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US Attorney General Eric Holder and his brother failed to pay the property taxes on their childhood home in Queens, which they inherited last August after their mother died, The Post has learned.
And because their ailing mom, Miriam, was already behind on two quarterly tax bills when she succumbed to illness on Aug. 13, the charges went unpaid for more than a year — growing to $4,146.
It wasn’t until The Post confronted Holder last week about the delinquency that he and younger brother William Holder finally paid up Friday, including $73.14 in interest.
The siblings “weren’t aware of the initial missed payments, which happened in the last months of their mother’s life when she was battling illness,” said a Holder spokesman.
The subsequent unpaid bills “occurred during a time period in which the disposition of the estate is still being resolved,” said Department of Justice spokesman Matthew Miller.
The two-story attached brick home on 101st Street, which sits on a corner lot in the middle-class neighborhood of East Elmhurst, has remained empty since Miriam Holder’s death, a neighbor told The Post. The home has a market value of $417,000, according to city records.
Holder’s father, Eric Sr., an immigrant from Barbados and a US World War II veteran, purchased the house in 1952, when Eric was just over a year old. After her husband’s death in 1998, Miriam became the sole owner of the property, although the tax bills in the name of “E. Holder” continued, said a spokesman for the city Department of Finance.
Eric, 60, who became the nation’s first African-American attorney general in 2009, still speaks fondly of his boyhood home, and of growing up in a neighborhood that was a center for black artists and intellectuals. Jazz legends Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie lived there, and civil-rights leader Malcolm X was a neighbor.