Tony and Charlene — ha-cha-cha!
Accused mother-swindling octogenarian Anthony Marshall and his 20-years-younger wife got frisky in the courthouse hallway this morning — good-naturedly smooching and hugging for the news cameras.
The couple was just taking a break from the Brooke Astor swindle trial, now in its eighth week of testimony at Manhattan Supreme Court.
Marshall is fighting a potential 25-year-sentence on charges he strong-armed his Alzheimer’s-addled mother into giving him more than $60 million in bequests and gifts — a swindle the DA says was motivated by Charlene’s lust for loot.
But the display of affection could support the prosecution, which has argued that Astor was quite crazy when she supposedly paused in the midst of signing over $60 million to her son — and asked whether Tony and Charlene are happy “in bed.”
Looking at these pictures — need any sane person have asked?
Testimony is resuming this afternoon after a juror became ill in the morning and had to rush out of the courtroom in the middle of prosecutor Joel Seidemann’s examination of a Manhattan trusts and estates lawyer, Warren Whitaker.
The juror was back in her seat following the lunch break, and Whitaker resumed his testimony.
Marshall hired Whitaker to handle two of the most lucrative changes to his mother’s will — changes that would result in Marshall and Charlene inheriting $60 million cash and millions more in executor fees.
In his fourth full day on the witness stand, Whitaker is being made to justify, nearly paragraph by paragraph, dozens of documents from his law firm’s bulging Astor file.
Prosecutors say the documents show a pattern of subterfuge and track-covering on the part of Whitaker, Marshall and co-defendant estates lawyer Francis Morrissey.
Among the documents are Whitaker and Morrissey’s bizarrely detailed and multiply-revised memos concerning Astor’s signing-over of the $60 million in Jan. 2004. Prosecutors say that Astor at the time was in her third year of documented, serious Alzheimer’s, and was unable to even make change of a $10 bill at the time.
But Whitaker and Morrissey’s memos go on length about how, during that signing, Astor made bawdy jokes about whether Tony and Charlene were “happy in bed,” asked about the price of gold and world events, and even made mention of her memories — as a child growing up in China — of the Boxer Rebellion.
Whitaker has conceded that he did not personally hear Astor discuss gold, world events, or the Boxer Rebellion, which Seidemann has pointed out occurred two years before Astor was born.