Clyde Waite did not expect to be stymied by the notorious Queens County Surrogate’s Court.
A Yale-educated attorney and senior judge, Waite was the first African-American elected to the bench in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His distinguished legal career spans a half century.
But Waite has been mired in Queens Surrogate’s Court for a decade, attempting to settle, without success, the estate of his sister, who died in Queens without a will. Ten years is an extraordinarily long amount of time for an estate to not be settled. Even complex cases, observers say, only take a handful of years.
Waite believes the court’s insider politics are playing a role in thwarting him and his family.
“Their subtle suggestion is if I get the right lawyer, this would go away,” Waite told Gothamist. “I just want to get this thing administered and closed out.”
The last bastion of Democratic machine politics in New York City, Surrogate’s Court remains unchanged, despite the reform energy unleashed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning upset victory in 2018. Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley, the former chairman of the Queens Democratic Party and a local power broker who ensured close allies could grow wealthy processing the estates of those who die without wills.
Peter Kelly, the Surrogate’s judge, is the brother of Crowley’s former district chief of staff, Ann Anzalone. Elected unopposed in 2010, Kelly’s term runs until 2024.
Kelly appointed Lois Rosenblatt, a former Queens Democratic Party election lawyer, to lead the Office of the Public Administrator, the publicly-funded agency that manages the estates of those who die without wills. Rosenblatt’s counsel is Gerard Sweeney, who can earn millions annually processing those estates.
Sweeney, along with the Long Island-based attorneys Michael Reich and Frank Bolz, has effectively controlled the Queens Democratic Party for more than 30 years. Sweeney was a law partner of Thomas Manton, the congressman and party boss who bequeathed his congressional seat to his protégé, Crowley.
Crowley’s defeat did not mean the end of the Sweeney, Reich and Bolz troika. All three attorneys are favorites of the new party boss, Congressman Gregory Meeks. They performed extensive pro bono work for the party’s chosen candidate for Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, with Sweeney even making court appearances on her behalf.
Since judges in Queens rarely, if ever, run in competitive elections, rising to the bench means having the support of the Queens Democratic Party. The attorneys who handle lucrative cases in the scandal-plagued Surrogate’s Court are typically those already known by politically-connected judges. Top-earning attorneys in Queens Surrogate’s Court include Bill Driscoll, an influential lobbyist who once served as Manton’s chief of staff; Stephanie Goldstone, a former Democratic district leader; and Scott Kaufman, a former campaign treasurer for Joe Crowley and the law partner of his brother, Sean.
“The wealth that is processed through the Surrogate’s Court system in the State of New York is extraordinary, and there is an incredible concentration of authority in a very small handful of people,” said James Sample, a Hofstra University law professor who studies New York’s judicial system. “This is one of those dirty little secrets of New York politics.”
All of this works against any outsider who attempts to navigate Surrogate’s Court. Waite, as a judge himself, thought he was different.
His sister, Lillian Waite Dunn, a resident of Southeast Queens, died suddenly in May 2010 without a will. She was unmarried and had no children.
Dunn had amassed a real estate fortune in New York, worth between $6 and $7 million, Waite estimates. She owned almost two dozen units in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. There are 16 heirs in total to the estate, including siblings, nieces, and nephews.
Rather than have a local, well-wired attorney administer the estate who would reap a sizable legal fee, Waite and his siblings decided he should be appointed the administrator. This made sense, Waite said, because of his own extensive legal background and experience navigating the comparable Bucks County Orphans Court. Since Waite had a successful legal career of his own, he would not need to take a fee from his sister’s estate.
Given the size of his sister’s estate, an attorney could have easily commanded $250,000 or more, plus other associated smaller fees.
“I am an heir, along with my siblings, and we are all in full agreement on everything. There’s never been a dispute on the part of anyone,” Waite said. “I didn’t think there would be any basis for this grinding on the way it has been.”
For the apartments, Waite needed to become the administrator so he could accept rent payments and use those payments to cover maintenance charges and other related costs to keep the estate from going into bankruptcy.
Slowly, the apartments were sold off. But Waite says Kelly, the Surrogate’s judge, increasingly became an obstacle. Unlike the previous Surrogate’s judge, Robert Nahman—Waite had been appointed administrator of Dunn’s estate shortly before Kelly took office—Kelly required Waite to obtain a $4.5 million surety bond, forcing him to pay an annual fee on the bond of $7,000 while seeking approval for selling units.
At one point, Kelly ordered what it is called an interim accounting of the estate, not offering a clear rationale, according to Waite. A document, dozens of pages long, was produced, going back what was then six years, from 2010 to 2016.
“There was a threat I would be removed as administrator and someone else put in my place,” Waite recalled. “In effect, I would have to have someone do what I knew very well how to do myself.”
In July 2018, Waite reached an agreement with a buyer for the final apartment, a cash sale that would have allowed the estate to be settled. All the siblings were in agreement on the sale. They hoped to have the final account approved to dispose of the unit, discharge the bond, and finally close the estate.
The sale, though, has been repeatedly blocked by Judge Kelly. For reasons unclear to Waite, Kelly will not recognize their family settlement agreement, though all heirs are on board. If the agreement isn’t approved in Surrogate’s Court, the co-op association, in turn, can’t allow the sale to go through with Waite as the administrator. “We want to sell the last unit and close the estate. They won’t let us do it,” Waite said. “They won’t accept an agreement on our part.”
Waite had even tried to hire two different attorneys to help him close the estate. Kelly, for reasons also unclear, rejected their work.
In a letter to Gothamist, Janet Edwards Tucker, Kelly’s deputy chief clerk, said Waite was to blame for any delays. According to Tucker, Waite was “rude and aggressive” with staff and attacked the Pennsylvania judge for his “incompetence” and “intransigence.” Tucker, complaining that Waite too often reminded Surrogate’s staff of his judicial pedigree, also claimed Waite had improperly filed paperwork and sold off assets of the estate.
“Mr. Waite has consistently refused to follow instructions/suggestions given by the clerical staff, has been rude and aggressive in his dealings with same, and has uniformly informed staff, in all his interactions, of his status as a judicial officer in Pennsylvania,” Tucker wrote. “While I am not aware of rules governing judicial conduct in Pennsylvania, I do know such representations are totally unethical and improper in New York.”
The estate now has a value of only one unit worth $245,000, yet Waite remains saddled with the $4.5 million bond. He believes he is being “punished for my audacity to want to handle this pro se and not utilize a favored attorney.”
Just last week, Surrogate’s Court staff refused to accept the petition for filing, effectively refusing approval of the sale, according to documentation provided to Gothamist. For Waite, there is little recourse: a filing is simply refused, which means no chance for a judicial appeal or even a case that appears on the docket. He remains in limbo.
“I would not be surprised that this has been settled upon as a practice to punish unfavored litigants for whatever reason,” Waite said.
