HEROIN BINGE KILLS ROTHSCHILD HEIR

Pubdate: Mon, 01 May 2000 Source: Irish Independent (Ireland) Website: http://www.independent.ie/

Author: Ben Fenton Raphael de Rothschild, scion of one of the world's richest families, has been found dead of a suspected heroin overdose on a pavement in a rundown area of New York. Mr de Rothschild (23) is believed to have taken a large dose of the drug at a party with friends on 10th Avenue in the city's Chelsea section. Living in the same building on Fifth Avenue where Jackie Onassis had her home, Mr de Rothschild was the grandson of Elie de Rothschild, one of the stalwarts of the French side of a financial dynasty that once held the purse strings of Europe. Elie had a tempestuous relationship with the late Pamela Harriman, ex-wife of Sir Winston Churchill's son Randolph, in the post-war years but rebuffed her entreaties to divorce his wife and marry her. Mr de Rothschild's father, Nathaniel, is chairman of a European banking business worth 5bn pounds Sterling. Friends said Raphael was bursting with vitality and was a fixture on New York's fashionable social circuit. In a life of glamorous parties and beautiful girlfriends, he frequented nightspots like Moomba and Harry Cipriani. New York papers yesterday quoted friends who described him as "out of control and in the city's fast lane". He had been a student at America's best known private schools and then went to the Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island. The death is the latest in a series of tragedies to afflict the world's greatest banking dynasty. In 1923, Charles Rothschild, a scion of the British branch of the family, cut his throat while in the grip of depression. Charles's grandson Amschel hanged himself in a Paris hotel in 1996. Raphael de Rothschild is not the first member of his family to have flirted with heroin. Four years ago, his cousin Benjamin was fined pounds 400 for carrying the drug in Southampton airport, England. The Geneva-based Benjamin was revealed to be a registered addict who had been enrolled in rehabilitation programmes in Paris.