Steve Powers moved into 10060 Sunset after his buddy Aita bought it from Bill Osco, and remained until he was usurped by Tom Childers and Dan Zerfas, two lawyers who became Ghazi Aita’s partners in real estate development. Not to be discouraged, Powers set up an office in the pool house. Real estate development wasn’t his, or Aita’s, only interest. Indeed, it often seemed to those around Aita that investing was a sideline to his main preoccupation, girls, specifically the ones memorably described as model-actress-whatevers, who were happy to do whatever with rich and generous men between modeling and acting jobs.
Some of the people around Aita believed he only kept Powers around because the Playboy mansion regular knew the right kind of girls. Was he a procurer? “No question about it,” says Zerfas. But Greg Hagins said Powers was an amateur at the procuring game—and Aita was about to meet a pro. Vince Conti was known around L.A. as the best friend of the actor Telly Savalas, who cast him as a detective named Rizzo on his hit TV cop show, Kojak. Conti calls himself a photographer, but comes close to admitting he’s committed the crime he went to jail for, pimping.
When they were introduced by an unnamed friend, Conti had the impression Aita was “was one of the richest guys in the world,” he says. And Conti had something Aita wanted. “There were no frickin’ girls prettier than the ones hanging around me,” Conti says. He claims one of them was a famous film star. “I brought her up there [to Carolwood],” says Conti. “His wife was never there. You want to call it pimping, go ahead. I just introduced them and he was very generous to me.”
Conti evades the direct question of whether Aita was paying women for sex. “I don’t want to go into it,” he says. “They were taken care of.” But finally, he can’t help himself. “If a girl was loose, she’d do it for money, ferchrissakes.”
No one really knows what Aita and the girls Powers and Conti brought him did behind closed doors, but they left a strong impression on all who watched the passing parade and came to understand the rhythm of life at 141 South Carolwood. Or rather, the two different rhythms of life in the house: the one that prevailed when Salma Aita was in town, and the other that started up as soon as she left or when Ghazi flew in alone, as he often did, for a week or a month.
The house wasn’t quiet when Salma was in residence. “She came every summer,” says La Vella, “and she made Leona Helmsley look like a Sunday School teacher. She was the kind who was put here to shop and make people’s lives miserable, and she did good at both.” She was known to throw things at her maids and hit her dogs. “She’d have you in tears,” says La Vella. “Bipolar, we’d call it today.”
Aita rarely socialized when his wife was in town. “When she was there, he’d paint or play the piano,” says La Vella. “She found her own amusements. When she gave parties, he’d make himself scarce.” When Salma was in residence, there were butlers and chefs, but when she left, they disappeared. “He didn’t want them seeing what went on at night,” said Hagins.
Though Aita enjoyed visiting neighbors like Hugh Hefner (until they had a falling-out over a girl) and the producer Robert Evans, “his real friends were Middle Eastern,” said Hagins. Several Saudi princes were in Aita’s orbit. “But they’d bring security with them,” said Hagins. “He stopped inviting them because he didn’t like that.” Aita appeared to share his women with his Arab friends.
Usually, though, Aita’s nights were spent with Powers or Conti and a pack of girls, the younger the better. “Vince brought two or three girls a night,” said Hagins. “They never came twice unless they were exceptional. They’d go to [fashionable restaurants like] Morton’s or Spago for dinner and Ghazi would pick one and take her back to the house. Vince took the rest.”
When Salma was in residence, “he’d have to meet the girls at the Hilton,” said Hagins. “I went with him so she’d think we were shopping. When she was there, he was in hell.” But Salma Aita was no fool. “One day one of his little bimbos called and told her what was going on,” says La Vella. Salma responded, “Didn’t he pay you well?”
In the early 1980s, Aita “made a lot of money,” said Greg Hagins. “He went from fairly to very wealthy. From asking what things cost, [he progressed] to cost was no question, just find it.” Hagins assumed that money came from his dealings with and on behalf of the Saudis. “I saw pictures of them meeting in tents—a bunch of really scary guys,” he said.
Dan Zerfas and Tom Childers created a partnership, Somerset Co., to invest in real estate; through Somerset, and also personally, Aita put money into property in Jackson, Wyoming; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Foster City, outside San Francisco; and several other deals, including the historic Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, onetime home to ice shows and Elvis Presley concerts, which they hoped to convert into a hotel.
The secrecy that shrouded Aita extended to Somerset. Though he lived next door for a year and was a partner in Aita’s property investments, Tom Childers was never clear whose money the partnership was spending. “I always had a nagging suspicion it wasn’t what it seemed,” he says.
According to La Vella and Hagins, those local investments were only a small part of a larger enterprise of unknown dimensions centered in the banking havens of the Dutch West Indies and Switzerland. Then, in the mideighties, something went wrong in Aita’s paradise. He fell out with one of his powerful Arab friends, got tangled up in several lawsuits, and stopped traveling to the Middle East. “All at once, he was afraid to go,” says La Vella. “He was afraid for his life.” The social calls from Saudi royals stopped at the same time. Aita’s Arab partners “would call,” said Greg Hagins, “and he’d shake his head like, ‘I’m not here.’ ” There was a recession in the Middle East at the time, but that didn’t seem to be the problem. La Vella heard there was “some big deal he’d wheeled and dealed somebody important out of.”
Two years later, Aita was enmeshed in more litigation, this time suing a partner in his land investment outside San Francisco. He lost, and the resulting animosity ended his partnership with Zerfas and Childers. By that time, Aita’s ego had grown along with his wealth and sense that he could flaunt convention with impunity. He stormed out of a postopera dinner in Santa Fe, furious because he felt he’d been badly seated. He deserved better; not only was he rich, he’d become a diplomat. According to Hagins, Aita bought himself the title of United Nations Ambassador for the Most Serene Republic of San Marino, a tiny (sixty square kilometers) landlocked state within the borders of Italy, in exchange for $6,000 a month. He remained in that post for a year, San Marino’s last as a nonmember observer state at the UN, giving up the title when it became a member state. He was then named ambassador-at-large, the post he still held early in 2011.
Roberto Balsimelli, the honorary consul of San Marino in New York, says Aita got and kept his posts “because a person with his power, knowledge, and possibility could help a lot.”
“If he paid something, it was some kind of donation in support of the expenses of the consul general,” says the consul’s son. (The San Marino consulate is the Balsimellis’ small home in suburban Elmont, New York.) So did he help with expenses? “Most likely,” says Balsimelli Sr. “Why not?”
Why would Aita want the job, though? Greg Hagins suggested diplomatic immunity was a factor. “Ghazi was arrested several times,” Hagins wrote in an e-mail. “He was Never Prosecuted (Dip Low Mat).” Many of those who surrounded Aita knew of his weakness for women. And it was common knowledge among his inner circle that his weaknesses went beyond a fondness for young demi-prostitutes. “A couple filed police reports about biting and nasty things,” says Daniel Zerfas, who hired a lawyer for Aita to make the charges go away. “I’d enjoyed and admired him but it turned out to be pretty ugly.”
On one occasion, Carol Ann La Vella got a call from another of Ghazi’s lawyers saying there’d been “a mishap the night before and Ghazi would be arrested and he needed to pay somebody off,” she recalls, “and I had to sign this check. They tried to keep it from me, but the lawyer finally told me what he’d done. His teeth were involved and she [the girl] was not particularly happy.”
Zerfas and Childers weren’t the only associates who broke with Aita. Next to depart was Vince Conti. A new procurer named Heidi Fleiss seemed to be edging onto his turf. Conti had legal troubles of his own. “No way” did Fleiss replace him, Conti insists. “I went to jail. I introduced a guy to a girl. The girl said I pimped her and the fucking jury said I was guilty.” Luckily for Conti, Aita was either very loyal or wanted to keep the man who’d long brought him women close and quiet. When he got out of jail after nine months, Aita “took care of me,” says Conti, whose food, rent, and clothes were paid for by Aita for several years afterwards. “But I never saw him again and one day he disappeared.”
Heidi Fleiss got arrested, too, in June 1993. When some of her Gucci appointment books, seized by police but written in code, were shown on television, Carol Ann La Vella thought she saw a date “I had set up,” and realized Aita was a Fleiss customer. After that, “Ghazi went incognito,” said Hagins, “changed his license plates,” which had read GAITA, “and stopped having girls in the house. He thought he’d be named, so he lay low in New York. He’d only come back for a week or two at a time. He turned into a choirboy.”
In the late nineties, Salma Aita fell ill, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and Aita put Carolwood and 10060 Sunset on the market as a unit in fall 1999, asking $58.9 million for the combined properties on eight and a half acres. The estate took four years to sell. In the meantime, Aita divested his collection of twenty-three Persian, Turkish, Egyptian, and Caucasian carpets and Islamic prayer rugs, built up over twenty-nine years, at Christie’s in London, in the fall of 2001, earning over a million dollars. Salma died not long afterwards. Aita remained in residence in Holmby Hills throughout the long slog to a sale. According to one of his real estate brokers, “he stayed up late, played a lot of poker and backgammon, went to Las Vegas.”
The actual sale was mysterious; his brokers insist they don’t know to whom they sold Aita’s house. They dealt only with the unnamed buyer’s lawyer. And apparently for this mysterious high roller, two houses weren’t enough. The lawyer told them he would need to buy “the house on the corner, too.”
That was the old Jayne Mansfield house, which now belonged to singer Engelbert Humperdinck. It had been on and off the market for thirteen years, listed during many of them with Aita’s pair of brokers. “He wasn’t sure,” says one of them. “He loved his house.”
Humperdinck was born (and legally remains) Arnold George Dorsey in Madras, India, just before the start of World War II, and moved to England as a boy. At seventeen, he started performing at a local singing contest, and soon went professional as Gerry Dorsey. After a stint in the military, he recorded his first song. It was a flop, yet he continued his career until 1965, when an old friend, who was managing the crooner Tom Jones, suggested he take the stage name Engelbert Humperdinck, after a nineteenth-century German opera composer. Friends called him Enge.
By 1966, he’d grown his signature lush sideburns (later stolen, he claimed, by Elvis Presley) and was recording again, and the next year he topped the British pop charts with the ballad “Release Me,” which kept the Beatles’ two-sided hit, “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” from the top of the pops. Seven British hit singles followed, and though they didn’t score in America, the handsome and smooth Humperdinck became a television and touring star there, with well-produced stage shows featuring celebrity impressions and his signature crooning. Those shows made him a hit in Las Vegas, especially with women, after Dean Martin, whom he imitated, promoted his first appearance at the Riviera. His signature gimmick was to mop his onstage sweat with a handerkerchief and end the show by giving it to a woman in the audience. A second appearance on the U.S. pop charts in 1976 with “After the Lovin’ ” won him a coveted Grammy nomination—and convinced him to move to the States and become a tax exile to avoid Great Britain’s onerous levies on his earnings.
That July, a Las Vegas real estate broker Humperdinck shared with Harold Greenlin showed him Polaroid photos of 10100 Sunset Boulevard and said it was available for a good price. When Humperdinck learned it had once belonged to Jayne Mansfield, he was shocked; they’d performed together in a club in Bristol, England, years before, and after having dinner together, the blonde starlet had invited him to visit her Pink Palace. He also thought it was an appropriate home for a man who’d been dubbed the King of Romance. (“They say I had an affair with Jayne Mansfield,” he’d later tell an interviewer. “I’m not saying it’s true or not. I’m away from home a lot and things happen.”) He bought it and spent six months renovating, spending a total $1.9 million, he claimed in his autobiography, What’s in a Name? though that’s unlikely as he paid only $233,500 for the house.
“The Pink Palace was beautiful, but very dilapidated and a little on the dark side,” Humperdinck wrote. Though the property had “unbelievably beautiful” trees, they “cast too much shade,” so the grounds needed work as well. Greenlin had kept the place a shrine to Mansfield, leaving pin-up photos lining the staircase. Humperdinck also “inherited a naked bust of her, but unfortunately,” he wrote, “missing her left nipple! When the builders were taking down a wall in the house, they came across a lot of memorabilia and personal stuff that Jayne had stuck to the walls.… One of the rooms was called the ‘copper room’ for its ornate copper ceiling, while the ceiling in Jayne’s office was covered in red leather pads. Once, when there was an earthquake, one of the pads came off and underneath it, we discovered a hand-painted ceiling from years before.”
Humperdinck is quite candid in some respects. In his book, he admits to excessive drinking and regular infidelity; over the years he’d fend off or settle multiple paternity suits stemming from his on-tour womanizing, and his wife is said to have joked that she could have papered their bedroom with the lawsuits. But he doesn’t mention that he bought the Pink Palace from Harold Greenlin.
After he and his family moved into 10100, they had the sense they weren’t alone. Only when they did roof repairs did they discover that “a tramp,” as he put it, was living in the attic, raiding their refrigerator at night, and sometimes leaving catnip for a cat he’d inherited from the realtor. And then there were the ghosts—“little children dancing around the living room” almost nightly until “they disappeared one day for no reason that we could come up with.” His wife missed them terribly and “genuinely pined for their return,” Humperdinck writes. “They kept her company.” But another kind of spirit also haunted the place, and after twenty-seven years, drove them to sell. In that time, his family counted forty-nine fatal accidents on the twisty stretch of Sunset Boulevard just outside their still-pink home. The last, in which a boy was killed at the end of their driveway just as their same-aged son was learning to drive, finally convinced the crooner’s wife it was time to leave.
Humperdinck put a fresh coat of paint on the house, keeping it pink, and listed it for sale for the first time in January 1990, asking $8 million and claiming, in another outrageous lie, he’d bought it from a spinster who lived in one back room. By March, he’d taken it off the market, explaining, “It means too much to me.” In 1992, he dangled it again, that time at $7.2 million. In 1997, it went back on the market at $3.95 million, and his brokers advertised the fact that Mansfield’s shag carpet, gilt balcony, pink bathroom tile, and other decorating touches had been preserved (though the bottom of the pool had been refinished, obliterating Mickey Hargitay’s tiled love note). When it didn’t move quickly, Enge went on the home shopping network QVC, giving a guided tour with a camera crew.
By then, his wife had returned to England, where they lived in a grand Victorian mansion originally built for the Duchess of Hamilton in 1856 in Enge’s hometown of Leicestershire; that house had its own pub, driving range, wishing well, fountains, and a swimming pool emblazoned with a crest that read in French, “One God, One King.” But the master of the house was still a tax exile, living mostly in a home on a Vegas golf course and the deteriorating Pink Palace, with its old-fashioned kitchen and leaking foyer. When he was in L.A., he spent most of his time at the Bel-Air Country Club, where he shared a locker with the actor Joe Pesci. When he wasn’t, one of his three sons (the Dorseys also had a daughter) lived there alone with a piano on which George Gershwin allegedly wrote “Rhapsody in Blue.”
In 2000, the Pink Palace came back on the market, listed this time at $5 million. For the first time, however, an alternative was offered—the brokers told potential buyers they could also buy Owlwood and 10060 Sunset in separate but simultaneous transactions. The total asking price for the three houses was $63 million. Just after September 11, 2001, Humperdinck cut his price to $4.75 million. He didn’t need the money; he was said to be worth as much as $150 million at the time, thanks to multiple reissues of his recordings and constant career maintenance, including an album of dance remixes (the video for one of which was filmed in the Pink Palace) and a comic ballad, “(Fly High) Lesbian Seagull,” that he recorded for the Beavis and Butt-head movie.
Drew Mandile, one of the realtors, says the deal to sell the Pink Palace and Owlwood happened fast once it happened, taking only thirty days. But it took somewhat longer to close. Though the sale was already in the works, late in 2002 Humperdinck gave an interview threatening to take his house off the market and rebuild it to make it worth “a vast amount of money.” By the time that interview was published, though, an entity called Davis Carolwood Holdings had closed on 141 South Carolwood and 10060 Sunset, and shortly after that, a second entity called Burns Sunset Properties acquired 10100 Sunset. Before he left the house, Humperdinck invited Jayne Mansfield’s husband and children over for one last visit. Mickey Hargitay refused, saying, “The house died when Jayne did.”
Some of their kids accepted the offer. “We hadn’t been back in thirty-some-odd years,” says Mickey Jr., “and we were able to take a few little things.” He got a wrought-iron railing with decorative hearts and an ornamental copper shield from the fireplace in the pool house, engraved with a note from Mickey to Jayne reading, “My love will flame for you forever.” It now sits in his Los Angeles backyard. Humperdinck moved first to Brentwood and three years later to a $3 million mansion at the very top of Bel Air Road, just shy of the Stone Canyon Reservoir.
The buyer of the great new combo estate on Carolwood and Sunset went to great lengths to remain anonymous. Drew Mandile insists he never met the actual buyer, never even knew a name. “You won’t see his name anywhere, on anything. He never signed any documents. We sold to a bunch of attorneys.” Those lawyers refuse to comment even though the buyer’s name did eventually surface.
Despite the years it took to sell his house, Ghazi Aita was so pleased, he tipped his brokers an extra 1 percent in commission. He kept a New York apartment for another four years before selling it for $3.3 million in spring 2006. The buyers had no direct contact with him. By then, he was living on the Riviera in Monte Carlo, in a full-floor penthouse at a top-notch condo called Les Floralies, a block away from the city’s famous casino. Early in 2011, Aita still lived in that Monte Carlo apartment, and was greeted as Your Excellency as he remains an ambassador of San Marino. But though he used to phone regularly, he no longer called his former employees in Los Angeles. “It’s not like him,” said attorney Barry Fink, who reported his former client was ailing and in and out of hospitals. Some worried that in Monte Carlo, that famously sunny place for shady people, he might die and nobody would know.