According to a press release today from the offices of Attorney General Schneiderman, Ms. Astor's son Anthony Marshall, who was accused of neglecting his elderly mother to the point of abuse and was indicted in 2006 by a grand jury on 16 counts of grand larceny, conspiracy, and possession of stolen property, is only going to get half of his original inheritance. (ONLY half?) $30 million will be going to the Brooke Astor Fund for New York City Education.

Other big payouts will be given to the Metropolitan Museum of the Arts and the New York Public Library.

Said Attorney General Schneiderman:

Brooke Astor was at the center of New York philanthropy for nearly half a century. Her legendary generosity and charisma touched New Yorkers of all backgrounds. I am pleased that my office led the way to an agreement that honors Mrs. Astor’s final wishes and benefits New York's landmark educational and cultural institutions.”

Other organizations that will benefit from Ms. Astor's charitable will include Central and Prospect Park, Historic Hudson Valley, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Museum, Rockefeller University, the Morgan Library & Museum, and New York University.

Astor cherished the 15th-floor duplex in one of the city's most coveted co-ops--but then who wouldn't love six terraces and five wood-burning fireplaces? Following her death in 2007, the estate, headed by her son, Anthony Marshall, listed the spread for a princely $46 million in May of the following year. The price fell from the sky slowly, and not always gracefully. It was chopped to $34 million in 2009, then to $29 million. Most recently it was asking $24.5 million, barely half the original ask.

Now Astor's estate has accepted an offer in the high-teens, reports the New York Post.  

Hold on, though, because 778's famously picky co-op board could still reject the low-ball offer. Moreover, the estate is reportedly hoping something better will come along. Mr. Marshall is still heavily steeped in legal bills over accusations that he stole something in the order of $60 million from his mother during her lifetime.

Recently, the coveted Buckley maisonette at 778 Park sold to a Rockefeller heir. The last asking price on the Buckley place was $10 million, down from $12 million. StreetEasy now shows the price as $8.75 million, yet another steep discount

It seems even blue bloods are bargain-hunting these days.

Would it have been one of the biggests sales of the year? Find out! >>

lkusisto@observer.com

It took two years for the idealistic price to approach reality. The 13-room ground floor unit of the Candela-designed building, where the late Brooke Astor's apartment upstairs also lingers on the market (price sliced, incidentally, from $46 million to $24.9 million), was relisted after a recession-weary market hiatus, by Brown Harris Stevens mavens Paula del Nunzio and John Burger for $12 million, a discount of over 50%. Now, the Brown Harris Stevens' listing reveals yet another price cut to a bargain $10 million. Clearly the cost had become prohibitive for potential buyers!

The 5,000 square foot home which boasts its own address, 73 East 73rd Street, is famous for its red library, Mr. Buckley's office left as is, an 18 foot long marble foyer and the legions of political, intellectual and cultural elites who dined and wined with high-society conservatism's host Mr. Buckley and wife, Pat.

Something about 778 Park Avenue and provenance seems to equal price cuts, or perhaps it's simply a case of over-zealous preliminary pricing. The building's ground floor maisonette, which also boasts its own private, and symmetrical, address--73 East 73rd Street--entertained legions of New York City's elite as the headquarters for high-society conservatism with the home's hosts. As Ms. Del Nunzio told The New York Times in March, “This is the place where all those conversations and dinners with statesmen and political figures, not to mention film and television stars, with a quiet family dinner thrown in here and there, happened. This is a rare opportunity to acquire a piece of New York’s intellectual history.”

-cmalle@observer.com

What I miss much more are the real estate brokers themselves, especially the few at the top. They were eloquent, acrobatic, cruel, connected, imaginative, well bred and ill-mannered, sometimes all in the same afternoon.

There were all kinds. Kirk Henckels was a good-natured equestrian who always wore a bow tie. Carrie Chiang was a competitive ballroom dancer. John Burger liked talking on the phone about the subtleties of Park Avenue co-op design, even if he was poolside in the Hamptons.

Dolly Lenz was the genius power broker who explained over lunch at the Four Seasons that she doesn’t have tirades; she just cuts people out of her life. After I wrote a story that described how the recession had made her into a mere mortal, she stopped talking to me.

A. Laurance Kaiser IV, whose father died after leaving his Park Avenue club and stepping into a pothole, sold a single duplex at 834 Fifth Avenue four times—first for $225,000; then to John DeLorean; then to Reginald Lewis, the first African-American allowed into a so-called Good Building; then to Carl Icahn’s old chief investor, who paid $33,444,500.

“They lie, the brokers—they lie to brokers, they lie to clients. There’s lying. Lying,” Linda Stein, probably the first New York celebrity real estate agent, told me in the spring of 2007. “There is no high except the money, which is extremely taxable.” She was found murdered by her assistant that October.

And Edward Lee Cave was the pristinely genteel agent whose eponymous brokerage was taken over last year by Brown Harris Stevens. “When I first started, all the doormen had white gloves,” he sighed then. “And they don’t anymore. It’s called change.”

In October, he was convicted of stealing millions from his mother, Brooke Astor, who allegedly spent nights in tattered nightgowns on a urine-stained couch. Though Mr. Marshall wasn’t charged with the abuse of his elderly socialite mother, who died in 2007 at age 105, he was convicted on 14 counts, including the theft of two $500,000 paintings, one a Tiepolo of dancing dogs, and of misusing $655,000 of Astor’s money to pay the captain of a yacht and maintain his own real estate. At Mr. Marshall’s sentencing next Monday, he faces up to 25 years in prison, though his attorneys have asked the State Supreme Court to throw out the only charge that carries mandatory jail time.

Though his wife was never charged, she has been painted in the press as the motive behind Mr. Marshall’s crimes, the evil schemer behind the tainted son. “It was she—a woman of humble origins and grand designs—who motivated him to steal from his philanthropist mother,” the Daily News thumped.

Throughout a long conversation in the Marshalls’ Upper East Side apartment, she seems genuinely perplexed by the way things have played out. “Oh, I’ve been very introspective. What did I do wrong? What part have I played in this? What’s in me that has caused this reaction from others?”

In 1989, she left her husband of two decades, the Episcopal minister at Brooke Astor’s century-old Maine church, for Mr. Marshall. She says their love has only intensified. “We were a we about this size.” Her arms stretch. “And then as the years went on, we were a we about this size.” They stretch more. “But having had this experience, we are now a we like this. In fact we’re so we that we’re one. There is no he and I. There’s only the one. We’re the one. We’re one.”

She doesn’t think her husband has done anything wrong. “He’s still the most decent, honest, honorable, compassionate, intelligent, humorous man I know. And I’m going to stick by him.” But does she feel angry? “Why should I get mad at him?”

She turns the heater off to help her husband’s hearing. Mr. Marshall, who had quadruple bypass surgery last year, is almost inaudible when he speaks, which isn’t often. But his velvety accent survives. “As dull as it might seem to others,” he says very slowly, “we’ve never had an argument.”

ON THE MORNING of the Marshalls’ 17th wedding anniversary, a May New York Times cover story pointed out that Astor had told her ear doctor she’d rather have her dachshunds, Boysie and Girlsie, “than her son and his wife, whom she described as a bitch.” In the fall, Philip Marshall, Anthony’s son, called her a sugarcoated poison pill, a description that stuck. “I saw a woman of steel who would rip your throat out to protect what is hers,” the Post’s Andrea Peyser wrote. “Anthony did it for love. He did it to keep Charlene in sensible shoes and shapeless suits. He did it to please this coarse and devoted woman on whose heaving breast he always found a comfortable home.” The Post has taken to calling her Miss Piggy, from a code name that one of Astor’s nurses used in her diary.

In closing arguments, prosecutors called Mr. Marshall a morally depraved son—“a son,” an assistant district attorney repeated, “an only son”—who robbed an incapacitated woman to line his wife’s pockets. In particular, they said, a will amendment in 2004 gave him control of a $60 million chunk of the Astor estate at her death, steering money away from charity. After it was signed, her housekeeper testified, Astor was panicked, worrying that “men in suits” were lurking in her closets and under her bed.

“If that’s what they think, that he did it for me, I’d say God bless him!” Ms. Marshall now says. “The man really loves me!

“You know why it doesn’t bother me? They don’t know me,” she says. “If we ever had a fire in this apartment, the first thing I’d do is grab Pichou”—their dachshund—“and Tony. The second thing I would grab is as many of my books and photographs as I could. Other than that, you can take the rest and it can go flying out the window. I don’t care. So when I read these articles—I was greedy, I wanted the money, I wanted Brooke’s things, her furs, whatever it is—I just have to sit there and laugh because it’s so far from the truth. Because those kinds of things I don’t care about; I never have cared about them.”

The rain is falling outside of her window. “Give me trees, pine trees, and walks, and water, and the woods, and beautiful big rocks,” she says. “These are the things that speak to me, the sea, the smell of the sea, the smell of the pine. Give me the little red squirrels running around, or a chipmunk jumping on me. That’s the best. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”

THE APARTMENT IS HALFWAY between a Francis Bacon painting and a John Cheever story. Mr. Marshall seems beaten, and his wife has come up with a way to temporarily endure. “I have been on a spiritual journey for many, many years, but of course this really intensified it. I couldn’t not continue my own spiritual journey, which has taken me farther, deeper, than I could have ever imagined. The hell has brought me to a closer sense of the kingdom of heaven than I could have ever imagined.”

Still, she admits the six-month trial was draining. “My feeling was, for a long time, that I made a mistake, and I hurt the very person and people that I love.” She says she worried that she gave her husband wrong advice, but will not say on what.

“I didn’t know,” Mr. Marshall hums from his chair, “she was blaming herself.”

She feels she understand things now, even why her husband’s sons, her mother-in-law’s closest friends, the press, the prosecutors and at least one juror consider her a ravenous conniver. “I think it was pure projection on their part. And that’s why I’m saying it’s very important to know yourself. And I think these people, when you don’t know yourself, then what you do is, you project onto the other person.”

Are they aware of it? “That’s what I’m saying. They don’t know it. They still don’t know it. They think that they’re doing the right thing. And yet probably somewhere in their soul they know they weren’t. But they think in their head that they were all doing the right thing.”

Weeks later, closer to next Monday’s sentencing, Ms. Marshall is more tense. She says they are not doing well. “Tony’s in terrible shape, he’s in terrible shape,” she says. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know if he’s going to make it to Monday.” She is tired and scared. “I just cry all the time. It’s just a hell of a thing. It’s just a hell of a thing.”

mabelson@observer.com

For the mainstays in the press corps--Ms. Gordon, who is chronicling the case for Vanity Fair, and the reporters for The Times, Post, and Daily News--Courtroom 1536 became a second home, during a summer filled with probate and codicils.

"It's the most collegial experience as a journalist I've ever had," said Ms. Gordon, whose book Mrs. Astor Regrets became an almanac for others in the press. "Probably because it was a really long trial and everybody knew they were going to need some help at some point and it was sort of informal that we'd help each other. It's just unusual that people kind of watch each other's backs in that way. Usually we're trying to kill each other with competition."

From the first day, the courtroom gallery had a particular geometry that brought the press together. Charlene Marshall sat on the right side of the courtroom, in the second row (the first was reserved for legal assistants) directly behind her husband, who cocked his seat sideways so he could exchange glances with her. But the reporters wanted to see her too: They mostly sat in a loose cluster on the left side of the courtroom, where they could see the witnesses without missing Mrs. Marshall's reactions.

Mr. Hermann felt less awkward.

"For all the bad things that are said about Tony and Charlene, these are said by people who haven't had the chance to get to know them," he said. "The jury unfortunately, sees just two people sititng there and mountains of evidence against them. But if you don't get to know them as people, you're missing a great deal of what they're about."

"Once when I talked to Tony about his World War II experiences, I didn't feel like I was speaking to the heir to one of the wealthiest people in New York. I felt like I was just talking to a guy who might be sitting on a bar stool at a VFW post somewhere," said Mr. Hermann, a history buff who participates in World War II re-enactments as a Signal Corps photographer. He said Mrs. Marshall chimed in when her husband--a former U.S. Marine and C.I.A. intelligence officer and ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, among other places--couldn't remember the base where he did basic training.

Mr. Eligon, on the other hand, couldn't quite get past Mr. Marshall's quasi-British accent.

But after months spent together, how was a reporter to feel when a verdict finally came down?

"It's hard not to feel sad for Tony and Charlene and Morrissey. You've spent all these months in the courtroom together, you've seen them, you've chatted with them," said Ms. Gordon, who added that she was somewhat surprised the verdict was so overwhelming. "I just didn't think it would feel so emotional, oddly enough. I didn't think that--I don't know what I thought--but you know I've been watching this and talking to this cast of characters of three and a half years and so it's a pretty powerful thing."

Mr. Hermann said he was surprised too, and that for all the regulars, the closure has yet to come. "I think that because of that we're there and we've spoken to them and seen them everyday, I think we have the same feeling that they might have, of it not being over yet. Perhaps for the people who just came down for the 9 to 5 aspects of the trial, it's over. But because we've become so invested in every aspect of this case, there's still a lot to play out."

Another Times article explains how the jurors struggled to relate to the rich, powerful characters of the Astor saga:

Jurors said they had tried to see through the wealth and glamour of the characters in the unfolding drama. And although the amounts of money were at times astounding to ponder, they infused their deliberations with experiences from their own lives.

Ms. Fernandez, 52, who said her grandfather had suffered from dementia for years, said Mr. Marshall and his wife, Charlene, who was not charged, were no different from common criminals. “It sort of reminded me, when I was in Brooklyn years ago and there was a blackout, and the lower-income people were stealing refrigerators and TVs, and they felt that was due to them,” Ms. Fernandez said after the verdict.

Presumably Sulzberger would have come up with a different analogy.

But despite their personal unfamiliarity with Astor-type lifestyles, the jurors were resourceful. From the Times: "One juror, Philip Bump, a freelance consultant for labor unions, was good at math, and helped the panel sort out" the significance of Anthony Marshall's shenanigans.

Yes, the Daily News explains, "it was 'little people,' as Leona Helsmley derisively described them," who saw that justice was done.

The Post speaks a language that transcends money:

"That bitch," Brooke Astor famously called her daughter-in-law.

"No neck, and no class," the grande dame of New York society would sniff to friends -- certain that the ruddy wife of her only child was making a back-door, dimpled-fisted grab at her diamonds, her cash and even her mantle as a philanthropist.

Yesterday, Astor got payback.

But the Astor tale is not the only sordid courtroom drama wrapping up in today's papers! Hiram Monserrate's defense has rested its case, without any testimony from Monserrate himself. According to the Post:

Defense lawyer Joseph Tacopina said it was "very difficult" for Monserrate to remain mum when he stands "wrongly accused."

He said the decision to keep Monserrate off the stand was made Tuesday night after reviewing the entire record of the trial.

"Obviously he's had to remain quiet -- while this trial is going on -- about what happened that night," the lawyer said. "He's got a lot to say about it."

The "new 1839 Greek Revival townhouse has five stories, but it's currently set up as a four-unit building, with a duplex on the bottom two floors and three floor-through units above," The Observer wrote back then. The townhouse is now a single-family townhouse, according to floorplans and photographs (click on the slideshow to see them), with French doors leading from the kitchen to the 49-foot-long garden; a fourth floor that's been given over to the children; a fifth floor with a home office and media room; plus, best of all, a full-floor master bedroom suite whose "front room has been made into a luxurious spa-like bath."

A listing broker and a publicist did not immediately return emails.

Ms. Moore's place sounds plush, but this isn't a good era for plush real estate. In the last 24 hours, for example, the listing price for Brooke Astor's duplex (which had already fallen from $46 million to $34 million to $29 million) was cut to $24.9 million, its listing on Stribling's Web site shows.

mabelson@observer.com

And on the seventh day, Henry Christensen rested.

The late socialite Brooke Astor's former attorney sat for his sixth (and mercifully final) consecutive day on the witness stand as the trial of Ms. Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, wrapped up its sixth week of testimony on Thursday, June 4.

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Lowey grilled Mr. Christensen on a variety of topics in hopes of better proving her case that Mr. Marshall had taken advantage of his elderly mother's Alzheimer's to swindle her estate to the tune of some $60 million.

Mr. Christensen arrived in court wearing a beige suit and bright blue tie, but his spring-like attire did not match his demeanor.

He raised his head to the ceiling on more than one occasion and often nodded brusquely instead of stating his answer verbally.

A few times, he jolted forward, at one point barking, “I gave fifteen years of devoted, undivided attention to Mrs. Astor, and I was fired, and I resent the suggestion that I was doing anything other than what she wanted.”

Most of his comments seemed tart not belligerent. When the questions again returned to Ms. Astor’s state of mind and her medication, Mr. Christensen said with a smirk, “I already testified [about this] this morning, yesterday, or last week." To which, Ms. Lowey replied, “I’m sorry, we’re almost done with you.”

During a series of questions about Herbert Haseltine animal sculptures and drawings of donkeys and dancing dogs left in her will, Mr. Christensen said bemusedly, “These are the only dancing dogs I’ve heard about.”

Contributing to the collective short fuse of the courtroom, defense attorney Fred Hafetz engaged in a round of whack-a-mole dissent, rising out of his seat every few questions to object to what he called Ms. Lowey’s “entirely improper line of questioning.”

After celebrity defense attorney Thomas Puccio asked Mr. Christensen only one brief question, Judge A. Kirke Bartley told Mr. Puccio dryly, “You broke my heart.”

When the judge finally excused Mr. Christensen, he joked, “I have no further questions, either. You may now resume your life.”