J. Paul Getty III, 54, Dies; Had Ear Cut Off by Captors<br />Don’t let me be killed.”<br />The eldest Mr. Getty refused to pay the kidnappers anything, declaring<br />that he had 14 grandchildren and “If I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” His son said he could not afford to pay.<br />[ALSO READ: New Trailer: ‘All the Money in the World,’ Now With Christopher Plummer]<br />“Get it from London,” she was reportedly told over the phone, a reference either to her former father-in-law,<br />J. Paul Getty, the billionaire founder of the Getty Oil Company, or her former husband, who lived in England.<br />At the time of his abduction, Mr. Getty was just 16<br />and living on his own in Rome, where his father, J. Paul Getty II, had, for a time, helped oversee the family’s Italian business interests.<br />According to the 1995 book “Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune<br />and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty,” by John Pearson, the eldest Mr. Getty paid $2.2 million, the maximum that his accountants said would be tax-deductible.<br />Three months after the abduction, the kidnappers, who turned out to be Calabrian bandits with a possible connection to organized crime, cut off Mr. Getty’s ear<br />and mailed it, along with a lock of his hair, to a Roman newspaper.<br />J. Paul Getty III, who was a grandson of the oil baron once believed to be the richest man in the world<br />and who achieved tragic notoriety in 1973 when he was kidnapped by Italian gangsters, died Saturday at his home near London.
