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MONEY CO. FROM THE RULING FAMILY TO THE RESIDENT JOCKOCRACY, SPORTS ARE A DEFINING ELEMENT IN THE BIKINI MECCA OF MONACO

Once you learn that Gunnar Everhed is Swedish, two things about
him don't surprise you: that he has intimate knowledge of the
confiscatory tax codes of northern Europe and that he regards
the recent travails of German tennis star Steffi Graf and her
father, Peter, with an abundance of Hammarskjoldian compassion.
"Such a pity," says Everhed, whose business is advising foreign
nationals, primarily athletes, on how to establish and maintain
residency in the Mediterranean tax haven of Monaco. "And so
unnecessary."

If only the Grafs had come to him a dozen years ago, Everhed
says, they might have avoided all the unpleasantness now
besieging them, from the tax-fraud charges to the embarrassing
revelations of sexual indiscretions, to Peter's humiliating
prison sentence of three years and nine months. Actually,
Everhed says, "to come to me is not enough. A client must also
listen to me. And the client must do as I say."

The Grafs could have easily cleared the first hurdle of tax-free
residency in Monaco: a bank account of 500,000 French francs (or
roughly $100,000). But telling them that they should have made
the move today is like telling Mary Lincoln that she and Abe
should have rented a video instead of going to the theater.
Still, Gunnar's admonition bears repeating so long as there
remain sportsmen and sportswomen who haven't yet read the
chapter in The Pro Athlete's Primer that falls somewhere between
Keep Your Eye on the Ball and It Ain't Over Till It's Over: Get
Thee and Thy Sweat-Gotten Millions to Monaco.

Once a playground for tycoons, courtesans and nobility, Monaco
has been a company town for the jockocracy ever since tennis
players Bjorn Borg and Mats Wilander bivouacked there during the
1970s and '80s, seeking refuge from Sweden's compulsory military
service, a marginal tax rate upwards of 85% and public
disclosure laws. Now tennis's Richard Krajicek and Thomas Muster
count themselves among Monaco's 30,000 residents, as do athletes
from such other sports as track (pole vaulter Sergei Bubka,
sprinter Merlene Ottey and hurdler Mark McKoy), auto racing
(Gerhard Berger and Jacques Villeneuve), rally driving (Colin
McRae, Carlos Sainz) and cycling (Toni Rominger). Together
they're exerting outsized influence on the principality's
economy, social life and international image.

Indeed, this location, location, location--it's where Suzanne
Lenglen served and Johnny Weissmuller swam; where Princess
Grace's lady-in-waiting was Virginia Gallico, widow of
sportswriter Paul; where Prince Rainier keeps his private
collection of 85 vintage automobiles--seems perfectly matched
with vocation, vocation, vocation. The offices of the
International Amateur Athletic Federation (the world governing
body of track and field), the General Association of
International Sports Federations, the International Association
Against Violence in Sport and the European operations of
tennis's ATP Tour can be found in Monaco, as can three of the
highlights of the sporting calendar, the Monte Carlo Grand Prix
track meet, the Monte Carlo Open of tennis and the Monaco Grand
Prix. Every May sidewalks morph into grandstands and parking
garages into pits so that Formula One drivers might travel the
78 earsplitting circumnavigations that make up the race. With
September comes the World Push Championship, in which two- and
four-man teams turned out in shorts push a wheeled bobsled on
rails down the long quay of the port, then hop in like common
hobos to see how far they can coast. "It does look kind of
funny," concedes Prince Albert, the second of Rainier's three
children, who has represented his country as a bobsledder in
three Winter Olympics and never misses the Monaco event.

Monaco takes its name from Portus Herculis Monoeci, the
legendary port of Hercules, so there was muscularity in the
place's heritage even before a Genovese swashbuckler named
Francois Grimaldi, posing as a monk and concealing a knife
beneath his habit, seized it for Albert's forebears in 1297. For
most of the seven centuries after that bit of derring-do there
wasn't much to rule over, just penury and bleak rock. But in
1858 the principality felt the first stirrings of the gaming
industry that would be its salvation. Prince Charles III ordered
the erection of a casino on an outcropping that came to be known
as Monte Carlo, and the first gambler there was a winner,
pocketing two francs. Unfortunately, it had cost him more than
50 francs for the four-hour coach ride from Nice and the
perilous mule-borne descent to Monte Carlo itself, and the
casino soon went bust. Only after the French government extended
the railroad to Monaco in 1868 did the suckers start streaming
in so steadily that the Grimaldis could abolish all taxes.

The casino is where Dick plied Liz with diamonds, where Mata
Hari was revealed to be a spy and where to this day few pilgrims
enter without rubbing for good luck the statue of the French
king Louis XIV in front of the adjacent Hotel de Paris. Earlier
in this century, in what might be characterized as an attempt to
diversify the economy, Monte Carlo introduced cabaret-style
entertainment, enlisting a number of showgirls, including one
American who, legend has it, was sunning herself on a balcony at
the Hotel de Paris one afternoon with a towel draped just so.
Suddenly a wolf whistle cut the air, and she discovered to her
horror that a rogue gust of wind had rearranged her concession
to modesty.

"I see you're no gentleman!" she said indignantly, glaring at
her admirer and clutching her serviette.

"I see you're no gentleman, either," he called back. His riposte
so disarmed her, the story goes, that the two were eventually
married.

Romance like that was of a piece with Monaco's gambling trade
and, after Rainier married American movie star Grace Kelly in
1956, its international glamour. But the image of cash and
cachet has been gradually recast over the past two decades.
While the Grimaldi gilt has been tarnished by tragedy and
scandal, the industries of banking, communications and trade
have grown so much in the principality that gaming now accounts
for only about 4% of Monaco's economy. In deference to this new
order, in which financial status counts as much as social rank,
it's no longer appropriate to describe residents as "the idle
rich." They're now "high-net-worth private individuals." Nor is
Monaco a "tax haven" or, worse yet--this is Somerset Maugham's
phrase--"a sunny place for shady people." It is, according to
the government, "a tax-efficient center of commerce." Clean,
mercantile and international, sports fit in with the palace's
vision of the principality's future while retaining a whiff of
the storybook aspect that has been missing in Monaco since 1982,
the year that Grace died.

In this place that for so long staked its livelihood on the
losses of others, the first family has recently suffered
profound losses of its own: Rainier, his wife, who was killed in
a car accident; Princess Caroline, her second husband, Stefano
Casiraghi, who died in a powerboat accident eight years later;
and Princess Stephanie, her ex-husband, Daniel Ducruet, whom she
divorced last October after he was photographed poolside
flagrante delicto with a former Miss Nude Belgium.

Prince Albert, the heir to Rainier's throne, is the one happy
exemption from this sad streak, and sports may be part of the
reason. Not that he has won much of anything in the can of his
bobsled; he never placed higher than 25th in his three Winter
Games. But there's something winning about the extent of his
appetite for athletics: He is president of Monaco's yacht club
and of the principality's swimming, track and bobsled
federations. His influence was also instrumental in helping
Monaco lure the aforementioned international sports bodies along
with such events as the Special Olympics, the World Monopoly
Championships and the Dream Team's 1992 pre-Barcelona training
camp.

How much of a sporting omnivore is the athlete formally known as
Prince? He has a weight room in the palace, and in the morning,
if the sea is calm, he'll jog down to the port of Fontvieille
and take his sea kayak out on the Mediterranean. He frequently
joins moonlighting resident athletes--Bubka, McKoy, Sainz and
Rominger--on Monaco's Star Team for the Children, a soccer
troupe that travels around Europe to play benefits for charity.
Of the 17 sports accommodated by Monaco's Stade Louis II sports
facility, Albert has partaken of judo (he's a black belt),
boxing (workouts, not bouts), gymnastics, soccer, swimming,
volleyball and weightlifting.

In addition, at Lycee Albert I, he rowed and captained the
handball team. At Amherst College he played four years of
soccer, swam until he caught the flu during his sophomore
season, played a little volleyball and jayvee tennis and threw
the javelin. While attending language school at Cambridge
University, he gave rugby a try. And one summer, at age 17, as a
waterfront counselor at Camp Tecumseh on New Hampshire's Lake
Winnipesaukee, he coached the 10-and-under boys to a dual-meet
victory so sweet that if you ask him about it today, the prince
will triumphantly enunciate every syllable of the vanquished
camp--Pe-mi-ge-was-sett. "I just can't see myself being
inactive," he says. "Sports are so much a part of my life and my
character, and they're a way to escape. I had to travel pretty
far to find a bobsled track. It got me into a completely
different environment with completely different people and
allowed me to be in the Olympics, which is the greatest thrill
of my life."

Albert has had his share of sporting mishaps: During the cycling
portion of a minitriathlon in Monaco four years ago, he swerved
to avoid a camera crew, skidded and ruptured a tendon in his
wrist. And he has twice essayed the Paris-Dakar rally, neither
time with much success. "Broke down both years on the same day
in pretty much the same place in Niger," he says, vowing not to
enter the race again. "Someone was trying to tell me something."

But he is an Olympian. In addition to his participation in the
Winter Games, he's a member of the International Olympic
Committee--in fact, the only member of that sclerotic body to
actually compete in Lillehammer, where he lived quite
unceremoniously in the athletes' village, and his credential
read ALBERT GRIMALDI. He also served as the IOC observer for
modern pentathlon in Atlanta. "It's the one sport that probably
would have been perfect for me," he says. "I was a pretty good
fencer, and I rode a lot as a kid. And shooting and running and
swimming, you can always work on."

Albert turns 39 on March 14, and when he succeeds the
73-year-old Rainier he will be the 33rd Grimaldi to rule. In
keeping with a deal his father hammered out with French
president Charles De Gaulle in 1962, Monaco will revert to
France if the as-yet-unmarried prince hereditaire should fail to
produce an heir--page through this issue, Albert; page through
it carefully, my man--though Albert has the option of
designating his successor as well.

Only 5,000 of Monaco's residents are citizens, and, in part
because they are so few, the palace can treat each with
paternalistic solicitude. No Monegasques, not even the
Grimaldis, are permitted in the casino where the depredations of
gaming might touch them. "It is as if the prince is saying,
'This is not good for the family,'" says Jean-Pierre Viale, the
Monaco native who played the sleazy nightclub emcee in Blue
Velvet. "He is like the bartender who chooses not to drink or
the surgeon who will not operate on his own family."

But Monaco is a place small enough so that a commoner might show
a prince reciprocal concern. Growing up with a front-row seat
for the Grand Prix, Rainier developed a taste for fast cars
that, while suiting his pre-Grace life as a heedless playboy,
landed him in several auto accidents. Viale tells how a number
of Monegasques, including a great-grandfather of his who worked
in the palace, pleaded with the young Rainier to give up racing
for the good of the country and ultimately prevailed on him to
be a collector of roadsters rather than a pilot of them.

Find the switchback curve over which Grace's Rover 3500 plunged,
and you have located Monaco's grassy knoll, the place to which
the principality's loss of innocence might be fixed. According
to Robert Lacey's biography Grace, only days before the
accident, at the Grimaldis' weekend house high above the
Mediterranean in Roc Agel, she still thought Stephanie would
soon be going to Paris to study fashion. But her younger
daughter's boyfriend, Paul Belmondo, planned to learn how to
drive race cars, and Stephanie told her mother that she was
going to race car school too. Agitated and perhaps arguing with
Stephanie, who was a passenger in the car, Grace is believed to
have suffered a stroke as she tried to negotiate the serpentine
descent into town. Couple that tragedy with the 1990 death of
Casiraghi, then 30 and the defending world offshore champ, the
day after his announcement that he would "soon" give up the
sport, and the instinct to keep Rainier--and Albert, who as a
boy wished he were Jackie Stewart--out of fast conveyances looks
to be a sound one.

As a teenager backpacking with buddies along the Riviera, I
never breached the borders of Monaco. The place was
prohibitively expensive, and the casino required a coat and tie,
which we hadn't packed. So to lash Monaco to my imagination I
had always run string through two geographical grommets, one on
either side of the principality: Cap d'Ail, the place where
Grace's Rover came to crumpled rest and where we stayed in a
villa turned youth hostel and chilled the evening's vin blanc in
the Mediterranean; and Menton, where we unfurled our sleeping
bags in a schoolyard, only to be chased out by a fussbudget
prefect at sunrise.

Upon first glimpsing Monaco two decades after getting run out of
Menton on a Eurail, I was struck by how easy it is to tell the
residents from the tourists. Whether staring slack-jawed at the
Cartier windows or hopefully ascending the casino steps, the
sojourners are all palpably in search of something. Residents,
by contrast, all look hunted: the men by revenuers, the women by
cellulite, the poodles by the gendarmes (there is one for every
60 residents) ready to impound them if they should deliver
themselves of so much as a single crotte. In Monaco, the society
chronicler Taki once observed, "One does not choose friends.
It's a bit like being in prison. You talk to the people you're
thrown in with."

So it is that baseliners coexist alongside hurdlers alongside
time-trialers. To become tax-free residents they had to produce
bank records establishing the filth of their richness; to renew
that residence card they must prove either that they have lived
in Monaco for at least six months of the previous year or that
the principality is "the center of their interests"--in other
words, that between tournaments or races they routinely alight
at their soulless studio apartments. (Someone who has actually
visited Krajicek's digs describes them as little more than a
mattress on the floor, a stack of CDs and a mass of dirty
laundry "that looked like it had been dropped from a great
height." This is the habitat of a guy who, you'll recall, called
female tennis players "pigs.")

Resident status is so prized that, once granted, athletes will
do almost anything to retain it. There are slapstick tales of
their rushing into Monaco, turning on the taps and flicking on
the lights, trying to run up meter readings so their
documentation will look more impressive when their permits come
up for renewal. Australian tennis pro Mark Woodforde unavoidably
missed the Monte Carlo Open last April when a sister in London
fell ill, so he wrote an abject letter of apology to the
authorities, lest his absence be held against him when he
renewed his residency. "It doesn't work anymore simply to have
an address and never be here," says a Monaco-based American
lawyer with many international clients.

But what wealthy and healthy athlete wouldn't want to be here?
"It's not exactly a great hardship," says Marcos Romagosa, an
agent in International Management Group's Monaco office.
Residents must cope with a negligible crime rate; the Nice-Cote
d'Azur International Airport's being a six-minute chopper flight
away; breakfasts of socca, a crepelike delicacy made from beaten
garbanzo beans, served fresh off the griddle down at the market;
and with the choice of clay or hard courts at the country club.
There also looms the likelihood that they will bump into such
resident lovelies as Helena Christensen, Claudia Schiffer and
the herein-pictured Karen Mulder at jock commissaries like Stars
'n' Bars, a sports bar where a framed cover of this magazine,
signed by the depicted, one Jus d'Orange Simpson, graces the
doorway. In florid script J.O. reassures the owners, "I'm
rooting for you!"

And if they should feel just a bit hemmed in by Monaco's paltry
473 acres, the residents can always hop into their Testarossas
and head 90 minutes into the Alps to ski, or cruise the
Riviera's littoral, or explore the Provencal backcountry with
its mile after Peter Mayle of terra-cotta-roofed villages and
parasol pines. To a Swede or a German or a Dutchman there is
much to be said for life lived at a pace that should be unlawful
for its languor and in weather so reliably satisfying that the
local paper integrates an all-purpose forecast into its name,
Nice Matin.

There is, of course, even more to be said for not being taxed at
all, and that is where Gunnar Everhed comes in. He has one more
cautionary tale to tell, about Michael Schumacher, the two-time
Formula One world champion driver from Germany, and a former
client. "He lived in Monaco, but wanted a second residence, in
Italy or France," Everhed says, getting all rueful at the
retelling. "I recommended Italy because it is so much easier to
dodge the fiscal authorities, and there are lower taxes. While
if you have a house in France, you are taxed again and again."

Though he had gone to Gunnar, though he had listened to Gunnar,
Schumacher did something very stupid. He didn't do as Gunnar
said. His manager went ahead and bought that villa in France
anyway. Then Schumacher moved in, not very inconspicuously, with
his dogs and cars and girlfriend. "Aha!" said the Clouseaus of
the French tax police. "You are ici, nooooet in Monaco!" And the
same German IRS, da Finanzamt, that turned the Grafs' world into
a living hell wanted to know the provenance of every one of
those 17 million francs Herr Schumacher's manager plunked down
for that villa. All because he didn't stick by his principality.

"I tell all the clients that they must play the game," says
Everhed.

Last year Ferrari paid Schumacher $25 million to drive for its
Formula One team. He made another $8 million in endorsements. Of
all athletes worldwide, only Mike Tyson and Michael Jordan
outearned him. But ask Everhed what has become of his former
client, and it is as if this international superstar who
routinely stares down death has dropped off the face of the
earth. "Last I heard, he was living in Switzerland," he says.
"Or suddenly moved to Portugal."

Such a pity. And so unnecessary.

B/W PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE RAU [Aerial view of Monte Carlo]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE RAU KAREN MULDER bikini by DELFINA SWIMWEAR [$130]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE RAU KAREN MULDER bikini by BACHATA SWIMWEAR [$145]

B/W PHOTO: SOCIETE DES BAINS DE MER/EDITIONS ASSOULINE THE NIGHTLIFE: SOPHIA LOREN HEADS OUT (1969); PRINCE RAINIER AND PRINCESS GRACE ENTER THE CENTENNIAL BALL (1966); BLACKJACK DRAWS THE BLACK-TIE SET [Sophia Loren]

B/W PHOTO: SIPA PRESS [See caption above--Princess Grace and Prince Rainier]

B/W PHOTO [See caption above--gamblers playing blackjack]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE RAU KAREN MULDER bikini by CALVIN KLEIN [$80]

COLOR PHOTO: PAT BEHAR/TEMPSPORT, PARIS THE GRAND PRIX: AFTER 78 SCENIC LAPS, THE WINNER GETS A ROYAL RECEPTION (GIUSEPPE FARINA, 1948) [Race cars]

B/W PHOTO: PIERO SAPORITI [See caption above--Giuseppe Farina with trophy]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE RAU KAREN MULDER bikini by ROSA FERRER [$122 FOR SET]

B/W PHOTO: EVERETT COLLECTION TO CATCH A THIEF: WHILE FILMING HITCHCOCK'S 1955 CLASSIC WITH CARY GRANT, GRACE MET HER PRINCE [Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in movie To Catch a Thief]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE RAU KAREN MULDER bikini by DOMANI [$228]

COLOR PHOTO: J.M. EMPORTES/AGENCE D.P.P.I. THE MONTE CARLO OPEN: PRINCESS CAROLINE PRESENTS THE CHAMPION'S TROPHY TO A RESIDENT OF MONACO, BJORN BORG (1979) [Tennis stadium in Monte Carlo]

COLOR PHOTO: PRESSE SPORTS [See caption above--Bjorn Borg and Princess Caroline]COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE RAU KAREN MULDER bikini by DELFINA SWIMWEAR [$130]