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PROSECUTORS: ASTOR’S SON STOLE $50M FROM ELDERLY MOTHER

The butler saw it. And the maids. And the nurses.

The Brooke Astor swindle trial began Monday with Manhattan prosecutors promising jurors they’ll hear testimony by some of the beloved philanthropist’s most luminous friends, including Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters and Annette de la Renta.

But the most damning testimony against accused larcenous son Anthony Marshall may come instead from “the help,” according to dramatic opening statements by

Manhattan prosecutors today.

It was the servants who watched in shock as Marshall removed a $300,000 painting from Astor’s Park Avenue apartment wall in 2004, leaving only the nails behind before snapping, “My mother says I can have whatever I want,” prosecutors charge.

That same year, a nurse watched in helpless shock as Marshall and his shady attorney marched the doddering, 101-year-old doyenne — one man clutching her by either arm — into her drawing room to sign papers in which Marshall gave himself sole power of $60 million of his mother’s money, prosecutors charge.

This stunning vignette of literal strong-arming stands out even among what prosecutors are calling, “An ugly torrent of greed and manipulation,” on the part of Marshall and co-defendant Francis Morrissey.

“The defendants actually physically extracted her from nurse Pearline Noble’s arms,” assistant district attorney Elizabeth Loewy told jurors. “Mrs. Astor nearly fell.”

“Who are those men?” the nurse will testify Astor later asked of the cadre of dark-suited lawyers in that back drawing room. “What did I just do?”

The nurse also will testify that, by this time, Astor’s Alzheimer’s had advanced to the point that one of her favorite activities was joining her in singing “How Much is That Doggie In the Window” — a sorry and precipitous decline for an emerald-bedecked icon once known as the Queen of New York Philanthropy.

Jurors will hear that it was at around this time, in 2004, that Astor began begging her night nurse, Minette Christie, to check under her bed at night “in case the ‘bad men’ had come back,” Loewy said. Using the fortune bequeathed to her by her third, and last, husband, Vincent, the white-gloved and lively Astor had bestowed on the city some $200 million in charitable funds, reviving the New York City Public Library, funding the Metropolitan Museum’s Chinese Courtyard, underwriting expansions to the Bronx Zoo.

But over the course of her final five years on Earth — from 2000 to 2005, years in which Astor herself admitted, “I feel like I’m losing my mind” — it was the servants and health aides, watching her round-the-clock, who most closely saw the greedy predatory maneuvers of Marshall and his cadre of lawyers, prosecutors told jurors Monday.

In 2002, Marshall easily convinced her that she was broke — and that she’d have to sell her favorite and most valuable painting if she wanted to buy dresses, Loewy told jurors.

Marshall that year sold the painting — “Up the Avenue From 34th Street” by Childe Hassam, which hung in a place of honor, over an 18th century fireplace at her Park Avenue duplex — for $10 million, awarding himself a $2 million commission that is being charged against him as a grand larceny.

Marshall, 84, faces a maximum of 25 years prison if convicted of that top charge.

“He told her, ‘Now she could buy dresses,'” Loewy told jurors they’ll hear from yet another house staffer. Astor was in fact far from broke — she was worth about $100 million at the time.

Opening statements are expected Tuesday by the lawyers for Marshall and Morrissey.