The Detroit-based Stroh Brewery Company was once the third-largest brewery in America and a household name, particularly in the Midwest, until its dissolution in 2000.
An all-too-common occurrence in families with multi-generational wealth is the various struggles among heirs and trustees over the management of trust funds.
A fifth-generation and direct descendant of the Stroh's beer founder, Whitney Wetherill Stroh, is now in a legal battle to save his rightful inheritance from the machinations of his sister, Frances Robertson Stroh, the caregiver for her 91-year-old mother, Gail Robertson Marentette, who is allegedly senile. Gail has total control of her three surviving children's $100 million trust fund that Whitney's grandmother, Mary K. Robertson, created for the benefit of her descendants.
Frances gained some notoriety over her 2016 tell-all book, "Beer Money," which described the decline and fall of one of Detroit's greatest family fortunes.
Whitney filed an elder abuse complaint against Frances five years ago in Lee County, Fla., for allegedly embezzling and mishandling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the family trust and manipulating their elderly mother into not recognizing his children as part of the family. The complaint further alleges that Frances convinced her mother to move her accounts to a firm in California, where she lives so that she could gain greater control over the trust.
Thomas Kenniff, the most recent Republican nominee for Manhattan DA and the lead defense attorney for Daniel Penny, the former marine and NYC Subway hero in his trumped-up murder trial, is currently representing Whitney.
Whitney told PJ Media that his sister is a "greedy, narcissistic trust-fund Marxist who supports left-wing causes" and manipulated their mother to cut off not just him and his kids but also their surviving brother, Edward, from their rightful inheritance. He pointed out that Frances admitted in her own book that she enjoyed stealing from others and even played a role in convincing their mother to divorce their late father, Eric, who eventually died alone in 2009.
He also said that Frances repeatedly schemed over the years to have them all disinherited so that she could keep the money for herself and her son. Whitney's ex-wife testified that Frances told her father before he died that Whitney had a drinking problem, despite being a teetotaler for several years, to convince their dying father to disinherit him.
He also filed a separate complaint in Palm Beach County, Fla., accusing his mother of fiduciary malfeasance for violating her responsibilities as a trustee and for being too mentally unfit to manage the trust.
Meanwhile, a judge rejected a plea last month by attorneys representing Gail to move the court venue closer to a more favorable location near her home in New Jersey after her attempt to have the courts strike down Whitney's affirmative defense against her counterclaims failed earlier this year.
"This week's Florida court ruling for my client Whitney Stroh is a significant victory in his five-year-long suit claiming recompense for fiduciary malfeasance against his sister and his mother, who have looted his trust fund. The defendants' motion to move the venue to New Jersey failed, and that keeps the trial in Florida, where punitive damages can be assessed accordingly," Kenniff told PJ Media.
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