The Probate Lawyer Blog: “The Michael Jackson probate dispute between his mother and his two executors has been active since it started this summer. But it looks like it's about to really get heated up.”
UPI.com: Author Michael Crichton's daughter filed papers with the probate court asking that the court remove her step-mother as a trustee of the deceased author's estate. Crichton was a prolific author whose works include “Jurassic Park” and “ER. ” He was in the process of updating his estate plan, but died before he could complete the revisions.
See also the Probate Lawyer Blog article called “Family fight over control of Michael Crichton's trust.”
Arizona Republic: Columnist Russ Wiles writes “Anyone who has signed a financial-incapacity document has to be squirming a bit over Brooke Astor's estate case. Her son, Anthony Marshall, recently was convicted of stealing millions of dollars from Astor while she suffered from Alzheimer's disease before her death. Although the case largely centered on a contested will purportedly signed by Astor, other estate-planning issues also came into play.”
Independent.ie: “Two British orphans who were plucked from obscurity by an Italian princess and given the names Prince Jonathan and Princess Gesine are fighting each other in court to decide whose children will inherit the family's magnificent Renaissance palace and £1bn (€1.068bn) fortune. . . . When the princess died at the age of 78 in December 2000, the two children inherited her 1,000-room palazzo in the centre of Rome, another in Genoa, 14 noble titles and one of the world's greatest art collections, including works by Raphael, Titian and Caravaggio.”
Los Angeles Times: “Anna Nicole Smith spent the last days of her life drifting in and out of consciousness under the pale blue comforter of a king-sized hotel bed, too weak to walk, sit up or drink from anything other than a baby bottle, according to court testimony today. The description of the period preceding the supermodel’s 2007 death from a combination of sedatives and other drugs came on the opening day of a hearing to determine whether there is enough evidence to try three people for conspiring to illegally furnish Smith with prescription medications.”
Wall St. Journal: “Bankruptcy cases generally don’t involve bitter divorces, complaints about mistresses and boy-toys, multiple homes, Rolexes, furs, expensive cars and plastic surgery. . . [Denny] Hecker is in the middle of a particularly contentious liquidation of his personal assets as a result of the collapse of his business empire. The former owner of 26 auto dealerships, the Advantage Rent-A-Car chain and other businesses is simultaneously going through a nasty divorce battle with estranged wife Tamitha Hecker . . . . a state district court judge has ordered Denny Hecker to explain just how he’s been able to burn through a minimum of $25,000 a month while calling himself bankrupt and unemployed.”
Wall St. Journal: “Brooke Astor's 85-year-old son was convicted Thursday of exploiting his philanthropist mother's failing mind and helping himself to her nearly $200 million fortune. Anthony Marshall now faces a mandatory jail sentence of at least one year — and perhaps as many as 25 years. Jurors delivered their verdict on the 11th full day of deliberations, ending a five-month trial that revealed the New York society doyenne's sad decline. She was 105 and had Alzheimer's disease when she died in 2007.”
TMZ.com: “Michael Crichton's widow just filed a creditor's claim against his estate … and she wants $7 million.”
Probate Lawyer Blog: Michigan Probate Attorney Andrew Mayoras has written an interesting article on the latest developments in the probate of murdered ex-NFL quarterback Steve McNair.
Questions, problems and complications. Those are usually the result when someone dies without the proper estate planning. Steve McNair should have at least had a basic will. Even better, with a properly-funded revocable living trust, his heirs would have avoided probate court altogether.
One of the biggest benefits for avoiding probate court (other than the costs and legal fees caused by probate) is privacy. Because probate court is very public, the media gets to report on everything that happens.
Gayatri Devi was a very rich Indian princess who personified glamor. She partied with the rich and famous, but her death caused a grubby struggle over her estate.
She was once named by Vogue magazine as one of the world's 10 most beautiful women, the third wife of a Rajasthan prince who counted British royalty and Jackie Onassis among her friends. During the summer months that she spent every year in London's Knightsbridge she would mingle with aristocracy, while back home in India's “pink city”, she would host parties on her lawn for the likes of Mick Jagger and Michael Caine.
But the death of Gayatri Devi, the third wife of the last official Maharajah of Jaipur, has reignited a bitter dispute in the royal family over assets worth perhaps £250m which include fabulous palaces, jewels and paintings. It is a fight that has pitched grandson against step-uncle and half-brother against half-brother – an unseemly row that has reverberated around this desert city where she lived a life in the style of another age.
The dispute within the Jaipur royal family is extraordinarily labyrinthine and multi-layered, but in its essence it pitches Gayatri Devi's grandchildren against two of her step-children.
Mercury News.com: The fight over Michael Jackson's estate is just beginning. Stay tuned.
Katherine Jackson's attorney says a judge's ruling that she can challenge the administrators of her son's estate could result in a deal that will determine control of the singer's gargantuan assets.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff determined in a ruling released Friday that Michael Jackson's mother can argue against keeping the men currently administering her son's estate without being disinherited. Those arguments would have to be laid out in further motions that the judge will decide on.
Jackson's mother, represented by L. Londell McMillan, had sought a favorable ruling from Beckloff that would allow her to contest the authority of attorney John Branca and music executive John McClain to guide the pop singer's fortune. The men were named the executors of the estate, which could be worth more than $500 million, in Michael Jackson's 2002 will.
My favorite hamburger is the basic In-N-Out burger, and I love their fries too. I just wish I lived closer to one of their Arizona stores. The hamburger chain was created by Harry and Esther Snyder who were the sole owners until Esther's death August 4, 2006. Harry died in 1976. The Snyder's had two sons, but both died before Esther leaving granddaughter Lynsi Martinez as the sole heir to the family fortune.
A 2006 lawsuit filed by In-N-Out executive Richard Boyd opened the door briefly on the closely held chain “with allegations of a renegade heiress plotting to seize control of the $450 million dynasty.” The lawsuit was settled and sealed so the terms are not public.
Boyd's court filings portrayed Lynsi Martinez . . . as the spoiled granddaughter of Esther Snyder who sought to break with the chain's regional strategy and bring the fast food eatery's “Double Double” to a national audience.
For more, see the LA Times story In-N-Out: Can perfection survive:
The Snyders established a line of succession skipping over their older son, Guy, in favor of the more stable Richard. That well-laid plan dissolved with Richard's death in a 1993 plane crash. The inheritance passed to Guy, who had a history of drug abuse and died from an overdose of a prescription painkiller in 1999. With Esther's death seven years later, majority control became vested in two family trusts. It will pass after 2011 to Guy's only natural child, his daughter Lynsi Martinez, 27.
New York Post: The prosecutor said in closing remarks in the 4-month-old Brook Astor swindle case that Brooke Astor “committed the unforgivable sin of living too long” and that her son “could not wait” for her money. Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann said that the elderly Astor said of her only child, “All he wants is money, money, money. I wish he had made something of himself, instead of waiting for the money.”
Anthony Marshall faces up to 25 years in prison for allegedly strong-arming his frail, failing, century-old mother into signing over more than $60 million in bequests, money long promised to city institutions. Astor was Marshall's “own little ATM,” [prosecutor] Seidemann told the Manhattan state Supreme Court jurors. He noted that Astor had changed her will 32 times, with seven codicils, over 50 years. But by the time she died in 2007, she was not competent to amend it in Marshall's favor, Seidemann said.
TMZ.com: Court papers show that the Michael Jackson probate court authorized the estate to pay Michael's mom, Katherine Jackson, $26,804 per month. Not bad for a granny raising three young uns. Michael's three kids, however, are a little more high maintenance. Katherine Jackson will be paid $720,000 per year for the kids expenses, including $159,120 a year for “entertainment and other.”
See also the LA Times story, “Jackson estate pays singer's mother $86,000 a month for expenses.”
CNN.com reports that the children of Martin Luther King are fighting in Fulton County, Georgia, Superior Court, over their parents' estates. The children are the shareholders of a corporation that manages their MLK's estate. Two children sued a brother for wrongfully taking money from their parents' estates. The plaintiffs are the Rev. Bernice King and Martin Luther King, III. They allege that Dexter King took assets from Coretta Scott King's estate and “wrongfully appropriated” money from Martin Luther King's estate.
Vanity Fair has a story about the death of a Russian billionaire and the battle over his estate.
The sudden death in February 2008 of Badri Patarkatsishvili, Georgia’s richest man, rocked the ruthless world of the Russian oligarchy, pitting his widow, Inna, against his partner, exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky, in one of the biggest estate battles ever, and landing an American lawyer in a Belarusian penal colony. Talking to key players in New York and London, the author reports on suspected forgery, secret marriage, and an alleged private-jet kidnapping.
TMZ.com reports that the family of Michael Jackson is interviewing lawyers to represent them in a wrongful death lawsuit against Dr. Conrad Murray and others. One problem for the family, however, is that MJ apparently is worth more dead than alive.
San Francisco Chronicle: Korbel is the U.S.'s 12th largest winery with $160 million in annual sales. It's millionaire owner and impoverished daughter are going to trial next month. Daughter wants $24 million from father. You can't make this stuff up.
Falcon Crest has nothing on Korbel Champagne Cellars these days. It's all there: The graying scion of a Sonoma County wine empire throwing his daughter off the ancestral grounds. A seamy sex scandal. Vicious legal fighting over multimillion-dollar fortunes. There's even a ritzy horse stable with wild zebras trotting around.
The saga continues. Billionaire Leona Helmsley created a lot of trouble when she provided in her Will that her Maltese dog “Trouble” was to inherit $12 million in a pet trust. Why she left the gift in her Will (a public document in a public probate proceeding) instead of in a Trust (a private document not normally subject to court scrutiny) is unknown. Arizona is one of a few states that allows Arizona trusts to name animals as beneficiaries. For more on the “Queen of Mean,” her money and post death developments, see Jeffrey Toobin's article in the New Yorker entitled “Rich Bitch – The legal battle over trust funds for pets.”