Leona Helmsley

Leona Mindy Rosenthal, property broker and hotelier: born 4 July 1920; married 1940 Leo Panzirer (one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1950), 1953 Joe Lubin (marriage dissolved 1960), 1972 Harry Helmsley (died 1997); died Greenwich, Connecticut 20 August 2007.

'No two billionaires loathe each other on a personal level more than The Donald and The Queen of Mean." This was how Forbes magazine described the bickering and public feuding of two of New York's most controversial figures of the 1980s, the property tycoons Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump.

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Helmsley became a household name in the United States when her smiling face appeared on billboards saying that, since she would never settle for a skimpy towel and could not live without a telephone by her bath, "why should you?" People flocked to the Helmsley hotels and business boomed. But, with her lavish make-up, curling, downturned lip, and her ruthless ambition to dominate the New York real-estate scene, Helmsley came to symbolise the excesses of the era.

Ultimately it was her petulance and high-handedness before a jury of ordinary New Yorkers that led to her undoing. In 1989 she was prosecuted for income-tax evasion by the then up-and-coming US Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who later became Mayor of New York and is now the leading Republican presidential candidate.

It was during that trial, one of the great celebrity set pieces of the era, that Leona Helmsley burnished her reputation as the "Queen of Mean". She was charged with diverting funds to fit out her luxury Connecticut mansion, while claiming tax deductions for the hotels. As evidence was presented of marble bathroom fixtures and gold taps, New York's tabloid media went into overdrive.

But it was the testimony of one Elizabeth Baum, a former housekeeper at the mansion, that sealed Helmsley's reputation as the capitalist from hell. Baum recalled the following exchange shortly after she began working for Helmsley in September 1983: "I said, 'You must pay a lot of taxes.' She said, 'We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.'" Hotel employees revealed how, aware of her hair-trigger temper, they had arranged a warning system to alert them if she was on her way to one of the hotels.

Convicted as charged, Helmsley was handed a 16-year prison sentence and, after appeals, spent 19 months in prison. Giuliani meanwhile basked in the publicity surrounding the case. Helmsley was finally released from prison in 1994.

Born Leona Mindy Rosenthal in 1920, she was raised in Brooklyn and worked as a teenage model, and then as a secretary for an estate agent, before becoming a broker herself, specialising in the sale of condominiums. She was already a millionaire by the time she met and married the multi-millionaire property developer Harry Helmsley. Harry was also charged in 1989 with Leona, but he was deemed unfit to stand trial as he was both mentally and physically enfeebled. All this added to the sense that it was her greed, not his, that had put their business empire at risk.

Harry Helmsley began his career in the Depression as a rent collector in Hell's Kitchen, one of New York's toughest neighbourhoods. He started buying properties that banks had foreclosed on, using syndicates to build an empire quickly, while avoiding New York's high property taxes.

When Harry married Leona in 1972, the New York property market was in crisis and they got their hands on some of the city's most iconic buildings. Over the next 20 years their holdings grew to include the Empire State Building, the Tudor City apartment complex near the United Nations, the Park Lane Hotel, the Helmsley Palace Hotel and the New York Helmsley Hotel.

Once out of jail, Leona began her climb back to respectability and when Harry died in 1997, she became chief executive of Helmsley Enterprises, managing the hotels and property portfolio.

Like so many high fliers who had fallen from grace before her, Leona Helmsley turned to philanthropy to help restore her reputation. She gave $25m to New York's Presbyterian Hospital; handed $5m to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and another $5m to help the families of those who died in the 11 September attacks on New York.

Her generosity knew few bounds and New Yorkers watched in some admiration as she lavished money on rebuilding black churches burned by arsonists in the American South. As if her name were not already burnished on enough buildings, it was added to New York's Medical Centre and Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut, among others, as soon as they had cashed the cheques she had generously donated.

Leonard Doyle