Marshall/Morrissey trial updates

Son a ‘heel’ to shoe fan Astor
Laura Italiano
April 30, 2009
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04302009/news/regionalnews/son_a_heel_to_shoe_fan_astor_166885.htm?page=0
No shoes for you!

Anthony Marshall had his famous but failing mother, Brooke Astor, in such a tizzy over her finances that she was afraid to even go shoe shopping, according to startling testimony in his Manhattan swindle trial yesterday.

On Day Two of testimony, two prosecution witnesses — her cousin, Lord William Astor, and her longtime Vincent Astor Foundation director, Linda Gillies — told jurors that the millionairess was convinced by her only child that she was flat broke.

By Marshall’s bamboozling of his mother, she became putty in his hands, prosecutors charge. That way, she wouldn’t spend the cash Marshall hoped to inherit — and he could con her into agreeing to sell her most valuable art, giving him $2 million in commissions, the DA’s Office said.

“Mrs. Astor loved shoes,” Gillies told jurors yesterday, launching into the alleged “My Son the Shoe Nazi” scandal. “She bought a lot of them.”

One day in 1995, Astor, then 93, walked into her foundation’s Midtown offices — where she’d controlled the dispersal of close to $200 million in donations in her lifetime, and where Marshall himself kept desk space to manage her personal fortune worth tens of millions more. She was holding shopping bags full of new shoes — and looking sheepish.

“I bought a lot of shoes, and Tony isn’t going to approve,” Gillies recalled Astor saying.

“And did you ask her why Tony would not approve?” prosecutor Joel Seidemann asked the witness.

“She said, ‘Tony says I can’t afford it.’ ”

By 2002, as Astor neared 100, she had been conned by Marshall into believing she was so close to the poorhouse that she needed to sell her 1917 masterpiece “Up the Avenue from 34th Street” by Childe Hassam, prosecutors charge. He allegedly told her that was the only way she could afford new dresses.

It was her favorite painting, hanging in a place of honor over the fireplace of her Park Avenue apartment’s red-lacquered library.

Lord Astor — a charming British aristocrat — told jurors the painting was coveted by no less than Barbara Walters.

“[Brooke] said every time Barbara Walters came by, she made an offer to buy it,” Lord Astor testified. “She was half pleased and half irritated that [Walters] would do that. Barbara Walters used to make an offer every time she saw it — it almost became a joke.”

Then, “suddenly, one day, it wasn’t there. I asked her where it had gone, and she said Tony sold it because she needed the money, which was a somewhat surprising remark to me.

“When I first saw a gap on the wall, it was particularly noticeable. There wasn’t anything to replace it with.”

Marshall sold the painting to a gallery for $10 million, and is charged with grand larceny for pocketing a $2 million commission.

The gap on the wall was eventually filled by a dreary portrait — a copy of an original — of Astor’s father.

“Mr. Marshall was telling Brooke that she was running out of money,” said the very proper Lord Astor — who peppered his testimony with the occasional “as it were” and once referred to the PBS talk show host as “Charles Rose.”

“She would say, ‘Tony said I mustn’t spend too much money.’ ”

Astor’s mental decline was in full force by 1995, Gillies told jurors, almost a decade before Marshall claims his mom was competent enough to sign a will change handing him and his wife, Charlene, an extra $60 million. Case in point: Astor called a meeting with the Rev. Jesse Jackson to continue discussions on a charity project, then, in his presence, became completely confused.

“I think she couldn’t remember who he was,” Gillies said, her voice tinged with sadness at the memory. “I think she realized he was a distinguished person. But she couldn’t remember why she’d asked him there.”

By the time she celebrated her 100th birthday, Astor was petrified she wouldn’t remember who her own guests were. “Just tell them, ‘Thank you so much for coming. So nice to see you,’ ” said Lord Astor, her escort that night.

“Sure enough, there was a rather burly security guard” standing at the door to the party, Lord Astor recalled with a chuckle. “And she marched up to him and said, ‘Thank you so much for coming. So nice to see you.’ ”

Testimony continues tomorrow, with author Louis Auchincloss, a longtime Astor friend, slated to take the stand.

Trial of Brooke Astor’s son gives a dizzying look into world of too much everything
Joanna Molloy
April 30, 2009
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/04/30/2009-04-30_astor_a_dizzying_look_into_too_much_everything.html
The rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “are different from you and me.”

And just about everybody else, he might have added.

They buy shoes by the bushel.

They have mansions, estates and swanky apartments with more rooms than the Days Inn.

They have butlers and French maids and non-French maids, and chauffeurs at each place and different gardeners everywhere.

They have diamonds the size of kumquats, racehorses up to here and they jet thousands of miles to have lunch and then jet back home.

Different?

Here’s Lord William Astor testifying at the trial of Anthony Marshall, who’s accused of looting the $185 million fortune of his mother, Brooke Astor.

In an accent out of “Masterpiece Theatre,” Lord Astor recalled how “Cousin Brooke used to visit us in England whenever she came to Europe.

“We have a family holiday home in Scotland, and we might go there. Sometimes, she would go to Italy and we would join her there.

Or we would visit her at Holly Hill, her estate on the Hudson.”

Can Helena Bonham Carter be far behind?

On one visit, Astor recalled, “She said she was staying at the Connaught Hotel and that she shouldn’t be staying there because ‘it was very expensive and Tony was always saying I’m spending too much money and I’m low on cash.’

“I was concerned and made inquiries with a friend at Citibank. I was entirely satisfied that this wasn’t the case.”

Heck, the bank account must have been down to a paltry $200 million. Here’s Linda Gillies, former head of the now-defunct Vincent Astor Foundation, describing Brooke Astor’s lifestyle, under questioning from prosecutor Elizabeth Loewy:

“She had Holly Hill, a very large, handsome house that sits on many acres overlooking the Hudson, and she had the estate in Cove End, Northeast Harbor, Maine, and she had her apartment \[on\] Park Ave.

“Chris Ely was her butler, Ramone was Mrs. Astor’s personal maid, she was French. She helped Mrs. Astor decide what to wear. . . .”

Astor also had a “parlor maid,” a chauffeur, and numerous housekeepers and gardeners – at each residence, Gillies said.

“How many rooms did her Park Ave. apartment have?” Loewy asked.

“Oh, goodness, I never counted!” Gillies exclaimed. “Ten? Twelve?”

Note to self: Count the rooms in your apartment in case anybody asks.

Astor spent $25,000 a year at one Manhattan dressmaker, and had jewels so “important” as they say – a 10-carat diamond ring, three strands of pearls, a necklace of huge emeralds – that when Marshall’s wife, Charlene, showed up at the Tony Awards wearing Astor’s snowflake diamond necklace, socialites recognized it on their TVs and sounded alarms.

Still, Gillies recalled, one morning Astor came into her office upset.

“She’d bought a lot of pairs of shoes. Mrs. Astor loved shoes,” Gillies recalled. “She said, ‘Tony says I can’t afford it.’ She would say Tony told her she didn’t have money.’ ”

Poor babies. We can’t wait until Annette de la Renta, wife of Oscar, the designer, testifies.   A woman whose stepfather owned 250 racehorses and who used to put stacks of South African gold coins on dinner tables for guests as party favors, de la Renta is to the manner born.

She once took her private plane from the Dominican Republic just to have lunch with Astor at Holly Hill, and flew back by nightfall.

Boy, that’s gonna really hit home with jurors who can barely afford the monthly MetroCard to get to the courthouse.

Brooke Astor intimidated by son Anthony Marshall, witnesses say
Melissa Grace/Corky Seimaszko
April 30, 2009
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/04/29/2009-04-29_brooke_astor_was_so_senile_when_she_changed_her_will_she_didnt_recognize_jesse_j.html
Brook Astor who scared her – but didn’t always recognize her friends.

Two prosecution witnesses testified yesterday that in her final years, the grande dame of New York society was intimidated by her son Anthony Marshall and his wife, Charlene.

Part of that was because Marshall badgered his mother about her spending and made her feel like she was running out of money, said Linda Gillies, the longtime director of the now-defunct Vincent Astor Foundation.

Once, Astor arrived at the foundation carrying several pairs of shoes and said, “I’ve bought a lot of pairs of shoes, and Tony isn’t going to approve,” Gillies said.

“She said, ‘Tony says I can’t afford it,’ ” the former aide said.

Astor’s British cousin Lord William Astor said Brooke asked him to accompany her to her 100th birthday party in 2002.

“She said, ‘I want you to take me to the party this evening. I don’t want to go with Tony and Charlene.’ ”

Lord Astor testified at the trial of Marshall and co-defendant Francis Morrissey, who are charged with taking advantage of Astor’s senility to plunder her $185 million fortune.

The British blueblood said Astor “was rather nervous about going with” the Marshalls to her ball. “She gradually became slightly intimidated by the combination of the two of them,” he said.

When they got to the soiree at the Rockefeller Estate, Astor walked up to a security guard and told him, “Thank you so much for coming,” Lord Astor said.

“She never would have made that mistake [previously],” he said.

Addled by Alzheimer’s, she often failed to recognize even close friends or well-known people like the Rev. Jesse Jackson – long before she died in 2007 at age 105.

Gillies said that when Jackson called on Astor in 1995, “I think she couldn’t really remember who he was.”

“I think she realized he was a distinguished person, but she couldn’t remember why she asked him there.”

Gillies said Astor “didn’t know what to say.”

“She began to tell the same stories to fill up space,” she said. “And finally it was clear the meeting should end, and the Rev. Jackson said, ‘Thank you very much for having me,’ and he left.”

Prosecutors contend her deterioration progressed long before she amended her will in January 2004 to give Marshall $60 million she’d earmarked earlier for charity, prosecutors contend.

“She went downhill very quickly” after her centennial bash, Lord Astor said, adding, “She could be easily intimidated – she lacked confidence.”

Prosecutors put Lord Astor and Gillies on the stand to counter defense claims that Brooke Astor was still lucid when she rewrote her wills.

Gillies also testified that Astor would sometimes hide her befuddlement by suddenly blurting out unexpected things, such as, “I’ve never had a face-lift.”

Sometimes, Astor would tell well-worn family stories, including one one about how her mother told her, “Brooke, don’t get beyond yourself,” Gillies said.

Gillies took the stand a day after lawyers for 84-year-old Marshall and co-defendant Morrissey ripped the famous philanthropist who donated millions to New York causes as as a social climber.

“She used that money to position herself in the highest echelons of New York society,” Marshall’s lawyer Frederick Hafetz said.

Hafetz insisted the millions Marshall and Morrissey are accused of conning Astor out of was money the socialite was trying to keep from Charlene.

Hafetz also said Astor had a change of heart a decade later when she realized that Charlene was “the love of \[Marshall's\] life.”

The millions Astor donated to support city jewels like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art came from her late hubby’s foundation – not her personal fortune, Hafetz insisted.

Marshall faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

Brooke Astor’s mental state at time of changes in her will key to Anthony Marshall’s fate
Joanna Molloy
April 29, 2009
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/04/29/2009-04-29_glitterati_may_shine_brightest_for_trial.html
When Anthony Marshall’s prosecutor name-dropped the bold-faced New Yorkers who will testify against him, he must have felt like he was back in Iwo Jima.

Instead of enemy soldiers out to wound him, though, it would be members of the ruling class. Henry Kissinger. Annette de la Renta. Louis Auchincloss. Lord William Astor, over from London. Barbara Walters, even.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Kirke Bartley’s courtroomwill look like lunchtime at Swifty’s.

Bring ‘em on, Marshall’s lawyer, Fred Hafetz, says.

“Annette de la Renta and Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller are bit players,” Hafetz told jurors yesterday, calling them the “social glitterati.”

Their job, he said, will be to testify about whether Marshall, 84, and co-defendant Francis Morrissey played three-card monte with Marshall’s mom, Brooke Astor, after she got Alzheimer’s.

“The assistant district attorney may bring each of them up to tell a little anecdote, but not one of them was there on Jan. 12, 2004.” That’s when 102-year-old Brooke, whose fortune was estimated at $185 million, signed a change in her will to give $60million to her only child, Marshall.

“No one disputes that Mrs. Astor had Alzheimer’s,” Hafetz told the jury, adding that Marshall had immediately notified her doctor and lawyer when she began to show symptoms in 2000.

“The critical issue is whether, when Mrs. Astor signed, she knew what she was doing. There is no question that from time to time Mrs. Astor was confused.

“Did she understand when she signed that she was leaving her property to her only son, who had always been a loving and loyal son?”

On Monday, prosecutor Elizabeth Loewy described times when Astor, once the grande dame of New York society, had been reduced to “looking at animal picture books and singing ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?’” with her nurse.

Other times, she had “Sundowner’s Syndrome” – the mysterious agitation some Alzheimer’s patients go through at twilight.

Anyone who has a family member with dementia knows there are good days and bad days that can last a decade: The bottle of milk in the cabinet. The cereal box in the fridge. The clown makeup. Addressing you as the sister who died years ago. And then, suddenly, clear as a summer sky, she recognizes you and starts making with the wisecracks. Her old self.

If only the jurors could watch the Oscar-nominated film “Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter,” in which filmmaker Deborah Hoffman documented her mother’s 17-year descent into the disease.

Somehow, Hoffman made it funny by dividing the changes her mother, a brilliant academic, went through into phases.

There was the “Suitcase Period,” where her mother would fill her luggage with bananas in preparation for an imagined trip. Next time, it was cracker boxes. Then came the “Dentist Period,” when she put hundreds of Post-it notes around the house to remind herself of a dentist appointment. On other days, Prof. Hoffman was perfectly normal.

Brooke Astor, too, had her good days and bad days. She’d still dress up for dinner, and make the risqué joke. At the end of her incredibly long life, she may have finally felt she had given enough to charity and wanted her only son to taste life at the level she had lived it.

She wasn’t a big fan of Charlene, the third wife, but, Hafetz told the jury, Astor knew “Charlene made Tony happy.”

In the years after Astor’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, she signed will updates that gave her son the mansion in Maine, sent $5 million to Charlene and ordered her estate and Park Ave. duplex sold while she was alive to save money on estate taxes.

If jurors believe that each time she signed them was a good day, Marshall goes home. If they think it was a bad day, well, Sing Sing does have a river view.

Selfless socialite was actually self-centered, greedy, says lawyer for Brooke Astor’s son
Melissa Grace/Corky Siemaszko
April 28, 2009
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/04/28/2009-04-
28_lawyers_brooke_astors_son_anthony_marshall_stole_from_mother_and_gave_to_wife.html
Now they’re bashing Brooke.

Lawyers for the son of saintly socialite Brooke Astor opened their case Tuesday by going after the reputation of his late lamented mother.

While Astor was celebrated for giving millions to various New York institutions and charities, Anthony Marshall’s defenders portrayed her as a penny-pincher who gave not one cent more than required under the will of her husband, Vincent Astor.

“She used that money to position herself in the highest echelons of New York Society” and to become “one of the greatest benefactors,” defense lawyer Frederick Hafetz said. “Make no mistake” she used the money “to position herself.”

Hafetz said the $60 million that Marshall and his lawyer buddy Francis Morrissey are accused of conning Astor out of – while she lay addled by Alzheimer’s – was money the socialite earmarked to charity out of spite.

Astor was mad that Marshall ran off and married her minister’s ex-wife, Charlene, Hafetz said.

It was only later that Astor realized that Charlene was “the love of (Marshall’s) life.”

“Like a tide flowing in at the end, she decided that’s where she wants her money to go,” Hafetz said.

“She realized that Tony’s third marriage to Charlene made Tony happy. And although Brooke never had any great love for Charlene, she loved her son Tony and she realized and recognized what Charlene meant to her son.”

Hafetz’s syrupy words moved Charlene Marshall, who sat directly behind her 84-year-old husband, to tears.

A day earlier, Manhattan District Attorney Elizabeth Loewy charged that Marshall – with the help of Morrissey – pillaged his mother’s $200 million fortune to satisfy Charlene.

Loewy said Marshall knew as far back as 2000 that his mother was losing her mind and took advantage of her senility to reroute $60 million meant for Astor’s favorite charities to his pocket.

Hafetz said he has “incontrovertible” evidence that Astor was in full command of her faculties when she amended her wills – something she did regularly.

“She changed her wills like people change socks, it was second nature to her,” the defense attorney said.

From the time she married Vincent Astor in 1953, the socialite changed her will 38 times. Thirty-three of those changes were made between 1960 and Dec. 2003, the lawyer said.

Astor was “obsessed with her wills” and would take them with her to her Westchester County estate and pore over them “like you read the newspaper,” Hafetz said.

“The one subject that had emotional resonance, that spoke to her heart, was her will,” he said. “The one subject that this woman would understand was her will, the subject that dominated her entire life.

Astor died two years ago at age 105 amid accusations Marshall robbed her blind while she languished on a urine-soaked couch – a prisoner in her Park Ave. home.

Marshall’s chief accuser was his son Philip, whose explosive elder-abuse allegations set the stage for a historic battle of blue bloods fought in open court.

Also on the witness list is a who’s who of New York’s upper crust, including Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters and Annette de la Renta, wife of designer Oscar de la Renta.

Marshall faces up to 25 years in prison, if convicted. He and Morrissey have pleaded not guilty.

Astor Case ‘Maid’ in Shade
Laura Italiano
April 28, 2009
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04282009/news/regionalnews/astor_case_maid_in_shade_166551.htm
The butler saw it.

And the maids. And the nurses.

The Brooke Astor swindle trial began yesterday with Manhattan prosecutors promising jurors they’ll hear testimony by some of the beloved philanthropist’s most luminous friends, including Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters and Annette de la Renta.

But the most damning testimony against accused larcenous son Anthony Marshall may come instead from “the help,” according to dramatic opening statements by Manhattan prosecutors yesterday.

It was the servants who watched in shock as Marshall removed a $300,000 painting from Astor’s Park Avenue apartment wall in 2004, leaving only the nails behind before snapping, “My mother says I can have whatever I want,” prosecutors charge.

That same year, a nurse watched in helpless shock as Marshall and his shady attorney marched the doddering, 101-year-old doyenne — one man clutching her by either arm — into her drawing room to sign papers in which Marshall gave himself sole power of $60 million of his mother’s money, prosecutors charge.

This stunning vignette of literal strong-arming stands out even among what prosecutors are calling “an ugly torrent of greed and manipulation” on the part of Marshall and co-defendant Francis Morrissey.

“The defendants actually physically extracted her from nurse Pearline Noble’s arms,” Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Loewy told jurors. “Mrs. Astor nearly fell.”

“Who are those men?” the nurse will testify Astor later asked of the cadre of dark-suited lawyers in that back drawing room. “What did I just do?”

The nurse also will testify that, by this time, Astor’s Alzheimer’s had advanced to the point that one of her favorite activities was joining her in singing “How Much is That Doggie in the Window” — a sorry and precipitous decline for an emerald-bedecked icon once known as the queen of New York philanthropy.

Jurors will hear that it was at around this time, in 2004, that Astor began begging her night nurse, Minette Christie, to check under her bed at night “in case the ‘bad men’ had come back,” Loewy said.

Using the fortune bequeathed to her by her third, and last, husband, Vincent, the white-gloved and lively Astor had bestowed on the city some $200 million in charitable funds, reviving the New York City Public Library, funding the Metropolitan Museum’s Chinese Courtyard, underwriting expansions to the Bronx Zoo.

But over the course of her final five years on Earth — from 2000 to 2005, years in which Astor herself admitted, “I feel like I’m losing my mind” — it was the servants and health aides, watching her round-the-clock, who most closely saw the greedy predatory maneuvers of Marshall and his cadre of lawyers, prosecutors told jurors yesterday.

In 2002, Marshall easily convinced her that she was broke — and that she’d have to sell her favorite and most valuable painting if she wanted to buy dresses, Loewy told jurors.

Marshall that year sold the painting — “Up the Avenue From 34th Street” by Childe Hassam, which hung in a place of honor over an 18th-century fireplace at her Park Avenue duplex — for $10 million, awarding himself a $2 million commission that is being charged against him as a grand larceny.

Marshall, 84, faces a maximum of 25 years prison if convicted of that top charge.

“He told her, ‘Now she could buy dresses,’ ” Loewy told jurors they’ll hear from yet another house staffer. Astor was in fact far from broke — she was worth about $100 million at the time.

Opening statements are expected today by the lawyers for Marshall and Morrissey.

All For Wife’s Love of Money
Andrea Peyser
April 28, 2009
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/seven/04282009/news/columnists/all_for_wifes_love_of_money_166535.htm
He did it for geriatric love. Some of us look at Char lene Marshall and see only the stout ankles, support hose and generous double chins.

But Anthony Marshall, who is standing trial in Manhattan for ripping off and tormenting his late mother, the Grand Dame Brooke Astor, saw so much more in the lady a maid uncharitably dubbed “Miss Piggy.”

Charlene was Anthony’s aging, nagging, domineering queen. She was a shiksa Leona Helmsley. In his eyes, she was perfect.

Anthony Marshall was already rounding the bend to 80 when he allegedly began telling his elegant, multimillionaire mother, Brooke, that she was going broke, a prosecutor said in opening statements in this uproarious trial.

In fact, he convinced Brooke she couldn’t afford a simple dress, when she could have bought and sold Bergdorf’s several times over.

The question nags at the depths of the soul. What drives the heart of a civilized, elderly gentleman to behave so shamelessly?

What makes a formerly dutiful son crack? What gives a man of advancing years sweaty nights and haunted days?

And what makes the sexagenarian Charlene — who came to court yesterday in sensible shoes and a black headband — the Geritol Bonnie to Anthony’s Clyde?

Now the answer appears as plain as Charlene in the morning. Anthony was in love. Or the senior equivalent.

In an opening statement lasting an eternity, prosecutor Elizabeth Loewy said Charlene, whom Anthony married in 1993, was impatient to get her mitts on Brooke’s fortune. Anthony obeyed, like a lovesick puppy.

“Anthony Marshall’s preoccupation with getting money for Charlene was motivation for the scheme to defraud,” Loewy said about the defendant. He is Brooke’s only child. But he was never her favorite.

Brooke was “not intimately close” with her boy, Loewy said.

But with Charlene, now 63, he got the affection, attention and deep, rippled flesh his stylish mother could never provide.

Even better, his mother despised his bride.

“There was no love lost between Mrs. Astor and Charlene,” said Loewy. “Mrs. Astor simply didn’t care for Charlene.”

Mrs. A found Charlene, who left her preacher husband for Mrs. Astor’s baby, to be coarse. Common. Not good enough, even for a boy she merely tolerated.

For Anthony Marshall, love nearly conquered all. Too bad greed got in the way.