HELMSLEY, ECLIPSED BY WIFE : `QUEEN OF MEAN' AT BEDSIDE OF SELF-MADE REAL ESTATE MAGNATE.

Byline: Beth J. Harpaz Associated Press 

Harry Helmsley, a self-made billionaire whose many business successes were overshadowed in recent years by his wife, Leona, and her highly publicized tax evasion conviction, has died. He was 87.

Helmsley died Saturday of pneumonia at a hospital in Scottsdale, Ariz., said Howard J. Rubenstein, Helmsley's New York-based spokesman.

Helmsley had ``been ailing for some time'' and had been hospitalized for about a week in Arizona, where he and his wife had a home. His wife was at his side when he died.

``My fairy tale is over,'' she said in a written statement. ``I lived a magical life with Harry.''

From the 1950s to the mid-1980s, Helmsley was a major player in real estate. His vast holdings included 27 hotels, 50,000 apartments and control of the Empire State Building.

By the end of his life, however, Helmsley was best known not as a powerful businessman, but as the senile husband of a woman who came to symbolize the greed of the 1980s.

He avoided being prosecuted along with her on tax-evasion charges after a court found him incompetent to stand trial because of old age and failing health.

While much of his property was in New York, he also had holdings in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Washington, D.C., and some other cities.

He pioneered the syndication of real-estate properties with a system developed by lawyer Lawrence A. Wien. Helmsley found the buildings, and Wien rounded up the money for their deals.

Son of a dry-goods buyer, Harry Brakmann Helmsley was born March 4, 1909. He never attended college. He started to work at 16 as an office boy for a real-estate company that he eventually headed and gave a new name, Helmsley-Spear Inc.

``The best advice I ever got was from my mother. It was simply, `Buy real estate.' And like a dutiful son, I bought and bought and continue to buy throughout the country,'' Helmsley once said.

He purchased his first property, a run-down office building, for $1,000 in 1936. A decade later, he sold it for $165,000.

Gradually he built up the Helmsley empire to monumental proportions. Forbes magazine, in its annual rating of America's richest, put Helmsley's net worth at $1.7 billion in October 1996, ranking him as the 67th-richest American.

His crowning achievement was the purchase of the Empire State Building in 1961 through syndication for a then-record price of $65 million.

While an admitted penny pincher in running his business, Helmsley was generous to charity. In 1986 he donated $33 million to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.

Helmsley hired the former Leona M. Rosenthal as a real estate executive in 1971 and married her a year later after divorcing the wife to whom he was married for 33 years.

In 1980, Leona Helmsley took control of her husband's hotels, six luxury hotels in New York and the Cleveland-based Harley chain.

An ad campaign dubbed her the hotel queen, and her husband said he was happy to let her have the limelight. Her reputation as a tough, often dictatorial, businesswoman began to emerge, and local tabloids dubbed her ``Queen of Mean.''

In 1988, the Helmsleys were charged by state and federal prosecutors with tax evasion. He was declared incompetent to stand trial because of memory and reasoning problems.

She was convicted in 1989 of evading $1.2 million in federal taxes by billing personal expenses to the business. Expenses ranged from underwear to renovations on their 28-room Connecticut estate.

She was sentenced to four years in prison and 750 hours of community service, fined $7.1 million, and ordered to pay $1.7 million in back taxes.

The prison sentence was later reduced to 30 months, and good behavior trimmed it further. She wound up spending 18 months in prison. The U.S. Supreme Court turned down her appeal to overturn the conviction.

By all accounts, the Helmsleys were devoted to each other. She called him ``Pussycat'' and gave him an ``I'm Just Wild About Harry'' birthday party each year.

When she was sent to prison in April 1992, her husband ordered that the Empire State Building be darkened as a symbolic gesture. She ordered a similar mourning gesture for a week after his death.

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PHOTO Harry Helmsley

Pioneered syndication of properties