Empty Mansions (47 page)

At Beth Israel, the two amateur detectives naturally looked for Huguette first in the “deluxe patient care unit,” which offers luxury suites and gourmet meals for higher-paying patients. Huguette was not in this VIP section, which is named for the chairman of the board, the shipbuilder Morton Hyman, who had been meeting with Huguette to seek her donations. Instead, the nurses sent them down the hall to the drab 3 Karpas.

Carla and Ian spoke with the weekend nurse, Christie Ysit, who told them that Huguette was asleep. Carla asked to be able to give Huguette a blessing, and the nurse allowed them inside the darkened room. Carla and Ian stood at the foot of Huguette’s bed. The shades were drawn, but in the dim light they could see a small Christmas tree. They saw no machines, no artificial life support, nothing out of the ordinary—aside from their wealthy aunt asleep in this sparse room. Carla recalled, “She was sleeping peacefully in her bed.” They left after about a minute.

In the hallway, nurse Christie told them that Huguette was alert, of normal mental and conversational ability, and healthy enough to walk without assistance. She said Huguette was in control of her affairs, knew of the family reunion, but didn’t want anyone to know she lived at the hospital. To find out anything more, she said, they’d have to come back the next day, when Hadassah would be there.

The next day, Ian and Carla arrived at the room bearing flowers. They were met in the hallway by an angry and agitated Hadassah Peri, who insisted they leave immediately. They heard Huguette call out to Hadassah, asking something they couldn’t quite make out. Hadassah insisted they leave, and they did.

Though they hadn’t talked with Huguette, Carla and Ian said they had succeeded in their mission. Ian wrote to the family:

The nurse’s notes in the medical chart show that the night before the first visit, Huguette was “
alert and very responsive.” After she heard about the visit, she was “
agitated and not oriented to time” and kept asking if it was bedtime. Dr. Singman called in an order for Ambien, a sedative. Early the next morning, before the second visit, she again was disoriented and delusional (perhaps a side effect of the Ambien) and sat on the floor of her room while being helped to the bathroom, apparently thinking she had reached the bathroom.

Hadassah wrote in the chart that Huguette called Suzanne Pierre twice after the visits “
stating to respect her privacy and not to divulge any information to her family members which she never see these people in her entire life. It’s only now they are trying so hard to get too close to Madame which Madame was so upset about all their inquiries.”

Hadassah and Huguette both called Bock to complain about the visits. “
Telephone call from Mrs. Clark,” Bock’s logs show. “Make sure none of her money goes to any one in her family. Wants to make sure that Hadassah gets the $5 M she promised her.” Inside Huguette’s hospital room, the family visits weren’t seen as expressions of concern but as attempts to get her money.

Bock sent Carla a stern warning to stay away from Huguette. “
Neither she nor I understood your reasons in attempting to meet with her. Whatever the reasons she asks that it not be repeated either by you or any other ‘well meaning’ family members. If this conduct persists she
has instructed me to arrange with the hospital administration to have any further intruders removed by security.” Carla met with Bock, who tried to reassure her that Huguette was well cared for. In his office, Carla wrote out an apology to Huguette. Bock passed it on.

Ian Devine reassured his cousins, “
We need not apologize” for the visit. “It was motivated solely by love and concern for her well-being; it was our familial obligation to determine for ourselves her health and happiness.”

A day later, Hadassah wrote in the chart that Huguette was relaxed, “
in very good mood. Asking about my family and what kind of weather we’re having.”

• • •

The family was still concerned about Kamsler, who was awaiting sentencing. Bock assured them that Kamsler was never alone with Huguette. Still, the family pressed Bock to force Kamsler to resign as her accountant. Bock said Kamsler worked for Huguette, not for him.

Kamsler reached a plea deal with the prosecutor, pleading guilty in January 2009 to a single felony: attempting to disseminate indecent material to minors. He got no jail time, five years of probation, a $5,000 fine, one hundred hours of community service, and a listing on the state’s registry of sex offenders.

The felon was allowed to continue working as a certified public accountant. At first the judge on Long Island said in court that a felony conviction would result in the loss of Kamsler’s license. But Kamsler’s attorney said this was not a financial crime and Kamsler should be allowed to make a living. It was his first contact with the criminal justice system, and he was in treatment with a clinical social worker specializing in sex therapy. His attorney also told the judge that
it was important that Kamsler was not accused of meeting with the girls, though the record showed that Kamsler had indeed proposed such meetings. The district attorney didn’t take a position for or against Kamsler’s request, and the judge granted him a “relief from civil disabilities,” which state officials interpreted as sufficient to let him keep his CPA license
after he served three months of a two-year license suspension and paid a $2,500 fine.

Kamsler’s full statement to the court, when his time came to show remorse, was simply this: “
I just want to apologize to the Court, to my wife, to my family for what I have done, and the aggravation, and thank the court very much for their consideration and assistance in this.”

A month after his plea, as the Clark relatives kept pressing Bock, Kamsler met with Huguette and gave her a letter:

Kamsler, in line for more than $3 million in fees when this elderly client died, had waited a year and five months to tell her about his arrest on sex charges, and even then his letter didn’t disclose that he had explicit sex talk with people who had told him they were underage girls, or that he’d talked with them about meeting him, or that he was charged with multiple offenses over several years, or that he was undergoing sex therapy, or that he would remain a registered sex offender.

To pacify the relatives, Bock sent them a copy of the letter, signed by Huguette. He vigorously defended Kamsler, his co-executor of Huguette’s estate, saying the accountant “
had been changed” by the therapy and was the “victim” of a sting operation, as though he had been entrapped by police into doing something he didn’t want to do.

The relatives were less than pacified. Kamsler the victim! They discussed whether Huguette could possibly have understood what had happened,
but they were stymied. They feared that Bock was failing to protect Huguette from Kamsler, but they also considered that Bock could be protecting her from change, which they thought she feared, based on their knowledge of how she dealt with Bellosguardo.

One relative who is an attorney, half-grandnephew Paul Albert, urged the family to be cautious:

• • •

By early 2009, Huguette’s eyesight was quite dim, and she stopped using her magic bottomless checkbook. She implored Bock to complete her promise to Hadassah from the sale of the Cézanne. That February, Bock wrote a third $5 million check to Hadassah. To cover the check, Huguette had to borrow. Although Huguette was nowhere near broke, in terms of total assets, she didn’t have enough cash. Bock and Kamsler arranged for her to get a line of credit at JPMorgan Chase.

In exchange for the “good” $5 million check, Hadassah handed over to Bock her marker, the undated $5 million check that Huguette had written.

With the “fussy” Gehry plan for the Corcoran now dead and buried, and the new director pledging a “new approach” of respecting the W. A. Clark Collection, Huguette pledged in 2009 to give the museum $1 million in four installments. Her accountant, Irving Kamsler, delivered the first installment personally at the Annual Corcoran Ball, just after his sentencing.

THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY
 

T
HE ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY
held Huguette’s hand and said hello, offering a greeting in French.

It was late summer 2010 at Beth Israel, after stories by NBC News raised questions about Huguette’s orphaned houses, the men managing Huguette’s money, the Stradivarius violin and the gifts to Hadassah. Huguette’s photo from 1928 was in the tabloids and on the
Today
show. To protect her from prying eyes, attorney Bock arranged for her hospital room to be disguised with a fake room number and her medical records were stamped with the pseudonym “Harriet Chase.”

The assistant district attorney was Elizabeth Loewy, chief of the Elder Abuse Unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Loewy had successfully prosecuted the son and attorney of heiress Brooke Astor in 2009 on charges of forgery and grand larceny from the heiress’s accounts. Now Loewy was looking into the affairs of Huguette Clark, who had nearly three times as much money as Mrs. Astor.

At 104, Huguette was still able to walk and to feed herself, and she was still lucid nearly all the time, her medical records show. But since early 2007, she had had occasional hallucinations, a couple of times a year. Once, when she was one hundred, Huguette awakened with a night terror, reliving the torturous death of Joan of Arc. When she was 101, one night Huguette insisted that a tissue box was flying around the room, and she wouldn’t get out of bed because it might fly into her. She talked again about the terrible way Joan was killed, burned at the stake.

The next day after these episodes, Huguette would be as conversant as ever. The doctors would say she had just been dehydrated, not at all unusual for an older patient, but now she was back to her cheerful self, commenting on events in the news. At age 101, she said she felt so sorry for the wife of New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after being caught paying a call girl.

About the same time as the assistant DA’s visit, in September 2010 as the publicity about Huguette was reaching its height, the hospital arranged
for a psychiatrist to see her for the first time in her nearly twenty years in hospital care. The doctor, evaluating Huguette’s capacity to make medical decisions, wrote on her chart that she was in frail health with “
periods of delirium,” a confusion that comes and goes suddenly.

The assistant district attorney visited Huguette three times, seeing no evidence of dementia. She did see her frailty. Huguette didn’t seem frightened at all and was responsive and friendly. Though nearly blind, she could hear well enough, could understand what Loewy was saying, and could speak clearly enough to communicate her answers. But the documents would have to tell whether Huguette’s finances had been handled according to her wishes.

• • •

Two police detectives and a forensic accountant began to go over Huguette’s checking accounts, the sale of the Renoir, the sale of the Stradivarius La Pucelle.
The element in the news stories that most caught Loewy’s eye was the curious case in which attorney Bock and accountant Kamsler ended up with the property of another former client. The elderly client was someone Huguette knew well: Don Wallace, her attorney for many years before his death in 2002 at age seventy-six.