Rothstein Estate Gets Revenue From Versace Mansion Auction

Law360, Miami (September 18, 2013, 4:39 PM ET) — Almost $700,000 of the $41.5 million sale price of Gianni Versace’s former South Beach mansion will go toward the estate of Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein’s law firm, an attorney for the mansion’s owner told a Florida bankruptcy court Wednesday.

Lawrence Pecan of Marshall Socarras Grant PL told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Laurel M. Isicoff that the estate of Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler PA would receive $692,109 of the auction proceeds under a deal hammered out in January settling a $4.92 million secured claim asserted by the law firm’s…

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Rothstein Estate Gets Revenue From Versace Mansion Auction

Huguette Clark estate trial delayed 2 days to allow attempt at settlement

Huguette Clark estate, “Empty Mansions” The copper heiress Huguette Clark  poses in a Japanese print dress  in about 1943, when she was 37.

NEW YORK — A last-ditch effort at a settlement is delaying Tuesday’s scheduled start of the trial to determine who will inherit the $300 million estate of Huguette M. Clark, the reclusive heiress to a copper mining fortune, attorneys said Monday.

To allow time for negotiations, jury selection has been put off until Thursday morning in Surrogate’s Court in Lower Manhattan.

The office of the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is trying to broker a settlement, attorneys said. His office’s Charities Bureau has made previous attempts, but Clark’s relatives, who are challenging her last will and testament, have not been able to find common ground with the beneficiaries named in the will.

 

It wasn’t clear Monday night how close a settlement might be. Several of the more than 60 attorneys in the case declined to comment. Schneiderman’s office had no comment.

 

Huguette (pronounced “oo-GET”) Marcelle Clark was the youngest daughter of former U.S. Sen. William Andrews Clark (1839-1925), one of the copper kings of Montana and one of the richest men of the Gilded Age, a railroad builder and founder of Las Vegas. Born in Paris in 1906, Huguette was a shy painter and doll collector who spent her last 20 years living in simple hospital rooms. She attracted the attention of NBC News in 2009 because her fabulous homes in Connecticut, California and New York sat unoccupied but carefully maintained.

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Huguette Clark estate trial delayed 2 days to allow attempt at settlement

Worse Than Paying Taxes? Paying Someone Else’s—And IRS Can Make You Do It

Can the IRS collect someone else’s taxes from you? In some cases, yes, where you end up with assets or money from that person. You may have a right to the assets or money, but the IRS trumps you. The IRS calls it transferee liability and says ‘show me the money.’

Take Joseph L. Mangiardi, who died in 2000. Lots of money was spent on lawyers in this mess. I noted earlier court cases in this same tax kerfuffle here: Paying Taxes Pennies On The Dollar. Mangiardi’s daughter Maureen was co-executor of her dad’s estate. When she filed the estate tax return in 2001, the tax due totaled about $2.5M.

The estate was mostly stock and a retirement account, but there was plenty of value so there should have been no problem. Stock prices were low, so it made sense to let them rebound before selling. The estate asked for time and the IRS said sure. The IRS and heirs would both do fine.

You can guess what happened. Instead of waiting for stock prices to rebound, the executors must have thought they were Gordon Gekko. They engaged in active trading of securities, buying and selling. Unfortunately, they weren’t Gordon Gekko and lost money. That was bad enough.

But like Gordon Gekko, the executors were paying themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. The IRS got pretty annoyed. The IRS first went after the estate but found it was insolvent. Meanwhile, the tax debt had ballooned to over $3 million. See U.S. v. Mangiardi.

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Worse Than Paying Taxes? Paying Someone Else’s—And IRS Can Make You Do It