Empty Mansions

lawyer and accountant were aghast. The tax implications were astounding. Giving away $25 million to Hadassah and Madame Pierre would cost Huguette another $28 million in taxes. Bock and Kamsler told Huguette she would have to sell other assets just to pay the taxes, so she improvised.
    She immediately gave Hadassah two checks for $5 million each—along with an IOU, in the form of a third check, also for $5 million, undated.
    “She told me to hold it,” Hadassah said, until the Connecticut property was sold. Bock and Kamsler weren’t told about this check, but Hadassah made an unusual note of it in Huguette’s medical chart, citing the $5 million that “she promised.”
    Huguette also may have profited from this transaction. She did notlike hiring new people. An employee carrying a well-worn, undated check for $5 million would be unlikely to seek other employment.
    • • •
    Huguette’s man Friday, Chris Sattler, also started receiving gifts. He said Huguette instructed him to open the large safe in the walk-in closet in Apartment 12W. He had to get a locksmith to drill the lock. There he found her stash of everyday jewelry. He brought the boxes from Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels to the hospital in a shopping bag. Huguette enjoyed looking it all over and gave him a piece. Then she gave Hadassah a piece, “andit just snowballed,” Chris said.
    Chris, who is Catholic, received from Huguette a crucifix, a $7,000 Cartier antique diamond and ruby cross pendant on an Art Deco diamond and platinum chain, and other pieces, in all worth $27,000. He said he didn’t think to refuse the gifts, which were documented through Huguette’s attorney after an appraisal.
    To Hadassah she gave eighty-four pieces of jewelry, appraised at $667,300, as well as two antique harpsichords, a clavichord, and fifteen antique dolls.
    And to Hadassah’s younger son, David, Huguette gave an even larger gift. When he had been a schoolboy, David played the violin for Huguette in her room.“And Madame said, ‘Someday I have something for you, but you are too young,’ ” Hadassah said. “ ‘When you are responsible to have, I have something for you.’ ” Now she gave him her third-best violin by Stradivari, worth about $1.2 million.
    “I told Madame, he doesn’t play anymore,” Hadassah said, “but she insist he will go back to learn again.… I think one time she told me she played the violin for twenty-one years, but she never really like it, but she just did it for her mother.”
    Counting all the gifts, Hadassah and her family receivedat least $31,906,074.81 in cash and property from Huguette while she was alive.
    Of course, one must keep that amount in perspective. If Huguette were willing to keep selling property, she could have afforded ten Hadassahs.
    Hadassah was asked whether she questioned the ethics of accepting large gifts from her patient. Hadassah showed no hint of embarrassmentor doubt, only entitlement, saying she didn’t know of any rules, and besides, she was an independent contractor, not a hospital employee. “I cannot recall any paper that I am not allowed to receive any such gift.”
    What about the ethics of the nursing profession?
    “Never come to my mind.”
KEEP THE BAD PEOPLE OUT

 
    I T WAS TIME to dig in their heels. On October 26, 2001, Huguette’s advisers wrote separate letters to her, a coordinated warning about her excessive generosity. Her significant gifts in the past year had depleted her cash, and her income was no longer sufficient to pay her expenses.
    “You will have to seriously consider,” attorney Bock wrote, “the sale of additional assets in order to raise the cash necessary to meet all of these obligations.”
    Five days later, Bock sent his client a solicitation for a gift.
    Wallace “Wally” Bock, born in 1932, is a quiet Orthodox Jewish American with ties to Israel that reach back long before there was a State of Israel. His parents, before World War I, were among the founders of the Mizrachi religious movement in the United States to build a Jewish state. His mother was personal secretary to the world leader of that movement. His brother was imprisoned by the British for helping transport Jewish immigrants to Palestine.
    Now Bock’s daughter and her husband were making a return to Israel (in Hebrew,
aliyah
, or “ascent”). They were living with Wally’s grandchildren and a great-grandchild in an Israeli settlement town called Efrat, in the Judaean