HEROIN BINGE KILLS ROTHSCHILD HEIR

Raphael de Rothschild, scion of one of the world's richest families, has
been found dead of a suspected heroin overdose on a pavement in a rundown
area of New York.

Mr de Rothschild (23) is believed to have taken a large dose of the drug at
a party with friends on 10th Avenue in the city's Chelsea section. Living
in the same building on Fifth Avenue where Jackie Onassis had her home, Mr
de Rothschild was the grandson of Elie de Rothschild, one of the stalwarts
of the French side of a financial dynasty that once held the purse strings
of Europe.

Elie had a tempestuous relationship with the late Pamela Harriman, ex-wife
of Sir Winston Churchill's son Randolph, in the post-war years but rebuffed
her entreaties to divorce his wife and marry her. Mr de Rothschild's
father, Nathaniel, is chairman of a European banking business worth 5bn
pounds Sterling.

Friends said Raphael was bursting with vitality and was a fixture on New
York's fashionable social circuit.

In a life of glamorous parties and beautiful girlfriends, he frequented
nightspots like Moomba and Harry Cipriani. New York papers yesterday quoted
friends who described him as ``out of control and in the city's fast lane''.

He had been a student at America's best known private schools and then went
to the Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island.

The death is the latest in a series of tragedies to afflict the world's
greatest banking dynasty. In 1923, Charles Rothschild, a scion of the
British branch of the family, cut his throat while in the grip of
depression. Charles's grandson Amschel hanged himself in a Paris hotel in 1996.

Raphael de Rothschild is not the first member of his family to have flirted
with heroin. Four years ago, his cousin Benjamin was fined pounds 400 for
carrying the drug in Southampton airport, England.

The Geneva-based Benjamin was revealed to be a registered addict who had
been enrolled in rehabilitation programmes in Paris.