Did white Europeans, led by a shadowy “Mr. X,” kill the U.N. secretary-general 60 years ago—to keep power over black Africans?

By Ravi Somaiya

In 1960, the Congo split in two. It was the first of many conflicts that have wracked the nation since. And it was driven by the desire of its native citizens for democracy and equal rights.

Belgium had ruled over the Congo for decades. Its aim was to extract as much wealth as it could from one of the most naturally rich nations on earth. Rubber. Copper. Palm oil. Uranium. Diamonds. Gold. Cobalt.

It landed on a remarkably cruel and efficient method. The Belgians worked the black Congolese population to death, extracting and shipping their own wealth away. Those who objected were made an example of. READ ON

Just why did Georgina Chapman marry Harvey? And what did she get out of it?

By Phoebe Eaton

“It can be very scary to stand up to bullies.”
—Georgina Chapman, in her 2012 anti-bullying public-service announcement

The Other Woman

Anybody in the vicinity of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Weinstein at the 2003 Oscars knew his wife, Eve, was in a foul mood. By then, Harvey’s interest in Georgina Chapman was a loosely held secret. Nobody is entirely sure how they met. “He’s friends with her mom” was how people were instructed to explain sightings of Harvey with the Ingres-shouldered ex-model he called “George.”

Harvey had been talking to Jackie Chan in the spring of 2002 about a potential Miramax channel when Georgina turned up on-screen as a buxom saloon girl Owen Wilson picks up in Chan’s READ ON

How Bob Weinstein played a primal role in Harvey’s rise and—perhaps—fall

By Phoebe Eaton

Through the years, Bob and Harvey had grown apart. Bob, always the withdrawn, less social of the two, at first moved his office to another floor, then to a separate building. Their bickering was infamous. Bob’s ex-girlfriend Ivana Lowell recalls that one of his offices had a hole in the wall, a reminder of that time he threw a telephone at Harvey. Yet the brothers remained united, feuding constantly but always locking arms when they needed to. As one former Miramax employee said, “Do Bob and Harvey go through periods of not talking? All the time. But at the end of the day they’re going to come back and fuck you instead of fucking each other.” READ ON

Tax fraud, an absent accountant, and squabbling male models are threatening to undermine Karl Lagerfeld’s legacy

By Alexandra Marshall

It probably would have been simpler just to leave his alleged $300 million estate to Choupette, his blue-cream tortie Birman cat. And immediately upon Karl Lagerfeld’s death from prostate cancer on February 19, 2019, that was his fortune’s rumored fate. But the eccentric designer also had a circle of humans he wanted to do right by. This is where things get complicated.

The Absent Accountant

In December, Lagerfeld’s bodyguard/driver/shopping-bag carrier/right-hand man Sébastien Jondeau gave an interview to Paris Match explaining that Lagerfeld’s estate was a disaster, legally speaking. He wasn’t wrong. The French tax police had already been sniffing READ ON

Threats, lies, and armed guards: it’s all too real for the woman once married to a Russian dubbed “Putin’s banker”

By Hilary Rose

Alexandra Tolstoy’s life has been many things, but she can never complain that it’s been dull. Take her romantic CV. Her first marriage was to a penniless, alcoholic Cossack horseman, whom she met on the Silk Road. Her next relationship was with a billionaire Russian oligarch, Sergei Pugachev, a Russian senator known as Putin’s banker. They travelled the world and had three children, but it did not end well, as anyone who saw The Countess and the Russian Billionaire, a recent fly-on-the-wall documentary filmed over five years, knows.

“As we went along, everything went completely pear-shaped,” she says, sitting READ ON

What hidden demons drove Harvey Weinstein’s rise and fall?

By Phoebe Eaton

They say all families have their secrets. But showbiz families? Their secrets are at a whole other level.

For years, the name Miramax was one of the most revered brands in Hollywood, signifying class and intelligence in the stories it championed. Founded by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, brothers from Queens, New York, the name was an amalgam of Miriam and Max, the mother and father who loomed over their sons in life, and in death. It was his mother’s death, after all, that Harvey used as a pretext in November 2016 to lure aspiring actress Jessica Mann to his READ ON

A daring and, some would say, inspired $4.5 million jewel heist in the middle of Mayfair

By John Simpson

A member of an international gang of thieves who carried out a “truly audacious” $4.5 million diamond heist at a jewellers in Mayfair has been jailed.

Mickael Jovanovic, 27, and his gang posed as Russian businessmen and invited Nicholas Wainwright, the chairman of Boodles, to meet them in Monaco and arranged a sale at the company’s store on New Bond Street.

In a raid compared by police “to the plot of a film” such as Ocean’s Eleven, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, the gang used distraction techniques to switch the seven diamonds, one of which was a heart-shaped jewel worth $2.7 million, with pebbles before making their getaway. READ ON