Sisters' Great Expectations Fizzle in 25-Year Probate War With Law Grad Sib
When real estate investor Max Sakow died in 1956, his handwritten will left one-third of his estate to his wife and said the other two-thirds should be divided equally between his three children.
But that’s not what they were told, his two daughters claim in probate litigation that began after they saw the will, filed in a New York City courthouse, in 1983, reports the New York Daily News.
Their older brother Walter Sakow, a law school graduate who never practiced, told the two, with their mother’s support, that their father’s property had to be sold to cover their dad’s debts—while secretly using the money to build up his own real estate business, Diana Sakow and Evelyn Breslaw contend. Their brother’s lawyer declined to discuss the case with the newspaper. It reportedly involved some 100 properties.
Now, after more than a quarter-century of litigation, the case appears to be on the verge of a final resolution, the newspaper reports. The two sisters are to get a portion of nine properties; two that they already obtained were sold in 2005, but most of that money went to pay their legal fees. That bill was largely racked up in the first round of the Bronx Surrogate’s Court case, which took 11 years to reach a ruling, according to the Daily News; Breslaw and Sakow eventually argued their case pro se on appeal and in a second trial, because they couldn’t, at that point, afford to pay a lawyer.
Diana Sakow tells the newspaper she is doubtful the case will be finally resolved in her lifetime: “There’s no end. He will litigate until everyone is dead,” she says of her brother, “because the system allows it.”
The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School provides a link to a 2002 New York Court of Appeals ruling in the long-running case.
