Jack Dreyfus, the elderly Wall Street legend who was at the center of a sensational court fight over his care, died early this morning.
The 95-year-old Dreyfus Fund founder died at 3:10 a.m. at New York Presbyterian Hospital, said lawyer Raoul Felder.
Felder was representing Dreyfus’ longtime girlfriend, Laima Drobavicius, who charged Dreyfus’s caretakers were isolating him his friends and family. She also claimed that his health care proxy was signed under “dubious circumstances,” and that longtime employees were let go over the past year, including a favorite nurse.
The judge hearing the case, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Shafer, appointed a court evaluator to look into Drobavicius’ claims. Based on the evaluator’s interim report earlier this month, she replaced Dreyfus’s caretaker, Mary Beth Whitehead Gould, with a temporary guardian.
The guardian, Sam Leibowitz, had Dreyfus moved from his penthouse apartment to the hospital last week.
“We did our best, the judge did her best, but nature always wins,” Felder said.
Dreyfus grew up in Alabama, where he became a golf and cards enthusiast. He moved to New York in his 20s and got a job on Wall Street that he soon parlayed into his own firm.
After some early struggles, Dreyfus found a way to set himself apart from the competition – advertising. Print and TV commercials featuring a lion roaming around Wall Street became a sensation, and his business was suddenly booming.
Success at business, golf, horse breeding, tennis and cards couldn’t bring Dreyfus happiness – he struggled mightily with depression, which he said he was able to conquer in mid-1960s thanks to the drug Dilantin.
Drobavicius’ filing said she met Dreyfus back in 1967, and they would see each other several times a week. “Although we never married or cohabitated,” she said, “our relationship felt like a good marriage.”
It was also slightly unconventional – the former model said, “Jack told me that he hated to buy presents on ‘prescribed holidays’ and preferred to give me a monthly gift to do with as I pleased.” The presents ranged from large sums of cash to books and records, she said.
Dreyfus sold his firm for an estimated $100 million in 1970, and established two charitable foundations to raise public awareness about Dilantin and to champion its different uses.
In recent years, the directors of the foundations included a doctor named Barry Smith, and two accountants, Dean Gould and Arnold Friedman.
In her court filing, Drobavicius said Smith had been named Dreyfus’s agent in the “dubious” health care proxy, and that Gould and Friedman had taken charge of his business affairs.
Gould and Friedman hired Gould’s wife, Mary Beth Whitehead Gould, to manage his household. Whitehead Gould gained some notoriety in the 1980s, when she was a surrogate mom who reneged a deal to provide a New Jersey couple with a daughter in what became known as the “Baby M” case.
Shortly after Whitehead Gould took over, Drobavicius said, expensive furnishings and furniture went missing from20Dreyfus’s apartment, and some long-time employees were canned and in some instances replaced with Whitehead Gould’s relatives.
A lawyer for Gould and Friedman has denied any wrongdoing.
Drobavicius’s concerns led Shafer to order a court evaluator to investigate Dreyfus’s finances and medical care, but his death effectively ends the currently court case. The allegations will likely come front and center again when his will is filed in surrogate’s court.
Dreyfus is survived by his son John, 66, who court papers say is poor health. Court filings say the “Lion of Wall Street” was married to his son’s late mother for four years, and the couple separated for 17 years until finally divorcing in 1961.