If there is anyone, even a single person, concerned about the toll that Steward Health Care’s bankruptcy is having on CEO Ralph de la Torre, worried about how he must be consumed by the plight of the hundreds upon hundreds of his workers who will soon be out of a job, I have some reassuring words for you. He’s handling it all better than anyone might imagine. How much better? Well, when Steward filed court papers in late July to shutter two Massachusetts hospitals, setting off panic and protests in the communities involved, de la Torre wasn’t at his desk in Dallas or visiting his leadership team in Massachusetts.
He was in — I can’t believe I’m about to write this — Versailles. Yes, that Versailles, the one in France, with the palace, the lavish works of art, the Grand Canal, Marie Antoinette, the treaty, all of it. Advertisement It’s important to understand that de la Torre, in addition to being a yachtsman, has become something of a horseman as well, because of course he has, with a ranch outside of Dallas and a wife who is deep in the equestrian world, according to those who know him.
And Versailles is currently playing host to the Olympic equestrian events, providing what the official website for the games describes as a “truly exceptional and historic setting,” in the heart of Versailles’ stunning gardens. The promotional videos, with muscular horses gamboling across bridges and along grassy fields as the palace windows glint in the sun, say it all. All of which is to say, nothing — not bankruptcy, not the protests in Massachusetts, not the pain of 1,250 soon-to-be jobless Steward workers — was about to keep Ralph de la Torre away from watching unusually rhythmic dancing horses compete for medals in the Olympic dressage events at one of the world’s most opulent homes of kings and queens.
Multiple people with knowledge of de la Torre’s Olympic trip shared his whereabouts with me as chaos reigned at his company, some of them passing around a since-deleted social media post of de la Torre’s wife holding a glass of wine in Versailles. When I reached out to a Steward spokeswoman with questions about his trip to the Olympics, I received an email back from Rebecca Kral, a partner in an outside public relations firm, who said she’s representing de la Torre “in a personal capacity.” She then declined to comment.
Advertisement Still, one person with knowledge of de la Torre’s trip, talking on the condition of anonymity, described it as a long-planned family vacation with “unfortunate timing.” Let’s make sure we capture the entire context of just how unfortunate the timing was. In Dorchester and Ayer last week, outside of the Carney Hospital and the Nashoba Valley Medical Center, frightened workers stood in the heat and the rain protesting the impending closure of their community institutions, sometimes drowning out the politicians who were trying to show their solidarity.
At the State House, Governor Maura Healey confessed she was powerless to take meaningful action to keep them open. In Houston, a federal bankruptcy judge continued picking through the wreckage that is Steward Health Care. All the while, the CEO and founder of the foundering company was watching multimillion dollar horses perform ballet — perhaps his ultimate “let them eat cake” moment.
. Is it journalistically appropriate to pause here and ask, are you kidding me? Is there a Hollywood director who would even include such a jarring scene in a movie about the amorality of unwarranted wealth? The real question, though, is whether this is even surprising, and here I’ll take a stab at an answer. At one level, why anyone would expect anything different from the CEO who sold the buildings and land from under his own hospitals, buried the company in debt, raked in a dividend north of $100 million, cut patient care, failed to pay vendors, and then had the company fund two ultra-luxury corporate jets that he used to soar to every conceivable five-star destination around the world? Advertisement But at another level, wouldn’t it be nice to think that maybe, just maybe, a person like de la Torre might learn from his excesses and be capable of some sort of modest change — not redemption, certainly, but a greater awareness that his actions were wreaking havoc on countless others.
The Versailles interlude would indicate otherwise. Perhaps it should make me feel better, though I’m not sure it does, that the two Steward-funded jets, the Bombardier Global 6000 and the Dassault Falcon 2000LX, were recently sold after a column was published about them on these pages, leaving de la Torre to fly commercial to Paris, an indignity for the ages. But this invites a question that Maura Healey might ask as she commits $30 million in Massachusetts taxpayer money to keep Steward’s hospitals afloat: Where exactly did the money go from the sale of the jets? You can all but imagine even Marie Antoinette taking in this entire sordid situation and proclaiming, “This is ridiculous.
” Maybe. But this, madame, is Versailles. Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist.
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