Empty Mansions

closed. A developer wanted to buy the hospital and tear it down to put up a high-end apartment building. Dr. Newman suggested to the chairman, Hyman, that they use this opportunity to get a “super-mega gift” from Huguette.
    On May 11, 2004, Dr. Newman and Hyman visited Huguette. Dr. Newman wrote a note documenting his visit. He told Huguette that Beth Israel was almost sure to sell the building and that offers were in hand. The hospital wasn’t for sale, wasn’t being shopped around, but these offers were just too lucrative to ignore. Beth Israel would have to sell the hospital, and the patients would have to move.
    Huguette asked to see a copy of the hospital’s financial statement. And she said she didn’t want to move.
    There was one way she wouldn’t have to move, Hyman told Huguette. “A contribution in the neighborhood of $125 million would obviate the need to sell.”
    The next day, in her medical chart, Dr. Singman wrote, “Expressing concern about having to leave her room here in the hospital.” Hadassah explained Huguette’s anxiety: “She don’t want changes. She used to that place. She loved that place. She liked the place. It is comfortable, she knew all the people there, all the nurses, and she is really happy in that place.”
    Huguette’s choices as presented by Hyman and Dr. Newman were clear: If she did nothing, she would have to move. If she gave the hospital $125 million, or bought the building for that amount, she could stay.
    This was a shakedown. On the street, such a payment is called protection money. In nonprofit hospital management, it’s called major donor development.
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    Beth Israel staff, from janitors to doctors, receive annual notices of thehospital policy on conflicts of interest. Gifts from patients are strictly forbidden. Accepting a tip is grounds for termination. Yet Huguette’s doctors and nurses were receiving millions in checks, and now the hospital’s leaders were holding up one of their most vulnerable patients for $125 million.
    Beth Israel officials won’t answer questions about the hospital’s efforts to procure gifts from Huguette, or about their decision to let a healthy woman live in the hospital for twenty years. Attorney Marvin Wexler offered a general statement that the hospital acted in its patient’s best interests. Indeed, Huguette thrived at the hospital much more than she had in her last years at home. “The indisputable reality is that Beth Israel rescued Mrs. Clark from a secluded and extremely unhealthy existence that endangered her life,” Wexler said, “and then provided her a well-attended home where she was able to live out her days in security, relative good health and comfort, and with the pleasures of human company.”
    Huguette’s reply to the $125 million request was “That’s a lot of money.” Hyman and Dr. Newman assured her they’d “never abandon her and that somewhere in the Continuum empire she’d find a home if she needed.” She told Dr. Newman that she would have to talk with her lawyer, that she’d have to think about their request.
    Yet her answer gave them hope. Dr. Newman wrote to his staff that he’d gotten a similar answer when he’d asked her for a painting: “She came through with the Manet. So we’ll see this time.”
    She did consider it. Two days later, she called Bock to ask if she could sell her Connecticut home to “buy Beth Israel.” He told her the property, worth perhaps $20 million, wouldn’t bring nearly enough for that.
    She could have raised the money. She had more than $150 million in stocks, bonds, paintings, jewelry, and cash, in addition to more than $150 million in real estate. But she withstood the pressure. The shakedown failed. As desperately as she wanted to stay in the hospital, in that very room, she agreed to move.
    Indeed,Huguette’s last donation to Beth Israel was in 2002, not counting money she left in her will. For the last nine years of her life, she repeatedly said no to its implorations. She gave nothing when Dr. Newmanwrote her a letter asking for an annual donation in 2003. She gave nothing when he wrote again in 2004. She said no when they asked her to buy the building in 2004. She gave nothing when the new president of the hospital wrote to her in 2007 asking for $255,000. Beth Israel’s leaders had tried their best to exert their influence on Huguette Clark, but W.A.’s daughter stood firm.
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    So Huguette would move. But