THE OPERA LOVER.

On the evening of May 26th last year, the financier Alberto Vilar attended an Internet conference, sponsored by Goldman Sachs, at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, in Las Vegas. During a presentation by Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, he recalled recently, his thoughts kept wandering to Austria, where he planned to see a new production of "Parsifal" in a few days. Another distraction was a Treo wireless handset, which he held discreetly under the table as he tapped out messages.

Whitman was an old business acquaintance of Vilar's, and he had been an investor in eBay since its public offering, in 1998. Such foresight, as well as an early enthusiasm for Internet stocks and the technology-led stock-market bubble of the late nineteen-nineties, had put him in the Forbes ranking of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. In 2000, according to the magazine's estimates, his personal fortune amounted to a billion dollars--a distinction he shared with two hundred and thirty-five other American billionaires. With his business partner, Gary Tanaka, he had created an empire that now included mutual funds, hedge funds, and other investment vehicles. His company, Amerindo, was headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, Panama, and the Cayman Islands. Vilar lived in New York, in a large duplex apartment in U.N. Plaza, overlooking the East River. The only blight on his success had been his health; over the years, he had been hospitalized frequently for various ailments, and he had suffered back pains so severe that in 2001 he underwent a series of surgeries in an effort to relieve them.

What distinguished Vilar, even among billionaires, was his remarkable generosity and his financial support for the arts. Lavish and much-publicized gifts to the world's leading opera companies and other music institutions had made him, as he told the Times in 2000, "the largest supporter of classical music, opera, and ballet in the world," and according to Forbes the donations he made between 1996 and 1999 amounted to nearly three hundred million dollars--a largesse reminiscent of the projects of the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner's benefactor. In return, Vilar's name, in brass letters, adorned the Grand Tier of the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, and was etched on the menus at the Met's Alberto Vilar Grand Tier Restaurant. Vilar served on the Met's board of managing directors, whose members are each expected to donate a minimum of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. (Vilar donated far more.) In 1999, after a ten-million-pound pledge, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, renamed its spacious Floral Hall the Vilar Floral Hall. At the Salzburg Festival, a full-page color portrait of Vilar appeared in all programs and at the entrances to performance venues.

The "Parsifal" production that Vilar was looking forward to was being mounted in Wels, an Austrian town whose annual Wagner festival, which accommodated only six hundred seats, had recently become a coveted ticket. Wagner was one of Vilar's favorite composers; "Parsifal" was Wagner's last opera and crowning achievement; and the title role would be sung by the Finnish Heldentenor Heikki Siukola. The Wels festival is dedicated to purist, literal stagings of Wagner--a philosophy that accorded with Vilar's own conservative taste.

Among Vilar's e-mails that evening were travel arrangements for the trip. He would return to New York the next day and depart for Europe. In New York, he was to have lunch with a recent graduate of the Duke University School of Medicine who had worked as an orderly at a Vail hospital where Vilar had been treated in 1997, after a skiing accident. Vilar had subsequently paid for the young man's college and medical-school education--one of about thirty students he had put through college.

The next morning, as Vilar was trying to open an e-mail during a presentation, his Treo screen went blank. When the presentation ended, he called his New York office. It was the middle of the workday, but no one answered, and the call went into voice mail. Baffled, Vilar moved up his departure to twelve o'clock, even though it meant that he would have to fly coach. Five hours later, when he stepped off the plane at Newark Liberty Airport, he was greeted by two plainclothes inspectors from the United States Postal Inspection Services. "Mr. Vilar?" one of them asked politely.

Vilar nodded.