Brooke Astor’s son Anthony Marshall tapped mom’s fortune to fund his Broadway dreams: accountant
Melissa Grace/Corky Siemaszko
July 1, 2009
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/07/01/2009-07-01_brooke_astors_son_.html
When Brooke Astor’s son needed money to fund his Broadway producing career - he tapped his mother’s fortune.

Astor’s accountant testified Wednesday the socialite pumped $500,000 into Anthony Marshall’s production company, Delphi Productions.

The money went to stage a play about a German transvestitite called “I Am My Own Wife,” which was tanking at the box office, Stephen Cohen said at Marshall’s fraud trial.

“Who told you that was a gift,” asked Assistant District Attorney Peirce Moser asked.

“Mr. Marshall,” replied Cohen, 54.

Marshall, 85, and lawyer pal Francis Morrissey, 66, are accused taking advantage of the demented doyenne to plunder her $185 million fortune.

Astor was 101 when two checks of $250,000 from her checking account - the first on Sept. 4 2003, the second on Nov.18 2003 - were made out to Delphi, Cohen said.

It appears to have been money well-spent. The play won a couple of Tony Awards in 2004.

Prosecutors contend Astor was too senile to know what she was doing - and was unaware her son was running Delphi out of her Park Ave. duplex.

Cohen also testified that he had no idea Astor had given her son a $5 million cash gift in 2003 until he started working on her taxes. He told the court Marshall only reported $3.23 million of money on his gift taxes.

Marshall also used his mother’s money to pay staffers at the family’s Maine getaway - even though Astor had deeded the property to him in May 2003, Cohen said.

Cohen said when he asked Marshall for an explanation, he said, “As long as she was on this earth she would be visiting.”

The last time Astor visited Maine was in 2002. She died five year later at age 105.

Astor had a history of funding her only son’s careers, including donating big bucks to the Republican Party to secure Marshall a series of ambassadorial posts.

Cohen testified a day after Astor’s maid told the court she didn’t recognize the signature on a codicil to the socialite’s will that gave Marshall a bigger piece of his mom’s fortune.

Witness:  Astor’s Son Also Cheated on Taxes
Accused of Only Claiming $3.2M or $5M ‘Gift’
Laura Italiano
July 1, 2009
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07012009/news/regionalnews/manhattan/witness__astors_son_also_cheated_on_taxe_177044.htm
Why just swindle your 101-year-old mom when you can cheat on the “gift” taxes, too?

Prosecutors in the Brooke Astor swindle trial are spending today grilling her former accountants — and showing jurors that the beloved philanthropist’s son, Anthony Marshall, took a more than $5 million cash “gift” from his Alzheimer’s addled mother in 2003, but only reported $3.225 million of the loot on his gift taxes.

That would mean Marshall hid almost two million in income from the taxman.

Marshall had transferred a million of those allegedly hidden funds into his own coffers out of his mother’s hedge fund shares, then chalked up another $757,000 of the “gift” as reimbursement for paying Astor’s personal expenses, according to bank records shown to the jury this morning.

But Marshall never mentioned any of this money as “gifts” at tax time — not on paper or during a face-to-face meeting, testified Astor accountant Stephen Cohen.

“I always rely on the information submitted to me by my client,” Cohen said, meaning Marshall. The allegedly swindling son — charged with strong-arming Astor out of more than $60 million in gifts and bequests — had power of attorney over the affairs of his mother, and drew a more than $400,000 a year salary from her accounts as manager of her finances.

“Did that $757,320 ever make it onto Mrs. Astor’s 2003 gift tax return?” prosecutor Peirce Moser asked the CPA, who answered, “No.”

Manhattan prosecutors don’t charge the actual $5 million “gift” itself as a crime. But they’ve sneered at the circumstances surrounding it. Astor was recuperating from a broken hip, in her bedclothes, at her Westchester County estate when she agreed to sign a letter giving Marshall permission to take the money.

Afterward, her butler testified, the dementia-afflicted doyenne had no idea what she’d just signed. The butler, Chris Ely, told jurors he was rebuffed on repeated attempts to get a copy of whatever she’d signed that day.

The alleged tax cheating carries a mere four year maximum sentence for Marshall, a physically frail 85-year-old whose real headache in the now two-and-a-half-month-old trial is a grand larceny charge carrying a maximum of 25 years prison.