June 22, 2011; Source: msnbc.com | This will be an interesting story to watch. Huguette Clark, a copper heiress with an estate worth $400 million died at the age of 104 in May of this year. Since then there has been much speculation about where her assets might end up since 1) her closest financial advisors are under investigation for improprieties as advisors to Clark; 2) she was estranged from every single member of her family – and they say the advisors had a part in this; and 3) she retired to a private room in the hospital under a fake name in the late eighties leaving beautiful properties in Connecticut, California and New York City (42 rooms on 5th Avenue) vacant.
The good news is that Clark left about 75 percent of her estate to charity – with instructions to transform her seaside estate in California, Bellosguardo, (which she had not been to in nearly 50 years) into a museum that would display her extensive collection of art (minus a Money that is bequeathed to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.).
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The not so great news is that two of the three trustees of that effort will be – you guessed it – the same two guys that handled the financial dealings that the Manhattan District Attorney now has under investigation. They also, by the by, got $500,000 apiece in her will.—Ruth McCambridge