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---
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Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🇷🇴", "👑", "👤"]
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Date: 2025-02-02
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DocType: "WebClipping"
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Hierarchy:
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TimeStamp: 2025-02-02
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Link: https://www.ft.com/content/51f88322-c9e2-4045-8ea8-862288fb1d6f
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location:
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CollapseMetaTable: true
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---
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Parent:: [[@News|News]]
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Read:: 🟥
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---
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```button
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name Save
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type command
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action Save current file
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id Save
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```
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^button-ThefugitiveprinceNSave
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# The fugitive prince
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Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
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In September 1940, King Carol II’s armoured train hurtled towards Romania’s western border. Aboard were his paramour, a small group of courtesans, three poodles and 30 truckloads of the royal fortune. For years, the Romanian monarch had held out against pressure from Hitler, but now his reign was over. The only question was whether he would escape alive.
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At Timișoara, several miles down the line, a fascist death squad would be waiting with machine guns. Not stopping the train ran the risk of being derailed by dynamite. Stopping probably meant being executed. Before the war, Carol had been famous for loving women, hunting and fast cars, and for spending lavishly on all three. He had been a playboy and a wild card. Now, he gave the train operator one command: full speed ahead.
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As the train flew through Timișoara station, gunfire shattered carriage windows. The king and his passengers threw themselves to the floor, ducking for their lives until, moments later, the noise faded into the distance. Eventually, they reached the border. Carol lived the rest of his life in exile, spending his last years in a villa in Portugal, much like other fallen European kings, such as Umberto II of Italy, and an array of counts and countesses displaced by the war. Carol, who died in 1953, didn’t live long enough to see the rise of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist dictatorship after the end of Romania’s monarchy.
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The new regime seized the immense wealth Carol had left behind, worth the equivalent of billions of euros today. Among other treasures, this included extravagant palaces, vast tracts of land and vaults of gold. Many of the prized possessions Carol managed to flee with, including one of the largest rare stamp collections in the world, were sold off in exile. But some treasures, including 40 paintings by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Bruegel and El Greco, seemingly vanished.
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It was a loss anybody would mourn. But for one man, there was a part of King Carol II’s inheritance more valuable than anything: his name. That was something he had spent his entire adult life trying to reclaim. In a final, desperate attempt to get it, he would strike an audacious deal with a crew of international businessmen that ultimately led to prison, exile and infamy.
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His given name is Paul. To his friends, he is Prince Paul. Today, he is in his seventies. A flash of grey runs through his slicked-back black hair, but his bushy eyebrows and pouty lips retain some boyishness. He favours the uniform of European playboys, tailored sports jackets and luxury loafers. He speaks in the clipped, French-accented manner of someone who attended a continental finishing school. Depending on who you believe, his true name is Prince Paul Philippe al Romaniei, Crown Prince of Romania, grandson of King Carol II, direct descendant of Queen Victoria of England and Tsar Alexander II of Russia. To his enemies, he is simply Paul Lambrino, a fantasist who, even after everything that happened, claims heirship to a nonexistent throne.
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Paul, who was born in France in 1948, grew up with his father’s stories. He was told about Romania’s fairytale palaces, lustrous countryside and peasant folk songs. It sounded like a distant fantasy, but it was also a place of sorrow, the site of an injustice that cast a shadow over his entire life. Romania, his father explained, wasn’t just their lost country. It was their stolen kingdom, and Paul was a prince.
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Paul’s lineage stemmed from a royal controversy, dating back more than a century. When Carol was still a hard-partying heir to the throne, he eloped with a beautiful young socialite named Zizi Lambrino. Carol’s father was furious and ordered the union annulled. The young Carol was temporarily banished to a monastery and forbidden from ever seeing her again. But Lambrino was pregnant with a son, Paul’s father. On his Romanian birth certificate, the space for the father’s name should have read King Carol II. But it was blank. The surname was listed as “Lambrino”, legally recording his illegitimacy.
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This is a story from The Great Escape, the FT’s series of carefully crafted and deeply engrossing tales. It was originally published in the FT Weekend Magazine.
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As a teen, Paul was packed off to Britain, where he attended Millfield boarding school in Somerset, before deciding to skip university to make his way in 1960s London. He worked variously as a fashion photographer and an art dealer, living in a flat off the King’s Road in Chelsea. In his late twenties, Paul began to have vivid dreams about his grandfather.
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After the Lambrino affair, Carol had been briefly married to a Greek princess, with whom he’d had another son, Michael. This legitimate heir had never acknowledged Paul or his father. So in the late 1970s, Paul travelled to Portugal to seek out the woman who had been Carol’s wife at the end of his life.
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She was still living in the villa but, when Paul got there, he found she was gravely ill. On her deathbed, she left him Carol’s gold signet ring, embossed with the symbol of the Romanian monarchy surrounded by a crown of thorns. Paul began wearing it religiously.
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Then, one evening in the early 1990s, Paul met his own princess. He was at a black-tie charity ball in London, when he spotted her: an elegant woman in a long Valentino gown, with dark hair and a regal bearing. Her name was Lia Triff. She was an American divorcee in her early forties, who dressed like Elizabeth Taylor and talked like Joan Rivers. She explained that she was at the party “playing hooky” from her postgraduate studies at Oxford. Paul, until then a resolute bachelor, was instantly taken.
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They had plenty in common. Lia was of Romanian heritage, too. They were both shameless name-droppers, referencing famous acquaintances from the Dalai Lama to the Sultan of Brunei. And both had made regrettable mistakes in their youth. But it may have been their differences that truly bonded them.
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Lia was born in the late 1940s and grew up in Dearborn, Michigan. In her early twenties, she married the famously pugnacious San Francisco celebrity attorney Melvin Belli, who represented clients including Zsa Zsa Gabor and The Rolling Stones. He was 42 years her senior. Lia became a well-known San Francisco socialite, attending art openings in white-cocked hats and mustard suede suits, and throwing parties in the 18th-floor suite of the InterContinental Mark Hopkins hotel for guests such as Joe DiMaggio and Rudolf Nureyev. In 1984, she unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for California’s state senate and was later fined for making disguised campaign contributions to herself. That didn’t stop her from working as an adviser in both the Carter and Reagan White Houses.
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In the mid-1980s, the marriage ended in a spectacularly acrimonious public divorce. Lia said Belli emotionally and physically abused her. Belli accused his wife of having multiple affairs, including with the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which she denied. Belli later claimed a friend of hers had threatened to kill him and that Lia threw their dog off the Golden Gate Bridge, which she also denied. Belli was kicked out of court during the hearings for claiming the judge had slept with his wife, too. The spectacle filled so many column inches that Lia’s name ended up in a question on the game show *Jeopardy!*
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By the time Paul and Lia met, she longed to get far away from gossip and scandal. Paul had always wanted the world to recognise him for who he believed he was, a prince, and Lia — glamorous, charming and fearless — made him feel like one. The couple married in 1996, convinced they could make each other’s dreams come true.
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© Emmanuel Polanco
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---
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**Soon, Prince Paul and his wife**, now calling herself Princess Lia, moved to Romania permanently. The revolutions of 1989 had swept away the Communist dictatorship and left a fledgling republic. Although he and Lia barely knew the country and there was no chance of the monarchy being restored, Paul was convinced Romania was their destiny.
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They settled in Bucharest and began courting public attention. During his dictatorship, Ceaușescu had allowed only one western television show to be broadcast: *Dallas*. The idea being that the gaudy lifestyles and petulant feuding of Texan oil barons would demonstrate the greed and decadence of America. The idea backfired. *Dallas* was a smash hit and JR Ewing, its star character played by Larry Hagman, became a national idol. At one point, Lia says she flew to London, where Hagman happened to be, and “talked him into coming. He said, ‘But you know Princess . . . I’m kind of retired.’ And I said, ‘Larry, it’s going to be the Second Coming, believe me.’”
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Bringing JR to Romania made headlines, but it didn’t bring Paul any closer to being recognised. Early on, he made a pilgrimage to Peleș Castle, a Neo-Renaissance palace on the medieval route linking Transylvania to Wallachia. Paul’s ancestors had constructed the gothic spires that still overlook the Carpathian Mountains. Paul had only ever seen them in photographs. But when he got there, government officials wouldn’t let him in.
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His elderly uncle, Michael, was still living in exile in Switzerland at the time. But he too had begun making trips home. They had never spoken, but Paul held out hope for some kind of reconciliation. He sent Michael a heartfelt letter by registered post; there was no response. On the occasions Paul and Lia found themselves at the same events as Michael or his children, they were ignored.
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Then, in the run-up to Romania’s accession to the EU in the mid-2000s, the country passed laws allowing people who had lost property or other assets during Communism to try to reclaim them. Suddenly, there was a path. If Paul could convince Romanian courts that he had a legitimate claim, he would not only become wealthy. He might force his estranged family to finally recognise him.
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---
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**By early 2006, trying to** live like a prince and princess was becoming a burden. Paul and Lia had been in Romania for several years, supported by a meagre annuity provided by his father. The couple’s attempts to jump-start the complex reclamation process had stalled. That’s when Paul was first contacted by a man who claimed he could turn dreams into reality.
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When they met in person, in a lawyer’s office in downtown Bucharest, the man introduced himself as Remus Truică. In his thirties, Truică was tanned, with a chiselled jaw and a whiff of money. He’d made millions in the Romanian telecoms sector, and he enjoyed the good life: expensive suits, fine cigars, rare wine. He owned a yacht, which he named after his wife and sailed around Monte Carlo. His estate in Romania was equipped with a helipad, a swimming pool and a miniature town for the kids.
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Truică told Paul that he represented a group of anonymous international investors who controlled a company called Reciplia through various offshore shareholdings. This consortium was aware of Paul’s claim and was interested in partnering. Reciplia had the resources, Truică assured Paul, to hire the best lawyers and was willing to pay him several million euros upfront in addition to a substantial monthly allowance and a luxury car. Money that would allow Paul to finally live like a prince.
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In exchange, Reciplia wanted Paul to hand over 50 per cent of any royal assets they won. He didn’t like the idea of handing over such a large amount of his inheritance to people he didn’t know. But Paul could see that without heavyweight assistance, he might end up with nothing.
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It would take several years for Paul to find out Reciplia’s largest financial backer was a man named Beny Steinmetz. The Israeli billionaire, then in his fifties, had piercing blue eyes and a seemingly insatiable appetite for making high-risk deals in extremely corrupt countries. He had inherited his family’s diamond business and expanded from selling precious stones to sourcing them directly in Africa. Steinmetz made headlines around the world for securing a vast iron ore mining concession in 2008 in Guinea with terms so favourable that rivals were left wondering how he pulled it off. Dubbed “the deal of the century”, it netted a staggering profit of several billion dollars in less than two years, after his company flipped a stake in the project to the Brazilian mining company Vale.
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After that, “Beny was always looking for a lot of upside,” said one person who knows him well. “Guys like Beny, they don’t care about a 20 per cent return. They are looking for huge bets, a minimum of 10 times, or ideally 30 times on their money.” The Prince Paul deal promised exactly that.
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Even if Reciplia’s upfront costs for lawyers and Paul’s walking-around money reached upwards of €20mn, the potential payout would still be immense. An initial assessment found the Romanian royal fortune could be worth as much as $1bn. “At one stage, there was even the idea that the country’s gold reserves belonged to the royal family,” said the Steinmetz associate. “Like how Congo belonged to King Leopold of Belgium. Beny looked at the underlying assets, and the value was there.”
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© Emmanuel Polanco
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---
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**The past few decades have not** been particularly glorious ones for European monarchs and former royals, with most restitution claims faltering. In 2002, Greece’s deposed king, Constantine II, was awarded a tiny fraction of the £320mn in seized estates he claimed to be owed by the government. Vittorio Emanuele, son of Umberto II, punched his cousin in the face at a party in 2004, during a row over which of them was the true heir to Italy’s nonexistent throne. He later sued the state for more than €200mn for confiscated property — and lost. Juan Carlos I of Spain was forced to abdicate in 2014, after a string of financial scandals. And last year, the heirs of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II gave up on a nearly decade-long battle to regain hundreds of works of art, the imperial crown and sceptre, and various castles.
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After several months considering Reciplia’s audacious offer, Paul decided to sign the agreement. Steinmetz would provide the cash. Truică, the flashy businessman, was going to be on the ground in Romania, dealing with the lawyers and local authorities. But to succeed, they needed to recruit a number of other specialists, each with a different set of highly valuable skills.
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First was Tal Silberstein, a former Israeli special forces commando turned international political consultant. He had built a reputation for being cunning and sometimes ruthless, cutting his teeth working for US pollsters and consultants James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, and later advising politicians in Austria, Ukraine and Romania. Silberstein’s role was to keep Steinmetz updated on what was happening and to troubleshoot the unexpected. “Tal is one of the brightest people I have ever met,” said one person who knows him. “He is an expert in getting inside people’s heads.”
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Then there was Robert Roșu, a partner at one of Romania’s most prestigious law firms, picked to lead the legal charge on behalf of the prince. Roșu’s firm spent weeks doing extensive due diligence on the strength of the claims, producing the report that pegged the assets that Prince Paul had a claim to at $1bn.
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Once assembled, the team got to work on what they codenamed “Project Prince”. Truică was busy from the start. Working with Roșu, he convinced a Romanian court to hand over Paul’s share of Snagov Forest, a 47-hectare nature reserve formerly owned by the royal family. Project Prince soon had a far more valuable target: a vast tract of land in the north of Bucharest called the Băneasa Royal Farm. Formerly belonging to King Carol II, Băneasa was an agricultural estate that had once served the royal household. If that land could be redeveloped, it could be worth hundreds of millions of euros.
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There was one significant hurdle. The land was occupied by a state research body, the Bucharest Plant Protection Research and Development Institute. Its director, an elderly man named Horia Iliescu, feared the institute would be shut down if the land was signed over. Under the obscure regulation involved, Iliescu’s refusal would have been enough to block the deal.
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Wooing him took some time. Then, early one morning in September 2008, Truică noticed he had missed numerous calls. The businessman had invited Iliescu to take a cruise on his yacht in Monte Carlo, during an upcoming trip to the south of France.
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“Good morning,” Truică said, when he called back. “I apologise. I was playing tennis.”
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“I called several times because this is what I call being polite,” Iliescu replied. The director, seemingly nervous and bumbling, launched into a rambling explanation of telephone etiquette. Despite having spent months refusing to countenance the transfer, Iliescu was now eagerly looking forward to his trip with Truică. He wanted to confirm the details of his hotel in France.
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Not long afterwards Iliescu got on a flight from Bucharest to Nice, where he was picked up in a Mercedes Vito van by Truică’s driver and taken to Monaco. Once there, he and Truică had dinner on Truică’s yacht. Exactly what happened on the boat is unclear. But after returning to Romania, Iliescu appears to have undergone a complete change of opinion about signing over Băneasa Royal Farm. (Iliescu died of natural causes not long afterwards. Truică denies that he ever bribed Iliescu or paid for his trip to France.)
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Paul, meanwhile, was enjoying the lifestyle of a true prince. Flush with his Reciplia allowance, he and Lia hired a chauffeur to shuttle them around Bucharest. Two people who knew him around this time said Paul also started to frequent exclusive private members’ clubs in London, such as 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair.
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There was something money couldn’t fix: the indignity of being called Lambrino. At one point, Paul had travelled to a public records office in central Bucharest in search of his father’s birth certificate. Accompanied by his lawyer, Paul marched in and asked to see the document. The line that should have affirmed paternity was there, just as blank as he’d been told.
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In small letters, he wrote in the name “King Carol II”. This little act of defiance hadn’t changed anything, but winning Băneasa would. That would put Project Prince on the path to reclaiming Paul’s share. In September 2008, the board of the research institute voted to allow the return of the land. The following January, Băneasa Royal Farm was officially transferred to Reciplia.
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---
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**The feeling of triumph** did not last. Some members of Project Prince were becoming suspicious of one another. Some worried Truică was skimming money from the operation and he, Steinmetz and the others began to fall out. (Truică denies ever appropriating money from the project.)
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Paul also started to wonder if something was off. Rather than selling Băneasa and distributing the profits, Reciplia told him it wanted to develop the land instead, delaying his payout. He and Lia complained to Silberstein, the political consultant. He was busy trying to keep the couple placated by getting them favourable coverage in the Romanian press. In October 2011, Silberstein rang up a friendly journalist. “Listen, you have to help more . . . with the princess,” he said. “The fact that she is nagging . . . is not helpful for the project, you know?”
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Paul started to notice people following him and his wife around Bucharest. Then he began to suspect that Reciplia had ex-Mossad officers on its payroll. They “told us at one point they were there to make us . . . feel safe”. But they were there “to find out our weaknesses”, he said. (Steinmetz denied employing any former intelligence officers during Project Prince, calling it a “blatant lie” and “another deceitful rumour aimed at conveying false impressions.”)
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To keep a lid on things, Silberstein decided to reveal who was really behind Project Prince. He rang Lia. “OK, I want to do something,” he said. “I want to bring someone you have never met before with me, someone who invested everything in the company . . . It’s Mr Steinmetz. He came to Romania on a special occasion.”
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That evening, Paul and Lia met with Steinmetz at their lawyer’s Bucharest office. Paul recollected telling the Israeli about his concerns. “We don’t get what is happening. We don’t know what’s going on,” he said. Paul remembered Steinmetz placating the couple’s worries. (Steinmetz disputed this account of the meeting, saying it was “a courtesy visit” of “maybe two, three, four minutes”.)
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A few weeks later, Silberstein was dismayed to find the meeting had not had the intended effect. “The prince,” an alarmed Silberstein told his friend on the phone, “has started a war with us.”
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Convinced he was being conned, Paul was threatening to report Silberstein and the rest of the team to the police. “Can you imagine?” Silberstein raged down the phone. “After working five and a half years for these people, helping them everywhere, paying €5mn in cash on their behalf . . . When I met them, they were completely broke. Completely. Everything you see is our money!” Project Prince, Silberstein worried, was falling apart. He had no idea how right he was.
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---
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**Laura Codruta Kövesi did not** look like the person Romania’s macho politicians and gangsters most feared. In her early forties, with jet-black hair cut into an Anna Wintour bob, she often wore pink lipstick. Kövesi had been Romania’s youngest ever prosecutor-general. Then in 2013, she was appointed to lead a new anti-graft office called the National Anticorruption Directorate. Her mandate was to root out high-level crimes in one of the EU’s most corrupt countries. She moved fast. In her first two years on the job, Kövesi indicted 14 current or former members of parliament, four government ministers, the mayor of Bucharest and, stunning the country, the prime minister.
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It was lonely work. Kövesi, who had grown up in a small Transylvanian town, was known to say she didn’t have friends, just acquaintances. She often walked alone around Bucharest, watched over by state security agents. The prime minister whom her investigation forced out of office claimed she was “trying to make a name by inventing and imagining facts”. But Kövesi believed she was fighting for the soul of her country. For the first time in Romania’s modern history, the powerful were being held to account. (Kövesi is currently serving as the EU’s first chief prosecutor.)
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They did not know it, but Kövesi had the members of Project Prince in her sights. Recording devices had been installed in Paul and Lia’s home and the phone lines of every member of the project had been wiretapped. Agents with Romania’s intelligence service, the SRI, were following their every move, having come to believe Project Prince represented a national security threat. The SRI had shown Kövesi what it deemed proof of a criminal plot by foreigners to defraud the state.
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In late 2015, Kövesi appeared on national television to announce a sweeping new indictment. Prince Paul, Truică, Steinmetz, Silberstein and others, she said, had been charged with “establishing a criminal group” to bribe and corrupt public officials. All of it to win what she said were bogus inheritance claims.
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The damages the group had inflicted on the state from reclaiming Băneasa and the other land exceeded €100mn. It was “an enormous amount”, Kövesi said, on air. “It would be the equivalent of the allowance that approximately one million children in Romania could receive for one year.”
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Paul, who had come to reclaim his lost homeland, was about to become one of its most-wanted fugitives.
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It was 5.30am on a Sunday in December 2020, when men arrived at Paul and Lia’s door in Bucharest. Lia was awoken by the buzzer and the sound of voices on the other side of the intercom. Five policemen were outside, and they were looking for Paul. She opened the front gate and asked to see some identification. They began to rush from room to room, searching under beds and inside the couple’s walk-in safe. But her husband wasn’t there.
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Lia knew she had to warn him. The Romanian state had been pursuing the members of Project Prince for a while. Lia picked up a phone, suspecting that every line in the house was wiretapped. “Darling,” she said when she got through to Paul. “Stay calm. There is a huge, huge confusion . . . You cannot leave for Romania. They will arrest you. I can’t give you any more information but please, please get a lawyer.” Then she hung up.
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On the other end of the line, Paul was stunned. He put the phone down and sat alone in his Lisbon hotel room, grappling with the fact he was now an international fugitive. If he stayed in Portugal, he would probably be arrested and eventually sent back to Romania. So Prince Paul, direct descendant of Queen Victoria of England and Tsar Alexander II of Russia, decided to lam it.
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First, he had to get out of Portugal as fast as possible. The airport was too risky. Paul went to an ATM and took out several thousand euros, stuffing them in his pocket. Whatever came next, credit cards would leave a trail. Paul hailed a taxi and asked the driver: “Would you be OK to go to Madrid?”
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A six-hour trip across an international border wasn’t exactly a normal fare, but the bemused cabbie checked his schedule and agreed. As they sped off, Paul ran through his options. He couldn’t book a hotel using his real name. Where could he go? He knew some people he trusted in Naples. But getting there required crossing from Spain to France and then into Italy, without attracting attention. He feared the Romanian arrest warrant could already have been sent to every European police force. If so, every border was a potential trap.
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Once his taxi arrived in Madrid, Paul got out, handed the driver €500 in cash and hailed another cab. The switch might throw off anyone following, he thought. Soon, he was headed to Monte Carlo, a day-long drive.
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As the hours passed in the back of the taxi, Paul thought about Lia. When would he be able to see her again? He thought about Romania, the homeland he had spent his life dreaming about, which was now trying to put him in prison. And he thought of his grandfather, King Carol II, who had fled across Europe 80 years earlier.
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About an hour outside Monaco, Paul saw what he was dreading: a police checkpoint. It was too late to turn around, so the taxi pulled over and a French officer instructed Paul to hand over his papers. He gave his British passport, hoping that the arrest warrant was issued on his Romanian documents.
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“Where are you going?” the policeman asked.
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Sheepishly, Paul said he was on his way to Italy.
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“You’re going to Italy . . . by taxi?”
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Paul’s heart was pounding as he confirmed he was. The police officer walked away with the documents and, while Paul waited, all he could do was silently reassure himself: at least it’s France. Better to be arrested here than in Romania. The police officer returned to the taxi slowly, then handed over the passport and waved them on.
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© Emmanuel Polanco
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---
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**As Paul snaked down the Mediterranean** coast towards Naples, the other members of Project Prince were in total disarray. After several years battling Kövesi’s charges, some of them had been convicted and sentenced to prison in a country with some of the most notoriously brutal jails in Europe.
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Interpol arrest warrants had been issued for Paul, as well as Steinmetz and Silberstein, who had been sentenced to five years in prison each. Steinmetz was in Dubai at the time, out of reach, but Truică was already in a Romanian jail, serving a seven-year sentence. Even Roșu, the high-powered lawyer, had been convicted.
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Truică, who was released in July 2024 after serving half of his sentence, told me that he had only ever acted legally during his work on Project Prince, the conviction was unjust and that there were serious problems and errors with the evidence that was used against him, including the use of wiretaps gathered by Romania’s secret intelligence service.
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Truică also alleged that an unnamed Romanian prosecutor threatened him to gather evidence against other members of the team. “The prosecutor told me that he knows I am innocent, but that he will go ahead with the case if I do not accept to make allegations against certain persons of interest to him,” Truică said.
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Silberstein declined to comment.
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In Bucharest, Lia had no way of contacting her husband or even knowing where he was. Then a coded message came through, passed from Paul via a lawyer, reading: “I am in the place where I was a child”. She was overcome with relief, realising that Paul was in France. He had travelled all the way across Europe in taxis to Naples, only to decide he would be safest in the country of his birth after all. He was hiding in a village.
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Lia was still stuck in Romania, being hounded by the police about his whereabouts. She said the authorities told her that she would be liable for the costs of pursuing her fugitive husband for as much as €9mn. The house she owned with Paul was later repossessed by the bank to be sold for the value of the mortgage. Then men arrived to take the furniture.
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But Lia vowed to do whatever she could. “They didn’t understand that even though I was blessed to be born and educated part of my life in America, I’ve also got a stronger backbone,” she told me. “I’m not able to be broken.”
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---
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**Project Prince was not** the only one of Beny Steinmetz’s high-risk, high-reward deals going bad. In fact, his legal problems around the world seemed to be spiralling out of control.
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Several years before the Romanian indictment, a former employee of Steinmetz’s who had worked on the Guinea mining deal was arrested by the FBI. Federal agents had secretly recorded him plotting to destroy evidence suggesting millions of dollars in bribes had been paid by Steinmetz’s company to one of the ex-wives of Guinea’s former dictator. The Guinean government then accused Steinmetz of bribery and said it would strip the rights to the mine from his company and Vale, the Brazilian miner.
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The US probe into the Guinea deal hadn’t implicated Steinmetz directly, but he had been charged by a Swiss court for bribery relating to the deal. He appeared to sink under the weight of a growing number of civil and criminal cases brought against him.
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In 2018, Steinmetz’s holding company put itself into voluntary administration to try to protect assets against further legal claims. Then Vale accused Steinmetz of deliberately misleading it into a deal he knew was tainted by corruption. Vale launched a claim for billions in damages in courts in London and New York.
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By December 2021, a year after the police arrived at Paul and Lia’s door, Steinmetz had been arrested in Greece on a European arrest warrant issued by Romania and barred from leaving the country before an extradition hearing.
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---
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**Back in Romania, someone** had been trying to hit back. Shortly after Kövesi appeared on national television to announce the Project Prince indictment, an ex-colleague contacted her about a strange experience. The colleague had been approached by a recruitment agency based in the UK about a lucrative job. But when she went for an interview, they only seemed to be interested in asking about working with Kövesi.
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Then, someone using a British number rang up Kövesi’s elderly father at home, claiming they were organising a conference in London. They wanted to pay him to attend. Her father, who didn’t speak English, was suspicious and told his daughter. More members of her family were approached by odd-sounding outfits, seemingly using job offers as a pretext to gather information about Kövesi.
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In March 2016, two athletic young men, one with a Belgian passport and the other an Israeli national, flew into Bucharest’s Henri Coandă airport. One had reddish-brown hair and a beard, and was wearing blue jeans, white sneakers and a black jacket. The other was dressed all in black, apart from a white shirt. They checked into a hotel downtown and got to work. Soon, Kövesi began to get security alerts on her official and personal email accounts, suggesting someone was trying to hack her.
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The two men were undercover agents dispatched to Romania as part of an espionage operation targeting Kövesi called “Project Tornado”. They weren’t spies working for a government; they were from the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube. Founded in 2010, Black Cube advertises itself as being made up of a “select group of veterans from Israeli elite intelligence units”. The company became internationally notorious for its work on behalf of convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein, during his attempts to stifle investigations into his crimes.
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Steinmetz has been one of Black Cube’s most important clients. He used undercover agents from the firm to secretly record executives from Vale admitting that they were aware the Guinea deal they were suing him over had been corrupt from the start. As a result, Vale eventually withdrew its legal claim against Steinmetz.
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On its website, Black Cube cites its work for Steinmetz, which involved a team of 20 agents, as one of its most successful cases. Unfortunately for the two Black Cube agents, the Romanian security services had become aware of their presence, and they were soon arrested. (They were later released with suspended sentences.)
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What never became clear was who the client behind the operation to dig up dirt on Kövesi was. Steinmetz was one of several people suspected and investigated by the Romanian police’s organised crime unit, but the case was later closed due to a lack of evidence.
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Steinmetz denies having any role in Black Cube’s work in Romania and said he had only ever employed the company once. He called the suspicions raised against him “a clear slander by the Romanian authorities to justify the prosecution against me” which was “clearly politically motivated”.
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When Black Cube’s CEO, Dan Zorella, was interviewed by Romanian police, he gave a puzzling explanation as to why his firm had taken on the Kövesi operation. According to a transcript obtained by Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, Zorella said the company was hired by a former Romanian intelligence officer who claimed that the work they would carry out was on behalf of the SRI, the country’s spy agency. Black Cube later said it “was hired by a senior official in Romania \[and\] fully co-operated with the Romanian authorities to solve this matter.”
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---
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**In France, Paul had eventually** reported himself to the authorities and defeated a first request by Romania to bring him back to serve out his sentence. By April 2024, Lia had joined him. Emboldened by his victory, Paul decided to accept an invitation from an order of the Knights of Malta to visit the Mediterranean island. His lawyers warned him he was taking a huge risk, but Paul was certain the Romanian government wouldn’t try to have him arrested.
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He flew to Valletta with Lia and passed through immigration without a problem. On their third day on the island, three Maltese policemen approached Paul and arrested him. He was under arrest on the orders of the Romanian state. Lia watched as her husband was taken away. By that evening, Paul was in Corradino prison, a penitentiary built in the 19th century under British colonial rule. “It was a shock,” he said. “You go from being in a five-star hotel to being in prison.”
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Paul knew the Romanian state would press as hard as possible to have him extradited. Roșu, the lawyer convicted for his work on Project Prince, had been jailed in conditions he described as “a metal cage”. (He was later acquitted and released.)
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In Malta, Paul was placed in a section of the jail reserved for high-profile inmates. One was a computer hacker, awaiting extradition to the US; another was the Maltese businessman on trial for the murder of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
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During his first days, Paul tried to stay calm, like a good sovereign, and make conversation with the other prisoners. None of them seemed to find the presence of a fugitive prince on their block particularly remarkable. In the mornings, the prisoners played football in the courtyard. Sometimes, he would watch cable television, mostly CNN, but this was difficult as he wasn’t allowed his metal-rimmed glasses in prison. (They were deemed a security threat.) Most days they were served fried food, which Paul described as “like KFC”. He looked forward to Thursdays when the inmates were given roast lamb. To keep his mind occupied, he read *The Firm* by John Grisham and bonded with a Dutch man accused of international cocaine trafficking. “He wasn’t too bad, I suppose,” Paul told me. “He took two or three showers a day.”
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Two months passed, as Paul’s lawyers worked to have him released on bail. Finally, the Maltese authorities agreed. The other inmates applauded as Prince Paul walked out of the iron gates of the prison. He felt triumphant, even though he knew there was another painful wait ahead of him, this time to see if Maltese judges would side with him or the Romanian state.
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---
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**The first time I met Paul** was in early August, 2024. We were inside Malta’s Courts of Justice, where I had just watched as a judge read out a lengthy administrative procedure in Maltese. This resulted in another uncertainty-laced delay. Paul was under strict bail conditions, reporting to the police twice a day. His passport had been temporarily confiscated.
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The next morning, we met again in a local hotel. Lia and Paul’s lawyers were present this time. Paul said he was holding up well and was relieved to be with his family. But he was noticeably shaken — at times he was energised and defiant, at others his voice became weary.
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In court, Paul’s Maltese lawyer Jason Azzopardi argued that Romania’s prisons were so overcrowded and dilapidated that it would be an abuse of his client’s human rights to keep him there. During the hearings, the Romanian government sent four officials to Malta to put forward its case for extraditing Paul. “It’s quite abnormal,” Azzopardi told me. “I do not recall any case where the representatives of the foreign government came over to testify.”
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Sitting with him, it was clear that Paul was exhausted. He had fought his entire life to be accepted, yet here he was, facing disgrace and years behind bars, not as Prince Paul of Romania, but as Paul Lambrino, crook.
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---
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**As Paul waited to learn** his fate, I travelled to Athens to meet Steinmetz. Due to his Project Prince conviction, Greece is one of only three European countries the billionaire can travel to without fearing arrest. (The Israeli had beaten an attempt by the Romanian state to extradite him after he was briefly arrested in Athens back in 2021.)
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We met on a warm summer evening on the terrace of a taverna not far from Syntagma Square. It was the middle of August, and the restaurant was nearly deserted. Later, he told me he never did anything illegal in Romania and was never aware of any of his partners paying bribes. “It was pure business,” he said. Steinmetz’s heavily accented English was delivered in the near-whisper of a man accustomed to those around him falling silent when he talks. “We do hundreds of deals in different sectors and what we saw was a good financial opportunity.”
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The Romanian conviction, Steinmetz said, was politically motivated by local officials who didn’t want to see a foreigner succeed. “It was all fixed in advance . . . it was a rigged game,” he said, calling the conviction against him “a joke, a Romanian joke”.
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In Switzerland, Steinmetz was convicted for bribery in one of Africa’s poorest countries. (He is appealing.) But the chances of him serving a prison sentence are slim. The Guinean state has since settled its claims against his company.
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Steinmetz said he was unfazed by the fact that Romania’s European arrest warrant for him is still outstanding. “What do I need to worry about? To worry about something I haven’t done? Because I can’t fly to Europe? I can fly to the rest of the world. I can do whatever I want.” As I left, I was alarmed by the thought that, perhaps, he was right.
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Judges across Europe have independently cast serious doubts about Romania’s case against the Project Prince crew, with Greece, Cyprus, Malta and France all independently rejecting attempts by Romania to extradite Steinmetz and Paul. Interpol later ruled to delete the warrants against them, deciding, according to a document seen by the FT, that the use of secret service wiretapping “was deemed contrary to fair trial standards”. The ruling also said there were “serious concern\[s\] regarding the existence of political elements” in the Romanian criminal case against them.
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---
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**Late last summer,** Paul stood in a Maltese court for the last time as it was announced that Romania’s attempt to extradite him had been rejected. He was free to return to France. Lia was overjoyed to be returning to Paris. “What was that . . . film? *If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium*,” she says. “Tomorrow we will stay with my husband’s dear friend, who has a castle in France. From a dungeon to a castle in one day! How many people from the Midwest can say that?”
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Weeks later, I learnt that Paul had managed to track down several of the missing paintings spirited out of Romania in the 1940s. Based on Paul’s legal claims, a French judge has frozen the transfer of two El Grecos, opening up the possibility that, after three decades, he may finally receive some small piece of his inheritance.
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During one of our last conversations, I asked him whether, after all the setbacks, the arrest warrants, fleeing and jail, he ever regretted having returned to Romania? “I’m from birth, from conception, the grandson of King Carol,” he said.
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“I respect Romania’s republic . . . But I am really the rightful crown prince.”
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*Miles Johnson is the host of* [***Hot Money: The New Narcos***](https://www.ft.com/content/40406849-e120-40d4-8c21-f41b5e5f8a9c)*, the FT’s investigative podcast series exploring a web of drugs, money laundering and state-sponsored assassinations. Subscribe to Hot Money on:* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/hot-money-who-rules-porn/id1621757273)*,* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/show/2EU1S3kZdhPp1RgscY473O?si=6esPit7RRn2jPjIXgFsS8Q&nd=1)*,* [*Pocket Casts*](https://pca.st/podcast/8885bfb0-b201-013a-d8e2-0acc26574db2)*, or wherever you listen to podcasts.*
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*Miles‘s book ‘Chasing Shadows: A true story of the Mafia, Drugs and Terrorism’ is now out in paperback*
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---
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