Why Alexander Onassis Never Got His Father’s Fortune — And What Destroyed the Heir JJ

At 4:23 in the afternoon on Monday, January 22nd, 1973, a Piaggio P.136L-2 amphibious aircraft, registration SXBDC, operated by Olympic Airways and belonging to the Onassis family, rolled down runway 33 at Athens Ellenikon International Airport for what was supposed to be a routine test flight. The plane was in the air for 15 seconds.

The right wing dropped, it stayed down, the aircraft lost control, and smashed into the tarmac before it had climbed high enough to give the three men inside any chance of survival. The cockpit crumpled. The man sitting in the left seat suffered catastrophic trauma to his skull, a brain hemorrhage so severe that the English neurosurgeon flown in from London to save him would later walk out of the operating theater, find the father waiting in the corridor, and tell him quietly that his son had no chance of surviving his injuries.

The man in the left seat was 24 years old. He was the only son of Aristotle Onassis, the richest, most feared, most mythologized Greek on Earth. He was the heir to a shipping empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the future of a dynasty that had remade the economics of the post-war Mediterranean, the one person on the planet for whom Aristotle Onassis had built everything.

He was dead by the next afternoon. And within 2 years, so was his father. In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we trace the life and the suspicious death of Alexander Onassis, the prince who never got to be king, the heir who was erased before he could inherit, and the 24-year-old whose 15 seconds in the air destroyed the most powerful family in the world. The son of the world.

Alexander Socrates Onassis was born on May 30th, 1948 in New York City, the first child of Aristotle Socrates Onassis and his wife Athina Mary Livanos, herself the daughter of Stavros Livanos, one of the two or three most powerful Greek shipping magnates in the world. He was born into a room where the oxygen itself was money.

His father’s name, by 1948, was already a legend. Aristotle had been born in Smyrna in 1900, survived the Turkish destruction of the city in 1922, arrived in Buenos Aires with no money, no connections, and no language, and by the age of 30 had become a millionaire in the tobacco trade. By the age of 40, he controlled one of the largest private fleets of oil tankers in the world.

 By the time Alexander opened his eyes for the first time in a Manhattan hospital, his father was negotiating contracts worth more than the annual budgets of small nations and keeping company with politicians, film stars, and kings. Alexander had a sister, Christina, born two years later in 1950. The four of them, Aristotle, Athina, Alexander, Christina, constituted the nuclear unit of what the international press had taken to calling, with a mixture of admiration and suspicion, the Onassis dynasty.

But the nuclear unit was already radioactive at its core. Aristotle was not a man who came home for dinner. He was not a man who attended school plays or sat quietly beside a pool. He was a man who conducted his life at the velocity of acquisition, always moving, always closing, always building. And the children of that life were not companions, they were investments, heirs, future instruments of the empire’s continuation.

Alexander learned this early. He learned it in the way that rich children of absent fathers always learn it, not from a single confrontation, but from the accumulated texture of a thousand absences. His parents divorced in 1959 when he was 11 years old. The final rupture accelerated by the eruption of Aristotle’s affair with the opera singer Maria Callas, a liaison that became one of the most photographed scandals of the decade and that left Athena Livanos Onassis carrying the wreckage of a public humiliation in the most public

possible world. He was 11 when his family became tabloid mythology. He would spend the rest of his short life trying to find the edges of the cage it built around him, the empire he was born into. To understand what Alexander was born into, you have to understand what Aristotle Onassis had actually built, not the legend, which was romantic, but the machine, which was ruthless.

By the early 1950s, Aristotle Onassis controlled a fleet of oil supertankers that moved the energy of the industrial world. He had negotiated a landmark agreement with Saudi Arabia in 1954 that, had it survived American and British interference, would have given him a monopoly on the transportation of Saudi crude, a deal so threatening to Anglo-American petroleum interests that the US government intervened directly to kill it.

He owned a private island, Scorpios, in the Ionian Sea. He owned the most famous yacht in the world, the Christina O, a converted Canadian frigate named after his daughter, fitted with bar stools covered in whale foreskin leather, and visited by Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt’s son, and eventually Marilyn Monroe.

 He also owned Olympic Airways, the Greek national carrier, which he had taken over in 1957, and which had become, among other things, a plaything, a status symbol, and a mechanism by which his son Alexander would one day be given the title of president of Olympic Aviation, a title that came with a Piaggio amphibious aircraft and a license to fly planes for which he was not technically qualified.

That detail would matter. In October of 1968, Aristotle Onassis married Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the widow of the 35th president of the United States, the most photographed woman in the world, the living icon of American grief. The wedding took place on Scorpios. The international press went into a collective convulsion.

Christina, his daughter, called Jackie my father’s unfortunate obsession. The marriage was, depending on who you asked, a love match, a business arrangement, a public relations master stroke, or an act of supreme vanity by a 68-year-old man who had spent 50 years acquiring everything the world had to offer, and wanted the one acquisition that would make every other acquisition complete.

It was probably all four simultaneously. What it was not for Alexander was welcome. He had grown up watching his father’s appetites consume his mother, consume Maria Callas, consume everyone who got close to the center of the machine. The marriage to Jackie Kennedy was one more proof that his father’s desires operated on a scale that left no room for the preferences of anyone else, including his children, including the heir.

The rebellion. Alexander Onassis was not built for the role his father had written for him. He was handsome, dark-eyed, lean, with the confident physicality of someone who had grown up on boats and in the sea. He was charming in a way his father was not, less calculating, more instinctive. He liked fast cars. He liked flying.

 He liked, above all, a woman named Fiona Thyssen-Bornemisza, Baroness Fiona von Thyssen, who was 16 years his senior, the former wife of an industrial billionaire, and the last person Aristotle Onassis was prepared to accept as his son’s companion. She was too old. She was divorced. She had children from a previous marriage.

She was, by Aristotle’s calculus, entirely wrong for the heir of the Onassis dynasty, which was, of course, precisely why Alexander loved her. The relationship was the central battleground of the father-son conflict that defined the final decade of Alexander’s life. Aristotle pressured, threatened, maneuvered. Alexander refused.

The arguments between them were legendary in the circles of the Athenian and Parisian jet set, conducted across continents, through intermediaries, in yelling matches aboard the Christina O that left staff pale and silent. Aristotle threatened to disinherit him. Alexander called the bluff. The threat was withdrawn, reinstated, withdrawn again.

Alexander had also begun, by the late 1960s, to develop opinions on the management of Olympic Airways that his father did not share. He was given the title of president of Olympic Aviation in 1969, the subsidiary that operated the smaller aircraft fleet, and he took the role seriously in a way that occasionally put him in direct conflict with the people his father trusted.

He understood operations, he understood aircraft, he had been flying since his late teens and had developed over years of informal instruction real skill as a pilot. The skill was constrained by a medical fact that would not go away. Alexander had poor eyesight, poor enough that he could not qualify for an air transport certificate, the license required to fly commercial or large aircraft.

 He was limited, officially, to light planes. He flew them anyway, with the casual indifference to official restrictions that characterized the relationship between the Onassis family and the rules of the world they inhabited. He was 24 years old on the afternoon of January 22nd, 1973. He had been at war with his father for the better part of a decade.

 He had refused to abandon the woman he loved. He had carved out, inside the prison of inherited wealth and inherited name, something that resembled an actual identity. >> [snorts] >> He had 15 seconds of flight left. January 23rd. The afternoon of Monday, January 22nd, 1973 was cold and clear at Athens Ellinikon International Airport.

The Piaggio P.136 L2, registration SXBDC, had been sitting on the tarmac for months, grounded since the previous autumn, awaiting maintenance checks, parked in the open air at Alinikon through the Greek winter. The plane was an aging amphibious aircraft, a twin-engine flying boat capable of landing on water, built in the 1950s.

By 1973, it was not new. By 1973, it required careful attention from experienced engineers. The flight that afternoon was a check flight, a test run to verify the airworthiness before it was returned to active use. Donald McCusker, an American pilot who was being evaluated for a position with Olympic Airways, occupied the left seat as pilot in command.

 Alexander took the right seat as co-pilot. A third man was aboard. At 4:23 p.m., the Piaggio rolled onto runway 33. It climbed to approximately 100 ft. The right wing dropped. It did not come back up. The aircraft yawed violently to the right, overcorrected, lost all stability, and fell back to earth in a controlled impossibility.

The controls responding in the exact opposite direction to the inputs being given by the pilots. Whatever the pilots did to raise the right wing, the right wing dropped further. Whatever they did to level out, the aircraft turned harder. In an aircraft where the steering mechanisms respond in reverse, there is no recovery. There is only the ground.

The Piaggio hit the runway and disintegrated. McCusker survived with serious injuries. The third occupant survived. Alexander Onassis, 24 years old, the heir of the largest Greek shipping fortune in history, suffered a catastrophic depressed skull fracture and a massive brain hemorrhage. He was taken immediately to the Evangelismos Hospital in Athens.

The medical assessment was swift and unambiguous. The brain damage was irreversible. Aristotle Onassis received the news in New York City. He collapsed. He booked the next available flight to Athens and did not sleep. 36 hours By the morning of January 23rd, the corridor outside the neurosurgical ward at Evangelismos Hospital had filled with the kind of people who fill corridors only when empires are ending.

Aristotle Onassis arrived directly from the airport having not changed clothes or eaten. He had flown Dr. Alan Richardson, one of England’s most distinguished neurosurgeons, from London to Athens on a private charter. Richardson examined Alexander, reviewed the imaging, and emerged from the ward to speak to the father waiting in the corridor.

He told Aristotle that his son had no chance of surviving his injuries. Athena Livanos Onassis, Alexander’s mother, who had remarried Stavros Niarchos, Aristotle’s lifelong archrival, arrived from Switzerland. The two ex-spouses stood in the same hospital. Their decades of enmity made temporarily irrelevant by the fact that the person they were both there for was already, in any meaningful sense, gone.

Aristotle Onassis, in the grip of grief so acute that those present described it as physical, reportedly considered having his son’s body cryogenically frozen, a measure that at least one person in his circle took so seriously enough to have to talk him out of. He could not accept the fact. He could not organize it into the structure of his mind.

Aristotle Onassis had spent 50 years acquiring things and bending the world to his will and destroying anyone who stood between him and what he wanted. He had no mechanism for a loss he could not negotiate, sue, buy, or intimidate away. Alexander Onassis died in the afternoon of January 23rd, 1973, 25 hours after the crash.

He was buried in the family cemetery on the island of Skorpios beside the small chapel where his father had once married Jackie Kennedy. He was 24 years old. He left behind a woman his father had refused to accept as his companion, a title he had held for 4 years without real power, and a father who would spend the rest of his life trying to understand what had happened on runway 33.

He also left behind a question that the official investigation would answer and Aristotle Onassis would refuse until his own death to accept the evidence of sabotage. The official technical assessment compiled in July of 1973 by a three-party committee including Greece’s Olympic Airways Accident Investigation Committee, the Military Aviation Flight Security Committee, and British Aeronautics expert Adam Hunter, representing the legal interests of Aristotle Onassis, reached a formal conclusion.

The steering gear connecting wires had been reversed. The wires that should have caused the aircraft to bank left caused it to bank right and vice versa. In an aircraft where the control inputs produce the opposite of the intended result, a pilot has at 100 ft of altitude no time and no options. The official finding attributed this to a combination of deliberate or negligent reversal of the connecting wires during maintenance and the pre-flight inspection to detect the reversal before takeoff.

Seven Olympic Airways engineers were indicted on charges of professional negligence. This was the official story. It was also immediately contested by the people who knew the airplane best. Nikolaos Pronoitis, 26 years old, the engineer who was personally responsible for the maintenance of the Piaggio SXBDC and the last person who had spoken to Alexander before the fatal flight, conducted his own investigation.

He took the sister aircraft, an identical Piaggio held by Olympic Airways, and attempted to reverse the connecting wires. It was physically impossible. The wires were of a prescribed length. When he attempted to crisscross them rather than running them parallel, there was not enough wire. The reversal that the official investigation said had occurred could not, according to the engineer who knew the aircraft better than anyone, have occurred.

Sotiris Varvaroutsos, the president of Greece’s civil aviation, added a further dimension. The Piaggio had been sitting outdoors at Ellinikon for nearly 4 months. If someone had tampered with the steering gear, they would have had to remove a section of the aircraft’s outer body surface to access the connecting wires, a procedure requiring a team of technical specialists lasting several hours conducted in full view of security personnel and maintenance crews who worked the airport in shifts 24 hours a day for the entire 4 months the aircraft

sat there. Varvaroussis’ question was precise. How could a team of specialized saboteurs invest weeks of preparation in a plan that could be detected and neutralized by a routine pre-flight inspection of the steering gears? An inspection that would have taken any experienced pilot less than 5 minutes. In November of 1977, 4 years after the crash and nearly 3 years after Aristotle Onassis’ own death, the Magistrates Court of Athens acquitted all seven indicted engineers of all charges.

Donald McCusker, the American pilot who had survived the crash and spent years fighting the manslaughter charge Aristotle had brought against him, was awarded $800,000 in compensation. The official investigation was closed. The cause of the crash was formally classified as undetermined. The reversal of the steering wires remained officially unexplained.

No individual was ever identified as responsible. No criminal tampering was definitively established. No one was ever charged with the deliberate killing of Alexander Onassis. But Aristotle Onassis did not need a court’s verdict. He had already reached his own. The man who believed it was murder. In the months after Alexander’s death, Aristotle Onassis did something that no grieving father with his resources had ever done quite so publicly and quite so desperately.

He launched a private investigation. He funded his own parallel inquiry into the crash, separate from the Greek government’s official process, employing his own technical experts, his own investigators, his own lawyers. He commissioned independent analyses of the Piaggio’s maintenance records, the airport security logs, the timeline of who had access to the aircraft during the four months it sat at Ellinikon.

And then, in December of 1974, more than a year after Alexander’s death, six months before his own, he placed a paid advertisement in newspapers offering $1 million in reward money to anyone who could provide proof that his son’s death had been the result of deliberate action rather than negligence. $1 million in 1974, published in newspapers by the most powerful Greek in the world.

The advertisement named names. It identified three suspects by implication: the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, Greek military junta leader Georgios Papadopoulos, who had been overthrown in a counter-coup in November of 1973, 10 months after Alexander’s death, and Stavros Niarchos, Aristotle’s lifelong rival, the man who had married his ex-wife Athena, and stood in Aristotle’s increasingly paranoid cosmology as the living embodiment of everything that had tried to destroy him.

The CIA connection was not invented from grief. Aristotle had spent decades accumulating enemies in the American intelligence apparatus. His attempted Saudi crude monopoly in 1954 had been destroyed by coordinated American and British government pressure. His relationship with Greek political figures, his ownership of Olympic Airways, his control of shipping lanes that intersected with Cold War strategic interests, all of it had placed him in a decades-long friction with agencies that had resources and motivations he could

not fully see or map. He believed, with a certainty that was equal parts evidence and anguish, that the accident on Runway 33 over Athens had not been an accident, and who spent the final year of his life buying what he could never obtain, confirmation. The collapse of Aristotle. Those who saw Aristotle Onassis in the months after Alexander’s death described the same phenomenon in different words.

The man had been extinguished. Not weakened, not diminished, extinguished. He had been, before January 23rd, 1973, a force of nature in the literal sense, inexhaustible, aggressive, physical, present in every room he entered in a way that left people slightly breathless. He had the energy of a man half his age and the willpower of a man twice his size.

He had been building things and fighting people and winning for 50 years without apparent fatigue. After Alexander, there was no building. There was only the investigation, the grief, and the disintegration. He was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease causing progressive muscle weakness, in 1973, not long after Alexander’s death.

Whether the disease was triggered or accelerated by the psychological devastation of his bereavement is a question that physicians who treated him in his final months debated without resolution. What was observable was that the man who had negotiated with heads of state and terrorized shipping markets and married the most famous widow in the world, could no longer, by late 1974, hold his eyelids open with tape.

He walked with difficulty. He spoke with effort. He had lost, in the space of 18 months, the physical apparatus through which his entire identity had been expressed. His marriage to Jackie Kennedy, which had been deteriorating for years, collapsed entirely under the weight of the grief he could neither manage nor share.

Jackie was not built for this version of Aristotle. The man she had married, imperious, magnetic, overwhelming, had been replaced by a figure consumed by a private agony she could not enter. They separated, effectively, in all but legal terms. On March 15th, 1975, Aristotle Onassis died at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, from bronchial pneumonia.

He was 74 years old. He was buried on Scorpios, beside Alexander. He had survived his son by 2 years and 21 days. In those 2 years, he had watched an empire without an heir, a private investigation produce nothing, and a body that had obeyed his will for seven decades systematically refuse every further instruction.

He had spent his final months trying to build something, a foundation in Alexander’s name, an architectural memorial that would make the boy’s existence permanent in ways his brief life had not allowed. The Alexander Onassis Foundation was established in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, with headquarters in Athens, and it endures to this day.

It was not what he had wanted to build. He had wanted to build a dynasty. He had wanted to hand it to his son. The curse completed. In a period of 29 months between January 1973 and March 1975, Christina Onassis lost every member of her immediate family. Her brother, Alexander, died in January 1973. Her mother, Athina Livanos Onassis Niarchos, who had remarried Stavros Niarchos, died in April 1974 of acute pulmonary edema, though the circumstances of her death on Niarchos’s private island of Spetsopoula produced

their own cloud of questions that were never fully resolved. Her father died in March 1975. She was 24 years old when her father died. She was entirely alone. She said so directly, “I am all alone in the world now.” She inherited the empire. She ran it. She managed the tanker fleet and the corporate structures and the foundation and the island with a combination of competence and desperate personal unhappiness that became over the following 13 years one of the defining cautionary narratives of inherited wealth. She married four times. She

divorced four times. She was diagnosed with clinical depression at 30 and lived for the remainder of her life on a rotating architecture of prescription drugs, uppers, downers, sleeping pills, diet pills that gave her body no rest and her mind no peace. On November 19th, 1988, Christina Onassis was found dead by her maid in a mansion in Tortuguitas outside Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she had been staying with friends.

 She was 37 years old. The cause of death was a heart attack caused by acute pulmonary edema, the same official cause of death that had been recorded for her mother 14 years earlier. She was buried on Scorpios beside her father and her brother. The island that had once been the most glamorous private retreat in the world, where Churchill had sailed, where Kennedy’s widow had been married, where supertanker contracts had been signed over dinner, became a family cemetery.

Three graves, three Onassises, all gone before the end of the century. The formal investigation into the crash of Piaggio SXBDC was closed in 1977 with the acquittal of the seven engineers and no finding of criminal responsibility. What was never investigated was the specific question Aristotle had spent his final year and $1 million trying to answer.

 Not whether the crash was an accident, but whether anyone with the motive, the access, and the capability to arrange the crash had done so. The Greek authorities in 1973 were operating under the military junta of Georgios Papadopoulos, one of the three suspects Aristotle would later name publicly. The investigation was conducted by institutions that reported ultimately to a government Aristotle believed was complicit.

The records produced by that investigation, the maintenance logs, the security access records, the testimony of the airport personnel who had worked around the Piaggio for 4 months, were compiled and evaluated by investigators whose independence Aristotle had every reason to doubt. Donald McCusker, the American pilot in the left seat, the pilot of record, the man who was flying the aircraft when the controls failed, was charged by manslaughter by Aristotle’s legal team, and ultimately awarded compensation when

the charges were dismissed. He gave his account of the final 15 seconds. He described controls that responded in reverse. He described a perfectly normal takeoff roll followed by an aircraft that did exactly the opposite of what any competent pilot would have commanded. He was not, in any meaningful sense, disbelieved.

 The controls had been wrong. The question that was never answered was why. The maintenance records for the 4 months the aircraft sat at L Nikon were reviewed. The security logs for airport access during that period were reviewed. No individual was identified as having tampered with the steering gear connecting wires. The absence of an identified suspect was not the same as the absence of a crime.

It was the absence of an investigation with sufficient resources, independence, and political will to pursue the answer to the actual question. That investigation never happened. In 1973 in Greece under a military junta of Georgios Papadopoulos, investigating whether a powerful enemy of the government had been assassinated by that government or its allies was not an investigation that any Greek institution was positioned to conduct.

By the time the political conditions that might have permitted such an investigation existed, the witnesses were aging, Aristotle was dead, and the institutional will to reopen a 40-year-old case involving the CIA, a defunct military junta, and the most powerful shipping rivalry in Greek history had never materialized into anything beyond the occasional newspaper retrospective and the unanswered advertisement Aristotle had placed in 1974.

The million dollars went unclaimed. The question went unanswered. It still is. There is a particular cruelty reserved for the children of mythologies. Not the cruelty of poverty or violence or deliberate neglect. Those cruelties at least have the coherence of cause and effect.

 The cruelty reserved for people like Alexander Onassis is subtler and more complete. It is the cruelty of a life that was never fully his own. He was born into a name. He was raised inside a story that had begun before his birth and that would continue after his death. Every decision he made, the woman he loved, the plane he flew, the title he held, the arguments he had on the deck of the Christina O with the man who had built the cage he lived in, was conducted against a backdrop of inherited mythology so immense that the person inside it was perpetually in

danger of disappearing. He spent his 24 years trying to be a man rather than an heir. He succeeded partially in the only way available to him, by refusing to be entirely controlled, by loving who he chose to love, by flying planes he wasn’t licensed to fly, by insisting, in the small ways available to someone born at the center of a dynasty, that he existed as something other than a continuation.

The 15 seconds over runway 33 ended that insistence. They ended the man and they ended the dynasty simultaneously because Aristotle Onassis, for all his ferocity, was not a man who could survive the loss of the one thing he had built everything else to protect. He had remade the post-war shipping world. He had married a president’s widow.

 He had accumulated everything the 20th century had to offer. And none of it survived the afternoon of January 22nd, 1973. Three graves on a private island in the Ionian Sea, a foundation in a dead man’s name, an unanswered advertisement, a million dollars that no one ever claimed. What was buried on Scorpios was not just Alexander Onassis or Aristotle Onassis or Christina Onassis.

 What was buried there was the idea, the sustaining catastrophic generational idea that enough power, enough money, enough will, enough acquisition could insulate a family from the particular destruction that awaits everything built on the premise that the rules of the world apply to other people. They apply to everyone. They applied to Alexander Onassis in 15 seconds.