must be nice” are simply vibrating in my skull. Now she’s running out of money. Would I watch a movie about all this where she’s played by Mamma Mia’s Julie Walters? Obviously; I hope someone’s putting it into production now.
He works in PR at Inditex.
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