Not bad for a year’s work.
The five executors of Leona Helmsley’s estate can pay themselves a total of $4.5 million for their first year of work on her multibilliondollar estate, a Manhattan judge has ruled.
The executors — Alvin Rosenthal, David Panzirer, Walter Panzirer, Sandor Frankel and John Cody — contended that they should be paid $900,000 each, and Surrogate Judge Nora Anderson agreed.
While the state Attorney General’s Office — which oversees charities such as the bulk of Helmsley’s estate — urged that they be paid less, Anderson noted they were managing an “estate of singular magnitude and extraordinary complexity.”
“The estate’s assets have been valued in excess of $5 billion,” the judge wrote.
Because the estate will take years to unwind, it would also take years for the executors to get paid, so Anderson granted the group’s request for an “advance” on their first year’s work after Helmsley’s death at 87 in 2007.
The ruling covers the period of time — 2007 to 2008 — when some executors were busy working around the notorious “Queen of Mean’s” wishes.
For example, Rosenthal — Helmsley’s brother, who died this past January and has been replaced as executor by his widow — and another relative rebuffed her request to take in her beloved dog, Trouble, and had the pooch shuttled to Florida.
They also whittled down the $12 million trust fund that Helmsley left to provide for her bitey beast to $2 million.
In addition, they settled a claim by two grandchildren whom Helmsley had purposely cut out from her will for millions of dollars, and largely ignored her direction that the charitable trust that holds the bulk of her fortune be used to take care of dogs.