(NY Post) - This is a family feud on steroids.
A 14-year-long legal fight among five siblings over a Queens woman’s estate has gotten so nasty it landed two elderly sisters in jail, and now one of them may lose her home.
Sisters Jean Mamakos and Irene Savadian — both retired nurses in their 70s — thought they could live their golden years in peace and comfort but instead have been locked in a bitter battle with their three other siblings over their mother’s $2.7 million estate.
Frances Perrenod, who died in 2006, named Mamakos and Savadian as the executors of her estate, and all five of her children as beneficiaries.
Perrenod was a homemaker and her husband, Charles, who died in 1988, manufactured specialized miniature light bulbs.
Each side accuses the other of wanting more.
Since the siblings began their legal challenges in 2008, their objections have included the payment of legal fees to settle the estate with money from it; the cost to pursue mineral rights owned by their mother; and allegations that the executors were too slow in selling their mom’s Forest Hills home, legal papers say. They sold the Tudor home, which the family moved into in 1957, in 2014 for $1.8 million.
Anette Klingman, the oldest sibling who is a lawyer, told The Post that her sisters were mismanaging the estate and taking money out of it that they were not entitled to. She was joined in her opposition to them with sister, Yvette Ravina, and her brother Charles Perrenod Jr., who died in 2020.
Things really got ugly in April 2016, during a lunch break in a proceeding in Surrogate’s Court in Queens, Mamakos and Savadian said.
“All these people jumped on us,” Mamakos said. “They put us in handcuffs.”
Once back in the courtroom, Savadian demanded that Queens Surrogate Judge Peter Kelly, who was overseeing the estate, appear to explain why they were being treated like criminals.
The sisters were told they were in contempt of court.
At issue was a $100,000 distribution made to each beneficiary, a check the three disgruntled siblings refused to cash, Mamakos said.
Klingman told The Post the payments were “a clumsy bribe.”
The judge had directed the two sisters to return their checks, but Savadian refused. Because Kelly said the sisters’ actions were “entwined,” both were hauled off to Rikers Island where they were strip-searched and spent 21 days behind bars, Mamakos said.
Mamakos, 75, who was an OR nurse at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, said she lost 10 pounds at Rikers, subsisting largely on oranges and water. It was the second jail stint for the senior, who was locked up for three days in Washington state in 2013 over a seat dispute on a United Airlines flight.
“It was the most disturbing thing that has ever happened to me,” said Savadian, 79, who was an operating room nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital.
They retained a lawyer for $50,000 to get them released from the lockup.
But when they got out, they said Kelly replaced them as executors, naming their sister, Ravina.
In 2018, a final judgment in the estate was entered against Mamakos and Savadian for $1.8 million. It included the return of money they used for legal and other expenses to settle the estate. Kelly ruled against a motion to vacate the judgment in October 2021, which the sisters are now trying to appeal.
Meanwhile, Mamakos, a widow who lives on Long Island, is selling a condo she owns in Manhattan to help pay the judgment.
Ravina started proceedings in South Carolina to take Savadian’s $400,000 house. The former Manhattan resident moved down south seven years ago after raising two sons as a single mom.
“We didn’t steal any money from my mother. We tried to get a good settlement for our siblings,” Savadian said. “It backfired against us.”
Klingman, 80, said her sisters were dragging out the case with “bulls–t appeals” and did not feel badly about the foreclosure action.
“I feel badly that they tortured me,” she said. “That they stole my inheritance.”
By Melissa Klein
January 22, 2022
