Guilty!
That’s the verdict on Brooke Astor’s allegedly swindling son — at least if two alternate jurors have their way.
Released yesterday afternoon as regular jurors began deliberations, the alternates said they thought Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, and estates lawyer Francis Morrissey should both go to jail for trying to swindle the Alzheimer’s-demented philanthropist out of more than $60 million.
Asked who he thought masterminded the swindle — Marshall or Morrissey — Gerard Parham said, “I think it’s 50-50.”
Another alternate — a 34-year-old woman who asked that her name not be printed — agreed.
“The truth is just too obvious sometimes and there is just no way around it,” she said. “By the end, it was pretty unanimous.”
If Marshall’s wife, Charlene, had been named in the indictment, Parham said he would have voted to convict her, too.
Prosecutors say Marshall stole from his mother to satisfy Charlene’s greed. The elegant Astor herself famously called her daughter-in-law “that bitch” in private conversation.
“They say behind every good man is a smarter woman,” Parham said. “Maybe behind every bad man there’s a worse woman.”
“I think she was his downfall,” Parham said of Marshall’s 20-years-younger wife.
Marshall faces as much as a 25-year prison sentence if convicted of grand larceny.
Yesterday, Parham said that by age 101, Astor’s Alzheimer’s was too advanced for her to be capable of moving tens of millions around in her estate plan.
“She had no sense of money,” said Parham, a 30-year-old chef and dad of two from the Upper West Side.
The anonymous, 34-year-old alternate said she felt Astor had “failed” at creating the right boundaries with her son “early on.”
“Although she criticized her son, her actions did not back them up. She was wishy-washy in how she handled her finances,” she said. “Unfortunately, you should be able to trust your only son.”
The two alternates sat through 19 weeks of testimony, much of it detailing Astor’s descent into dementia. By the time of Marshall’s alleged pillaging, doctors had noted that Astor couldn’t even figure out how many quarters made up $1.75.
“All he did was take,” Parham said of Marshall.
Deliberations will “go awhile,” he predicted, given that “there’s a lot of big egos” among his fellow jurors.