The United Jewish Appeal is suing in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court to receive what’s left of a trust set up by developer Bill Gottlieb, The NY Post reported.
Gottlieb, who used to work for real estate mogul Harry Helmsley, owned more than 150 properties worth an estimated $1 billion in downtown Manhattan, from restaurants and townhouses in the West Village, to manufacturing spaces in the meat-packing district and tenements on the Lower East Side.
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He passed away in 1999, at age 64.
Gottlieb’s late sister’s husband, Irving Bender, became the beneficiary of the trust, and, according to the filing, spent away some $3.5 million meant for the UJA.
Irving’s spent $43, 000 on a luxury car, $7, 000 on rooms at the W Hotel in Union Square, and for a five-month stay at the Boca Raton Resort & Club in Florida he spent $50, 000, give or take.
Now the UJA is saying that club thing “was vastly beyond his ‘usual and normal standard of living.’”
Well, maybe he didn’t like his usual and normal standard of living?
Irving also spent more than $100, 000 a month on “eye-opening” medical expenses, according to court papers. This was close to his eventual demise, and the UJA says Irving was treated by as many as “11 nurses billing for more than 75 hours a day.”
His doctor only prescribed four nurses for 48 hours a day.
The more the merrier?
Then Irving passed away, in 2012, and his son Neil took over the Gottlieb empire, which the UJA believes created a “possible conflict of interest.”
Finally, the UJA is accusing US Trust, which is owned by Bank of America, and which in 2002 was put in charge of the Gottlieb trust, and which is supposed to offer “resources and customized solutions to help meet clients’ wealth structuring, investment management, banking and credit needs”—actually “abidcate(d) its responsibility” and signed off on Irving’s lavish spending following his wife’s death in 2007.
A spokesman for Neil Bender, a guy named Marty McLaughlin, told the Post that the UJA already received $6.75 million from the Gottlieb trust.
“Now they’re hondling for more, ” McLaughlin said in fluent Yiddish, which is no small feat even in NY City.
A gut yontef…
