Single? No Children? No Will? Big Mistake

You would think I would know better.

As an investigative journalist, I once spent months working on a series of articles about what happens to the estates of people who die without wills. It can be ugly. In New York City, politically connected lawyers, judges and contractors can, as our reporting team found, feed on these unguarded estates like leeches on flesh at a nudist camp lake.

In one typical case, my colleagues and I at The New York Post found that a Queens Surrogate’s Court judge had appointed three lawyers connected to the local Democratic Party as “guardians” of potential heirs to the estate of a never-married, childless woman. Ostensibly in search of heirs, they spent part of the deceased woman’s $670,000 estate on a junket to Puerto Rico for themselves, a court employee and their spouses. In the end, the highest-paid lawyer siphoned off $116,025 in fees, while the dead woman’s 14 cousins received inheritances of $33,150 each.

Read more at New York Times.