Heirs: Caretaker Ripped Off Our Dementia-Afflicted Granduncle Out Of Millions In Real Estate! Suit Filed To Resolve Manhattan Land Grab

In New York City, the New York Post reports:

• An elderly, lonely Manhattan pharmacist was allegedly duped by a Polish immigrant and her attractive daughter into signing over his $13 million real-estate portfolio before he died — and now his family is fighting for the properties, The Post has learned.
  
  
• Retired Boghen Pharmacy owner Joseph Bogen, 91 — whose family name is spelled differently from the Upper East Side business — died in 2011, leaving no children and no wife.
  
  
• But when it came time to read his will, his family — including relatives of his late wife, Anna Bogen — was shocked to learn his entire fortune had been left to Elzbieta Sztuka, her daughter, Karin Michonski, and Michael Wallerstein, the daughter’s fiancé — whom the elderly man had met only five years prior.
  
  
• “He was tricked!” said Michael Friedman, an attorney for Bogen’s grandnieces and grandnephews, who are fighting in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court to get back their granduncle’s millions.
  
  
• Bogen was a lonely octogenarian living on the Upper East Side when he ran into Sztuka in 2006. The Polish immigrant claims he became smitten with her immediately, court papers show. “He was all alone for almost 16 years,” Sztuka said of Bogen’s time as a widow. She insisted it wasn’t his money that sparked her attention.
  
  
• A Mount Sinai Hospital doctor noted a “history of dementia” in Bogen’s report during a 2010 visit, family attorneys said. “She came in and helped him clean [his home] up, helped him with his finances, cooked his meals, took him shopping and exercised a certain degree of control over him,” Friedman said.
  

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• Without a will, his family would have received his property under state law.

For more, see Tragic battle of will (Gal’s real-estate ‘grab’).