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[00:00:02] Bob: This week on The Perfect Scam.
[00:00:05] Phillip Marshall: My father was trying to convince his mother that she was running out of money. She had so, so much undue influence had been imposed on her. Here she thinks she's being completely broke and he's just selling stuff left and right.
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[00:00:26] Bob: Welcome back to The Perfect Scam. I’m your host, Bob Sullivan. The famous New York socialite Brooke Astor, sometimes referred to as the unofficial First Lady of New York City, lived an incredible life. When she died in 2007, she was 105 years old. She was the city's last tie to the Gilded Age, after all, she was born in 1902. But this woman of almost limitless wealth spent the last several years of her life worried about money. Her son, Anthony Marshall, was accused of elder financial abuse, eventually. The family became embroiled in a highly public legal battle over Brooke Astor's fortune and her care. When her grandson Phillip Marshall steps in to protect her taking his own father to court New York newspapers had a field day with the proceedings. The story shed elder financial abuse in a new light, starting a national conversation about a problem that far too often stays hidden as a family secret. Today, former Perfect Scam host Will Johnson talks with Phillip Marshall, the grandchild who stuck up for his grandmother, Brooke Astor, when she needed an advocate. Since November is National Caregivers Month, we thought we'd pluck this story out of our archives for you while we work on all-new episodes of The Perfect Scam. And just so you know, AARP has lots of general resources for caregivers at aarp.org/caregiving.
[00:02:03] Will Johnson: For AARP The Perfect Scam podcast, I’m your host Will Johnson. Well, this week's scam is one that highlights the dangers and prevalence of financial elder abuse or financial exploitation. It's the story of the late Brooke Astor and how she became a victim at the hands of her own son. It's a story of a stolen fortune, a fight for guardianship, and a family's broken trust.
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[00:02:30] Will Johnson: Brooke Astor defined NY society. She was classy, glamourous, smart, and funny. And for much of her life she was in charge of the events in Astor Foundation, her third husband's legacy, dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering. When Vincent Astor died in 1959, he left his fortune to the cause, and Brooke Astor took over. But the final years of her life before she died in 2007 at the age of 105 were overshadowed by a nightmarish scenario at the hands of her only son from her first marriage, Anthony Marshall. He and a family lawyer stole tens of millions from Brooke Astor after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. They were eventually convicted of the crime. It was Anthony Marshall's own son, Phillip Marshall, who came to his grandmother's rescue in a well-publicized case that captured headlines and brought together a cast of Brooke Astor's famous friends. Phillip Marshall never intended to pursue a criminal case against his father, already in his early 80s at the time of the trial, but as time went by and stories emerged, so did his focus and resolve.
[00:03:34] Will Johnson: Alright, I am here with Phillip Marshall. Tell us about Brooke Astor, who was she briefly and, and a little bit about where she was and your relationship to her at, towards the end of her life.
[00:03:45] Phillip Marshall: To the world, she was Brooke Astor. She was never really Mrs. Vincent Astor, she was Brooke Astor. She had her own identity. Uh, and but she was my grandmother. I had great memories in New York, we had amazing times in New York and probably best my memories were in her country house. In the country and especially in Maine where we'd just go hiking. She would just peel up mountains and we're talking this went on for decades. And sometimes she'd have to carry her dogs, but that's the only thing that would slow her down. And, and she would go out four nights a week, and that was, those were just very elaborate dinners, and, and all the benefits and the plays and theater and all this.
[00:04:31] Will Johnson: Phillip Marshall describes his father's relationship with his mother, Brooke Astor, as complicated from an early age. Anthony Marshall was the product of her first marriage.
[00:04:40] Phillip Marshall: He did not quite live up to her expectations. And uh, so that was difficult, and not to be disrespectful, but what happened, I think, is he was tied to her apron strings, and then later on he became tied to her purse strings, and he got all tangled up.
[00:05:00] Will Johnson: But it wasn't until Brooke Astor was elderly that things took a turn for the worse. She was clearly, cognitively declining, what would eventually be diagnosed as Alzheimer's.
[00:05:09] Phillip Marshall: December 2000, my father wrote an 8-page letter to a geriatric neurologist describing what, how my grandmother's feeling. She had no idea what was happening to her. She thought she was going crazy, and she was, and that's all her expression in this letter. He was chronicling how she was feeling in her words when she would meet, when they would meet and she would say to her son, she goes, you know, I am, I have no idea what's happening with me. I am, feel I'm losing my mind. I would rather die than feel this way. He was really concerned about her, but he also felt she was trying to give things away to whoever walked in the door. Oh, you know, this, and he didn't want that.
[00:05:57] Will Johnson: Phillip Marshall starts having conversations with his grandmother's staff members. Among the first, her butler, Chris Ely who Phillip met with secretly, outside of the home.
[00:06:07] Phillip Marshall: He reached out to me, and eventually I spoke with lots of staff and caregivers. We didn't know, at first I had no idea, could I trust people? I had to schedule a get together with my grandmother through my, my grandmother's staff after hours because if my father was alerted, he was going to be there. It was a part of isolation, and there were two, one nurse was on duty. Another came in, uh for her you know, for her shift, and we started sharing, expressing shared concern and stories and realizing this was really bad and it was that evening that I decided to act.
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[00:06:54] Will Johnson: As stories were shared, the picture began to get clearer and clearer, and events and memories from over the years started adding up, like a painting that disappeared in 2002.
[00:07:03] Phillip Marshall: My grandmother's favorite painting, a Childe Hassam painting that she had bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And um, the staff told me that my father had sold the painting.
[00:07:19] Will Johnson: What was the painting of, if I might ask?
[00:07:20] Phillip Marshall: It was Flags Fifth Avenue, so it was New York and it was, and it had flags in it, okay? That, she loved that painting. She bought it in 1970, but my father uh was trying to convince his mother that she was running out of money. And that she needed to sell the painting, and that after she, the painting was sold, she asked her son, my father, "Now, can I buy dresses?" She had so, so you know, so much undue influence had been imposed on her. Here she thinks she's being completely broke and he's just selling stuff left and right. And the nurses and the staff, they're saying, well things are just bad, but they weren't sharing that much until 2006. In-between, in 2004, uh I uh, I saw my grandmother and I, we drove up to see her. She was going out to the country because we couldn't arrange a, a visit with her could not be arranged. That would be again, isolation, so we just drove up, and I saw how terrified she was. It's like, whoa, she, you know, and then I remember visiting her once and reading her book to her, Patchwork Child, which is about her childhood. And because what am I going to do at that point? So I'm reading her book and I go to put it back in the shelf, and she looks up and goes, don't take that! It's like, whoa. What is happening here? So just that, even that alone...
[00:09:02] Will Johnson: She didn't want you to take the book?
[00:09:04] Phillip Marshall: You know, my father had been lifting off Tiepolo paintings worth almost half a million, putting them in Bloomingdale bags as we found out later and walking out. He was walking out of her apartment with pretty much whatever he wanted. I didn't know that at the time, but it was like, oh, I'm about to put the book back in the bookcase, and she's going, "Don't take that!" It's like whoa, this is so bad, and it all adds up slowly.
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[00:09:31] Phillip Marshall: She told the nurse, she goes, you know, "Oh, they're here," my father and third wife. It was like, "What do they want? Tell them I will pay them to leave."
[00:09:42] Will Johnson: As time goes by, Phillip Marshall develops a deep understanding of elder abuse and financial exploitation. His vocabulary has evolved.
[00:09:51] Phillip Marshall: What I would call it now, is she endured hybrid elder financial exploitation, which means money is going out, but as a, as part of the means of that exploitation, there's poly-victimization. So my grandmother was isolated, she had, as here, the undue influence is incredible, uh psychological maltreatment is putting it politely, and there was deprivation and there was a lot.
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[00:10:22] Will Johnson: Convinced that his father was victimizing and stealing from Booke Astor, Phillip Marshall decides that his father has to be removed as her guardian. The case goes to civil court.
[00:10:32] Phillip Marshall: And we didn't know where we were on this, okay? You know, I didn't know what side, and they didn't know where I was. Well it didn't take long for all of us to be on the same page and people say, you know, I say my grandmother, well there was an A team. There was a, and it was the staff who really started. What happened is a lot of people think you know, oh, you know, I, they were my grandmother's friends who were really helpful. I couldn't just pick up the phone and call them. I didn't really know them. And so it was through staff, my grandmother's staff and for example, staff of David Rockefeller who was a close, close friend of my grandmother's that I could connect with David. And with Annette de la Renta who eventually, who was my grandmother, ended up being my grandmoth--, grandmother's guardian, after I filed a petition for guardian, and Henry Kissinger filed an affidavit for that petition.
[00:11:26] Will Johnson: So this is a civil trial. Phillips wants his father out of his grandmother's house, money, and life. He wants her to live freely and with dignity, but as the trial ends and Anthony Marshall loses his fight to maintain his role as sole guardian, the judge makes a ruling that surprises Phillip and gets the attention of the Manhattan DA's office.
[00:11:43] Phillip Marshall: Based on the court evaluator’s report, the judge, the guardianship judge said, "Elder abuse was not substantiated." That one clause catapulted us from case to cause. We were no--, we'd saved, I'd saved my grandmother. She was in the country, okay? And but to think that if this was not elder abuse, it was going to be open season on seniors.
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[00:12:10] Will Johnson: In other words, the Manhattan DA and Phillip Marshall were now intent on pursuing a criminal case. Liz Loewy was the head of the Elder Abuse Unit with the Manhattan DA's office. She ultimately spent 30 years there before starting her own company EverSafe, a fraud monitoring platform protecting seniors and their families from financial abuse. She is passionate about protecting seniors from financial exploitation and elder abuse.
[00:12:35] Liz Loewy: Elder abuse is a huge problem, and it's a growing problem. There's physical abuse, there are all of those cases that involve family members, you know domestic violence can also be elder abuse. There are sex crimes that involve older victims, and neglect cases that also can be criminal. There's emotional abuse that can involve an older person. And then there's, of course, financial exploitation involving older victims.
[00:13:03] Will Johnson: Here's what might surprise you. Out of this range of forms of abuse, it's the financial abuse that is the most deadly.
[00:13:10] Liz Loewy: The University of Texas did a study about a year ago I'd say, where they looked at the mortality of different forms of elder abuse, and surprisingly, elder financial abuse and caregiver neglect had the lowest survival rate or the highest rate of mortality. Higher than physical abuse and domestic violence cases. I had a lawyer here in Manhattan who had lived through three heart attacks, and when he was exploited by a caregiver, an aide whom he loved, he passed away before I could even meet him, and his daughter told me, "I can't prove it, I cannot prove it, but I'm telling you he lost the will to live after, after she did this to him."
[00:13:51] Will Johnson: In addition to seeing family members taking advantage of the elderly, Loewy sees other common themes across cases of financial exploitation.
[00:13:59] Liz Loewy: The exploiters are smart. They start small, they don't take like a big amount from one bank account, they usually steal across bank accounts; sometimes they use bank accounts and an investment account and, and a credit card. Then they hit identity theft in the credit report, but they usually steal across accounts, across institutions, they fly under the radar.
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[00:14:25] Will Johnson: Loewy and her colleagues started looking at the Brooke Astor case. They took a close look at finances and saw lots of suspicious activity, erratic transfers, and Astor getting more and more ill. Six months and more than 70 witnesses later, Phillip Astor's father Anthony was convicted and sentenced to prison. The last time he spoke to his father was at the trial.
[00:14:46] Phillip Marshall: There, my father was found convicted on, I think it was 14 or 15 counts. There was mandatory sentence of at least a year in prison. And uh, and he ended up in prison.
[00:15:00] Will Johnson: He was sentenced to a year and then how long was he there?
[00:15:03] Phillip Marshall: He was there for a couple months, and then he was released on pa--, parole.
[00:15:08] Will Johnson: And then he subsequently passed away.
[00:15:10] Phillip Marshall: And then he passed away in November 2014, and I went to the funeral.
[00:15:14] Will Johnson: You did?
[00:15:15] Phillip Marshall: Yeah. For the service.
[00:15:18] Will Johnson: Your taking on this fight for your grandmother was a, I would imagine a big step in, in a lot of ways. But it cost you.
[00:15:31] Phillip Marshall: Uh you can see, or you can hear that it cost me. And so, and you know, um, it cost me a lot, and the money, you know people go, oh, you could have, you, you were disinherited by your father, and you would have inherited double digit millions. It was like, I don't care about the money, and so I'm compelled to uh advocate so people know that um, to be complacent about elder justice is to be complicit in elder abuse and our silence protects perpetrators, not their victim. And that today victims of this crime may be strangers. Tomorrow they may be our loved ones, and perhaps in the future ourselves; seniors and society deserve more. Isolation is one of the biggest issues. You know, basically renew that relationship that you have with seniors. Because you're going to be there soon enough if you're lucky also.
[00:16:38] Will Johnson: Outside of the main scope of this story, I have to ask what your feelings were about your father as this all sort of unraveled.
[00:16:47] Phillip Marshall: I cannot believe what he did to his mother. And uh, you know, and what's really sad, you know, sometime along, you know, halfway through the trial when I was testifying, you know somebody goes, well you have to speak to your father through the press, but you know my statement to the press the day, one of the days I testified was, you know, I asked my father to please, please, and asked to seek forgiveness, and he didn't. He never sought forgiveness. He ended up in jail for a few months, in prison for a few months and came out for parole board and the parole board said, well, "Mr. Marshall, would you do anything differently?" And he said, "I suppose."
[00:17:35] Will Johnson: Did you love your father?
[00:17:38] Phillip Marshall: Yes. Yeah, I felt so sorry for him. I felt really, really sorry for how, how things have not worked out.
[00:17:51] Will Johnson: Was your father in need of that much money?
[00:17:56] Phillip Marshall: No. He was going to inherit like the equivalency of...
[00:17:58] Will Johnson: He was doing alright.
[00:17:59] Phillip Marshall: ... 50 million already.
[00:18:00] Will Johnson: He was doing okay.
[00:18:01] Phillip Marshall: He was doing fine. He did not need another 100 million or whatever. No, he was doing just fine.
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[00:18:10] Will Johnson: I'd like to bring Jilenne Gunther into our conversation. She is director of BankSafe at AARP. Thanks for being here today.
[00:18:15] Jilenne: Thanks for having me.
[00:18:16] Will Johnson: BankSafe is an AARP startup project looking at stopping financial exploitation by empowering people on the front lines at financial institutions. Jilenne says that 1 out of 5 people become victims of financial exploitation and 2 out of 5 know someone who's been exploited. The average victim loses about 120,000 dollars.
[00:18:37] Jilenne Gunther: Imagine the fact that every week you're paying into your retirement, and then in a blink of an eye, that all disappears because you have one kid that's gone to the dark side. If you think about it as a con artist, a con artist with a scam has to um, they have to first look at gaining trust of their victim, they have to look at isolating their victim so no one can help, and they have to also figure out where the assets are. If you're a family member, you have that already. You know where the money is, you've already gained that trust.
[00:19:13] Will Johnson: What steps can be taken to ensure that a loved one is not financial exploited?
[00:19:18] Jilenne Gunther: I think one of the things to do is be that second pair of eyes to see if there's anything suspicious going on. Um, perpetrators of this crime are just like predators in the wild. They're looking for that, they're looking for the weakness to exploit. And one of the things to really keep careful eye on are kind of four different things: Has there been an illness? Has there been a loss of spouse? And has there been cognitive decline, and is there isolation? And when you see those types of things, you want to close ranks because that's where we see perpetrators take advantage of an open opportunity.
[00:19:59] Will Johnson: From the perspective of someone who could be a victim, if they feel like maybe something is not right, or they just want to make absolutely sure that something like this isn't going to happen to them, what can they do?
[00:20:10] Jilenne Gunther: I think one of the biggest things is to prevent isolation. If you are feeling pressured, fear, or manipulation to reach out to someone what you know, whether that's a friend, a family member, or a church member, and ask them for advice. And if, if there isn't someone in their community, every state has an adult protective services unit that you can call that’s anonymous. Um, and they'll start an investigation to look into the financial exploitation and stop it.
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[00:20:42] Will Johnson: For The Perfect Scam, I'm Will Johnson.
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[00:20:49] Bob: If you have been targeted by a scam or fraud, you're not alone. Call the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360. Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next. To learn more about the Fraud Watch Network volunteers and the fraud survivors they've helped, check out the new video series, Fraud Wars, on AARP's YouTube channel. Our email address at The Perfect Scam is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org, and we want to hear from you. If you've been the victim of a scam or you know someone who has, and you'd like us to tell their story, write to us. That address again is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org. Thank you to our team of scambusters; Associate Producer, Annalea Embree; Researcher, Becky Dodson; Executive Producer, Julie Getz; and our Audio Engineer and Sound Designer, Julio Gonzalez. Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For AARP's The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan.
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