Maurice Tempelsman, the enigmatic and politically connected Belgian-American diamond magnate who drew news media scrutiny for his shadowy business dealings in Africa and was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s companion for more than a decade before her death in 1994, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 95.
His death, at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was from complications of a fall, his son, Leon, said.
In a trade known for its discretion and secrecy, Mr. Tempelsman, one of the world’s premier diamond merchants, spent his career quietly cultivating African leaders across the political spectrum, from tyrants to liberation activists, and was an early business operator in newly decolonized nations such as Ghana and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).
For a half-century, he had also been a prominent fund-raiser for the Democratic Party and forged particularly close relationships with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
The intersection of mining and political interests in volatile countries, sometimes overlapping with coups and other foreign intrigue, made Mr. Tempelsman an object of ample curiosity and conspiracy theorizing. One of his employees in Africa was Lawrence Devlin, a former C.I.A. station chief in pre-Zaire Congo, who continued passing information to the intelligence agency while working for Mr. Tempelsman, The New York Times reported in 2008.
Courtly, charming and intensely private, Mr. Tempelsman rarely conceded any ground to critics of his business ventures or his methods. “I hate to deflate the romance,” he told Insight magazine in 1991, in a rare interview. “But the reality is a lot more pedestrian.”
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The post Maurice Tempelsman, Diamond Magnate and Jackie Onassis’s Companion, Dies at 95 appeared first on New York Times.
