The Astor Trial's Final Days

Jeff Day / AP Photo As closing arguments get under way, the attorneys in the epic trial fire their parting shots, and try to weave four months of testimony into a narrative for the exhausted jury.

After 18 weeks and 70 witnesses, the prosecution in The People vs. Anthony Marshall and Francis Morrissey faced a stupendous challenge this week as the moment for closing arguments finally arrived. No, the challenge wasn’t proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants were guilty of swindling Mr. Marshall’s mother, Brooke Astor, out of her fortune. Rather, it was proving that the millions of dollars that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had spent prosecuting the case had been a wise investment of taxpayers' money. (Defrauding a $187 million estate seems like decidedly small potatoes in the age of Madoff and massive government bailouts.)

Furthermore, that sentencing the poor, beleaguered jury—who were initially told they’ve be able to return to their jobs and families by July 4—to a summer of involuntary servitude, served some higher purpose.

“I’ve never had a case where over the course of a trial I’ve had four haircuts,” the prosecutor told the jury.

The prosecution may just have succeeded on both counts. The defense went first and, preying on the jury’s lost freedom, tried to portray the trial as an utter waste of time. “Francis Morrissey is really a casualty” caught between two sides of a family warring over an inheritance, insisted Thomas Puccio, Francis Morrissey’s lawyer. (The jury was not made aware that a recurring theme in the 66-year-old Morrissey’s career is befriending the elderly and finding himself the beneficiary of their estates.)

“He’s a gentleman, polite to a fault,” Mr. Puccio went on as the Zelig-like Morrissey sat hunched at the defense table. Morrissey is accused of masterminding a second codicil to Mrs. Astor’s will that made Tony and ultimately daughter-in-law Charlene the beneficiary of a $60 million trust originally intended to go to charity. “He continued to visit Brooke Astor years after the Barbara Walters and Henry Kissingers of this world stopped coming,” Puccio continued.

Mr. Morrissey is also charged with forging Mrs. Astor’s signature on a third codicil, but the jury may have a hard time finding him guilty of that allegation, even though her bold signature on the document in question (unlike her confused scribbles on other legal documents) resembles those of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Puccio was able to cast doubt on the testimony of Lea Opris, a maid who witnessed the codicil’s signing and said she distinctly remembers Mrs. Astor’s signature to be weaker and higher on the page, by showing that she may have been describing a first codicil that fits that description, and that Mr. Morrissey had nothing to do with. Two handwriting experts hired by the defense also contend the signature on the third codicil is authentic, perhaps canceling out the prosecution’s expert, who is equally confident the signature is a fake.

In addition, Mr. Puccio introduced an idea that Fred Hafetz, Mr. Marshall’s attorney, would also hammer away at: that Mrs. Astor so loved tinkering with her will—she changed it 38 times between 1953 and 2003 and took it away with her on weekends the way other people do their tennis racquets—that there was nothing fishy about her decision to do so again in 2003 and 2004, the time of the suspect codicils.

Mr. Hafetz risked insulting the jury’s intelligence by asserting that the only witnesses the jury could trust were G. Warren Whitaker, the lawyer Mr. Morrissey hired after Mr. Marshall fired Mrs. Astor’s longtime estate lawyer, Henry Christensen, and Robert Knuts, a colleague. The reason is that they were the only people in the room, besides Mr. Morrissey, when Mrs. Astor signed the codicil that gave away the store to her son, so only they can attest to her mental capacity.

The defense’s mantra throughout the trial has been that, while conceding Mrs. Astor had Alzheimer’s disease, she had good days and bad days and her son only dared to presume on her goodwill, or wills, on her good days. Taking that a step further during summations, Hafetz and Puccio contended she had good and bad moments. In other words, while Pearline Noble, one of Mrs. Astor’s nurses, may have testified that her patient had to be dragged into the library to sign the disputed codicil, literally kicking and screaming, the nurse wasn’t qualified to testify to her demeanor once she was behind closed doors and presumably settled down among the men in dark suits.