Choncita the Chihuahua was sitting pretty after her mummy Gail Posner passed away this March because she inherited $3 million and a very well-paid staff to take came of her every need and whim.
Now she and her housekeepers, who also inherited millions, are in the midst of a bitter lawsuit brought on by Gail’s independent filmmaker son, Bret Carr. He alleges that the staff drugged Gail, and conspired to get her to change her will in their favor, using the spoiled pooch as a strategic manipulation tool. He claimed they convinced her to hire a publicist and go on a campaign to promote Choncita as “one of the world’s most spoiled dogs.”
It’s a bitter fight, but where did all this money come from?
Gail’s father Victor Posner is the golden goose who accumulated the millions Bret, the house staff, and Choncita are all now fighting over, but this isn’t the first time his heirs have tangled over the Posner fortune. When he died in 2002, Victor left his children and grandchildren, including Gail, out of the will, and named Brenda Nestor as the main beneficiary of a fortune that consisted of hundreds of millions of dollars. His biological airs fought this allotment on the grounds that he was not competent enough to make decisions when he changed his will shortly before death.
But this money has a history of strife and turmoil that extends beyond estate battles. Posner, the son of Russian immigrant grocers, made his money in a rather disturbing way. As the front-runner of the leveraged hostile corporate takeover, Posner began buying out publicly traded companies as “investments.” He developed quite a track record of enriching himself out of the coffers of these acquired companies, and then letting them collapse on themselves.Some of the companies were able to recover when new leadership stepped in, but many were not.
From his New York Times obituary:
“A master of the hostile takeover from the mid-1960’s until the early 1990’s, Mr. Posner at one time or another controlled public companies as diverse as the Arby’s restaurant chain, Royal Crown Cola and Sharon Steel. He mismanaged many of these companies into bankruptcy but enriched himself as they foundered. He was forced to sell others at a discount.
Even as shareholders suffered, Mr. Posner was one of America’s highest paid executives for years, drawing millions of dollars in annual salaries from the corporations he ran. But by the late 1980’s, Mr. Posner was facing mounting legal problems.”
He also had myriad legal troubles for tax evasion schemes like overvaluing donated property and concealing the purchase of stock.
