No Good Deed

When a cousin of Albert Mallard Jr. is convinced that his late uncle's estate is being looted while the intended heir, his only son, Albert Jr., ekes out an existence by collecting cans and bottles for their deposit value, he asked his friend, Westchester, New York, attorney Guy Parisi, for help. Turns out he was right, and Guy Parisi began what turned into a ten-year crusade to return the estate to its rightful heir, for which he earned not one cent in legal fees. Instead, a successful forty-seven-year career in the law was ended with a plea bargain in federal court--a guilty plea to one count of mail fraud--to avoid a trial with legal fees that would bankrupt him. Parisi was sentenced to six months at a federal penitentiary, serving four, followed by two years of supervised parole.

Now a free man, Parisi is telling the whole story: By uncovering the repeated bungling in the handling of the estate by top New York State Democrats in Westchester and Albany, he himself, a prominent Westchester Republican, became the target of an investigation initiated by the very state office entrusted with caring for the undistributed estate. The intended heir, Albert Jr., died penniless in 2020 from COVID-19. The estate is still entrusted to the New York State comptroller's office and is now worth more than $70 million while out-of-state distant cousins and the alleged child of an illegitimate child of Albert Mallard's father fight to lay claim to it.