One afternoon in March 2024, Spanish society gathered at a prestigious Barcelona business school to celebrate Isak Andic, an unassuming Turkish-born entrepreneur who used to sell embroidered blouses in a Barcelona market stand and went on to found the affordable fashion brand Mango, becoming a billionaire in the process, the fifth-richest man in Spain.
At the ceremony, King Felipe VI gave Andic an award for his entrepreneurship, telling him, “It’s been said that by the time I was born, you were already buying and selling around the world.” Felipe bestowed Andic with a medal modeled on one from the reign of King Carlos III, who opened trade between Spain and its new-world colonies in the 18th century. Andic, in his time, had gone much further, opening nearly 3,000 stores in more than 120 countries, including a flagship on Fifth Avenue down the street from Tiffany’s. The annual ceremony is usually followed by a modest reception, but Andic offered his guests a sumptuous apéro dînatoire with extraordinary catering and free-flowing Vega Sicilia. He was 70, and almost six decades after arriving in Barcelona from Istanbul with his parents, middle-class Sephardic Jews, he had reached the summit of the country that centuries earlier had forced their ancestors to flee.
Nine months later, Andic was dead. On December 14, 2024, he went for a hike on Montserrat, the mountain just outside Barcelona, and plunged to his death from a cliff some 300 feet high. The only person with him was his son, Jonathan, then 43 and the firstborn of his three children.
Spain was stunned. Andic was a giant of industry, one of the country’s best-known fashion moguls — along with Amancio Ortega, the billionaire behind Inditex, Zara’s parent company, and Marc Puig, a member of Mango’s board of directors and the owner of the Puig fragrance empire. A few nights before Andic died, Mango had hosted a party at Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi arena celebrating Mango’s highest turnover in years, €3.3 billion. Now, the future and reputation of the company he built was in doubt, as was the largest fortune in Catalonia, an estimated $4.5 billion, according to Forbes.
Barcelona’s burguesía is so insular it is referred to as “endogamic,” literally inbred. Everyone knew Andic, and group chats blew up with theories about what had happened in the mountains, a well-connected writer told me. Was it strange that Andic didn’t have bodyguards and was alone with his son? Was it a freak accident? What if father and son had scuffled and Jonathan had pushed Isak without intending for him to fall off the cliff? The trail Andic fell from was not particularly challenging, vertiginous, or remote. It is well marked, part of a national park, reachable up a flight of stairs from a parking lot above a residential area. The weather that day had been clear. “It was a goat path, not Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible,” as Laura Fa, a Barcelona society reporter, puts it to me.
The wealth of the Andic family made its members the subject of intense scrutiny. In his will, Andic had bequeathed his girlfriend of seven years, Estefania Knuth, a 52-year-old former professional golfer, €5 million, while Jonathan and his younger sisters, Judith, 43, and Sarah, 28, all from his marriage to ex-wife Neus Raig Tarragó, were to divide the rest of the inheritance in equal parts. The sisters keep a low public profile, but Jonathan is married to Paula Nata, a Spanish fashion influencer, and became a fixture in her carefully curated Instagram feed — skiing in St. Moritz and sailing in Formentera, the tiny, exclusive island off the southern coast of Ibiza where the Andics have a home.
The jet-set image did not help dispel Jonathan’s reputation as a spoiled scion. A decade earlier, he had been positioned for the top job at Mango, but his tenure was so troubled his father ultimately installed an outsider as CEO, a decision that was covered in the Spanish press as a turning point for the company and a crisis in the relationship between father and son.
“The death concentrated all these tragedies at the same time,” says Jordi Graupera, a writer in Barcelona who once ran for mayor. “Generational tragedy, industrial father, abandoned-son syndrome, second spouse, younger spouse, an industry that now works at a level that nobody really understands in a Europe that has nothing to offer to the world but taste, and brands, and clothes made in Asia.”
Initially, Catalonia’s police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, declared Andic’s death an accident, the term Mango used in announcing the news the same day. Jonathan, in shock, was questioned, and he said he had been walking ahead of his father when he heard rustling; when he doubled back, he saw his father slip and fall. A judge provisionally closed the case, ruling there wasn’t enough hard evidence to prove a crime took place. A journalist for Catalan TV recalled the mood in the makeup room as the news broke. “You could feel the disappointment, like if they unexpectedly canceled a show we were all watching,” she says. “No second season on top of a final episode, that was the feeling.”
Then, in March 2025, the show picked up when a new judge took over the case and ordered it reopened. By the fall, there were new developments in the ongoing soap opera of the Spanish Succession. All along, the Mossos had continued to gather evidence, and it was revealed they had questioned Jonathan again, for hours, a month after Andic’s death and found his witness statements contradictory and confusing. In September, police stopped him as he was leaving Mango’s headquarters and took his cell phone as evidence. A month later, Jonathan was identified in the press as an investigado, a person of interest, in a possible homicide investigation.
As the investigation continues without a resolution more than a year after Andic’s death, Catalonia’s high court will only say it is not focused on any specific individual. Andic’s closest friends remain baffled by his death and by the suggestion that Jonathan might be a suspect. Josep Oliu, a friend of Andic’s and chairman of Banco Sabadell, one of Catalonia’s largest banks and Mango’s longtime lender, sees the investigation through the lens of Spain’s dislike for the rich. “When you look at the police that have a small salary and you think about the judge that has a small salary, they can only think, You know, if I was the heir maybe I would do it. But it doesn’t make any sense,” he says.
Isak Halfon, a friend of Andic’s since high school who later worked for decades at Mango, also defended Jonathan over a chocolate milk and pastries in a Barcelona café. “First of all, Isak was always fit. I mean, he’s not a guy who’s gonna get pushed like this. It’s impossible.” Halfon and Andic often took long walks together in a park in Barcelona. “And this time he went with his son. But this time his son said, ‘You know what, instead of going always to the same place, let me take you to a beautiful place where you can have also air.’”
Andic started out small in a city whose elite is largely dependent on inherited wealth. “He was not the typical businessman in Catalonia. It’s an American story, not a Catalan story,” says Jordi Amat, a writer and the editor of “Babelia,” the cultural supplement of El País, Spain’s leading daily newspaper.
Isak and his elder brother, Nahman, were born in Istanbul. Their father, Manuel, had a business importing electronics, and their mother, Sol, was a homemaker. With Turkey destabilized by military coups and political instability, the Andics moved in 1968 to Barcelona, where they barely knew anyone. Through the city’s small Jewish community, they befriended another Turkish Jewish family, the Halfons, whose son, also named Isak, was two years older than Isak Andic. The Halfons wanted to send their son to the pricey American School of Barcelona, and Isak Halfon’s father somehow persuaded the school director to lower the tuition if both teenagers enrolled at the same time. There, Isak met the children of American expats, including executives from Sears and Pepsi. “For Isak, it was great because of the way they study, the communication, everything is so open,” Halfon says.
That’s where the Mango origin story begins: While still in high school, Isak met a man who worked on a boat that made frequent trips from Turkey to Barcelona. He showed Isak a dozen embroidered blouses. “Hippie shirts,” Halfon says. Isak sold them, and the next time he asked for double the order. After high school, he studied business administration in college but dropped out to open a tiny market stall in downtown Barcelona. The store smelled of patchouli and usually had Lou Reed or David Bowie on the stereo, Halfon says. Several small shops followed where Andic sold cotton blouses, locally manufactured jeans, and Mallorcan clogs, zuecos, storing whatever merchandise wasn’t on the sales floor in the guest bedroom of his parents’ house.
What Andic really wanted was to sell American brands — Levi’s, Wrangler, Lee — but wholesalers refused to do business with an inexperienced nobody. “All the rest of the retailers were kind of trying to block this small kid from Turkey,” Halfon says. One day, the friends drove to València to meet with a company selling Spanish jeans. To convince them to sell him the product, Andic left them a check for a million pesetas. “The guy said, ‘You have this kind of money in your bank account?’” Halfon recalls. A month later, Andic had his jeans.
By the early ’80s, he owned six stores with different names. It was the era of Benetton and Esprit, and Andic had a vision for his own monobrand. “I remember perfectly well he said to me, ‘Listen, if Mr. Levi has sold millions of blue jeans in the world, why can’t I sell my blue jeans with the name of Isak?’” says another friend, Lluís Bassat, who met him when Andic was a teenager and would later become the Don Draper of Spain, bringing American-style TV promotion to a country awakening from nearly four decades of Franco-era fascism. On a trip to the Philippines, Andic ate a mango for the first time. He liked that the word was the same in many languages.
The first Mango store opened in 1984 on Passeig de Gràcia, a wide boulevard dotted with Gaudí houses and tasteful boutiques. A year later, Andic had opened four more stores in Barcelona. By 1992, he had 100 stores and was expanding abroad, diversifying the merchandise beyond post-hippie wares to include business casual and evening gowns. “He had a very clear target: young women,” says Oliu. “Andic said, ‘Our ladies are growing older!’ He was very intuitive.” Bassat helped him market the brand with campaigns starring supermodels such as Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, and Kate Moss, and the company’s success tracked the rise of middle-class professional women around the world. In the aughts, Mango was ahead of most clothing brands in embracing e-commerce. When Mango opened a flagship in New York in 2022, Andic sat next to Katie Holmes at the launch dinner at Balthazar. “He said it was his dream to open this store on Fifth Avenue,” says Triana Alonso, one of the journalists Mango flew over for the opening.
When I meet Bassat in his office with sweeping views of the city, he tells me he and Andic sometimes discussed whether Mango should go public, and Bassat always advised him to keep control within the family. His children, after all, seemed inclined to join the business. Jonathan had gotten his executive MBA in accounting, finance, and management at Barcelona’s IESE business school; Judith studied at the European Design Institute in Barcelona and worked in Mango’s design department for a while; and Sarah studied fashion-business management in London and at the Parsons School of Design in New York. But Isak and Jonathan were “together all the time,” Oliu says. The way Andic saw things, “the daughters were his wife’s daughters and the son was his son.”
“We’re like two drops of water,” Andic once told an audience at a Barcelona business school, with some obvious pride, about Jonathan. He brought his son into the fold early on. David Egea Gonzalez, who worked at Mango for 25 years, starting in 1987, recalls Andic once sending him a mixtape teenage Jonathan had made and suggesting that they use it as the soundtrack sent to Mango stores. “His father always wanted very much for him to be part of the company,” says Gonzalez.
Eventually, Jonathan rose through the ranks, and in 2007, while in his 20s, he helped launch the menswear line Mango Man, which he led until last year. He was a handsome young executive, trim and predisposed to an open collar. Even when the European debt crisis hit Spain hard, Mango’s revenue grew. By 2014, Andic felt comfortable enough to sail around the world on his beloved €30 million yacht, the Nirvana Formentera, and leave his longtime deputy in charge with Jonathan poised to take over. The honeymoon was short-lived.
Mango’s winning sales pitch is that it’s slower than fast fashion, which makes it more expensive than rivals. But when Jonathan was part of the leadership team, the company shifted the business model to compete more aggressively, including against lower-end brands. The company failed to meet its targets. Net profits in 2015 were €11.8 million, down from €113.4 million three years earlier. Morale dropped and multiple senior leaders left. Nahman, who had largely retired in 2013 to raise thoroughbreds, returned in 2016 to help stabilize things, and Andic was forced to come back to port. Mango, he realized, had become too big. And his son was not cut out to be its next CEO. In 2015, Andic hired Toni Ruiz, who had a stint at Leroy Merlin, France’s answer to Home Depot, as CFO, and Ruiz soon eclipsed Jonathan as heir apparent. (In 2020, Mango named Ruiz CEO, which he remains today. In 2023, Andic made him the only non–family member to have a stake in the company, giving him 5 percent; the Andics own the rest.)
When I ask Josep Oliu how Jonathan had worked out at Mango, he sighs. “He wasn’t Isak,” he says. Halfon, too, says Andic had hoped Jonathan would work out. “Isak was telling me, ‘What do you think about Jonathan? He’s good, right?’” He shrugs. “What are you gonna say? Jonathan is a very nice guy. Spoiled kid. But I mean, you cannot run an aircraft carrier if you’ve only run a small boat.”
Jonathan stepped down last summer from the executive committee and from his role as global director of Mango Man. But he stayed on Mango’s board of directors and as the chair of the holding company through which the Andics control Mango. (He also helps oversee the family’s extensive real-estate portfolio.) By some accounts, he maintained a cordial relationship with his father. But there were also signs of distance. A fawning 2024 cover story in the weekly magazine of El País about Mango’s global expansion push — “Inside Mango: A Story of Fashion and Audacity” — centered on Andic and Ruiz; Jonathan did not participate. And at the ceremony with King Felipe, Jonathan and his girlfriend sat at a table far from the stage. He and Nata first appeared as a couple on her Instagram feed in 2023, and their courtship played out on social media and in the Spanish society pages his family otherwise ignored.
Andic was what they call un senyor de Barcelona: discreet, not ostentatious, philanthropic without publicizing it. His friends all described his excellent taste in wine and his generosity — how he fed people, hosted them, sent them olive oil, invited them on boat trips. He served on the boards of the Princess of Asturias Foundation and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and enjoyed all the trappings of great wealth — a private jet, multiple homes, at least one Ferrari — but never flaunted it. He rarely gave interviews and never invited photographers into his private life. Until his death, most of the family stayed out of the headlines. His daughters, Judith and Sarah, who have never held executive positions within Mango but have board seats in its holding companies, also keep a light social footprint. There is nary a photo of either on the internet.
Meanwhile, Nata, who runs a fashion public-relationships company, broke the news of her engagement to Jonathan in June 2024 in Hola!, the People magazine of Spain. In the photos, she wore Loewe, Dior, and Max Mara, but not Mango. They married in a civil ceremony in September 2024 and planned a wedding for the spring, but it was postponed after Andic’s death. “This is a Cinderella story that went wrong,” says a friend of Nata’s.
The couple had their first child in the fall. During her pregnancy, Nata posted “daily bump” selfies on Instagram. But since Andic’s death, Jonathan has stayed entirely out of sight. Last year he hired one of the country’s top defense lawyers, Cristóbal Martell, who also represents the soccer club FC Barcelona. Martell declined to comment. No one knows if Jonathan will be called to testify again as a witness or as a suspect, if he’ll be cleared, or if he’ll be arrested.
When news broke in October 2025 that Jonathan was a person of interest, all the old rumors about father and son came roaring back, including questions about why Andic was hiking without bodyguards. Henrique Cymerman, a Portuguese journalist based in Israel, tells me Andic was upset he had to consider getting security after October 7 as a high-profile Jewish figure in Spain. When Cymerman met Andic at his home in Barcelona the week before he died to discuss a foundation the businessman wanted to set up, “the first thing he told me was, ‘Look, look what is this situation. I now need security,’” Cymerman says. (A spokesman for the Andic family says Andic never had bodyguards.) A columnist, Salvador Sostres, a right-wing fixture in Spain’s ABC newspaper who is notorious for blind items and poisonous editorials, wrote that Isak had hurt his son when he pushed him out of the running as CEO. “Jonathan became Catalonia’s official ‘fool,’” Sostres wrote. “From then on, his father strictly controlled the allowances and privileges he granted his heir, which compounded Jonathan’s sense of humiliation.” Sostres wrote that Andic had often reflected “that he had made a mistake in raising his children based more on his success than on his example.”
On October 20, which would have been Andic’s 72nd birthday, the three executors of his will — Ruiz; Dani López, Mango’s chief expansion and franchise officer; and José Creuheras, a kind of Rupert Murdoch figure who runs Grupo Planeta, the giant Spanish-language media and publishing company — published a joint statement. “We defend Jonathan’s innocence and his status as a victim,” it reads. “The spread of rumors and speculation about his son, Jonathan Andic, ranging from his professional abilities to his intimate relationship with his father, paints a picture that is far from reality. Isak and Jonathan loved one another. They loved one another very much.” Halfon, too, disputes that Isak and Jonathan had a strained relationship: “A hundred and ten percent no way.”
Still, reports surfaced that Jonathan’s therapist was called to testify but refused, invoking doctor-patient confidentiality. And in December, El País reported that Jonathan told police he had visited the hiking trail just a few days before his father died there. Adding to the intrigue, Spanish press reported that Knuth testified to police about tensions between her late boyfriend and his son. (Knuth’s lawyer disputes this.) She also demanded a much larger sum from the estate — around €70 million according to Spanish press — on the grounds that as his common-law wife she was a de facto widow. The Andic family has agreed to give Knuth €27 million to settle, but talks between the two parties are ongoing. A lawyer representing Knuth declined to comment further. The Andic family declined to comment.
Reporters following the investigation, who have deep sources in the Catalonia police force and judicial system, say it is not unusual for some criminal investigations in Spain to move slowly. But the circumstantial evidence, the lack of witnesses, the high profile of the family, and the financial stakes make things particularly thorny, says Mayka Navarro, a veteran police reporter for La Vanguardia, the leading paper of Catalonia. “It’s one of the most complicated cases the Mossos have ever investigated because you don’t have any direct proof,” she says. In her view, the first judge didn’t have the nerve to push ahead with an investigation, but the second one did. Friends of Andic, meanwhile, believe the investigation is a bogus witch hunt motivated by class animus. Oliu called the investigation “unfair and disgraceful.” A spokeswoman for the Mossos declined to comment, citing judicial secrecy. In a statement, the Andic family said it had cooperated with the proceedings at all times and declined to comment on an ongoing investigation.
On the one-year anniversary of Andic’s death, the family took out a full-page tribute in Spanish and Catalan papers — a black-and-white photo of Andic with a warm smile and intelligent eyes that was also posted in the windows of Mango stores worldwide. It reads: “A year without you, Dad, united in your memory. Your love guides us today, tomorrow, and always.” The company also released a posed photo showing the backs of Jonathan, Judith, and Sarah, dressed in white, their arms around one another, facing a sculpture outside the Mango headquarters. Ruiz, the CEO, published an open letter to Andic in which he said the company was going strong. His signature was “Sky is the limit.”
Mango did not make the Andic family, Ruiz, or anyone on the board of directors available for an interview. But it did invite me for a highly controlled tour of its flagship store on Avinguda Diagonal, as well as its enormous logistics center about 20 miles outside Barcelona. Much of the logistics center is automated, a kind of Willy Wonka clothes factory. Imagine a dry cleaner the size of several airplane hangars where items manufactured by Mango’s suppliers — mostly in Asia, Turkey, and North Africa — are sent and sorted for shipment. Hanging garments circulate on endless loops as robot arms reach out to gather them. The center processes 85,000 items per hour and ships 500,000 items daily. At the end of a central walkway was a multistory billboard of Kaia Gerber, the face of Mango’s 2025 season. It reads: “Craft Your Own Story.”
On my last morning in Barcelona, I walked the path Andic had walked before falling to his death. Someone familiar with the investigation offered to show me the spot. It was gray and drizzly as we drove out of Barcelona toward Collbató, the town in the foothills of Montserrat. We parked in the lower of two parking lots. The upper one, closer to the trail, was closed because a pile of red rocks had dislodged from the cliff and fallen into the road.
It began to drizzle. We climbed several flights of well-maintained steps, then reached the start of the path, where a detailed map of the mountain trails was posted on a sign. My guide led and I followed. The path was generally narrow, enclosed by the mountain and vegetation. I wore running sneakers without great tread. The trail was not difficult. After about 15 minutes at a brisk pace, we stopped: This was the place. The trail here was about three feet across. There was the mountain wall behind us and a rocky gradual slope below with a few bushes in the near distance. The slope eventually gave way to a sheer dropoff, but that was not evident unless you already knew. We could see cars on the winding road far below before a cloud moved in and blocked the view. It would be hard to fall here with enough momentum to roll down the slope over the cliff, but not impossible. You would have to be close to the edge of the trail.