New York (AFP) – Maurice Tempelsman, a renowned diamond merchant and long-time companion of former US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died in New York, his family said. He was 95. His death at a Manhattan hospital on Saturday was caused by complications from a fall, his son Leon told US media.
Tempelsman was as well known for his late-in-life friendship with Jackie O, as tabloids called her, as he was for his entanglements with authoritarian African leaders over the diamond trade. Tempelsman handled Onassis’s finances after the death of her second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, from whom she inherited $26 million. The two were often seen together in New York’s Central Park. Tempelsman, who was with Jackie Onassis from the early 1980s until she died in 1994, and lawyer Alexander Forger were co-executors of her will. In it, she left Belgium-born Tempelsman “my Greek alabaster head of a woman.”
In 1984, he acquired New York-based diamond jewelers Lazare Kaplan, propelling him onto New York’s business and social scene, and quickly becoming one of the world’s premier diamond merchants. But it was his entanglements with various African autocrats, including Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, that led to him becoming something of a back-channel intermediary between the US and the continent, the Washington Post reported. Lazare Kaplan had stakes in various mines in Africa as well as investments in major diamond operations on the continent, the paper said.
Tempelsman had opened a diamond-trading office in Kinshasa, the capital of then-Zaire and now-Democratic Republic of Congo, as early as 1960 and became an “intimate friend” of dictator Mobutu, according to author Crawford Young. Tempelsman sued the author of a book and its publisher for claiming that he was “close to the CIA,” AFP archives show, with the French judge ruling in 1984 that the allegation was not itself defamatory. The French court ruling reported by AFP said he was awarded a symbolic one franc, the country’s currency at the time, for invasion of privacy.
In later life, Tempelsman supported various charitable causes including the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
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