From Deseret News archives:
Location is key for an empress of real estate — even in death
Leona Helmsley, for years the imperious head of a multibillion-dollar real estate and hotel empire, will spend eternity in a $1.4 million suburban mausoleum with a magnificent view, alongside her beloved husband, Harry. She previously moved her husband's remains after becoming dissatisfied with his old neighborhood.
"You know what they say: location, location, location," said Philip Zegarelli, mayor of Sleepy Hollow, the quiet Westchester County town where Helmsley will be buried this week. "It's a very nice setting, well picked and well positioned."
The ornate granite mausoleum boasts 1,300 square feet, with a dozen Doric columns and stained-glass windows re-creating the Manhattan skyline — including the Empire State Building, once the crown jewel of the Helmsley properties.
The Pocantico River gurgles past the Helmsley holding in the tree-lined Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a historic 19th-century locale where Washington Irving and Andrew Carnegie were joined last week by philanthropist Brooke Astor.
Helmsley, who died Monday at her Connecticut home, became known as a hardhearted harpy with a hair-trigger temper after her 1988 indictment and subsequent conviction for tax evasion, when a Helmsley employee quoted her as snarling: "Only the little people pay taxes."
Harry Helmsley came to Sleepy Hollow, 14 miles north of New York City, last year after Leona engaged in an ugly battle with Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where the real estate magnate was originally buried in 1997.
The expansive family mausoleum at Woodlawn was memorably described as a "tomb with a view," but the sweeping vista disappeared when a public mausoleum — potentially filled with those "little people" who paid taxes — went up nearby three years ago.
An irate Leona called the new construction "a disgrace," and resolved to relocate the remains of her husband and her son, Jay Panzirer.
