A widow's $18 million inheritance lies locked inside her deceased husband's rent-controlled, $1,600 a month apartment on Park Avenue.
The New York City landlord of the two-bedroom apartment won't give Valentina Phillips the keys to get in unless she pays him $5,000 in back rent, according to the New York Post.
The wife of millionaire stockbroker Lewis Zagor needs access to the apartment to gather the paperwork necessary to collect her inheritance.
Zagor didn't leave a will when he died last December at age 77. Phillips, his third wife (her second husband), would have the right to all his money under state law because he had no other living relatives.
She sued the landlord MSMC Residential Realty in Manhattan Housing Court earlier this year. She claimed she'd been locked out of the apartment that's cluttered with her husband's shopping spree purchases.
The landlord will allow Phillips access if she takes over the lease and makes the apartment her primary residence, the landlord's lawyer told the Post. She currently lives in an apartment on Fifth Avenue and has a place in Kensington, Brooklyn. Zagor kept the Park Avenue apartment as a retreat space.
Phillips' own real estate attorney doesn't exactly agree that someone so rich should get to live in a rent-stabilized apartment.
"There's something wrong with our law where you get to be a multi-multimillionaire and get to live in a rent-stabilized apartment," Adam Leitman Bailey told the Post.
The widowed wife has a peculiar background. She previously worked as a translator for the Russian KGB and traveled the world before settling in New York. Phillips married Zagor a decade ago.
