The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (43 page)

Fire Island is a lovely refuge from New York during the summer, and thanks to its tradition of banning cars, the beach resort has a quaint nineteenth-century feeling. Irving Kamsler and his wife, Judi, spent a relaxing weekend on the island in early September 2007. It was their last carefree interlude for years to come.

The couple had been introduced by a mutual friend at a Manhattan bar; he was divorced with two sons, she was a few years younger, a George Washington University graduate who worked in the garment industry. As Judi recalls, “I’m really into the Grateful Dead and when I met Irving, he had a beard and little round glasses and a bit of ponytail. He looked like Jerry Garcia. He was very polite, a sweet guy, had
a little dog, very funny, chivalrous.” The couple, who wed in 2000, became involved with a new Bronx synagogue, Shaarei Shalom. As members of the shul’s “caring committee,” they made home visits to elderly members of the congregation. Irving had recently been named president of the synagogue.

Returning to their Riverdale co-op from Fire Island, Irving parked the car in the garage while Judi went up ahead to the apartment. Opening the door, she was stunned to see a notice from the Nassau County District Attorney’s office. The police had entered the apartment with a search warrant and her husband’s computer was missing. “The super had let them in,” she recalled. “I thought, oh my God, what’s going on?” The notice contained a phone number to call for follow-up information. Her husband reached the district attorney’s office and learned that prosecutors wanted him to come in for questioning. “I realized we needed to speak to an attorney,” he says. “After we’d met with the attorney, I made arrangements to turn myself in the next day.”

The charges against him: exchanging sexually explicit e-mails with underage girls in an AOL chat room. In an undercover operation called “Teen Saver,” Nassau County investigators had launched a sting, pretending online to be a fifteen-year-old tease who sent out photos. Under his online tax accountant moniker IRV1040, Kamsler had eagerly responded with such comments as “mmmmm nice smile so any sexier pics?”; “have you done anal yet”; and “do you want to set a scene on here for us to imagine meeting and being together” along with other sexually charged remarks. Based solely on his comments, he was charged with endangering the welfare of minors and distributing pornography to minors.

Two weeks passed before the arrest became public. “He didn’t tell me immediately,” says Wallace Bock. “He told me when it made the papers.” The
Riverdale Press
covered Kamsler’s arraignment—he pled not guilty and was released on $20,000 bail—prominently featuring a photo of the accountant with his wife by his side. Irving had insisted to Judi that he believed that he was in an adult role-playing chat room online, and she chose to believe him. “I thought, okay, we’ll get through this, he has my full support,” she recalls. As for her
reaction to the racy contents of her husband’s messages, she says, “We met when we were both older… People have habits. He didn’t try to change me, I didn’t try to change him. If he was in a chat room speaking to adults, which is what it turned out to be, as long as it wasn’t interfering with our lives, it didn’t bother me. He wasn’t acting upon it, he was just talking to people.”

Kamsler resigned as president of his temple, but at the urging of Rabbi Steven Burton, the couple turned up at temple for the High Holy Day ceremonies, where they were treated like pariahs.

The accountant debated taking his chances with a trial but feared that if he lost, he would end up in jail. As he explains, “The advice that I got was that we’re in a conservative county, you mention
child
and
pornography
in the same sentence… even if you can convince people that you were in an adult chat room and you never believed the person was a minor, you have so many counts against you that if you get one count, the judge will throw the book against you.”

A year after his arrest, when prosecutors offered him a plea bargain in which he would receive five years probation and a $5,000 fine, the relieved Kamsler agreed to plead guilty, although he would have to register as a sex offender. After his rabbi testified as a character witness, Kamsler received a certificate of relief allowing him to continue to practice as an accountant despite the felony conviction.

That October 2008 was the same month that the relatives of William Andrews Clark were enthusiastically gearing up for a family reunion at the Corcoran Gallery. Organized by Carla Hall and Ian Devine, this would mark the first time that many of the descendants of William Clark’s oldest children—Mary, Charles, and Katherine—had been in the same room.

In hindsight, Irving Kamsler was not the ideal choice to serve as Huguette’s representative at the family affair. Wallace Bock was unable to attend the Friday night and Saturday celebrations and invited Kamsler to go instead. It was a decision the lawyer would regret. “I have an idea that if Irving had not gone, things might have played out differently,” says Bock. “He got a lot of people pissed off that night.” For Irving Kamsler, the reunion was something to look
forward to—a respite from his legal troubles and a chance to be treated with respect.

The descendants of William Andrews Clark had never met Bock or Kamsler, but they had become very curious about the two men who represented Huguette Clark. Some family members felt frustrated that they had lost contact with Huguette, and wondered if their letters and messages were still getting through to her. The sale of Huguette’s Renoir in 2003 had piqued their curiosity about how her money was being managed. Bock was the voice on the phone and the name on the letter as Huguette’s chosen intermediary. The lawyer insisted that he was passing along to Huguette all communications from her family members, but they didn’t know whether to believe him. Irving Kamsler was an unknown to family members, but the accountant was on the party guest list as Huguette’s representative.

When Karine McCall, the great-granddaughter of William Andrews Clark, sat in front of her computer and looked up Bock and Kamsler and the stories popped up about Kamsler’s criminal record, she was horrified. She had met Huguette as a child, her mother Agnes had been close to Huguette; this was family. Karine felt obligated to tell her Clark relatives about this disturbing news.

That festive night at the Corcoran would launch a titanic clash between two worlds: the privacy-obsessed Huguette and her protective inner circle, and the assertive members of the Clark family, determined to belatedly become involved in Tante Huguette’s life and unafraid of a public fight. It began with an abrupt pirouette that evening as Karine threaded her way through the crowd looking for someone to confide in, and found herself artfully veering to avoid coming face-to-face with Kamsler, who had been upgraded to a seat at her table. As Karine recalls, “I wouldn’t even shake his hand that night.”

But even if the troubled accountant had not been in attendance, Karine would still have met the next day with Carla and Ian, relaying her concerns about whether Tante Huguette was being mistreated or exploited. During the following weeks, as the trio exchanged phone calls and e-mails, they were also getting acquainted.

After spending four decades in Europe, Karine had just moved to Washington, D.C., and she was the newcomer. Karine and her
husband, cellist Donald McCall, were grappling with lingering grief over the death of their son Alex, twenty-nine, a talented artist who died of a drug overdose in 2001. The couple’s return to the United States was meant to be a fresh start. A novelist and painter with a free-spirited style, Karine had grown up in San Francisco living with her mother, Agnes Albert, and her divorced maternal grandmother, Celia Tobin Clark, who detested both her ex-husband, Charles Clark, and her father-in-law, the senator.

For Carla, twelve years Karine’s junior, this was also a period of transition. She was spending her free time painting landscapes and creating abstract sculptures. She was much more attached than Karine to her identity as a Clark, due to family visits to Montana dating back to her childhood, plus her father’s and grandmother’s experiences as members of the Corcoran’s board. As a branding consultant, Carla was aware that the association of a convicted sex offender with William Andrews Clark’s daughter was not positive for the family’s image. Even though she had never met Huguette, she was eager to get involved.

Ian Devine knew very little about William Andrews Clark, his great-great-grandfather. “I knew the bare bones of his life,” he recalls. “My parents never talked about it at any great length.” As Ian became drawn into the family drama, the financial marketing consultant became hungry for information to understand his roots. “I was interested in my historical family roots, but also my extended family and getting to know them,” he explained. “All these relatives I had met for the first time at the Corcoran.” He would prove to be the diplomat when the two strong-willed women disagreed.

All three had grown up with wealth—some of the Clark copper fortune had trickled down—and judging by their real estate, they were all still doing quite well. Ian lived in an Upper East Side co-op and owned a second home in the Berkshires; Carla and her husband had renovated a handsome Upper West Side brownstone and also had a country house. Karine and her husband, Donald, had relocated to a spacious town house in Georgetown. Financially secure, all three insist convincingly that their original motivation in trying to contact Huguette was concern over her well-being and care.

In the months following the Corcoran reunion, the trio embarked on a flurry of activity. “This turned around my life and Ian and Carla’s,” says Karine. “We were obsessed about doing the right thing.” After Carla and Ian tried to visit Huguette twice and were thrown out on the second trip by an angry Hadassah, they endured a contentious meeting with Wallace Bock. But by the summer of 2009, hostilities had ground to a halt. Unsure of how to proceed, the family members temporarily retreated. “We were sort of at a dead end,” says Ian. Carla adds, “We were at a loss, like a sailboat in irons. We had no evidence but we had a lot of concerns. What were they doing? Why was she so isolated? Was she ill?” Wallace Bock was still trying to coordinate the construction efforts at Woodlawn Cemetery to make room for Huguette and was eager to resume good relations with the family.

So when Karine asked for permission to take her husband, daughter, and son-in-law to visit Bellosguardo in the summer of 2009, Bock convinced Huguette to authorize the trip. Karine had last been on the premises in 1989, when she had joined her mother and her brother Paul on a tour. As she walked through the grounds this time, she paid close attention to the conversational nuggets dropped by caretaker John Douglas. Karine recalled that the caretaker mentioned that he found Bock “difficult to work for as a boss.” She reassured Douglas that she would praise him in a letter to the lawyer, stressing what an exemplary job he was doing taking care of the estate.

As much as Huguette hated to acknowledge any frailty, her sight had become so diminished that she scarcely wrote her name legibly on checks. But she put her shaky signature on a document authorizing Wallace Bock on February 2, 2009, to draw upon a promissory note at J. P. Morgan, borrowing $5 million to give to Hadassah “in recognition of her devoted care to me and friendship to me for many years.” Finally—finally—she had fulfilled her promise to the nurse.