Hotel Mogul, 'Queen of Mean' Leona Helmsley

After her release in 1994, Mrs. Helmsley and her husband escaped the harshest media attention by staying on their property in Scottsdale, Ariz. She performed 750 hours of community service as a condition of her early parole and returned to a coterie of admirers in New York.

Mrs. Helmsley immersed herself in her husband's business, including its property management operations, as he became increasingly infirm. She began selling many of the landmark properties, and partners began to accuse her of enriching herself at the expense of the company.

Her return also prompted continuing scrutiny of her lifestyle. Newspapers ran accounts that she made other felons do her prison duties, that she never paid attorneys' fees and that her house staff in Arizona contributed to her community service obligations at a local hospital.

She was continually dogged by lawsuits. In 1996, a judge ordered her to pay $1.5 million to a ranking executive whom Mrs. Helmsley had fired while she was in prison. A former general manager of the Park Lane Hotel won $11.2 million when a judge found Mrs. Helmsley had dismissed him because of his being gay. The ruling was reduced to $554,000, but she also had to pay his $638,000 in legal expenses. Other cases against her reached legal settlements.

Forbes magazine recently estimated Mrs. Helmsley's net worth at $2.2 billion, placing her at 350 on its list of the world's wealthiest people. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that she donated $5 million to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, and she reportedly gave millions of dollars more to hospitals and black churches that had been burned in the South.

For all her philanthropy, Mrs. Helmsley and her husband were also known to have been inexplicably stingy. People magazine said in 1988 that the Helmsleys suffered from a "corrosive paranoia, believing that everyone was out to cheat them."

When Leona Helmsley's son died, the Helmsleys sued his estate to recover the expense of sending the body to New York from the son's home in Florida. Because of Florida law, Mrs. Helmsley was able to succeed in going after most of the son's estate, leaving her daughter-in-law and four grandchildren nearly bankrupt.

Her son's widow said at the time, "To this day, I don't know why they did it."