(Recollections of Joe Ragucci)
Uncle Joe Ciaccio didn’t trust his son Jimmy with money. Jimmy would spend money like it was water and couldn’t be trusted with it. That fact plus the fact that he converted to Judiasm made Uncle Joe create a very interesting will with a lawyer from NY City. My wife Rose (Ciaccio) Ragucci was the executor of the will.
In May of 1986, Joe died while visiting his son in Israel. It was an ordeal to get his body shipped back to the US. ( It had to be hermetically sealed before it could be transported back!) But then the fun began for Rose. We met with the lawyer in NY (Jim Kelleher) who was excellent and knew Uncle Joe’s wishes very clearly. Fundamentally it came down to the fact that he didn’t trust his son with money AND he didn’t trust Jimmy’s wife at all. Thus, he created a will that formed a trust fund (with Rose as trustee) that was slowly distributed to his son. I’m not sure exactly the initial value of the trust but it was around $10o thousand, if not more. He did give his son a significant amount of money outright at his death (100’s of thousands of dollars). When his mother died shortly after Uncle Joe, Jimmy got a large sum of money (100’s of thousands of dollars) from her also (since he was the sole heir). We found out that Jimmy spent this large sum of money very quickly including buying a home in Israel that he later abandoned when he fled Israel (see Jewish connection post). So when he returned to the US he was broke again.
The trust was setup with a monthly payout of $500 at first and then incrementally increasing as Jimmy got older. In addition, he could request another $3000 each year and could get up to $50 thousand if he started his own viable business. Rose was the trustee and had to sign checks and authorize extraordinary distributions but, fortunately, Jim the lawyer always gave advice that looked out for Uncle Joe’s intentions. The trust was written such that if Jimmy died it could only go to “natural born” descendents. The lawyer, Jim told us this was another way for Uncle Joe to avoid Miriam getting the money through adoption. He did not trust her at all! Unfortunately, Jimmy died in his 40’s as a result of a stroke he had a few years earlier and never received the final payout of the trust when he reached 50.
