Though it's not quite a story spun by Scheherazade in "1,001 Arabian Nights," it is a fantastic tale involving a colorful sheik, his bitter ex-wife, a desert kingdom and a vast fortune. And the story remains a cliffhanger.
The ex-wife, Diana Bilinelli, has battled for two decades to collect the assets of her former husband, Mohammed al-Fassi, an eccentric Saudi sheik best known for angering his Beverly Hills neighbors by painting his mansion and its outdoor nude statues garish colors.
Except for $6 million from the sale of their mansion -- money she's already spent -- Bilinelli has not been able to collect the rest of the $250-million judgment awarded her in Los Angeles Superior Court. Some experts say the chances of ever collecting are slim.
But still striving for a happy ending, Bilinelli has decided to put the judgment up for sale, at a modest discount, of course. In other words, someone can take ownership of the judgment and try to collect it on his own.
"It's a dandy investment opportunity," said Bilinelli's Los Angeles attorney, Helen Dorroh-White. "The only hitch is that any buyer has to collect from a member of the Saudi royal family."
So far, there are no takers.
The tale begins in 1974, when Italian-born Bilinelli was a 16-year-old salesgirl in London and al-Fassi, then 19, asked for her hand in marriage. A year later, the couple wed in Saudi Arabia and she assumed the name Sheika Dena al-Fassi.
The couple settled into a modest West Los Angeles apartment. She enrolled in language classes. He attended a small business school.
Mohammed al-Fassi, who came from an upper-middle-class Moroccan family, then began receiving fabulous stipends in the mid-1970s after his sister, Hend, married Saudi Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz.
"The money flooded in with no limit," recalled Bilinelli, who recently resumed using her maiden name. "We spent our lives on aircraft, in casinos, luxury hotels and palaces, in jewelers and fashion houses ... surrounded by 10 bodyguards."
Al-Fassi gained notoriety here in 1978 when he paid $2.4 million in cash for the 38-room Beverly Hills mansion, then painted it a shade of green one critic likened to rotting limes.
As a personal touch, the sheik filled the garden urns with plastic flowers and had the classic Italian statuary outside painted in natural skin tones with the hair and genital areas painted bright red.
