On the evening of May 6, a man carrying a shotgun approached a black Lancia Voyager pulling out of a hospital parking lot in Nice, France. Raising the weapon, he fired through the front passenger window and hit a woman in the chest, neck, and jaw. Another shot hit her driver in the heart and abdomen. The victims were rushed to Nice’s Saint-Roch hospital, where the driver, Mohamed Darwich, died four days later. His passenger, who died on May 21, was Hélène Pastor, 77, the richest woman in Monaco. “There was real astonishment,” says Frederic Laurent, a Monaco historian. “She was an extremely discreet individual, and the Pastor family aspired to be completely normal businesspeople.”
Over the next seven weeks, police pieced together phone records, closed-circuit television footage, and DNA found on a soap bottle in a hotel room. The evidence led them to two men who have been arrested and accused of carrying out the shooting, and to Wojciech Janowski, the longtime partner of Pastor’s daughter, Sylvia. When questioned by the police as part of their investigation, Janowski’s personal trainer, Pascal Dauriac, said Janowski gave him €140,000 ($180,000) in cash to arrange the attack, Brice Robin, the Marseille prosecutor, said at a June 27 news conference.
Dauriac’s lawyer, Jean-Robert Nguyen Phung, confirms that his client has implicated Janowski and confessed to a role in the crime: “He owns up to what he did. He accepts his responsibility, his involvement, and his part.”
The prosecution says Janowski may have ordered the ambush to get his hands on the matriarch’s estate. The fortune at the center of the case belongs to a branch of the Pastor family, the Monegasque clan that built much of Monaco’s skyline and owns thousands of apartments in the city-state. The entire clan’s assets are worth more than $13 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Janowski, who is being held in isolation at Marseille’s Baumettes jail, has been placed under formal investigation along with Dauriac and five other suspects, including the alleged gunman. Janowski said he was innocent in a Sept. 22 appearance before the case’s examining magistrate. “What Dauriac claims, namely that Janowski ordered the crime, is false,” says his lawyer, Erick Campana, adding that his client wouldn’t have inherited anything because he isn’t married to Hélène Pastor’s daughter: “The motive advanced by the state prosecutor is completely illusory.”
Details of the attack come from photographs of the crime scene, the press conference held by Robin, and two people familiar with the police investigation who asked not to be identified discussing an open case.
Hélène’s real estate company, Hélène Pastor Pallanca, did not respond to calls, e-mails, and hand-delivered messages requesting comment. Nor did Groupe Pastor, a company controlled by a different branch of the family. Michel Pastor Group, another family company, declined to comment.
“It’s almost impossible to try and do anything in Monaco without coming into some kind of contact with the family,” says Max Ryerson, a businessman who lived in Monaco for 12 years and ran Club 5 Thousand, an online club for high-net-worth individuals. “If you’re looking for a very nice apartment, you will need to rent from the Pastors. They’re part of life.”
The family’s influence on Monaco is visible on the five-minute drive along Larvotto Beach to Casino Square in the center of the principality, a stretch dominated by high-rise apartment blocks built and owned by the Pastors. At one end stands the 29-story Roccabella, one of Monaco’s most exclusive residences. Along the rest of the artificial beach, also built by the family, looms a continuous line of Pastor buildings erected in the 1970s and 1980s—the Bahia, the Estoril, the Formentor, and the Columbia, Houston, and Emilie Palaces.
The family first arrived in the principality in 1880, when Jean-Baptiste Pastor, an Italian mason from Liguria, began working in Monaco, according to Groupe Pastor’s website. He founded J.B. Pastor & Fils in 1920, which has been responsible for many of Monaco’s largest public works projects, including building the first sports stadium in 1936. After World War II, his son Gildo bought waterfront land in Monaco’s Larvotto neighborhood, where his company was building the underground railway, one of several public projects undertaken by Prince Rainier III in a bid to revitalize the principality. The Larvotto neighborhood became the foundation of the family’s empire after they received permission to develop the land in 1966.
“Our grandfather was a visionary,” Delphine Pastor, Hélène’s niece, told L’Express in a November 2013 profile. “At the time, to the east of the Monte Carlo casino, there was nothing.”
After Gildo’s death in 1990, the empire was divided among his three children, Victor, Hélène, and Michel. Properties owned by Hélène Pastor Pallanca are valued at $3.7 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Sylvia Pastor, born in 1961, and her brother Gildo, 47, are entitled to at least two-thirds of their mother’s fortune under Monaco’s Civil Code. “Monaco has forced heirship rules,” says Alexis Madier, an attorney at Gordon S. Blair Law Offices in Monaco. Children are entitled to a share of their parents’ assets unless they agree to renounce the bequest, and they can only do that after the parents are dead, he adds. There is no inheritance tax on assets passed from parents to children.
The Pastor family’s holdings have benefited as Monaco, where most residents don’t pay personal income tax, has become a favorite destination of the super-rich. The total value of property sales hit a record €1.2 billion in 2013, according to the Monegasque Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. Residential real estate prices are the highest in the world, with ultraprime property selling for about $11,700 per square foot, according to a 2014 report by broker Savills. Both the Victor and Michel branches of the family remain active builders in the city. Hélène “was a rentier and no longer did any construction,” Laurent says. Even so, her rental income was large enough for her to give Sylvia and Gildo allowances of €500,000 a month. According to prosecutors, that wasn’t enough for Janowski, who had run up debts of €9 million, French daily Le Parisien reported.
Sylvia, who was questioned by police and cleared, hasn’t said anything publicly since the murders. Dauriac has given investigators this version of the origins of the plot, which his lawyer confirms: Dauriac worked as a fitness coach for the couple for 15 years. He became a confidant of Janowski and Sylvia. He never met Hélène but says she was omnipresent in the couple’s lives, telephoning constantly. He remembers Sylvia getting up from a massage he was giving her to take a call from Hélène and returning upset, irritated, and sad. In recent years, Janowski became more vocal about Hélène, according to Dauriac, saying that she treated him and his wife as nobodies. About two years ago, Janowski said to Dauriac: “I cannot stand her anymore. Find me a weapon.” Dauriac took it as a joke, but a few months later Janowski began to talk seriously about hiring someone to kill Hélène.
Janowski initially admitted to a role in the crime, saying he wanted to protect Sylvia and their daughter from Hélène, but has retracted this confession, saying he didn’t understand the questions he was asked, according to Campana, his lawyer. Campana says the money Janowski gave to Dauriac was not meant to finance Hélène’s murder. It was meant to be used to arrange protection for him and Sylvia. Campana repeatedly cites his client’s lack of a motive, saying the prosecution’s case makes no sense because Janowski is not Sylvia’s husband and would have no claim on the money. Janowski is in prison while the prosecution assembles its case, which may take more than a year. “He lived more than comfortably in Monaco,” says Campana, “and yet the outcome of all this is that he finds himself in the Baumettes.”
