Huguette Clark's beneficiaries may have to give back gifts
RICH SCHAPIRO
Saturday, June 16, 2012
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| Heiress Huguette Clark |
Reclusive Manhattan heiress Huguette Clark lavished her caretakers with million-dollar mansions, rare violins and coveted works of art.
But if the court-appointed official overseeing Clark’s estate gets her way, her newly rich former nurses and doctors will have to return the gifts.
Public administrator Ethel Griffin has asked a court to force Clark’s ex-staffers to give up the goods, saying they manipulated the copper heiress into leaving them the stunning largess.
The effort is part of Griffin’s bid to reclaim $37 million for the $400 million estate, The Associated Press reported.
“It does not appear that anyone in a position of power or authority ever intervened to ensure that Mrs. Clark possessed the requisite capacity to make gifts and was acting of her own free ill,” Deputy Public Administrator Joy Thompson wrote in last month’s filing.
Clark died last year at age 104. The heir to a copper fortune, Clark had no kids and left nothing in her will to family members.
Among those targeted by Griffin is Clark’s private nurse, Hadassah Peri.
She was showered with almost $28 million, including three Manhattan apartments, two homes elsewhere and a $1.2 million Stradivarius violin.
Peri’s family received an additional $3 million.
Peri’s lawyer disputed the claim that she took advantage of Clark.
“(Clark) was a very generous woman” who made gifts to people she rarely or never saw, said the lawyer, Harvey Corn.
“It’s absurd to think that she would not give gifts to the individuals who worked with her.”
A handful of other nurses and doctors were gifted more than $4 million.
Members of Clark’s medical staff weren’t the only ones to make out like bandits.
Accountant Irving Kamsler got $435,000 in gifts, while lawyer Wallace Bock was given $60,000.
In an especially bizarre bounty, Bock was also rewarded with a $1.8 million contribution from Clark for a security system for the Israeli settlement where his daughter lives.
“The record will show that Wally Bock acted in Huguette Clark’s interest at all times,” said his lawyer John Dadakis.
With News Wire Services
rschapiro@nydailynews.com
Wallace "Wally" Bock, attorney for Huguette Clark, outside his office in Manhattan on Thursday, after the district attorney began investigating his client's finances.
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NEW YORK — Huguette Clark, the reclusive 104-year-old heiress, is known as generous toward those who care for her, including her social secretary, who received a $10 million gift. It's now clear that her longtime nurse has also been a recipient: To her, Clark has given the money to buy four homes for her family.
Clark also has made gifts benefiting her attorney's family, including a dollhouse worth more than $10,000 and a $1.5 million security system for the settlement where the attorney's daughters and grandchildren live in Israel.Cynthia Garcia, a paralegal who worked for two years for Clark's attorney, Wallace "Wally" Bock, described those gifts in an interview with msnbc.com. Garcia also said that Bock and Clark's accountant drafted a will that would have left money to Bock, trying repeatedly to persuade her to sign it — then joked about their client and cursed her behind her back when she would not sign the will.
The paralegal also said that attorney Bock called her last week after investigators started looking into Clark's affairs, encouraged her to leave town, and offered to pay for an attorney to represent her, who then told her not to talk to investigators or the press.
A spokesman for Bock acknowledged the gifts, but said that he acted "appropriately, professionally and consistent with her wishes."
Msnbc.com reported last week that the Manhattan district attorney is investigating the finances of the 104-year-old Clark, daughter of a Montana copper miner and heiress to one of America's great fortunes. The DA's Elder Abuse Unit has detectives looking at transactions in her bank accounts, as well as the sale of her Stradivarius violin for $6 million and a Renoir painting for $23.5 million.
Her wealth, estimated at half a billion dollars, is managed by her attorney, Bock, 78, of Queens, N.Y., and her certified public accountant, a convicted felon named Irving H. Kamsler, 63, of the Bronx, N.Y. The men have not been accused of a crime.
Full coverage: 'The Clarks, an American story of wealth, mystery and scandal'
Msnbc.com also reported that the attorney and accountant became the owners of the New York City apartment of another elderly client after his last will and testament was revised six times.
Private nurse on call Clark is said to be alert and in good health for her age, but she left her Fifth Avenue apartment for hospital rooms some 22 years ago. A few years later, she hired a nurse through an agency, and that nurse has been with her ever since.
This is the last known photo of Huguette Clark, taken Aug. 11, 1930, the day of her divorce, in Reno, Nev.
Clark gave Peri the cash in 2000 and 2001 to buy two apartments in Manhattan, on E. 96th Street near Park Avenue, for Peri's children to use as dorms while they were in college, the attorney said. They're valued between $200,000 and $350,000 each, according to property records.
There also is a two-unit house near Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, near the Peri family home. Clark offered to buy this house so there would be room for Peri's visiting family to stay. It's valued at about $700,000.
Finally, there's a vacation house next to a golf course on the Jersey Shore near Long Branch, N.J., valued at about $500,000.
Peri referred all questions to her attorney, Reiner, who said Clark bought the four homes for Peri and her family as gifts to thank her for nearly 20 years of attentive service.
The paralegal Cynthia Garcia, the former paralegal for Clark's attorney who has been interviewed by the DA, described expensive gifts that benefitted the family of attorney Bock — including the dollhouse and the security system. She first described these gifts in Saturday's New York Post.
Bock's spokesman, Michael McKeon, confirmed that those two gifts were made, but he said the paralegal has many of the details wrong and is just seeking "her 15 minutes of fame."
Cynthia Garcia, former paralegal for Wallace "Wally" Bock, attorney for heiress Huguette Clark.
She told msnbc.com that Clark gave Bock's granddaughter an antique Barbie dollhouse worth more than $1 million. Bock's spokesman, McKeon, said the dollhouse was neither an antique, nor a Barbie dollhouse, and was worth somewhere in the five figures, between $10,000 and $100,000.
Garcia also said Bock solicited from Clark a check for $1.5 million after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to build the security system, which Garcia called a "bomb shelter," for the community in Israel where his daughters and their families live.
McKeon, Bock's spokesman, said Clark did make a donation of about $1.5 million to the community in Israel, but it was not to Bock's family. He said it was for a sophisticated security system for the community — not a bomb shelter — and that the money was handled scrupulously through an attorney inIsrael, with money placed in an escrow account and paid out as needed for the installation. If Bock's family were to leave the community, McKeon said, the security system would stay.
New York state ethics rules prohibit lawyers from soliciting gifts from clients "for the benefit of the lawyer or a person related to the lawyer," but allow some gifts that are volunteered.
'Consistent with her wishes' Huguette ("hue-GET") Marcelle Clark is the last surviving child of William Andrews Clark (1839-1925), a copper miner and U.S. senator who in his time was described by The New York Times as neck and neck with John D. Rockefeller for the title of richest American. Huguette, born in Paris and married only briefly, had no children. She has lived as a recluse for several decades, leaving unoccupied her three empty homes in California, Connecticut and New York City. Her attorney, Bock, has said he is the first of her seven attorneys to meet her, and that even he has met her only twice.
Huguette Clark, heiress to a copper fortune, has been secluded for decades. In June she turned 104 in a New York hospital.
Kamsler and Bock have not responded to repeated requests for explanation, but McKeon offered point-by-point rebuttals to some of Garcia's claims, and also issued a blanket statement on Bock's behalf:
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