Chapter 19: The Lawyers Take Over
Mary Martha's convoluted will leads to legal battles and a major surprise
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Chapter 19: The Lawyers Take Over
Release Date: October 22, 2024
Harland Bryant Tibbetts was born in Danby, NY on October 26, 1883, the second son of local attorney and Civil War veteran, Franklyn Tibbetts and his society wife, Mary Ann Todd. Harland’s birth came just 22 months after the death of his brother, Carlton, who had passed away at the age of eight.
Raised as an only child in Ithaca, NY, Harland excelled academically, and earned an H. B. Lord Scholarship to Cornell University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Law degree in 1906. Four years later, Harland joined the prestigious law firm of Jerome & Rand, headed by William Travers Jerome, as Managing Clerk.
On June 21, 1912, 28-year-old Harland married Florence Edwina Gill, the 20-year-old daughter of James Valentine Gill and his wife, Minnie Boyne Gill in what local papers called “one of the most interesting Flatbush weddings of June”. 1
Harland’s Best Man was George Lewis, a fellow Cornell grad and attorney with Jerome & Rand. The two men were fast friends and roommates, in fact, just three months earlier, Harland had filled the Best Man position at George’s wedding. 2
The newlyweds made their home in Brooklyn, and in 1915, they welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Elaine. Six years later, a second daughter, Helen, was born, and the Tibbetts household – which also included Florence’s parents, James and Minnie – was complete.
By the time Harland took over Mary Martha’s case in 1929 following the retirement of William Travers Jerome, the family had moved into a swanky high-rise apartment complex in Brooklyn Heights. And they’d gained live-in help.
Sometime in late 1930 – while Harland was contesting the will of Mary Martha’s brother, James, and also negotiating what would become the 1931 Mishou Agreement – he was tapped by former Associate Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals Samuel Seabury to join his investigation into corruption within New York City’s Magistrates’ Courts.
It was a plumb position, and one which put Harland at the forefront of a new kind of legal investigation and law craft.
As Judge Seabury noted at the first meeting of his full staff:
“The public will not be aroused to an awareness of conditions in the Magistrates’ courts through a series of graphs, charts and reports. We must divorce this investigation, as far as possible, from legalistic machinery. There is more eloquence in the testimony of a single illiterate witness telling of oppression suffered from legal processes than in the greatest sermon, editorial or address ever written. Where preachers, editors and lawyers have failed in arousing the public to a consciousness of unjust conditions these simple, unlearned witnesses will succeed.” 3
Throughout the remainder of 1930 and into the spring of 1931, Harland and the other “Seabury’s Boys”, as they were called, examined 1,059 witnesses, and held open hearings during which 299 witnesses were interrogated, and 4,596 pages of testimony were covered.4
On April 13, 1931, Harland was named Chief Examining Counsel of the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Affairs of New York City, the largest of what would come to be known collectively as the Seabury Investigations. In taking on the critical task of getting witnesses to tell their stories and give their evidence to the court, Harland was replacing his former boss at Jerome, Rand & Kresel, Isidor Kresel, who had held the position during Seabury’s earlier inquiries.
During the course of the Committee’s 20-month investigation into nearly every aspect of city government and operations, more than 2,000 people were examined including politicians, judges and magistrates, law enforcement officials, government appointees and contractors, and ordinary citizens who had been victimized or otherwise harmed by corrupt city officeholders and their practices.
Nearly every act of corruption, and there were many, led back to Tammany Hall, a Democratic Party political machine which used its influence to control everything from government appointments and contracts to election results, and to make money. Lots and lots of money.
For example, “the city sheriff had amassed $400,000 in savings from a job that paid $12,000 a year. The mayor had awarded a bus contract to a company that owned no buses — but was happy to give him a personal line of credit. A judge with half a million dollars in savings had been granted a loan to support 34 ‘relatives’ found to be in his care”. 5
In the end, the committee’s investigation led to “the dismissal of several corrupt judges, including the city's first female judge, Jean H. Norris, the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker, the indictment of Deputy City Clerk James J. McCormick, the arrest of State Senator John A. Hastings, and the removal from office of Sheriff Thomas M. Farley by Governor Roosevelt.” 6
It also catapulted FDR into the presidency, and established Harland as a hard-nosed legal force to be reckoned with and a man passionate about civic duty and community service.
The timing of Harland’s death on July 6, 1943, meant that all the contingency plans Mary Martha had put into place fell apart. The one scenario she had failed to anticipate – that Harland would live long enough to inherit that portion of her estate she had bequeathed to him but die before he could honor the secret agreement the two had made – had happened.
The first order of business was to find someone to take over Harland’s role as executor of Mary Martha’s will. That someone was, according to Mary Martha’s elaborate plan, Harland’s partner, George. The process, however, took several months, and it wasn’t until November 14, 1943, that Mary Martha’s will was admitted to probate in the Surrogate’s Court of Westchester County.
Shortly after, George and Florence – who had been named executrix of her husband’s estate when it was accepted into probate on July 20, 1943 – joined forces and petitioned the Westchester Surrogate’s Court for a judicial construction of the will which would have substituted George for Harland as legatee of Mary Martha’s Estate, meaning he would receive the legacy originally bequeathed to Harland.
That didn’t happen. Instead, on May 8, 1944, Judge Charles Griffith denied the request, holding that the portion of Mary Martha’s estate which had been willed to Harland was an outright gift. The judge went further, determining the Surrogate’s Court didn’t have jurisdiction to consider the secret agreement made between Mary Martha and Harland since it had been made while Mary Martha was alive rather than after her death.
The ruling effectively gave Florence control over two-thirds of Mary Martha’s estate, some $320,000, or roughly $5.5M in 2024 money. It was a burden Florence had never asked for, nor agreed to take on, yet take it on she did, choosing to honor Mary Martha’s wishes and keep the promises her late husband had made — promises which he had revealed to her in great detail prior to his death.
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While Florence was dealing with the complicated legal issues around her husband’s estate, Aimee was battling some legal issues of her own, specifically having to do with the secret 1931 money-for-dismissal agreement she had signed with Mary Martha. The centerpiece clause in that agreement prevented Aimee from ever publicly or privately asserting or claiming the relationship of daughter to Mary Martha, or doing anything which could directly or indirectly disturb, annoy or embarrass her natural born mother.
And the clause remained in full force and effect after Mary Martha’s death, and even beyond, preventing Aimee’s heirs, legatees and personal representatives from ever claiming a blood relationship between Aimee and Mary Martha.
Which left Aimee in a very hard space, especially when, by all appearances, Mary Martha had failed to uphold her end of the 1931 agreement by bequeathing the bulk of her estate to Berdetha Lammiman and Harland.
When Aimee’s name appeared in legal documents following Mary Martha’s death, the courts were asked to determine if she had violated, and thus negated, the 1931 agreement.
The ultimate answer was no – Florence, George and the executors or trustees of other wills and estates involved in what one attorney noted “presented an interminable series of the most intricate problems imaginable”, had revealed the relationship between Mary Martha and Aimee, not Aimee herself or her representatives.
It had taken more than two years of legal haggling and fees to come to that decision, and Aimees still hadn’t received a dime.
On March 12, 1938, Adolph Hitler invaded Germany’s neighbor, Austria, and over the next 12 months, the Nazi war machine annexed Czechoslovak and Lithuania. When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, France and Great Britain declared war against Germany and World War II was on.
Three years after her husband’s death, Florence was still no closer to distributing Mary Martha’s estate, despite heroic efforts on her part and the part of her legal team. The issue was the content of the secret agreement Harland and Mary Martha had signed. Mary Martha had established two separate funds within that secret agreement, one named the “Mishou Fund”, and assigned to Aimee, and the other named the “Sakrausky Fund” assigned to a mysterious woman named Martha Sylvester Sakrausky, born July 11, 1899 in Prague, Czechoslovak and currently living in Nazi-occupied Austria.
Whoever Mrs. Sakrausky was, in the eyes of the U.S. Government, she was an alien enemy, and the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 prevented Florence from giving her any of the assets left to her by Mary Martha in the secret agreement.
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Copyright 2024 Lori Olson White
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Chapter End Notes
[i] Miss Gill’s Bridal Party, Brooklynn Life, Brooklyn, NY, June 15, 1912, P. 18.
[ii] Lewis-Lofgren, The New York Times, New York, NY, March 3, 1912, P. 23.
[iii] Herbert Mitgang, “Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age”, Cooper Square Press, 2003. P. 104.
[iv] Herbert Mitgang, “Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age”, Cooper Square Press, 2003. P. 113
[v] Herbert Mitgang, “Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age”, Cooper Square Press, 2003. P. 118.
[vi] Wikipedia, Tammany Hall
7 “Tibbetts Funeral Service Tomorrow: Lawyer was Associate in Seabury City Probe”, Brooklyn Eagle, Brooklyn, NY, July 8, 1943, P. 11.
Incredible.
Wow, just when it couldn't get any more complicated... along comes the Nazi rise!