A beer magnate may be toasting to a sale on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Luis Felipe Padreira Dutra Leite, the CFO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, has sold a six-bedroom townhouse at 18 E. 73rd St. for $38.3 million, a more than 40% premium over the $27 million he paid in 2019, public records show.
The actual legal entity that sold the 10,500-square-foot landmark near Fifth Avenue is Mallow Enterprises, a shell company previously linked to the executive, who uses the shorter name Luis Dutra professionally. Since 2005, Dutra has served as CFO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, a Belgium-based powerhouse that owns 500 beer brands including Corona, Beck’s and Budweiser. Dutra also wears the hat of chief technology officer at the company, which has employed him since 1990.
The buyer of the home, which was listed for $43 million in October and went into contract in early December, was an entity called Willow Trust, represented by New York attorney Ira Gilbert and with a Delaware address listed as a contact. The sale of the five-story, 22-foot-wide residence closed Jan. 31.
A trust with the same name is linked in recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings to billionaire Leslie Wexner, the founder and former chairman of L Brands, the owner of the apparel chain Victoria’s Secret. One of several trusts connected with Wexner and his wife, Abigail, that uses a name with a basis in nature, Willow, according to the filings, owned hundreds of thousands of shares in L Brands as recently as 2021, the year shareholders forced Wexner out of the company over his close ties to disgraced investor Jeffrey Epstein, who managed Wexner’s fortunes for years.
The dining room
Wexner also once owned Epstein’s notorious former residence, a townhouse at nearby 9 E. 71st St., before selling the mansion to a company linked to Epstein in the late 1990s. Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan prison in 2019 while awaiting trial.
As part of a 2021 reorganization, L Brands split into two companies, Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret. A message sent to a spokeswoman for Bath & Body Works was not returned. Gilbert did not respond to an email. Sami Hassoumi, the Brown Harris Stevens agent who represented the seller in the deal, had no comment by press time. And a separate contact for Willow Trust could not immediately be determined.
In 2019, the person who sold the townhouse to Dutra was Luca Orlandi, an Italian fashion designer behind the Luca Luca women’s line, which was known for its brightly colored dresses but that appears to have folded about a decade ago. Orlandi paid $19.7 million in 2013, when No. 18 was split up into a handful of apartments, and then undertook an extensive three-year renovation that turned the multifamily dwelling into a single-family home while adding an elevator.
It’s not the first time the property has had a top-to-bottom makeover. A century ago, Henry Wise, the U.S. district attorney for the Southern District under Presidents William Taft and Teddy Roosevelt, bought what was then a brownstone and removed its stoop, added brick façade walls and installed fireplaces, according to the building-history website Daytonian in Manhattan.
Townhouses, whose lack of both doormen and condo-style services can limit their appeal, have lingered on the market in recent years, though prices seem to be improving, according to Douglas Elliman. In 2023, their median sale price in Manhattan was $5.8 million, up about 5% in a year, the firm reported; though townhouses sat for an average of 184 days before finding a seller, up from 161 days in 2022.