NURSE MADE:Hadassah Peri, nurse to heiress Huguette Clark, stands to inherit $34 million from her will. (
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They operated on her wallet.
Beth Israel Medical Center milked reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark for more than $13 million in fees, donations and even a priceless painting during her 20-year stay as a patient — and greedy executives angled for $125 million more, her relatives allege in shocking new court filings over Clark’s estate.
The alleged shakedown was illuminated in an e-mail in which hospital board member and former CEO Dr. Robert Newman referred to Clark as “the biggest bucks contributing potential we’ve ever had,” according to court papers.
He told a colleague her “potential has been overwhelming[ly] unrealized.”
At one point, he suggested to Clark that she pay nearly one-third of her estimated $400 million fortune to keep the now-shuttered Beth Israel North on the Upper East Side open so she could keep living in the room she had refused to leave for 15 years despite being in good physical health, the papers allege.
But instead of addressing Clark’s crippling anxiety, hospital honchos played on her fears, engaging in “a concentrated effort, orchestrated at the highest board and executive levels,” to get her money, court documents obtained by The Post allege.
Clark’s death last year at age 104 set off a battle over her estate. Her distant relatives claim lawyer Wallace Bock, accountant Irving Kamsler, private-duty nurse Hadassah Peri and the Beth Israel administrators manipulated the feeble Clark for her money.
The nurse, who received cash and gifts from Clark, stands to inherit nearly $34 million and Clark’s priceless doll collection in the now-disputed will. Beth Israel is to get $1 million.
The Paris-born Clark inherited her money from her father, William, a rail and mining baron and former US senator whose wealth rivaled the Rockefellers’.
She went to Beth Israel North in 1991, when she was 85, after a doctor found her emaciated and ill in one of her three sprawling Fifth Avenue apartments.
She spent the last two decades of her life in dismal hospital rooms with the shades drawn and door shut even though there was “no medical basis for keeping her” past the first few months, documents show.
Clark was “the perfect patient” for the hospital, her relatives charge, noting, “She required no medical care, possessed enormous wealth, paid over $800 a day for her room, and became progressively more dependent on the hospital.”
“Beth Israel had a plan to subtly, but ever so persistently, court Huguette for the purpose of garnering gifts and ultimately do a will in favor of the hospital,” court papers claim.
Newman, former CEO of Continuum Health Partners, Beth Israel’s parent organization, took the unusual step of offering to help Clark complete a will so “some faceless bureaucrat of the government” wouldn’t get his hands on her estate, court papers say.
And relatives say Bock, the attorney, frequently warned Clark that without a will the government would violate her privacy and sell off her possessions. Newman discussed the issue with Peri, the nurse, who was “much more anxious re: lack of will,” court papers say.
When financial trouble was forcing a potential sale of Beth Israel North in 2004, Newman and board Chairman Morton Hyman told Clark “a contribution in the neighborhood of $125 million would obviate the need to sell” the facility, an e-mail by Newman shows.
“That’s a lot of money,” Clark responded.
Newman was undeterred.
“She responded the same way when we asked for several million a few years ago, and that time she came through with the Manet. We’ll see,” he wrote in an e-mail to a hospital fund-raising executive.
He was referring to a painting by the Impressionist Edouard Manet, worth $6 million to $8 million, that Clark donated to the hospital in 2000. It sold “Pivoines Dans Une Bouteillein” in a private sale for a “substantial sum,” court papers say.
After the execs’ visit, Clark asked her lawyer if she could sell her Connecticut estate to “buy” the hospital, court papers say. She never gave the $125 million and didn’t sell the estate.
Among the gifts Clark did bestow on Beth Israel was $400,000 for a cardiac unit.
When Beth Israel North shut in 2004, Clark told caretakers she wanted to stay in a hospital on the Upper East Side. She changed her mind when Peri and Dr. Henry Singman, her private physician, threatened to stop seeing her if she didn’t move to Beth Israel’s downtown facility.
Daniel Cohen, a lawyer for Beth Israel, refused comment. A hospital spokesman also declined, citing the active litigation.
Additional reporting by Melissa Klein