Picture a bejeweled, bawdy 101-year-old barmaid — only with a keen comprehension of the tax benefits of charitable remainder unitrusts.
On the day she signed $60 million over to her son, Brooke Astor graciously greeted the three lawyers sitting in her library, offered them drinks, understood all references to “lapsed legacies and devises” and even cracked a couple ribald jokes about death and sex, one of those lawyers insisted on the witness stand yesterday.
“Good! Good!” the lawyer said Astor chirped as they explained the paperwork — stopping short only at claiming she drafted the amendment herself while performing cartwheels.
Manhattan prosecutors call the $60 million bequest a swindle. They say Astor was in the throes of Alzheimer’s, unable to even make change from a $10 bill when Marshall strong-armed her into putting her spidery signature on a bequest redirecting a third of her $180 million fortune.
But yesterday, prosecutors’ own witness, top trusts and estates lawyer Warren Whitaker, described Astor as cordial and completely compis mentis — if a tad off-color.
Told the meeting was beginning, Astor jested, “Well, good; I won’t be around much longer,” Whitaker told jurors, adding, “We all laughed a little bit.”
“Are they still happy?” Astor supposedly then asked of Marshall and his 20-years-younger wife, Charlene.
“Are they happy in bed?” Whitaker claimed she quipped.
“We all kind of laughed at that a bit,” Whitaker said again.
Prosecutors are telling a quite different version of the same, ½ hour, Jan. 2004 meeting. They say Astor’s nurse will testify the old woman slammed her cane down on the ground in protest, shouting, “I won’t be dragged into business!”
The meeting left the beloved philanthropist confused and terrified, prosecutors say. “Who are those men? What did I just do?” they say she asked afterward. She also began demanding her night nurse check under her bed, to see if the “bad men” in dark suits had returned, they claim.
Whitaker’s testimony continues today.