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business came with a well-honed sense of social responsibility. If the poor were his best customers, then Alfredo was determined to be their best friend, and give back to the community in a country with one of the world’s biggest disparities between rich and poor, and an abysmal lack of government-financed social services. Shortly after founding Ponto Frio, Alfredo teamed up in Rio with a local priest who did charitable work among the city’s poor, and paid to restore the Rosario Church next to his offices in downtown Rio. In one of his more memorable moments, Alfredo managed to block one of the city’s main thoroughfares after he bought all the produce and livestock from a local farmers’ market, and started to give it all away to the poor.
    â€œPeople came from the favelas, blocking traffic and turning the day into a festive occasion,” said one observer, who also recalled that law enforcement officials were not amused by the gesture. “Fred decided that the government wasn’t giving the people enough holiday time, so he created his own national holiday. That was Fred.”
    He was also a hero to many. He was the first to step forward in August 1954 when the assassination attempt against journalist and opposition politician Carlos Lacerda resulted in the death of his bodyguard, the air force major Rubens Florentino Vaz. Although he was generally apolitical, Alfredo had a great deal of admiration for Lacerda, who was the most outspoken critic of the government of Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas. Alfredo insisted upon paying for the education of the young daughter Vaz had left behind.
    The assassination attempt against Lacerda, on a residential street in Copacabana, had deep political ramifications for the Vargas government. A few weeks later, an independent commission of inquiry implicated Vargas’s chief bodyguard in the death of Vaz, which eventually signaled the end of the dictator’s twenty-four-year reign and drove Vargas himself to commit suicide. In his blue and white striped pajamas, the country’s president shot himself in the chest in his bedroom at the presidential palace on August 24, 1954. Alfredo promptly stepped in again, this time to buy the dictator’s Rolls-Royce.
    There were other grand gestures. In 1961, Alfredo set up a fund to help the families whose loved ones had been killed when an arsonist set fire to a circus, resulting in more than four hundred deaths. Three years later, he bailed out Garrincha (Manuel Francisco dos Santos), one of Brazil’s greatest soccer heroes, who helped lead Brazil to two World Cup victories in 1958 and 1962. Garrincha, who was in serious debt, was in danger of losing his home on Governador Island, on the outskirts of Rio. Alfredo paid off his debts, in recognition, he said, of Garrincha’s contribution to Brazilian soccer.
    He also created a private foundation to assist his workers, who grew from a handful of employees in the late 1940s to several hundred twenty years later.
    At the Millfield School, his posh alma mater, in Somerset, England, Alfredo’s generosity even made the local papers when, on avisit to the school, he bought £2,500 worth of tickets for a student production of the Sammy Davis Jr. musical Golden Boy . Funds from the sale of tickets were earmarked for the school’s building fund. “Up rushed…Alfredo Monteverde, the Brazilian millionaire, who said he proposed to distribute the tickets among ‘French students, Kenyan emigrants, nurses and the doorman at the Dorchester,’” said one report. “But really you didn’t know whether to take the man seriously or not. Asked where he lived, he said ‘The Moon.’”
    Alfredo could be excused for his lunar preoccupations, especially after he was diagnosed with manic depression as a young adult. From the time he was in his twenties, his periods of whimsy and sheer euphoria alternated with periods of deep,