Charlene should go to jail, not Tony.
In a wide-ranging interview yesterday, Philip Marshall — the reluctant catalyst behind last week’s stunning conviction of his own father in the Brooke Astor swindle trial — said prosecutors got the wrong villain.
“She should have gone to jail,” he said of his step-mother, Charlene Marshall, dubbed Miss Piggy by one of Astor’s nurses.
“Quite frankly, the fact that my father is likely to serve a year and Charlene is walking away free — it’s like turning the blade.
“It’s just so unfair.”
His 85-year-old father, Anthony, was convicted of grand larceny and conspiracy Thursday for trying to help himself to more than $60 million of his mother’s fortune — money that was destined for charities.
For the swindle against his Alzheimer’s stricken mother, Marshall faces up to 25 years in prison when he is sentenced in December.
“I never wanted to see my father go to jail,” said Philip, 56, whose 2006 elder abuse lawsuit against his dad set the dominoes in motion for the bombshell verdict.
Marshall, a father of two who teaches historic preservation at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, said that Charlene’s greed fueled the swindling.
She personally cased Astor’s Park Avenue duplex for pricey artwork, and sat in on the plotting sessions with her husband and his band of lawyers — sessions to which Astor herself was notably never invited, according to trial testimony.
“What is so amazing,” Philip said, “is that if nothing had been done to my grandmother or her wills, Charlene would still have got tens of millions of dollars.”
Astor, the one-time queen of New York society who died at the age of 105, has now become the emblem of elder abuse, the grandson said.
“This is her last act of giving of herself for the greater good,” Philip said of the trial’s embarrassing, but legally necessary, public stripping of Astor’s elegant exterior including cringe-inducing testimony about her incontinence and senility.
“She was always so careful with her image and with her publicity. Now, she’s gotten so much more publicity on this than she’d ever gotten on anything else she’s ever done.”
And while he doesn’t want his father jailed, Philip had a few harsh words for Anthony.
His father took pains to portray his relationship with Astor in glowing terms at a point when he thought it would help him — the 2006 guardianship battle.
But Anthony eagerly tossed his mom under a bus for the criminal trial — having his lawyers describe her as manipulative, vindictive and ungenerous whenever she wasn’t spending her late husband Vincent Astor’s money.
“In the guardianship case, it was all, ‘I love my mother and my mother loved me,’ which may sound a little Oedipal,” Philip quipped. “Then he completely flipped it and ran his lawyers over her without any decency for their defense cause.”