In August 2007, an 83-year-old man sat on a pink quilt beside his dying mother and gathered her frail body into his arms. She weighed roughly 75 pounds. When she made a small sound, he took it as recognition. She knows I’m here, he thought.

The man was Anthony Marshall, a decorated Marine who had fought at Iwo Jima and served as United States ambassador to four countries. The woman was Brooke Astor, the most celebrated philanthropist in New York City, who had given away nearly $200 million over four decades. Within two years, her son would be convicted of stealing millions from her. Brooke Astor was born Roberta Brooke Russell in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1902, the only child of a Marine Corps officer who would eventually command the entire Corps.

Because of her father’s postings, she grew up in China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and other countries, recording her experiences in diaries, letters, and drawings. At seventeen, she married John Dryden Kuser, a decision she later described as a mistake. The marriage was brutal. Her husband was alcoholic, adulterous, and violent.

When she was six months pregnant with their only child, he broke her jaw during a fight. She called those years the worst of her life and divorced him in 1930. In 1932, she married Charles “Buddy” Marshall, a kind investment executive whom she described as the great love of her life. That marriage lasted twenty years until his death in 1952.

Eleven months later, she married William Vincent Astor, the last wealthy American member of the Astor family and the son of the man who had died on the Titanic. Vincent was difficult, melancholic, and suspicious of everyone around him. Brooke entertained him, played piano for him, and arranged occasions for laughter to keep him engaged. When he died in 1959, he left his entire fortune to a foundation, and Brooke Astor became its chairwoman.

She was fifty-seven years old, and she spent the next forty years giving the money away. She funded the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hospitals, zoos, and community programs. She visited grant recipients in person, traveling to Harlem and the South Bronx wearing white gloves, sitting down with the people her money was meant to reach. Her motto, borrowed from a Thornton Wilder play, was that money is like manure and worth nothing unless spread around.

She meant it. By the time she liquidated the foundation in 1997, she had distributed nearly $200 million. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 at age ninety-six. Her only child, born Anthony Dryden Kuser in 1924, grew up knowing what his father had done to his mother.

At eighteen, on the eve of enlisting in the Marine Corps, he changed his name to Marshall, taking the name of the stepfather who had been decent to him. He served at Iwo Jima, earned a Purple Heart, and reached the rank of captain. After the war he entered the Foreign Service, served as ambassador to the Malagasy Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, and the Seychelles, and worked for the CIA on the U-2 reconnaissance program. In 1977, Brooke Astor began paying him to manage her finances.

Over the next three decades, he earned tens of millions in compensation for handling her estate, which grew to roughly $186 million. In 1992, Tony Marshall married Charlene Gilbert, a woman twenty years his junior with three children from a previous marriage. The relationship between Charlene and Brooke Astor was openly hostile. Brooke’s nurses called Charlene “Miss Piggy.

” Brooke called her something more profane and said she had no class and no neck. Charlene returned the contempt. Biographers and prosecutors would later date the beginning of Brooke Astor’s mistreatment to this marriage. In early 2001, Brooke Astor was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Tony shared the diagnosis with her lawyer, her butler, her secretary, and his own son Philip, but not with the public, not with her closest friends, and not with the newspapers still covering her gala appearances. In 2002, he proposed selling a Childe Hassam painting, Flags, Fifth Avenue, that had hung over his mother’s mantel for thirty-two years. She had bought it in 1970 for $170,000, and it was her favorite work of art. Tony told her she was running out of money and needed the sale.

She agreed. The painting sold for $10 million. Tony kept a $2 million commission. The buyer quickly resold it for between $20 and $25 million, and it ended up in the Dallas Museum of Art.

Brooke Astor never knew where it went. In the months after the sale, she repeatedly asked her staff whether she could now afford new dresses. In January 2002, Brooke Astor signed her will. Two years later, three codicils were added, redirecting significant portions of her estate.

The third codicil, signed in January 2004, gave Tony control over roughly $60 million and allowed him to leave it all to Charlene. The lawyer who drafted it had never met Brooke before that day and had not been told she had Alzheimer’s. He was told only that she had good days and bad days. When Charlene’s name came up during the signing, Brooke turned to the lawyers and asked, “Are they happy in bed?

” Everyone laughed. She said, “Good. ” Her long-time legal adviser of decades had not been consulted on the document. In 2003, Brooke’s beloved summer estate in Maine was transferred to Tony, who gave it to Charlene within six months.

The transfer cost Brooke more than $3. 5 million in gift taxes, and there is no evidence she knew she had paid them. Philip Marshall, Tony’s son, received the phone call about his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s in 2001. He sat with the information for five years.

In 2002, he visited Brooke’s Park Avenue apartment and found the painting gone from its place over the mantel. He began collecting evidence from household staff. Over four years, he documented a pattern that alarmed him. Brooke’s dachshunds had been locked in a separate room.

Her Alzheimer’s medications had been discontinued. The heat in her room was kept low. She slept on a sofa that staff said was soiled. In July 2006, Philip filed a petition in New York Supreme Court seeking to remove his father as his grandmother’s guardian.

The petition included affidavits from Annette de la Renta, David Rockefeller, and Henry Kissinger. Within twenty-four hours, the judge removed Tony Marshall as guardian and appointed Annette de la Renta in his place. The settlement that followed required Tony to pay $1. 35 million to the estate.

Charlene’s comment on the settlement was brief and pointed: “There will be a battle royal when Brooke Astor dies. ”

In November 2007, the Manhattan District Attorney indicted Tony Marshall on sixteen counts, including grand larceny, conspiracy, and fraud. The prosecutor said Marshall had taken advantage of Astor’s diminished mental capacity and had convinced her to sell property by falsely telling her she was running out of money. The trial began on March 30, 2009, which would have been Brooke Astor’s 107th birthday.

She had died the previous August at 105, buried under a tombstone reading, in her own chosen words, “I had a wonderful life. ”

During the five-month trial, the jury heard from nurses, household staff, estate lawyers, and Philip and Alexander Marshall, Tony’s own sons, who testified against him. They heard that two additional paintings had been taken, that hundreds of thousands of dollars of Brooke’s money had paid for the captain of Tony’s yacht and maintained his real estate, that after signing the third codicil Brooke became terrified, convinced that men in suits were hiding in her closets. The prosecutor called Tony a morally depraved individual who had preyed on a physically and mentally ill 101-year-old woman.

He reminded the jury what Tony was: a son. An only son. On October 8, 2009, the jury convicted Tony Marshall of fourteen of sixteen counts, including first-degree grand larceny. He was eighty-five years old.

He was sentenced to a minimum of one year in prison. Appeals delayed his incarceration for three years. He entered prison in 2013 at age eighty-nine, unable to walk without assistance, and was released on medical parole after eight weeks. He died on November 30, 2014.

Charlene was with him. His will disinherited Philip and Alexander entirely, leaving the money he had inherited from his mother to Charlene and her children. Philip Marshall, who had given up an inheritance estimated at $9 million to save his grandmother, said he would do it again. He now lectures on elder abuse and testified before the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

He has said the case was never about the money. Tony Marshall went to his mother’s deathbed alone. Charlene was barred from the house by court order, and the butler stood in the doorway to enforce it. Tony sat on the pink quilt, lifted his mother into his arms, and heard her make a sound.

He believed she knew he was there. He cried. Two days later, Brooke Astor died at Holly Hill, the estate she had loved and asked to die in, under the care of the woman the court had appointed to protect her from the only son she had.