Winging a Broadway Angel

As she told it, her life read like the scenario for a Broadway musical: the rebellious daughter of a rich Madrid family flees her unloving husband and arrives in Manhattan, pregnant, frightened and perilously low on funds. She endures trials that would break a lesser spirit. Finally, thanks to her beguiling charm, brains ("The bankers could not keep up with me ") and beauty, she achieves a success no other woman has ever attained--she becomes Broadway's boldest angel (a $57,000 investment in Hair brings a $2 million gain) and its hottest producer. And guess what? On the side, she concocts fantastic business deals that bring riches to her friends and show-biz backers--and yes, even to that little secretary who entrusted her life savings to her.

As the curtain dropped on her career, Adela Holzer. 43, played out her self-scripted role with aplomb. She even managed to maintain her poise after she was indicted last week in New York State Supreme Court on 137 counts of larceny and falsifying records. "I don't wear dark glasses when I went to be booked," she told TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin in her heavily accented English. "Everything will be done openly as 1 have led my life." With first-nighter enthusiasm, she gushed over the mug shots taken as she was booked, pronouncing them "the best. I have short hair now; I look better than ever." And what about the many charges against her? "I have every good intention," she said. "In all my life, no one ever lost money with me." Why do some of her former investors claim otherwise? ''They confuse profits and losses."

According to the 99-page indictment filed against Holzer by New York Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz, she stole $824,820 from some of her investors in a variety of deals and issued false records "with intent to defraud." One example: an allegedly altered bank statement from a Chase Manhattan branch in Indonesia listed her balance as $10 million. In reality, her deposits at the time were less than $500.

Like Monopoly. As disaffected investors tell it, Holzer used her Hair-built Broadway fame to recruit backers for a wide variety of foreign import, commodity and real estate deals. She started out with a small group of associates, friends from the Spanish community and Broadway chums, to whom she would casually murmur, say, something about how she had an opportunity to make a bundle on Japanese automobiles imported to Indonesia. At first the results were impressive. One woman gave her $5,000 and made a $12,260 profit within a year. She then got some friends to put up $15,000 for a land deal in Spain; seven months later, they were paid back $26,325--a 75.5% profit. Says she: "It was a lark--it was like Monopoly money." As word of Adela's business acumen spread, people clamored to invest in her ventures, which until recently she ran from her home with the aid of two staffers, a middle-aged English secretary and a young college graduate. At first, most investors continued to do well, and some have volunteered to testify on her behalf. But later others failed to receive their anticipated returns. Last year Adela began offering shares in a Panamanian company called Dinars Interna tional Inc. Variations of her name began to appear on her letters--Adela LaFora. Maria LaFora, Maria Holzer, Adela Sanchez Duchin.

When backers complained about delays in payments. Adela gave excuses about how banks had lost her deposits, how Indonesia had frozen her assets, or how the C.P.A. in Djakarta had died, fouling up her accounting system. But then some began checking her stories. Her Panamanian company bore a confusing relationship to her similarly named Indonesian firm. A Swedish firm with which she said she was working real estate deals in Spain was not listed in any Swedish corporate directory.

Alarmed, three of Adela's investors filed bankruptcy proceedings against her earlier this month. Meanwhile, the New York State attorney general's office had been conducting the investigation that led to last week's indictment. The SEC is pursuing a separate inquiry.

But Adela professes to be unfazed.

"I am very confident," she says. "I don't disappear." She goes to her office each day and continues to make last-minute changes on her autobiography, If at first . . ., which is due out in the fall. After firing two other attorneys, she has now settled on Roy Cohn, the onetime investigator for Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy. "1 know he is controversial," says Adela. "but he treats me like a human being." On 70 charges of second-degree larceny in the New York indictment alone, she could be sentenced to a total of 490 years in jail, not counting the additional decades that might be added for other state charges. The total would make Adela the longest running Broadway play ever.

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