Marvin Stein lived an eventful and prosperous life. But a battle among his family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself.
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By John Leland
This much is agreed upon.
On the day after Thanksgiving 2018, Marvin Stein’s two adult sons removed him from the home he shared with his third wife and took him to three banks, where he withdrew nearly $400,000. Then they transferred the money to a trust account that they controlled.
Within days, the sons — who came from Marvin’s second marriage — helped him change his will to make them the only beneficiaries. Two months later, twin sisters from Marvin’s wife’s family, his grandnieces-in-law, petitioned the court to declare him legally incapacitated, and to appoint a guardian to manage both his person and his finances. And, they argued, they were the right people for the job. They were 23.
Here is where things become more contentious.
On a recent afternoon, Todd Stein, 56, the younger of Marvin’s two sons, showed a photograph of his father, taken shortly after that Thanksgiving, that he said revealed Marvin’s condition at the time. Shot from behind, Marvin, then 88, appears shirtless, his skin mottled and loose on his frame.
Is this just the body of a man in late life? Or is it, as his son maintains, evidence of potentially life-threatening neglect that Marvin, a lifelong fitness buff, had suffered at the hands of his wife’s younger relatives?
Had Todd and his brother saved their father? Or had they, as the twins claimed in court papers, taken advantage of his frail state to kidnap him and siphon off his life savings?
In the months after the bank tour, police officers, a judge, a court evaluator, a dozen or so lawyers and two very assertive families would all throw themselves at these questions, setting the trajectory of Marvin Stein’s late years and consuming hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Now Todd Stein, who runs a management company for actors, is trying to make a documentary series about the battle between the two families.
He proposed calling the series, “Fight of His Life: The Marvin Stein Story.” The production company that bought the rights preferred something juicier: “A Mafia Marriage.”
The Boxer
Marvin Stein, who was born in 1930, grew up poor in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he said he was the only Jewish kid boxing at the Flatbush Boys Club. His father was an alcoholic who left the family before Marvin was 10. Marvin was small but tough, fighting his way to Golden Gloves lightweight championship titles in 1946 and 1947. Boxing brought his first contact with organized crime figures.
“These underworld characters, they wanted to take advantage of me, so they drove me to Philadelphia, and I fought in Philadelphia, and they drove me back home again,” Marvin, 91, said in late September, in the Upper East Side apartment where he lives with Todd and Todd’s mother. His managers had chosen Philadelphia because the betting was “very loosey-loosey,” Marvin said. His voice was soft but even in his clipped phrasing, the grit of the episode seemed still fresh. “Real characters,” he said.
It was not his last encounter with gangsters.
“No,” Marvin said.
Marvin sat low in a wheelchair at one end of a table piled with shrimp, grapes and other noshes. Felicia Stein — Todd’s mother — sat in a wheelchair in a leopard-print blouse at the other end.
Marvin and Felicia, who divorced in 1986, sleep in separate bedrooms, each with a second bed for a home attendant. Todd, who had moved back to New York from Los Angeles to help care for his mother, created a third bedroom for himself from a section of the living room.
“He’s been wonderful, helping us,” Felicia said.
“What do I do for you?” Todd asked.
“You put up with me.”
The
conversation, like others over a span of several weeks, moved like a
river, winding here and there, occasionally stagnating in eddies. A few
years ago, Marvin had two transient ischemic attacks — like very brief
strokes — and he now has memory lapses that disrupt his narrative flow.
Todd addressed him deliberately, enunciating each word: “Do you remember the guardianship case?”
“I know you were involved in that,” Marvin said.
To steer Marvin’s memory, Todd brought out a thick album of family photos. In the early pictures, Marvin appears as a handsome, athletic man, prosperous through middle age. But later pictures, taken when he was in his 80s, show an emaciated figure living in a Brooklyn basement.
No court ever found that Marvin had been abused or neglected. But as he looked at the images, he tried to make sense of the change.
“As I look back, yes, I was taken advantage of,” he said. “At the time, I wasn’t aware of being exploited. I guess I was a sucker.”
Some memories were beyond recall, even with the photos. After high school, Marvin spent a year in a psychiatric institution to avoid prison. He could not remember why.
Todd asked his father, “How’s your memory today?”
Marvin thought about it. “I look back, it’s a movie,” he said. “I’m very fortunate I’m hooked up with Todd and this apartment. When I leave here, where am I going?”
“To heaven, I hope,” Todd said.
“Yeah.”
The High Life
In Todd’s mind — or in his patter — the documentary series is a sure smash. A production company, Fremantle, the makers of “American Idol” and “America’s Got Talent,” bought the rights. The powerful Creative Artists Agency was already pitching it to streaming services like Netflix and Peacock. Probably there would be a bidding war for the rights, Todd said. The pitch included a “sizzle reel” showing stacks of money and dramatized scenes of elder abuse. It had a story with real-life gangsters and celebrities, a health club — owned by Marvin — with a vault where members checked their guns and a “sleep room” where closeted gay men met. And it had a guardianship battle — just like Britney Spears, almost.
“You couldn’t write this stuff,” Todd said.
Boxing never developed into a professional career for Marvin, but it began his affinity for the gym. He married and became a father just out of high school, working in a fruit store for his first wife’s father. Customers included Barbra Streisand’s mother, who liked to haggle, Marvin said. “She was a cheapskate,” he recalled.
Memory is a strange and wondrous thing.
Marvin rode the fitness wave of the 1960s and 1970s. After divorcing his first wife, he married his second, Felicia Ann Salvi, a former dressmaker’s model, in 1961. He managed the health club at the Shelton Towers hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where celebrities like Ms. Streisand and Burt Reynolds were V.I.P.s, and George Hamilton tanned on the sun deck. Marvin started his own Shelton clubs in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. He bought property in Amagansett, in the Hamptons — $27,000 in 1969 — and built a house.
The club in Brooklyn became a hangout for wiseguys and judges from the nearby courthouse. “They would meet in the steam room and have contacts because it couldn’t be taped,” Marvin said.
The Son
Todd, who was born in 1965, attended Manhattan private schools, including the elite Professional Children’s School for young working performers. Schoolmates included Sarah Jessica Parker, Christian Slater and Phoebe Cates. At 13, he started to land roles in commercials, soap operas and Off Broadway plays.
Marvin lavished his children with money, especially after he and Felicia separated, when Todd was 16. It was how Marvin showed love, Todd said. They’d go shopping at Barney’s, and Todd could pick out whatever he wanted. But Marvin also warned his son, “Don’t let people know what you have.” That was the old Brooklyn talking.
Todd, who also goes by T.J., moved to California after college, eventually starting a management company for young actors, which was written up in The Los Angeles Times in 2000. In court papers, Marvin’s future guardians said that Todd and his father had little contact after Todd moved west, except when Todd wanted money, which Marvin resented. Todd and Marvin denied this. But when Marvin married a woman he met at the Brooklyn exercise club in 1991, he did not tell his children or invite them to the wedding.
The woman was Anita Montemarano, who worked for New York City in social services. She was also, the Steins learned, the sister of a high-ranking mafia captain.
The Gangster
Marvin’s new wife was the older sister of Dominic Montemarano, who was known as Donny Shacks and at the time of the wedding was serving what would be a decade in prison for racketeering and extortion. The federal indictment described him as a capo, or captain, in the Colombo crime family.
Mr. Montemarano, whose record also included arrests for assault, bribery, loan sharking, illegal gun possession and bookmaking, had a yen for the Hollywood life. When he got out of prison in 1997, he moved to California and started hanging out with celebrities like Pamela Anderson and Elizabeth Hurley, as well as Steve Bing, a mercurial movie producer who leapt to his death from his high-rise apartment in Century City in July 2020.
Mr. Montemarano also tried acting, starring as an aging criminal in the 2002 bomb “Night at the Golden Eagle,” produced by Mr. Bing, which took in less than $18,000 at the box office. Reviewing the movie in The Times, A.O. Scott wrote, approvingly, that “the smell of sweat, urine and cheap liquor seems to emanate from the screen.”
Marvin Stein said he had few dealings with his brother-in-law, by choice. “He used to come to my house to meet with my wife, and there was money going back and forth,” Marvin said, declining to elaborate. “I sort of excused myself and got busy with something. I didn’t want any part of it, because sooner or later it was going to catch up with me.”
Relations between the in-laws were fraught. Members of Ms. Montemarano’s family and their lawyer declined to be interviewed for this article, but in 2013, Anita Montemarano wrote a scathing two-page letter to Todd and his brother and their half-sister from Marvin’s first marriage, a champion powerlifter living in Brooklyn. In it, Anita called them “a self-centered, self-absorbed, ungrateful group of adults” who enjoyed “free rides financially and emotionally” from their father.
In court documents, Anita’s niece Donna claimed that Marvin’s sons ignored him for long stretches, “emerging only to make financial demands of their father and his wife.”
Todd and Marvin say it was Anita who tried to keep them apart.
“Anita would make sarcastic remarks: Is that Todd calling again?” Marvin said.
When Anita got a diagnosis of kidney cancer in late 2016, the conflicts between the two families — over money, over control — escalated. Despite the tension, Marvin said he had loved Anita, and that she had been very brave during her decline.
The Movies
Just before Thanksgiving 2018, Todd was on a business trip to Chicago when he called his father. He thought Marvin did not sound right. He flew to New York, he said, and found his father living in the basement of his home in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn, unwashed and in poor condition.
At this point, Anita was in the terminal stages of cancer, with a hospice nurse visiting three times a week and her niece and twin grandnieces caring for her and Marvin. The twins called Todd’s arrival that Thanksgiving “a rare appearance at a family gathering.”
“My dad was just skin and bones,” Todd said, adding that he was in delirium. “He had been moving six figures out of his bank accounts over the past 20 months. He was not eating, he was not drinking or taking his proper medicine.”
In their petition to be appointed Marvin’s guardians, the grandnieces described him as incapacitated, having dementia and unable to maintain a conversation or remember information told to him.
Marvin said it had been his choice to live in the basement. He had a television and exercise equipment there, and a futon frame piled with mattresses. But when Todd showed him the photo of himself taken shortly afterward, shirtless, Marvin was distressed to see how thin he was. “When I look at it, it indicates that I wasn’t getting food,” he said, “because my bones are showing.”
There were also financial questions. Four months earlier, in July 2018, with cancer ravaging Anita’s body, someone had helped Marvin change his will to leave the Dyker Heights house, worth more than $1.2 million, entirely to the grandnieces, rather than to be shared among the two families, as it had been before. Other accounts were also changed to favor Anita’s family, including the beneficiaries of Anita’s will and $368,000 in life insurance policies, Todd said.
That Friday, a few days after Todd’s initial visit, Todd and his older brother, Ralph, who lived in New York City, showed up at the Dyker Heights house and announced they were taking their father to lunch. Instead, they began the tour of Marvin’s banks to remove his assets.
Police officers, notified by Anita’s family, sent Todd text messages telling him to bring Marvin to a police precinct. They reported to a precinct in Manhattan, then to one in Brooklyn, and then to a hospital, because Marvin’s blood pressure was “off the charts,” Todd said. Finally, sometime around 2 a.m. and without warning his mother, Todd took his father to the apartment he was sharing with Felicia, in the Upper East Side building where Todd grew up.
It was the first time Marvin and Felicia had seen each other in at least a decade.
Todd said he was only protecting his father’s assets. In their guardianship petition, the grandnieces accused Todd and his brother of “exercising undue influence and duress” over Marvin to get hold of his money, saying he “cannot maintain a conversation of any length because he cannot remember the information shared with him and consequently loses the thread of the discussion.”
Marvin saw Anita only once more, when he returned to the house a few days after Thanksgiving to get his medications. In a very short video recorded on Todd’s cellphone, Marvin stands over her bed, apparently having told her he was leaving. “If you think I’m going to beg you,” she can be heard saying, “I’m not.”
With so much acrimony, both families got protective orders against one another.
When Anita died, on Dec. 10, 2018, her family did not notify Todd and Marvin. The brothers went to the Dyker Heights house around Christmas and found it had been largely cleared out. This was how they learned of her death.
About a month after that, in late January 2019, the grandnieces petitioned to have Marvin declared incapacitated, and to be appointed guardians of his person and property. They tallied his known assets at close to $2 million, in addition to the house.
Without meeting with Marvin, a judge in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn granted their petition.
Todd hired a team of lawyers for himself and for his father, and petitioned the court to release Marvin from guardianship, or appoint Todd as the guardian instead of the twins.
The legal fees began to mount, at up to $650 per hour. The court replaced the twins with an experienced, temporary guardian, but gave him authority only over Marvin’s property, not his person. The guardian’s fee, too, was billed to Marvin.
Living with Todd and Felicia, Marvin regained weight; his therapist and doctor submitted letters attesting that he was lucid and able to care for himself, with help.
But Marvin was still not in charge of his finances. If he needed money for a shave, he said, he had to ask the guardian. And the legal bills were adding up: $100,000, then $200,000 and rising — some of it a result of Todd’s constant emails to the various lawyers.
The two families fought over everything. Todd demanded that Anita’s family remove her cremated remains from a niche at Green-Wood Cemetery that Marvin had bought. That battle went on for months before the remains were moved.
Finally, in June 2019, the two families agreed to a settlement, and together asked the court to end the guardianship. Marvin regained control of his life.
Release
On a recent afternoon in the Steins’ apartment, Todd estimated that the cost of getting his father out of guardianship ran to about $300,000. He did not know how much the process cost Anita’s family.
Marvin and Felicia sat facing each other across a table. Felicia, who is now 87, wore a sash from a beauty contest she won in her youth.
Living together has been an adjustment for the three of them. Todd has just started dating after the breakup of a long-term relationship and surgery from a severe bicycle accident — all while running his business and caring for two very old parents.
“It’s a 24-hour job,” he said. “I plan the meals, take care of the medicines. It’s a lot.”
And there is the recognition that his parents, who are working out a new relationship after a long and acrimonious time apart, are getting frailer.
As he prepared to pitch the documentary series, Todd said, he worried that people might accuse him of exploiting his father.
“Would it look badly that I’m involved in a documentary that’s watching his decline?” Todd said. “Because it is something that could be judged.”
Felicia said that when Todd first brought Marvin to her apartment, she was “apprehensive.” But a kind of rhythm had emerged. “I’m used to him,” she said. Still, she added, all the talk of gangsters and police made her feel uneasy — though in the end, there is little evidence that criminal elements played a role other than as mood music for the documentary.
Todd asked his father whether he liked living with Felicia.
Marvin gave it some thought. “Doesn’t harm me in any way,” he said.
Todd pressed: “It’s nice to have someone you can talk to?”
“Yes,” Marvin said.
Their challenge now is to imagine their remaining lives together. Marvin and Felicia exercise in the gym downstairs; Todd takes them for meals at the corner restaurant. The couple’s combined incomes cover their living expenses.
“Luckily, my father is considered a success story,” Todd said, acknowledging that many people never get out of guardianship. “He lived. Imagine if they didn’t have the money to fight it.”
He paused and then corrected himself. “If they didn’t have money,” he said, “this never would have happened.”
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