Billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel S. Loeb was detained in Cuba after “hitting a local kid with his car” during a long weekend trip, according to a bombshell magazine article.
William D. Cohan, in an upcoming piece for Vanity Fair, addresses Loeb’s mysterious car crash in 2002 while the 51-year-old Third Point LLC founder was on a Cuba trip with friends.
Cohan writes in the December issue: “Things unexpectedly took a dark turn . . . “Cuban authorities had refused to allow him to leave.” Asked what had happened, Loeb told me . . . that he had been involved in a car accident, stuck around for a couple more weeks, had a legal hearing, and -everything turned out fine.”
An ex-friend of Loeb, hedge funder Robert Chapman Jr., told Cohan a “desperate” and “sobbing” Loeb had called him from a Cuban hotel: “How scared Dan sounded when describing the incident involving his hitting a local Cuban kid with his car . . . he told me he had found himself unable to leave the country, curled up in a ball on the floor of his room crying, promising God that he’d do anything if the Almighty got him out of his predicament . . . and who really knows what ended up happening to the kid?”
Despite widespread gossip, Loeb’s friend, art dealer Christophe Van de Weghe, insisted to us: “I was with Daniel Loeb in Cuba at the time of the accident and the period following. I state categorically that Daniel was never in jail . . . and that the child involved in the accident was not killed. These statements are malicious and defamatory.”
The incident is also described in Michael Gross’ upcoming book, “House of Outrageous Fortune.” Gross writes, “He’d been in a car crash, and that he’d ended up in jail until he was bailed out by another financier” after seven weeks.
Loeb’s pompous lawyer Matthew S. Dontzin said: “The statements you attribute to Mr. Chapman, Gross and an ‘unidentified source’ are entirely untrue, defamatory and libelous, and will be treated as such . . . I am in Paris and I don’t have any more time to talk to you, lady.”