After Judge A. Kirke Bartley Jr. yesterday handed Brooke Astor's son the minimum sentence for swindling his mother -- one to three years in state prison -- one of the prosecutors said he wasn't surprised. After all, there was that photograph in the judge's chambers of his beloved father in...

If come next Monday, Judge A. Kirke Bartley Jr. decides to sentence Tony Marshall, Brooke Astor's son, to prison for stealing from his mother, by law the 85 year old Marshall will have at least one year -- and as many as 25 years -- in the solitude of a...

Lia Opris, who was hired as one of Brooke Astor's maids in 2003, was back home in Romania recovering from a car accident around 2007 when Prince Paul-Philippe of Hohenzollern came calling, and not for the first time. Royalty apparently isn't what it used to be. Especially in the...

As soon as prosecutor Elizabeth Lowey asked Naomi Dunn Packard-Koot about her job history before she was hired as Brooke Astor's social secretary in March 2002 the jury could have guessed that the Princeton graduate's testimony was not going to be run-of-the-mill. The lovely, blond Ms. Packard-Koot listed, and I...

Is it possible that Brooke Astor, the patron saint of New York City charitable giving, was a snob? The prosecution and its first two upper crust witnesses -- Lord William Astor, Brooke's British cousin by marriage, and Linda Gillies, the former director of the defunct Vincent Astor Foundation -- have...

I ran into Brooke Astor's son Tony Marshall and his wife Charlene at Martha Stewart's trial -- I've known Charlene since she was married to her previous husband, a minister back in Northeast Harbor, Maine -- and the couple told me they'd dropped by "to support a friend". This would...