The deadbeat millionaire who’s been dodging his wife for five years didn’t know he owed her any money, his lawyer insisted yesterday.
Edward Weslock, 64, was arrested on a contempt-of-court warrant at Kennedy Airport Friday night for allegedly stiffing his estranged wife, Lesley. At the time of his arrest, he was preparing to board a flight to France with a young blonde and first-class tickets.
Lesley’s lawyers, Irvin Rosenthal and Helen Singh, said the former Church shoe president has refused to pay their client the $42,000 he was ordered to in 1996 – or the $8,000 a month he’s been ordered to pay in temporary alimony since then.
Instead, they said, he’s been “a fugitive” hiding in California, Florida, France and Monaco, and has moved an estimated $4 million from joint accounts.
But at a hearing before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Judith Gische, Edward’s lawyer, Maurice Menan, said his client has fallen on hard times, and was never told he had to pay his wife any money.
“He’s not a deliberate cheat,” his lawyer, Maurice Menan told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Judith Gische. Rosenthal called the claim “ridiculous.”
Menan said his “struggling” client was fired from Church in 1995, made $45,000 last year and expects to earn only $35,000 this year.
But when Gische said Weslock would have to spend another night in jail if he didn’t pay the contempt money, the businessman quickly produced a check for $44,000.
Gische said that wasn’t good enough, because it didn’t include $10,000 interest, and ordered him held another night. Weslock then said he could come up with the rest of the money in cash by early evening, but Gische said that would be too late.
Menan said he was “disappointed” by the ruling, and that his client’s previous three days in a Bronx civil jail had been “a horror.”
Lesley, 57, said at the hearing that she was evicted from her Fifth Ave. apartment because of her husband’s vanishing act and is “virtually penniless.”
The toupeed tightwad-tycoon didn’t seem moved by his wife’s testimony and laughed at several of her answers.
Afterward, Lesley said it was surreal seeing her husband of 29 years again. “I can’t believe I’m actually seeing him after so long.”
Rosenthal called Weslock’s claim of ignorance “ridiculous.”
Singh, Lesley’s other lawyer, said she’s worried Weslock will pull another disappearing act after paying the contempt money and will cheat his wife out of the estimated $2 million she’d likely get in a divorce trial.
“He’s going to get out [today] and we’ll never see him again,” she said.