UBC: Rosenman, Forgery, Perjury, and an Enormous Fortune

[truepenny]

Forgery, perjury, and an enormous fortune: 2303 claimants to the Ella Wendel estate by Mervin Rosenman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is an odd little book about an inheritance case straight out of Dickens. Ella Wendel died in 1931, leaving an estate worth $36,000,000--and that's the value in 1931, not adjusted for inflation to 1984, or to 2017. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator can't handle $36 million, but it tells me $36 in 1931 has the same buying power as $571.63 today. So the Wendel estate was worth something over $500 million. Since the Wendel holdings were mostly real estate in Manhattan, the New York Times estimates the estate would be valued today at over $1 billion.

Compounding the inherent problem of fuck that's a lot of money, Ella Wendel, her brother, and five of her six sisters all died without marrying. The sixth sister, Rebecca, did marry, but had no children. Ella's brother, John Gottleib, was a miser beyond even the dreams of Scrooge, and he ruled his sisters with an iron fist. Ella, who seems to have been only dubiously mentally competent, believed she was ruinously poor, and her lawyer--about whom the kindest thing one can say is that his ethics were remarkable for their elasticity in the face of fuck that's a lot of money--did nothing to convince her otherwise. In fact, he prevented her from spending money when she wanted to and refused to allow her to leave her property to the people she wanted to have it. "Her" will, aside from leaving a great deal of money to charities when everyone who knew her testified that she scorned charities utterly, left a great deal of property to her lawyer's daughter, as well as appointing her executrix, which meant another several hundred thousand dollars worth of income. And the will left nothing for the care of the only creature in the world she loved, her dog Tobey. (She had a succession of Tobeys, each pampered and cossetted and buried when the time came with elaborate care. Rosenman describes Tobey as a "Maltese poodle," a breed which, of course, does not exist. From the photograph in the book, Tobey was probable a Maltese, but he might, of course, have been a miniature Poodle.)

Ella's lawyer, Charles Koss, made the egregious and inexcusable blunder of telling reporters that Ella had no next-of-kin. The world promptly erupted with 2,303 claimants, each trying to prove that Koss was wrong. (He was wrong. Ella had no immediate family surviving her, but she did have provable next of kin, a first cousin once removed (or kin in the fifth degree) named Rosa Dew Stansbury. There were other fifth-degree relatives, but no one closer.) There were a lot of forgeries, most of them transparently inept, and wildly unsubstantiated claims. One man went to prison. In the end, the lawyers for the charities and the lawyers for the fifth-degree claimants negotiated a settlement--in which the charities got most of the estate. And Ella's lawyer's daughter was a very rich woman.

Rosenman's interest in is the lawyers, including hagiographic little biographies and quotes from reminiscences, and in the research they did into each claim. There was a forensic document examiner, Elbridge W. Stein, who did brilliant work in a couple of the cases where the claimants had faked signatures or entire documents. And because no Wendel ever threw anything away, teams of young lawyers did soul-destroying work correlating letters and check stubs and invoices and diaries proving that John Gottleib couldn't have been in Scotland fathering a son because he never left New York long enough to get there, or that Ella's sister Georgiana couldn't have been having a child out of wedlock because she was in a mental institution. I very much enjoy this kind of puzzle-solving narrative, so I found the book very enjoyable, despite Roseman's sycophantic attitude towards certain of his subjects.

Deeply bizarre case--more so than any novelist would dare to try to offer readers--and a very odd little book. I'm glad I found it.



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