The Assassination of Monaco’s Richest Woman… By Her Son-In-Law: The Tragedy of Hélène Pastor – HT
There’s a particular vulnerability that comes with being a parent to adult children who’ve never been financially independent. Not because they lack ability, but because your generosity has made independence unnecessary and therefore undesirable. When you provide €500,000 monthly to each child, you’re not just supporting their lifestyle, but creating a dependency so complete that your continued existence becomes the only thing standing between them and financial reality they’ve never had to face. Elen Pastor spent decades being
Monaco’s most generous mother, funding every venture and covering every expense for children who’d inherited her empire, but not the hunger that built it. creating relationships where love and financial desperation became impossible to separate. What she couldn’t have anticipated was that her generosity would attract someone who recognized that monthly allowances create perfect leverage.
Marry the dependent daughter, live off her money for decades, then discover that the grandmother controlling the purse strings has become the only obstacle between you and inheritance. In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we expose how Monaco’s second wealthiest woman was murdered by someone who’d spent 28 years at family dinners, calculating exactly when maternal generosity would become more valuable dead than alive.
Proving that sometimes the price of supporting your children is paid by becoming expendable to those who’ve [music] attached themselves to your fortune. 1880, penniless Italian stonemason Giovani Batista Pasta stumbled into Monaco with hands destroyed by mine work and ambitions that would spawn an empire worth 20 billion. The orphan from Buio had already spent his childhood underground, extracting minerals since age 13, learning that fortune favored those who grabbed it by the throat.
Monaco’s son church needed builders. Pastor recristening himself Jean Baptiste in French fashion laid stones for wages that barely covered bread. Each block a step toward transformation. Years passed in backbreaking labor, but past a possessed vision beyond his station, saving every Frank while studying Monaco’s geography like a general surveying battlefields.
1920s saw him establish JB Pastor and Phils, but the pivot came in 1936. Prince Louis II needed someone to build Monaco’s first football stadium. Pastor won the contract. That stadium’s silhouette became his company’s permanent logo branded on every building that would follow. A monument to the [music] moment poverty became power.
Post World War II, Monaco presented opportunities invisible to ordinary men. While others saw barren eastern seafront wasteland, Jean Baptiste recognized the Larvato district’s potential. He bought beachfront parcels for nothing when there was nothing to the east of the Monte Carlo Casino. Betting that millionaires would eventually crave Mediterranean views.
Each purchase expanded his holdings along what would become Monaco’s golden coastline, transforming worthless sand into the principality’s most coveted addresses. Son Gildo inherited more than a construction company. He possessed his father’s predatory vision for exploiting Monaco’s transformation into Europe’s money laundering jewelry box.
1966 changed everything. Prince Raineia, riding high on Grace Kelly glamour and tax haven status, authorized Gildo to build high-rise apartments along the coast. This single permission slip from the palace created a real estate revolution, allowing vertical expansion in a nation constrained by geography and French borders.
The pastor doctrine took shape. Build luxury towers. Never sell. Collect rent forever. Let compound interest and property appreciation work their dark magic. Formula 1 champions, arms dealers, and oligarchs would write monthly checks to the Pastor Empire for generations, trapped by Monaco’s limited geography and unlimited demand.
The portfolio exploded. 4,000 properties minimum, perhaps 4,500, worth between 12 and 20 billion, effectively 1/3 of Monaco’s total real estate. By the 1990s, the pastors controlled more of Monaco than anyone except the ruling family itself. Their influence measured in concrete and monthly revenues.
Gildo’s daughter, Elen, born 1937, represented the third generation of pastor dominance, inheriting the premium assets when her father died in 1990. Her empire encompassed Labaya, Emily Palace, the Trokado, Continental, Luilkill Apartments, and the Gildo Pastor Center, $3.7 billion concentrated in six square miles. Monaco nicknamed her Lavvis Princess, the vice princess, acknowledging the pastors as the principality’s shadow royalty, second only to the Grimaldes themselves.
Yet Elen cultivated eccentricities that humanized her billions. She drove through Monte Carlo in a London taxi, preferring its boxy anonymity to chauffeurdriven Bentleys. Two children consumed her attention. Sylvia, born 1961 from marriage to a pole named Ratkowski, and Gildo Palanka Pastor, born 1967, with dentist Claude Palanka.
Each child received monthly allowances of €500,000, €6 million annually, enough to purchase whatever they desired, except independence from mother’s purse strings. This financial arrangement would prove fatal, creating dependency that attracted predators who saw opportunity in Helen’s maternal generosity. The pastor name decorated 15% of Monaco’s residential buildings.
A vertical empire built by three generations of calculated greed and architectural ambition. Giovanni Batista’s ghost must have smiled watching his great grandchildren collect rent from billionaires. His mining scarred hands having built Monaco’s modern skeleton. Then came 1986, a charity ball where daughter Sylvia encountered a Polish charmer whose fraudulent credentials would eventually paint the Pastor Empire’s walls with blood.
Voychanovski materialized at Monaco’s 1986 charity ball, wearing bespoke suits and lies tailored just as carefully by expert hands. Warsaw birthed him August 15th, 1949, equipping him with communist era survival skills, forge documents, fabricate histories, monetize proximity to power.
His father, Sven Borberg, earned distinction as a Nazi collaborator, convicted and imprisoned after World War II. Legacy of deception passed to the son. The resume glittered with false gems. Cambridge University graduate, hotel magnate, casino operator, nanotechnology pioneer through Ferma SAM, Poland’s honorary consul to Monaco.
He’d co-founded Monaco against autism, earned France’s National Order of Merit from President Nicholas Sarosi. Genuine honors built a top fraudulent foundations. Sylvia Pasta, nursing divorce wounds at 53, avoided the dance floor that night until Janowski appointed himself her permanent companion, deploying charm like a sniper. History repeated itself, he’d later muse, noting how Sylvia’s mother once eloped with Sylvia’s father, a Polish man, before the family retrieved her.
Romantic precedent for his infiltration. 28 years together, one daughter. Millions upon millions siphoned from Sylvia’s accounts into Janowski’s elaborate theatrical production of non-existent success. Cambridge never knew him. Pascal Doryak, the personal trainer who’ eventually coordinate murder, had purchased that diploma from a Thai degree mill.
Hudson Oil existed primarily in Janowski’s imagination and self-authored Wikipedia entries. Reality, one defunct Polish refinery called Gleimar, purchased for $40 million, never paid. Court orders chased phantom payments while Hudson Oil’s website died and its headquarters transformed into a therapist’s office, fitting metaphor for Janowski’s delusional empire.
The company owed its first installment by the end of 2014. Pressure mounting as Janowski’s web of lies began fraying at every edge. Dubai became his financial laundromat. Sylvia’s money entered, emerged cleansed, then vanished into ventures that existed solely on letterhead and cocktail party conversations. The only money he ever had was his wife’s money, Gildo’s lawyer would observe, summarizing decades of parasitic attachment to the pastor fortune.
2012 yacht purchase. Janowski doctorred invoices adding €1 million to the price. Sylvia paid. He pocketed the difference with practiced nonchalants. London apartment for their daughter. The money bought property in Janowski’s name. secretly mortgaged before Sylvia noticed her gift had been stolen and leveraged.
Dental school tuition became another profit center. Actual cost €250,000 annually. Janowski’s claim 500,000. Pure mathematics of theft. 16 months before murder, 7.5 million of Sylvia’s 9 million vanished into Janowski’s financial quicksand, irretrievable as smoke. Investors adored Sylvia, he’d admit during trial. Whenever there was a problem, she’d call her friends and they’d sort it out.
Parasitism perfected. His Polish console title, unpaid, ceremonial, worthless, opened Monaco’s doors through perceived prestige rather than actual power. Fool’s gold that fooled everyone. 2012 brought disaster. Sylvia’s cancer diagnosis threatened the host parasite relationship that sustained Yanowski’s entire fictional existence.
Simple equation tormented him. If Sylvia died before Helen, the monthly 500,000 disappeared. His debts would devour him within weeks. Pascal Doryak testified that immediately after Sylvia’s diagnosis, Janovski first mentioned eliminating the old woman, murder as financial planning. Helen allegedly tortured Sylvia psychologically daily, Janowski claimed, though prosecutors recognized this as postuous character assassination designed to justify matricside.
The relationship between mother and daughter had always been complex, but Janowski weaponized these tensions, presenting himself as Sylvia’s protector against maternal cruelty. Hudson Oil’s collapse accelerated. Creditors mobilized. Criminal prosecution loomed. Every direction led to exposure, bankruptcy, and the end of Janowski’s Monaco masquerade.
Helen Pastor, 77 and healthy, controlled the solution to every problem. Her death would unlock Sylvia’s inheritance and save Yanowski from his self-created catastrophe. 700 p.m. May 6th, 2014. Helen Pastor completed her daily ritual at Lar Hospital, kissing her stroke afflicted son, Gildo, before departing. Muhammad Darwitch waited beside the black Lancia Voyager.
20 years of faithful service about to end in shotgun smoke and blood splatter. The chauffeur had become more than an employee. He was Hela’s trusted companion, a member of the extended family who’ driven her through two decades of Monaco life. The Lancia nose toward traffic when sudden movement erupted. A figure sprinting from behind concrete barriers sorn off shotgun rising toward tinted glass.
First blast shattered the passenger window. Buckshot invaded Elen’s jaw, neck, chest, [music] abdomen. Over 50 pellets perforating Monaco’s second wealthiest woman. The gunman leaned through the destroyed window, firing again. Darwitch caught the second load. Face, neck, stomach, chest transformed into a geography of wounds.
20 m forward, the Lancia crashed, its momentum finally exhausted. Dr. Eric Qua smoking nearby rushed toward gunfire echoes and found Helen pulseless. “I thought she was dead,”Quir later testified, describing the horrific scene of Monaco’s property queen slumped in her seat, chest riddled with shot. One witness described raw terror.
“I saw the gunman turn back towards me with his big gun and a bag. I thought he was coming for me.” Surveillance cameras captured criminal incompetence. Assassins arriving via taxi after failing to purchase a scooter, then escaping in another cab like tourists. €500 for the return taxi to Marseilles.
An absurd sum that immediately flagged the transaction. They did everything you’re not supposed to do. Police marveled. Amateur hour continued at their nice hotel, the Azour Riviera near the railroad station. DNA on a shower gel bottle, cell phone records creating digital breadcrumbs, financial transfers any investigator could follow.
A maid wearing gloves had appropriated the shower gel bottle and delivered it to police, providing the DNA evidence that would help convict the killers. Samin Side Ahmed, 24, Al-Hair Hammadi, 31. Koros Island natives with Marseilles addresses and criminal histories hired guns who’d never graduated from street crime.
They lived in Marseilles’s rough northern districts, men whose poverty made them susceptible to Janowski’s money, desperate enough to attempt murder for €30,000 each. 4 days later, Muhammad Darwitch died. Collateral damage. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong employer. His only crime driving Monaco’s marked woman. May 16th brought miracle.
Helen conscious speaking through her tracheotomy tube about a black man appear who fired two shots. The first on her, the second on Muhammad Darwitch. Police presented photographs. Helen studied them carefully before whispering, “I’m scared. I want to see you again because I have other things to say.” Those crucial words never came.
May 21st, Helen Pastor died, taking her secrets and suspicions into Monaco’s most expensive grave. Prince Albert issued platitudes, deep support for the Pastor family. Black funeral ribbons decorated corporate signs. Monaco reeled from its first assassination in memory. Investigators initially suspected Italian syndicates, Dranguta, Camora, or Russian mafia expansion into Riviera real estate.
The Pastor Empire made an obvious target. Financial forensics revealed different story. Nine Dubai account withdrawals between April 22nd and May 4th. €200,000 systematically extracted. June 23rd brought thunder. 23 arrests across France, including Sylvia Pastor and her Polish partner, the grieving daughter, and her Cambridge educated consort.
Pascal Doriaak cracked immediately. The personal trainer had no stomach for murder charges, spilling every detail of Janowski’s recruitment and payment schedule. The conspiracy extended from the splenders of Monaco to the slums of Marseilles, as prosecutors described it, connecting billionaires row to housing project Hitman.
The money trail led through Dubai back to Janowski, while the killer’s incompetence created evidence museums, DNA, phones, witnesses, surveillance footage, taxi receipts. Janowski had scripted everything. Kill both targets, steal Helen’s handbag to simulate robbery, create chaos to mask the most intimate betrayal imaginable. September 17th, 2018, Voychanovski entered the Exxon Provence courtroom, radiating the same false confidence that had sustained decades of deception.
4 years had passed since the murders, 4 years of maintaining innocence, while evidence accumulated like snow drifts against his elaborate denials. Show me the proof,” he demanded, silver-haired and impeccably dressed, maintaining that police brutality and language barriers had produced false confessions, performance art in the dock.
He claimed investigators had done everything to me but tear out my fingernails, painting himself as victim rather than orchestrator of matricside. Prosecutors obliged his demand, screening his 2014 interrogation video. calm questioning, clear French, Janowski stating, “Yes, madame.” I asked Doryak if he could resolve the problem with my mother-in-law.
The footage destroyed his torture claims, polite exchange, no coercion, perfect comprehension. Janowski’s own words convicted him more thoroughly than any prosecutor could. Pascal Doryak proved unbreakable. €140,000 from Janowski. specific instructions. Kill both victims. Steal the handbag. Make it look random. The trainer had kept 50,000.
Paid killers 30,000 each. Followed orders precisely. A fitness coach transformed into murder broker by Janowski’s money. Doryak testified about bonuses. €20,000 if Darwitch died. 20,000 more if they stole Helen’s handbag, incentivizing thoroughess in murder. Sylvia Ratkowski pastor endured 3 hours describing her life’s destruction, the tsunami that had obliterated everything, recounting Janovski’s explanation.
He said to me, “This is to save you.” She described their final meeting before his arrest. I was exceedingly angry. He told me he was the one who commissioned it. Gildo Palanka pastor attended every day, certain of his brother-in-law’s guilt. She died without knowing that the devil was sitting at our table.
Weeks passed. Denials accumulated. Evidence mounted. Then October 16th, Verdict Eve. Tears finally breached Janowski’s composure for the first time. Eric Dupon Moretti rose, delivering theatrical surprise. Voyier Yanovski is guilty of having ordered the assassination of Helen Pasta. These words which you wanted to hear from him come from my mouth.
He tried to say these words. He wanted to say them, but he couldn’t. Love, not greed, motivated his client, the lawyer argued, protecting Sylvia from her monstrous mother justified murder. Apparently, prosecutor Pierre Cortez eviscerated this fiction. It was with the money of his companion, that is to say, with the victim’s money, that Voyek Janowski paid the killers.
It doesn’t get more ignaminious. Financial records proved everything. Collapsed businesses, hemorrhaged millions, looming prosecutions, murder as the final solution to self-inflicted problems. October 17th, life sentences for Janovski, Ahmed, and Hammadi, 30 years for Doryak. The jury rejected love, saw only greed. This is an exemplary sentence, [music] pronounced Gildo.
The jury didn’t fall for his final manipulation, his lastminute confession. Appeals brought fresh delusions. Janowski accused Gildo of masterminding Matriide, prompting his lawyer, Gerard Bodu, to pronounce him simply despicable. “You are despicable,” Bodu pointed at Janowski in court, disgusted by the attempt to blame the victim’s son for her murder.
Intercepted letters exposed Janowski’s cynicism. I am innocent. My lawyers have decided to say that I am guilty, but only in part. Strategic confession as manipulation. November 12th, 2021. Appeal rejected after 7 hours of deliberation. Life sentence confirmed. 72 years old, Janowski would die in prison for his avarice.
Poland had already stripped his honorary console title in June 2014. The foreign ministry citing loss of the irreroachable reputation that is essential for this role. The pastor empire endures. Buildings still dominate Monaco’s skyline. Rents flow eternally. But the family lies shattered like Helen’s car window. Sylvia lost mother, partner, brother, and peace.
Gildo survived his stroke, but not his suspicions. The dynasty fractured beyond repair. Monaco’s shadow princess died without knowing her daughter’s lover had orchestrated everything. 28 years of family dinners concealing murder plans. Giovani Batista, Pastor’s ghost, watches his empire continue while his great great grandson rots in French prison.
From Italian stonework to life sentence in four generations. The Polish prince who promised salvation instead delivered damnation, trading Sylvia’s love for bullets that killed the golden goose he’d been plucking for almost three decades. And now we want to see you in the comments. Before this video, had you heard of this scandalous Monaco story? And what is your opinion on it? No.