Nice work if you can steal it.
Anthony Marshall paid himself more than $200,000 an hour for his efforts in selling his mother’s favorite painting out from under her, according to testimony yesterday in the sensational Brooke Astor swindle trial.
That’s a pretty high fee — a total of $2 million for fewer than 10 hours’ work — considering Marshall didn’t exactly get a good price.
He sold the painting — “Up the Avenue from Thirty-Fourth Street, May 1917,” by Childe Hassam, for $10 million — taking his $2 million “commission” off the top in what prosecutors are calling a grand larceny punishable by up to 25 years in prison. The sale, to the Gerald Peters Gallery on East 78th Street, took place in 2002, gallery Vice President Baird Ryan testified.
Speaking to jurors on day three of testimony, Ryan said Marshall had originally hoped to sell the masterpiece for $12 million, on consignment. But Marshall agreed to shave $2 million off the price after Ryan told him it just wasn’t selling. Lo and behold, the painting was ultimately flipped to billionaire financier George Soros for a reported $20 million.
“Did you ever meet Brooke Astor during this entire transaction,” asked prosecutor Joel Seidemann. “Not that I remember,” Ryan replied, cautiously. The gallery big declined to comment as he left court. As photographers snapped away, he tried to hide behind the two lawyers he’d taken to court with him.
Prosecutors say that around the time of the Hassam sale in February 2002, a month before Astor’s 100th birthday, she was ripe for the swindling.
Once the emerald-bedecked, white-gloved grande dame of New York society, Astor had begun suffering from the merciless onslaught of Alzheimer’s some five years previous, in her mid-90s. Even while she still headed the Vincent Astor Foundation, co-workers would catch the old gal staring blankly at a list of grantees, unable to recall who they were despite having personally approved their projects.
Then there was that awkward meeting in 1995 with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a meeting Astor had arranged herself, during which she couldn’t remember who he was.
Astor even began worrying, in an almost delusional way, about her finances, showing her foundation director some bundles of shopping bags and announcing, sheepishly, “I bought a lot of shoes, and Tony isn’t going to approve. Tony says I can’t afford it.”
She was worth well over $100 million, prosecutors say.
Marshall, 84, is trying to win the case by proving that Astor had many bad moments but many lucid ones as well — and that it was during those that she agreed to hand him paintings, vacation homes and tens of millions of dollars in new bequests.
In testimony so far, prosecutors have paraded five of Astor’s friends and co-workers to tell pitiable tales of her decline.
Each time, the witness has been cross-examined by lawyers for Marshall and his co-defendant, the alleged swindle-enabling lawyer Francis Morrissey, and the lawyers wring from these prosecution witnesses grudging admissions that, even in her final years, Astor very occasionally showed shadows of her old wit.
Yesterday, for instance, Astor’s favorite caterer, Sean Driscoll, founder of Glorious Foods, regaled jurors on direct testimony about how, at a private lunch in late 2003, the confused Astor thought she was in a restaurant and tried to hand her gold AmEx card to Driscoll’s butler.
But, defense lawyer Frederick Hafetz pressed Driscoll on cross, didn’t Mrs. Astor also have enough wits about her that afternoon to make a witty quip about the panther brooch on her shoulder, a gift from President Bill Clinton?
The caterer conceded Astor had indeed remarked, cuttingly, that she’d not been invited to the White House by either of the Bushes.
“She said it with some wit and some humor; is that correct?” Hafetz asked.
“Yes,” the caterer answered.
The day concluded with testimony from perhaps Astor’s most longstanding friend, the noted author Louis Auchincloss, who had socialized with her for six decades. Jurors chuckled as the patrician-sounding Auchincloss told them Astor had been petrified of poverty immediately after the death of her second husband but quickly became a very merry widow.
“She laughed all the way through lunch,” he. “And then I found out she was engaged to Vincent Astor.”
The six-year marriage, which ended with Vincent’s death, was a difficult one for Louis’ good friend Brooke — and for Vincent, the author joked. “He didn’t like any of her friends,” Auchincloss recalled. “He didn’t like me. He didn’t like me in particular.”
“Did there come a time when Vincent Astor died?” asked the prosecutor.
“Oh, yes!” Auchincloss said, brightly. “That was a great relief!”
The prosecution’s case continues Monday, with scheduled witnesses including Astor pal Betsy Gotbaum and Metropolitan Museum Director Philippe de Montebello.