On Tuesday, February 24, 1998 at 2:00:00 AM UTC-6, John Vogel wrote:
> From the 2/23/98 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
> Lieberman falls from 6th-floor apartment, dies of
> apparent suicide
> 12 noon Monday, February 23
> Tim Bryant
> and William C. Lhotka
> Of the Post Dispatch Staff
> Harold Lieberman fought to the last hours of
> his life not to return to St. Louis in
> handcuffs.
>
> With his deportation from Santiago, Chile
> fast approaching, Lieberman managed to
> leap from the balcony of his sixth-floor
> apartment Monday with three police officers
> guarding him. The death was ruled an apparent suicide.
>
> A man who helped found one of the country's biggest and most
> successful home building companies only to face a 37-count
> federal fraud indictment was a hard case to the end.
>
> Hard to prosecutors who tried unsuccessfully for six years to get
> him back to St. Louis. Hard to family members and others who
> tried to convince him to return.
>
> Of the many unaswered questions that surround Lieberman's
> death, one of the biggest is how much money, if any, he had left.
> The FBI said the brothers moved nearly $2 million to Chile
> before they fled. Other sources put the amount at closer to $6
> million. Alan Lieberman reportedly disclosed that at least $5.8
> million was laundered.
>
> Lieberman, 70, was accused of defrauding banks, contractors
> and home buyers out of millions of dollars.
>
> One of his company's victims, Sherry Miles of Creve Coeur, said
> Monday she had long predicted that Lieberman, 70, would never
> return to the United States alive.
>
> ``He'd rather die than give money back,'' Miles said. ``There is
> no way he could face the humiliation...There is no way he could
> come back in handcuffs and face all these people.''
>
> Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Reap said that had the
> Liebermans surrendered, as they had promised in May 1992,
> their prison sentences would have been completed by now.
>
> ``This is an unbelievably unfortunate, huge tragedy for a lot of
> people,'' Reap said. ``All this would be over by now.''
>
> Assistant U.S. Attorney Audrey Fleissig said: ``It's a tragedy to
> have a case end like this. Our objective from Day One was to
> return Harold Lieberman to the United States for a fair trial.''
>
> Lieberman was to be cremated Tuesday in Santiago. A memorial
> service was to be held there at one of the city's synagogues. His
> ashes were expected to be returned to St. Louis for burial,
> officials said.
>
> Police said that while under surveillance, Lieberman ``in a
> surprise manner jumped from the balcony of his room to the
> backyard of the building'' where he lived in one of Santiago's
> most exclusive neighborhoods. He fell approximately 70 feet.
>
> Deputy Interior Minister Belisario Velasco said an investigation
> had been ordered to ssee how Lieberman managed to jump with
> three police officers guarding him.
>
> The director of the city's emergency hospital said doctors worked
> for an hour to keep Lieberman alive.
>
> ``He arrived here in extremely serious condition,'' the doctor
> said.
> ``Our efforts were fruitless.''
>
> Lieberman's death was the closing chapter of an odyssey that
> began six years ago when he and his brother Alan fled to
> Santiago shortly before they were charged in St. Louis with
> defrauding banks and customers. Alan Lieberman, 68, returned
> to the United States a year ago and pleaded guilty. He is serving a
> ten-year sentence at the federal prison in Lexington, Ky.
>
> When the Lieberman Corp. collapsed in 1989, it was $15 million
> in debt.
>
> Federal prosecutors said they believe the Liebermans had spent
> nearly all of the $1.8 million the FBI managed to trace to
> Santiago. The approximately $750,000 of the brothers' money
> that wound up in a St. Louis bank was a ``minute'' bit of their
> total debt, prosecutors said.
>
> Quick tempered and prone to volatile outbursts, Harold
> Lieberman once tried to choke a Post-Dispatch reporter on the
> grand staircase of Chile's Supreme Court building.
>
> ``Get him out of here!'' he shouted. He gave the reporter's tie
> three or four good pulls as he tried to shove him over the railing.
>
> Lieberman never publicly apologized to the people he was
> accused of swindling.
>
> Lieberman must have realized all his options had run out when
> he was told he couldn't board a plane to Havana. On Saturday
> night, police drove him to the airport. He had a flight ticket and
> the required visa to go to Cuba, where he planned to apply for a
> resident's visa.
>
> Police took him back to his apartment -- about an hour's drive --
> when the airplane's crew refused to let him board.
>
> ``Things were not in order,''' an airline employee said.
>
> Lieberman's lawyer Hernan Montealegre predicted that
> Lieberman would have been arrested and returned to the United
> States if he had been deported to another country.
>
> Lieberman's most recent difficulties started late last year when
> the Chilean government refused to renew his resident visa. About
> two weeks ago, the country's Supreme Court upheld a
> government order to expel him.
>
> Miles said she suspects that because Lieberman was never tried
> in the fraud case here, his remaining money will go to his estate,
> not to his creditors. She said she other creditors believe
> Lieberman still had money despite Chile's decision to expel him.
>
> Miles said Alan Lieberman ``did the right thing'' by returning to
> St. Louis last year and pleading guilty.
>
> ``He probably figured he'd never see his brother again, anyway,''
> she said. ``What a sad thing.''
>
> Miles added that she was appreciative of federal authorities who
> never gave up their pursuit of the Liebermans. ``They never
> closed the door,'' she said.
>
> Alan Lieberman, 68, is serving at the federal prison in Lexington,
> Ky. Efforts to reach him Monday were unsuccessful.
>
> After Alan Lieberman's return, federal prosecutors quietly tried to
> negotiate an agreement for Harold to come home. On June 25,
> the federal court in St. Louis appointed lawyer Hardy Menees of
> Clayton to represent Harold Lieberman in the negotiations.
>
> Menees said Monday he had represented Lieberman ``to effect
> an orderly surrender and plea negotiations.''
>
> ``Despite discreet and diligent efforts, this result was never
> accomplished prior to his death today,'' Menees said.
>
> Reap said Menees had negotiated honorably.
>
> ``Harold was the one not dealing in good faith,'' Reap said.
>
> Harold Lieberman and his wife, Barbara, divorced in June 1995.
> That date is in a petition she filed a year ago Friday to change
> her
> last name to Kline. She previously was married to the late
> Richard Kline, her petition said. A judge in St. Louis County
> granted the request April 1.
>
> Reached Monday at her house in Ladue, Kline declined to
> discuss Lieberman's death.
>
> Alan Lieberman's wife, Phyllis Lieberman, pleaded guilty last
> year of federal currency violations. She admitted helping the
> Lieberman's Chilean lawyer, Alvaro Gomez, sneak some of the
> brothers' money into the United States. She also pleaded guilty of
> possessing a small amount of cocaine.
>
> She is serving her sentence at the federal prison camp, a
> minimum-security facility, in Pekin, Ill. near Peoria. Through the
> prison spokeswoman, Lieberman declined to discuss her former
> brother-in-law's death.
>
> When the Lieberman Corp. failed about 150 families lost escrow
> deposits.
>
> Among the victims was Carol Pohlman, who owns a condo near
> the one Harold Lieberman had planned for himself at The
> Carlyle, in Creve Coeur. Pohlman said from her winter home in
> Naples, Fla., that she feels sorry for Lieberman's relatives.
>
> ``Nobody should go out that way,'' Pohlman said. ``I guess his
> ego got him into this and his ego got him out of this.''
>
> She said an FBI agent who has worked on the case for years
> called her to tell her of the death. Pohlman said she believes the
> brothers had spent nearly all their money in Santiago.
>
> ``I still don't think we're going to get anything back but at least
> its
> over now,'' she added.
>
> After they arrived in Santiago, Harold and Alan Lieberman
> shared adjoining luxury apartments in a modern apartment
> building. Under house arrest for a time, they spent their time
> studying Spanish, eating long meals in front of a window with a
> spectacular view of the Andes and worrying about their possible
> extradition.
>
> It was a fear Harold Lieberman was never able to put out of his
> mind.
>
> Pohlman was unsure how to take Lieberman's death.
>
> ``Maybe he was despondent at this point, living under those
> conditions for the last six years,'' she said. ``It's sad but it's
> over.''