More on the Glassell estate dispute

Oilman’s heirs fight
Laurel Brubaker Calkins/Margaret Cronin Fisk
November 15, 2009
ArabianBusiness.com
http://www.arabianbusiness.com/573308-oilmans-heirs-fight-art-museum-over-estate
Curry glassell, the oilman’s 52-year-old daughter, is fighting to keep more of that fortune in the family through a probate battle that went to trial in Houston last week. Jurors will be asked to decide among more than a dozen wills her father executed before he died last year at age 95.

“Nobody ever said Mr Glassell was demented while he was alive,” David Gerger, an attorney speaking on behalf of the museum and the Glassell Family Foundation, told jurors in his opening statement. “He knew exactly what he was doing.”

Curry Glassell and her children will receive about $10m in cash and mineral rights under her father’s last will, a tenth of an earlier bequest. She contends the museum and its lawyers pressured her father to change his will and leave the bulk of his fortune to the museum and a family foundation controlled by her half-brother, Alfred C Glassell III, 45.

Glassell decided “to give most of his money to charity,” Gerger said. “Nobody tricked him to do that or bamboozled him to do that or pulled the wool over his eyes.”

Curry Glassell also will be receiving money from a trust fund, he said.

A lawyer for Curry Glassell said she was set to receive a much larger bequest until her father signed new wills in 2000 and 2003. The earlier wills left Curry Glassell about one- quarter of his estate, a share worth between $100m and $150m, attorney Jack Lawter said at the trial.

“There’s a long history of how he wanted to treat his family and his property,” Lawter told jurors. “It changes radically right at the very end.”

By this time, Glassell was “a very sick man,” Lawter said. “We’re not saying he was in a coma or couldn’t talk. The evidence will show Mr Glassell couldn’t form a reasonable judgment on these issues.”

Curry’s lawyers described her as a single mother of two teenage sons who is part-owner of Good Vibes for You, an Australian organic bottled-water company. “She doesn’t run in the same circles as a lot of people in this case,” Lawter said before trial, referring to Alfred III’s prominence on Houston’s charity ball and country-club circuit.

It will be difficult to persuade jurors that the museum didn’t have a special place in Alfred C Glassell Jr’s heart, museum lawyer Joe Jamail said in an interview. As chairman of the museum’s board of trustees in the 1990s, Glassell led a capital campaign that raised $112m to build an exhibition wing that doubled the museum’s size in 2000, making it the nation’s fifth-largest.

Glassell daughter’s tearful testimony
She says in her ‘gut’ inheritance left her is wrong
Mary Flood
November 5, 2009
Houston Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/6706152.html
In often tearful testimony Curry Glassell testified Thursday that though she didn’t really think of her father as incompetent when he signed his last will, he never intended for the bulk of his half-billion-dollar estate to go to charity while she only received $3 million and some oil interest.

“I just didn’t feel it reflected what my daddy had talked to me about. It was like in my gut something was wrong,” she said of first seeing the 2003 last will of her oil man and philanthropist father Alfred Glassell Jr.

The 52-year-old was reluctant to paint the harsh picture of her father her lawyers need to show a 1998 will leaving Curry around $100 million should be honored. Legally, the daughter is claiming her father was mentally unstable and unduly swayed when he signed his last two wills.

Curry, who is worth roughly $15 million, is alone on one side of the courtroom and the case. She testified about feeling that way in the family since her father divorced her mother when she was 6.

Curry’s brother, her father’s widow, a family foundation and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston are on the other side. That crowd is fighting to convince the jury in Probate Judge Kathy Stone’s court that the 2003 will should rule and the bulk of the estate should go to the museum and the family charitable foundation controlled by Alfred III .

Alfred Glassell Jr., a founder of the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Corp. and the Glassell School of Art, died in October 2008 at 95.

Curry balked at describing him as mentally weak. But she was willing to blame his lawyers at Vinson & Elkins for pushing Glassell to leave more to charity. “I don’t think V&E took care of me at all in the end,” Curry said of the firm she herself had used and that helped her father write his at least 13 wills.

Murray Fogler, a lawyer for her brother, tried to portray Curry as a woman with substantial millions who was constantly asking for more.

He went over a series of letters she wrote to her father . A 1990 letter asked for a college graduation present. In 1996 she wrote to apologize and ask for a half-million-dollar loan for a home, a lake house and a 37-foot cabin cruiser.

In 2001, a year after her father first cut her back in his will, she wrote a soul-baring 14-page single-spaced missive discussing their sometimes rocky relationship and hoping for a new start . She asked for an inheritance, saying she didn’t want to go to a nursing home in her old age and wanted to live in London and take her two sons travelling.

It was unclear from the testimony whether Glassell granted any of her requests.