Genevieve in Hofmann's Paris apartment in September 2005.   (Photo: Magnum)

Arie David sees things quite differently.

David grew up in Israel and moved to the U.S. in the sixties to attend Yale Law School, where he later taught international law. Now in his sixties, he runs a solo practice out of his Westport, Connecticut, home, specializing in joint ventures and “meta-national” trusts.

David met Hofmann in the early eighties through a mutual friend, Tony Pell, who had gotten to know the doctor through their mutual girlfriend, Genevieve’s sister, Evelyne. In 1984, David drafted the trust that controls the vast majority of Hofmann’s assets. By most accounts, Hofmann has less than $2 million outside the trust and somewhere between $400 million and a gazillion dollars inside it. David saw Hofmann only sporadically until 1999, when Hofmann asked David to amend the trust. At that point, David came to play, for better or worse, a more active role in safeguarding the well-being of Hofmann and his estate.

An attorney and academic of comparatively modest success, David looked up to Hofmann as both a businessman who had brokered deals with Josip Tito after the war and a physician who read medical journals into his nineties. “He was a scholar and a gentleman,” David says. “He was one of the smartest people I’ve met.” But after a May 1999 hospitalization for pancreatitis, Hofmann’s mind began to slip. By 2002, he barked like a dog, waved at invisible people, couldn’t recognize friends. He didn’t even remember his own apartment, recalls David, who checked in on him regularly. “He’d say, ‘Which hotel is this?’ ”

David appreciated that Genevieve took care of Hofmann until, over lunch at Artisanal in November 2003, she told him her big news: She and Hofmann had secretly married.

“I was shocked,” David says. “Everyone knew he was not well. She knew.”

Over the next few months, the tension between David and Genevieve escalated. After Genevieve flew her husband to Paris, David and Pell asked the court to appoint a guardian, David’s daughter Charyn Powers, to look after Hofmann. Genevieve’s supporters believe that Powers’s appointment undermines David’s credibility; with a pool of thousands of guardians who are objective, why use the only one who isn’t? Many involved in the case believe that David is like the Wizard of Oz. Trustees man the trust and Powers controls most everything else, but David, they say, is pulling the strings.

A month after her appointment, Powers petitioned the Manhattan Supreme Court to annul Genevieve and Hofmann’s marriage. If the court dissolved the marriage, Genevieve would no longer have the legal authority to keep Hofmann in Paris. More important, she’d lose her claim on a piece of Hofmann’s estate.

The annulment proceeding stretched out more than a year. Genevieve’s attorney, Sandra Katz, calls the trial the most “vicious” of her 36-year career. Matrimonial attorneys familiar with the proceedings say that Genevieve’s team was thoroughly outmatched. David and Powers took advantage of their access to the untold fortune in Hofmann’s trust. By the midpoint of the trial, they had paid their lead attorney, Donald Frank of the firm Blank Rome, more than $225,000. To date, Genevieve’s lawyers, Katz and Rachel Hirschfeld (daughter of the late parking-lot tycoon Abe Hirschfeld), have been paid less than their expenses. Frank called on high-priced physicians, including David’s cousin, to testify about CAT scans and other evidence of the severe, irreversible dementia that afflicted Hofmann at least a year before he and Genevieve tied the knot. Hirschfeld, 59, but just out of law school, was chastised by the judge for eating a sandwich in court.

This July, Justice Laura Drager annulled the marriage, ruling that in July 2003, Hofmann lacked the mental capacity required by state law to marry. The decision was faxed to a court-appointed French guardian, who ordered Genevieve to leave the Paris apartment. (Genevieve plans to appeal the decision, and remains in the apartment.)

David insists that he is acting with his client’s best interests at heart. “I care a lot about Dr. Hofmann,” David said. “The only interest I have is, I’d like to get Dr. Hofmann out of being a hostage.”

But Genevieve’s attorneys—Katz, Hirschfeld, and, in France, Alain Cornec—suggest that David is motivated by greed. “There are many signs that the David group”—David, Powers, Pell, and their attorneys—“will profit,” Cornec says. “There are a number of things that raise questions.”

Only David knows the terms of the trust, which he revised for Hofmann in March 1999, just two months before the hospitalization that precipitated Hofmann’s decline. “After that, we know nothing,” Cornec said. “It all disappears into the deepest possible fog.” The trustees reside in Gibraltar, a more unusual tax haven than, say, Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. David did not present a copy of the trust to the court, and told me if I wanted to see it, I’d have to fly to Gibraltar.