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South Florida

Tobias mansion on the market

Filomena Tobias, the widow of the late hedge fund mogul Seth Tobias, has quietly placed their faux Mediterranean mansion in Jupiter, including the resurfaced pool where the financier’s body was found, on the market for $7.8 million, just over $3 million more than the couple paid for it at the end of 2006.

The five-bedroom home in the exclusive Bears Club gated enclave is advertised as Mizner-style “old world elegance.” Perched on the edge of the sixth hole of a Jack-Nicklaus-designed golf course, the sprawling 6,704-square-foot home is selling for $1,163 per square foot. The couple’s history was much more turbulent.

“It’s just a spectacular property,” said Leslie Linder, a sales agent with David Fite of Fite Shavell & Associates, as she listed both the elegant and electronic upgrades the Tobiases made to the home.

“The property has only been in the computer [for] four days,” said Linder, who has not shown it yet.  According to Palm Beach County records, the 1.3 acre property was purchased in November 2006 by Seth and Filomena Tobias for $4.478 million. The property was listed at the end of January with David Fite of Fite Shavell & Associates.

Jupiter Police found Tobias, a hedge fund manager and regular pundit for CNBC’s “Squawk Box” business news program, dead in his pool Sept. 4, 2007. His wife was clutching his body. His death soon unspooled wild tales of potential murder, cocaine binges, gambling and infidelity, with a cast including a tattooed gay stripper, a flamboyant California psychic and even a voodoo witch doctor.

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The official cause of death was a heart attack.

Tobias’ brothers, Sam and Spence, suspected Filomena had murdered their 44-year-old brother with a last supper of pasta alla vodka laced with cocaine and sleeping pills. The psychic, Billy Ash, told police and anyone who would listen that in a phone conversation Filomena admitted she lured her drug-befuddled husband to the pool with promises of sex with a gay go-go dancer with tiger tattoos.

In the days that followed Tobias’ death, the widow spent $10,000 draining and resurfacing the pool.

The brothers sought to block the widow’s sole inheritance of Tobias’ estimated $25 million fortune. Under Florida’s “slayer” law, if the widow had been found guilty of murder, Tobias’ fortune would have gone to his brothers and other family members under a 2004 will executed before the couple married in 2005.

By February 2008, Palm Beach County prosecutors found Ash’s accounts unreliable and that they had no murder case. They announced “no evidence of criminality in the death of Mr. Tobias.”

Last June, on the eve of what promised-to-be a torrid civil trial pitting the brothers against the widow, the family members settled in a confidential agreement.