Ted’s Not So Excellent Adventure

ANYONE WAKING UP near Monaco's Carré d'Or in the early hours of December 3, 1999, will remember an eerie glow in the black sky as fire consumed the beautiful copper-plated dome of the historic La Belle Epoque residence on Avenue d’Ostende. At 6 a.m., I was on my way to work at the Stars’N’Bars restaurant on the port when police blocked me from taking my usual route off the Boulevard de Moulins. When I finally arrived at the restaurant, I could see the incredible spectacle of flames and smoke from my first-floor office. Throughout the rest of the morning, rumors spread across Monaco faster than the blaze itself of a running battle at the site involving Monaco police and Russian Mafia commandos or possibly Palestinian terrorists. Ultimately, the true story was far less dramatic, but subsequent events would continue to capture the imagination of conspiracy theorists for a quarter century.

The undisputed version of events is that the Brazilian-Lebanese billionaire banker Edmond Safra, who lived in the 5,000-square-meter penthouse, died in a fire started by his American male nurse, Ted Maher. (Safra suffered from Parkinson’s disease and required 24-hour medical care.) Maher originally claimed that he had started the fire in a wastebasket to trip a smoke alarm and alert building security as he fought off two masked assassins targeting Safra.

During his subsequent trial, however, Maher conceded that he had fabricated the story of intruders and that he had stabbed himself to appear the hero to his employer. His 2002 conviction for “arson causing death” and a 10-year prison sentence did nothing, however, to stop various conspiracy theories about the possible “true” killers, including Muslim fundamentalists, Safra’s wife Lily, Russian oligarchs, and, most recently, Vladimir Putin.

What followed after Maher’s conviction, however, was epic: his daredevil escape from the 17th-century Monaco fortress prison built on a sheer cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, less than 100 meters from the Princely palace. According to his book, Framed in Monte Carlo: How I Was Wrongfully Convicted for a Billionaire’s Fiery Death, published in 2021, Maher wrote that he had planned his prison break—Plan B—even before his conviction. Already ensconced in The Remand Prison (“Maison d'Arrêt”) on Monaco’s Rocher prior to and during his trial, he had sent a letter to his sister Tammy in the U.S., whose husband was a professional welder. He asked them to fabricate four 20-centimeter hacksaw blades and conceal them in the binding of a book on nursing, which could be delivered to him as a Christmas present. (If all of this sounds like a B-movie script, one of the co-authors of Maher’s book is Billy Hayes, whose escape from a Turkish prison in the Seventies was made into the 1978 Oscar-winning film Midnight Express.)

How could the book and the blades pass through the prison metal detection security system? Easy. Maher received regular visits from a 78-year-old retired Anglican priest—Father Peter Cannon Ball (yes, that was his name)—who had a heart condition requiring a pacemaker. The guards always allowed the elderly priest, who also walked with a metal cane, to pass through without the routine security check.

After the priest had generously—although unknowingly—delivered the Christmas present from Maher’s sister, the prisoner hid the blades in the rubber lining of his small cell refrigerator to avoid detection during the daily inspection of his cell by guards with a metal detector. Maher knew he needed help for the rest of his plan, which was to squeeze through the window in his cell and then scale down the wall of the six-story prison fortress in 22 seconds to avoid detection by a security camera. Various journalists have portrayed the Monaco prison as a “5-star hotel with amazing sea views.” The “window” in Maher’s cell was, in fact, a narrow, yards-long tunnel through thick fortified walls. Inside the tunnel were six barriers: a metal wire mesh, what appeared to look like a thick decorative Iron Cross, two more sets of bars, another wire mesh, and a final set of bars.

Maher recruited Luigi Ciardelli, an Italian career criminal who was a prison trustee and who could access elements needed for the escape. Ciardelli managed to convince the prison warden that Maher was suicidal and that he could help keep an eye on him by moving into Maher’s 3 x 4-meter cell.

For his part, Ciardelli smuggled in 46 plastic trash bags, a few at a time, which Maher would weave into a sturdy 8-meter rope. Each night, for five and a half weeks, Maher would squeeze into the narrow tunnel and painstakingly saw through the wire mesh and iron bars. Ciardelli would stand guard, watching TV in case a guard came by and asked about his “sleeping” roommate. In his bed under a blanket, they stuffed a dummy “Ted” made from old clothes, large Evian bottles for arms and legs, and a paper mâché head (made in the prison’s Arts & Crafts class) covered with hair clippings collected after each cell visit from the prison-approved barber. (Maher insisted on maintaining a proper grooming regime. Let’s call him “Ted” for the rest of the article.)

Finally, on January 21, 2003, at 11 p.m., the two made their move and miraculously squeezed through the tunnel, scrambled down the plastic rope, and landed unseen by the security detail. Unfortunately, Ciardelli was the first to land and immediately ran off, leaving Ted by himself in the pouring rain. Although the original plan was an escape through Italy with his Italian co-escapee as translator and guide, Ted chose to walk the 24 kilometers to Nice and check into a budget hotel.

Despite the early hour, the hotel manager allowed him a collect call to his increasingly estranged third wife in the U.S. who immediately hung up. Ted’s next call was to his sister, who gladly provided credit card details to check into the hotel, and a final call was to Father Peter Cannon Ball, who agreed to transport him to Marseille and the U.S. Consulate there. (According to Framed in Monte Carlo, the consul staff would offer Ted asylum as an American citizen if he could reach their headquarters.)

The next morning, he awoke to discover that his wife had contacted Ted’s Monaco lawyer, who informed the prison authorities of Ted’s escape. The police were questioning Father Ball when Ted called to finalize the last step in his journey to freedom. Nice police were waiting for him as he descended to the hotel lobby, and Ted was soon back behind bars for the next eight years. (Ciardelli was arrested two months later for vagrancy near the leaning tower of Pisa.)

The escape is covered at length in Ted’s 360-page book, as well as his accounts of an extraordinary life “before Safra.” Ted was born in my own home state of Maine, later becoming a Green Beret, a Las Vegas policeman, a casino surveillance expert, an Alaskan pizza delivery man, and finally…a neonatal nurse.

Before arriving in Monaco, he had already had three wives and three children. According to his book, he divorced his first wife after blackmailing her with videos of her with a lover. His second wife divorced him after he had stolen her car and kidnapped their 15-month-old baby in a custody dispute. He married a third wife with whom he had two children. In 1999, he arrived in Monaco after a friend of Safra’s thought he would make a good nurse—and unofficial bodyguard—for the paranoid Lebanese billionaire, two for the price of one. It proved to be a costly bargain.

In 2007, Ted was finally released from his Monaco prison cell and he returned to the U.S., where he found his life was in tatters. His third wife had divorced him and had obtained an injunction preventing him from seeing his three children. He tried to find work as a nurse in several states, but each time his conviction would be discovered, and he eventually lost his nursing license. (There are unconfirmed reports over the years of an arrest in Tennessee for “domestic violence” and trouble in San Antonio, Texas.)

Following his release, Ted was featured in several print and TV interviews and reverted to his original version of Safra’s death, saying that it was paid assassins, not him, who were responsible, but the story failed to generate any real media interest in “clearing his name.”

At some point, Ted legally changed his name to “Jon Green” and he became a long-haul truck driver. In 2017, he met Dr. Kim Lark in New Mexico, who became his fourth wife on Valentine’s Day three years later. Things were soon to go south, however, according to the New York Post, and Lark became concerned about Ted’s increasingly erratic behavior.

In April 2022, she notified police that he had broken into her office and stolen her checkbook, $600, a 9-mm handgun, and her iPad. Following the break-in, Ted then attempted to withdraw nearly $50,000 from Lark’s account at a local bank but fled after he was confronted and tasered by the police. Still at large two weeks later, Ted stole Lark’s SUV. Inside the SUV were her three search and rescue dogs named Storm, Felony, and Zero. Zero was heavily pregnant and due any day.

A nationwide search for the dogs (and a $50,000 reward) led to Ted’s capture a month later in Texas along with the three dogs... and eight puppies. Ted eventually pleaded no contest to forgery charges in a plea deal and was sent to the Eddy County Detention Center.
But Ted’s unbelievable adventure didn’t stop there.
On September 21, 2023, a local Carlsbad, New Mexico newspaper published a story about a “Jon Green” who had been charged with solicitation to commit murder. While still in jail, Jon Green/Ted Maher had allegedly paid the $2,500 bond of another inmate in exchange for killing his estranged fourth wife. Another inmate had overheard the plot and contacted Dr. Lark with hopes of payment for his information.
According to The Murder Sheet true crime podcast, Ted’s plan was for the inmate to use the painkiller Fentanyl to kill Lark and make it look like an overdose, steal money hidden in Lark’s house, and bury her body over the border in Mexico. There was even a secret code phrase—“walked the dogs”—to signal the job was done. Police investigated, and Ted was charged with solicitation to commit first-degree murder and is now awaiting further court proceedings… nearly 25 years after setting a small fire in a wastebasket in Monaco.
There is still one more twist in this long tale of misadventure. While awaiting his next day in court, Ted has been moved to a special medical correctional facility near Albuquerque with late-stage throat cancer. We may never know the true story of Edmond Safra’s death on that cold January morning in Monaco, but Ted Maher will probably take his own version of events to the grave.
Ironically, before the final verdict that sealed Ted’s fate for the next two decades, one of his Monegasque lawyers used her closing arguments to reinforce what had always been the defense’s case from the beginning: “Stupidity is reprehensible, but it is not a crime.”
The verdict is still out on Ted.

By Annette Anderson

Contributor