The Story of the Hospitalized 104-Year-Old Heiress Is a Law & Order Waiting to Happen
Huguette Clark is an heiress with a $500 million fortune and a 42-room apartment on Fifth Ave. Too bad she hasn't lived there in 20 years. Are her lawyer and accountant trying to take her for all she's worth?
The picture on the right is of Clark in 1930, when she was one of the reigning socialites of New York and was known for partying just as hard as the Hilton sisters. Her father made his money mining copper and he built a mansion on Fifth Avenue, another in Santa Barbara, and a castle in Connecticut. In the '50s, after her mother passed away, she became a recluse who rarely left the house. That made it even easier for attorney Wallace Bock and accountant Irving Kamsler to take control of her life. They're the two people in control of her finances and the only two who have spoken to her in since 1990 when she was taken from her apartment and installed in Doctor's Hospital on the Upper East Side. (She was moved to another institution in 2004 when Doctor's Hospital closed.) Bock and Kamsler say Clark is alive and doing fine, but it turns out that Bock might have had a hand in mismanaging the estate of another wealthy elderly client and and Kamsler was convicted of sending porn to an underage girl over the internet. Yeah, these are probably not the guys we really want looking after a frail old lady.
After a series of reports by NBC, enough people contacted Adult Protective Services that they are now investigating the matter. Let's hope this isn't another swindle like the one that happened to Brooke Astor, and, if it is, that these guys are prosecuted. After all, a hard partying heiress turned eccentric sounds like our kind of people!