Pubdate: Mon, 01 May 2000
Source: Irish Independent (Ireland)
Copyright: Independent Newspapers (Ireland) Ltd
Contact:  http://www.independent.ie/
Author: Ben Fenton

HEROIN BINGE KILLS ROTHSCHILD HEIR

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.
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