Home for the Holidays?
Lawyer Jailed for Hiding Millions From Spouse Wants Out

New York Lawyer
The Associated Press
November 13, 2007

MEDIA, Pa. -- A suspended Delaware County attorney accused of hiding $2.5 million from his ex-wife is asking for Thanksgiving and Christmas furloughs from his nearly 13 years of imprisonment on a civil contempt charge.

H. Beatty Chadwick's attorney, Michael Malloy, says his 72-year-old client is a model prisoner and helps operate the Delaware County Prison law library.

He says Chadwick suffers from Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and his imprisonment since 1995 without trial, review for parole or other alternatives is excessive and unreasonable.

Attorney Albert Momjian says Chadwick's ex-wife, Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick, will oppose any release unless Chadwick reveals the whereabouts of money he's accused of transferring out of the country. Chadwick maintains the money was invested unwisely and was lost.

Man Jailed for 11 Years in Bizarre Divorce Saga

By Erin Mcclam
Media, Associated Press
September 18, 2006

MEDIA, Pennsylvania (Sept. 16) - Slight, scholarly and enigmatic, H. Beatty Chadwick is doing this day what he has done for the past 4,093: He is sitting in a county jail outside Philadelphia.

It is a place meant for run-of-the-mill crooks just passing through on their way to comparatively luxurious state prisons. Certainly not for anyone to H. Beatty Chadwick and his ex-wife Barbara Jean           stay 11 years - not for the central
Crowther attended a society dinner in 1988. He has   figure in one of the most bizarre
been in jail for 11 years for refusing to turn over $2.5 divorce.

It hinges on a charge of civil contempt designed to force Chadwick to turn over $2.5 million the courts say he hid overseas all those years ago. Except he won't. Or can't, depending on whom you believe.

So Chadwick sits.

"He's an anomaly," says his lawyer, Michael Malloy. "They don't know what to do with him."

The case has produced an Everest of court papers - a dozen pleas to the Delaware County courts, nine to state appeals courts, nine to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 12 to federal courts, two of those to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But before all that, there was a marriage: Chadwick, 39-year-old successful corporate lawyer, to Barbara Jean Crowther, just 22, in 1977. Not surprisingly, they disagree about the very nature of their union.

H. Beatty Chadwick insists the marriage was placid, happy - at least until she became depressed in their later years together. He says he loved her very much. He smiled on her newfound hobby of painting.

But in past interviews, she has described a home life controlled intensely by her husband, with rationed toilet paper (six sheets per bathroom visit) and sex (7:30 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays).

She told Philadelphia magazine in 1994 that he once kicked her and caused her to fall down a flight of stairs and lose a child she had been carrying for 18 weeks.

H. Beatty Chadwick says it is all fiction, much of it dreamed up by his ex-wife's high-powered divorce lawyer, Albert Momjian.

Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick is now Bobbie Applegate - she made up the last name - and at her home in Maine she politely refuses to discuss the details of the marriage, for fear of being sued by her ex-husband.

But she will talk about the day during a vacation to the south of France when she announced she would leave H. Beatty Chadwick. She says he vowed she would never see a dime. He used a term unfamiliar to her, she says: Scorched earth.

"It sounded so comical to me," she says. "It's when you burn everything so that the enemy gets nothing." She filed for divorce in Delaware County on Nov. 23, 1992.

This much is undisputed by everyone who knows Beatty Chadwick: He is intelligent, precise, careful with words.

Carl Fernandes, a retired North Carolina lawyer who met Chadwick in the Air Force four decades ago, describes Chadwick as an excellent, methodical attorney.

"He was always very well-prepared, no hyperbole," Fernandes said. "He had a very good reputation as a lawyer and as a human being. She has destroyed that."

Chadwick's son Bill, a 38-year-old data manager in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, who dismisses his stepmother's claims, says his father was also a conservative investor, slowly building a personal fortune of several million dollars.

Which is why Chadwick's explanation for what happened to the money seems to strain credulity - and Chadwick himself smiles at the suggestion.

His explanation: He pledged a $5,000 investment in 1990 in a limited partnership called Maison Blanche, designed to invest in the hot European real-estate market and run from the British territory of Gibraltar.

He says the catch was that the investment carried a risk of $2.75 million: Investors like Chadwick would be liable for that much if the Maison Blanche partners issued a capital call.

He says a capital call is exactly what happened - in January 1993, two months after his wife filed for divorce. The obvious question: Why on earth he would put up $5,000 to a partnership that would later call in $2.5 million?

Chadwick first flashes his penchant for precision: It was $2.502 million, he corrects.

"It was $5,000 to play," he says. "And I anticipated there would be more requested, but it was never even in my wildest imaginations what they ultimately wound up asking me for."

In July 1994, the Delaware County courts ordered the $2.5 million sent back, into an court-controlled account, while the divorce played out.

Momjian showed the courts documentation that Chadwick's money wound up in Gibraltar, with some of it briefly returning to accounts in the United States, and eventually to Luxembourg and Panama. But that was 10 years ago. Momjian says the cash could be anywhere by now.

Chadwick insisted he could not pay up because the cash was no longer his. A county judge found him in contempt, and on Nov. 2, 1994, he was ordered imprisoned. The deal from the courts: Give up the money and go free.

Chadwick failed to show up for court. Then, the following April, Mr. Fastidious kept a 7 a.m. dental appointment in Philadelphia.

The hygienist had seen a Philadelphia magazine piece about the marriage, recognized Chadwick and alerted sheriff's deputies. He was arrested in his dentist's office.

More than 4,000 days later, at the Delaware County courthouse, Chadwick's image pops up on a small television screen from the prison nearby. Prison rules prohibit an in-person interview.

Traces of silver hair on either side of his head, his image is wan, his arms thin, but he looks healthy. He is wearing a blue prison-issue shirt, a white bracelet on one arm and a black wristwatch on the other.

He talks about biding his time - he reads The Economist and The Wall Street Journal and just finished a biography of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. A melanoma victim, he frets about rampaging infections in the cells.

He talks about his case. If he is lying, he knows his story by heart.

"It's been written frequently that I could get out of jail if I only told where the this money is," he says. "And that's never really been an issue. Everybody knew where the money went.

"The issue has always been whether I have the power to get it back. I've maintained that they have to prove that I had the power to get it back. I can't prove that I didn't."

Ever the lawyer, Chadwick busies himself with research and brief-writing on his own behalf. Time and again, frustration: He was denied at every turn, or overturned on appeal when he caught a break from lower courts.

And then, a lightning bolt: A. Leo Sereni, a former president judge of Delaware County appointed to follow the money with two accounting firms working for him, said he could find no trace of the money beyond where Bobbie Chadwick's lawyers had traced it - to Maison Blanche, and a small fraction back into some U.S. accounts. But most of it ... nowhere.

Sereni said Chadwick should be set free. But the Delaware County courts ruled this February that Sereni overstepped his bounds, and found that Chadwick had failed to fully cooperate.

Sereni stands by the report. "After 10 years, it's fruitless," he says. "It's 11 years now. My God - if he had stolen $2 million, he would have been out a couple of years ago."

These days Bobbie Chadwick lives with her new husband, a retired mathematician, in a modest home in the fog-shrouded village of Thomaston, Maine. Barefoot and curled up in a chair in her art studio, she discusses the matter over ginger ale.

"I'm totally free," she says. "I was a kept little girl when I left him. Frightened of everything. I have lived through intense fear. I've learned to make a living. I've bought a house. I've given up a major part of my life that was really hurting me."

She says she doubts she will ever see the money - in any case she owes an enormous chunk of it to her lawyers.

Still: Why? Suppose Chadwick does control the money - a sum that, responsibly invested, has probably grown past $8 million (euro6.3 million) by now, the courts estimate. Why not give it up and get out?

His ex-wife likens it to days-long silent treatments she says he would give her during their marriage.

"This is just Beatty to a T," she says. "It's the biggest tantrum you'll ever see anyone throw. And he's real good at throwing tantrums. He can't - just like he couldn't let me go - he can't let a single penny go. It's his."

Her lawyer, Momjian, continues to make hay over a letter sent to Chadwick by Fernandes, his North Carolina friend, which offered help in setting up a numbered account in the Cayman Islands.

Chadwick and Fernandes both now say the account was planned so Chadwick would have a safe place to store his money, Social Security checks and the like, once he leaves prison.

Momjian believes Chadwick is well-connected and steel-willed, and concedes he may never find the money.

"It may be under a mattress in his son's house. We don't know," he says.

Chadwick thinks he might like to work in the legal profession again if he ever gets out. He says he is happy she has settled contentedly in Maine.

"It took me a long time to forgive what she has done," he says. "I still have to work at that. My own religious faith says that if I expect forgiveness from others, I have to forgive."

Told this a few days later in Maine, the former Bobbie Chadwick throws her head back and laughs, long and loud.

Millionaire Held for Contempt for 10 Years

By MaryClaire Dale
The Associated Press
New York Lawyer
March 22, 2006

PHILADELPHIA -- A millionaire jailed for more than a decade for contempt in his divorce case continues to block efforts to trace his missing assets and should remain jailed, a three-judge panel ruled.

H. Beatty Chadwick, 68, is believed to hold the record for time served in a U.S. civil contempt case.

He was jailed in 1995 for allegedly hiding $2.5 million in overseas banks during a bitter divorce. Since then, a series of judges have told him he could go free once he tells the court what happened to the money, but Chadwick hasn't budged, the judges said.

Chadwick, a former corporate lawyer, maintains he lost the money in an overseas investment. Experts say it would now be worth more than $8 million.

In the latest ruling in the meandering case, a three-judge Delaware County panel concluded that the most recent court-ordered financial probe did little to resolve questions about the money. Chadwick, while claiming cooperation, did not give investigators full power to follow the money trail overseas, the judges said.

"Defendant Chadwick's lack of cooperation undermined the entire investigation, invalidating any conclusions or recommendations," the judges wrote in their ruling last month.

The ruling kicked aside the recommendation of a retired judge who believed Chadwick was being cooperative and should be released.

In contrast, the presiding judges found little change in Chadwick's stance.

Chadwick's lawyer, Michael Malloy, said Tuesday he will appeal. He said that lawyers for Chadwick's ex-wife, painter Barbara Jean "Bobbie" Chadwick.

                          Judge Orders Man Jailed
                in Divorce Case to Pay Ex-wife $4.2 Mil

By David B. Caruso
Associated Press
Nov. 11, 2004

PHILADELPHIA - The cost of freedom just got a little higher for a man jailed nearly a decade for failing to obey a judge's order in a nasty divorce battle.

          Chadwick to Tell His Side of Story on ‘‘20/20’’

By Marlene Digiacomo
Delcotimes.com
November 1, 2004

MEDIA COURTHOUSE -- Main Line attorney H. Beatty Chadwick’s marriage to Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick lasted a little more than 15 years, and ended in open hostility in 1992.

The 68-year-old Chadwick has been in jail for almost a decade on a contempt citation, involving $2.5 million in contested marital assets that the court ruled he stashed away during that contentious break-up. His lengthy jail stay is also earning him his 15 minutes of fame -- minus commercials.

Chadwick’s time behind bars, which is the second longest in the nation involving contempt and the lengthiest in Pennsylvania history, will be the focus on a future segment of the ABC-television news magazine program "20/20."

"He’s being interviewed from jail Nov. 5," said Chadwick’s attorney, Michael Malloy. "Since no cameras are allowed at (Delaware County’s) prison, we’re doing a feed through the county’’s legal audio-visual department. He will be interviewed, but the ‘‘20/20’’ anchorperson will be at the courthouse and he’ll be at the prison.

"There’s no date yet for the program. But our hope is that Beatty will be able to watch it at home," added Malloy.

Malloy has attempted to have Chadwick released from jail, contending there is no money and that he’s in ill health. He has been diagnosed with a recurrence of malignant lymphoma.

Malloy likened the search for the missing money to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "They’re just not there. I think (the money) is in the same bunker as the weapons," he said.

"He is accused of misdirecting $2.5-million, of which 66 percent is marital. It’s about $1.8 million to keep him in jail. If he wasn’t in jail, she could have saved $1.8 million in legal fees and they could have called it even," he said.

"They’ve spent all this money saying we can’t find it either. We can’t even find a trace of it. Why don’t they let him out of jail? It makes no sense to me. He is clearly dying. An oncologist has testified that the time period for which he is likely to encounter a fatal reaction to his cancer can be measured in months," said the attorney.

Chadwick has been represented by a number of lawyers since his arrest almost a decade ago. His case has gone before several Delaware County judges -- one of whom, Joseph Labrum, is retired, while another, Joseph Battle, is dead. During its long history, each jurist, including President Judge Kenneth A. Clouse, who is handling that portion of the case now, has concluded that Chadwick stashed the money in a secret account out of the country. Chadwick has maintained that there is no money.

The court’s position has been that Chadwick holds the key to his cell and he will be released once he reveals the whereabouts of the disputed cache of funds.

In a 40-page opinion handed down last week, Delaware County Judge Chad F. Kenney, who is handling the equitable distribution portion of Chadwick’s bitter divorce, likewise came to the conclusion that the money was fraudulently hidden.

Kenny also referred to testimony from a certified public accountant and financial analyst, who testified that the $2.5 million with added dividends and reinvestments would have risen to $8,189,909 before taxes as of April 30, 2004.

The judge has awarded the sum of more than $2.6 million to Crowther from the marital assets, with Chadwick receiving a like sum in a 50-50 split. Attorney Kevin McCullough, who has represented Crowther through the protracted and varied legal avenues that have wended their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, described the decision as a "good order."

"If," he added, "we ever find any money."

Kenney also ruled that Chadwick, who is representing himself in that action, is ordered to pay counsel fees for Crowther in the amount of $1.4 million.

Kenny ruled Chadwick is also to post security in the amount of $4,210,644 "in order to insure compliance with the terms of this order." Another $25,000 is to be held in escrow to be applied to fees and costs for a search of the disputed money being handled by attorney A. Leo Sereni, a retired judge who formerly served as county president judge.

In a stipulation hashed out earlier, Sereni was named as a master on behalf of the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas with the right "to investigate, search and obtain any and all information regarding the monies transferred out of the United States."

Kenney found that four motorcycles Chadwick owns are his property, as well as a cabin in Michigan that was owned by him prior to his marriage. The Bryn Mawr home was sold during the course of the proceedings and the $329,494 was placed in an escrow account.

The couple was married on March 31, 1977 -- the second for Chadwick and the first for Crowther, who turned 50 Saturday. She is an artist now living in Maine. During their time together, it was noted by the judge that they enjoyed a "very comfortable style of life, living in an expensive and well-furnished home," entertaining on the Main Line and traveling around the world.

In his decision, Kenney likewise reiterated that Chadwick has fraudulently stashed the money away.

"Defendant’s transmission of the sum of $2,502,000 to Maison Blanche Limited, without the knowledge or agreement of the plaintiff, (his ex-wife) was made in an attempt to defraud the plaintiff herein and constituted a dissipation of marital property," he wrote.

The judge further stated that the transfer of the funds and Chadwick’’s failure to return or account for the money was "dilatory, obdurate, and vexatious." The judge said Chadwick’s action entitles his ex-wife to an award of counsel fees as a sanction.

"The court finds that the defendant has repeatedly acted to hide assets in order to defeat proper equitable distribution of the marital estate," wrote Kenney. "The defendant has continued to fail to comply with the orders of this court and he remains incarcerated."

Chadwick’s incarceration in April 1995 followed his failure to show up for court involving a hearing on the alleged missing money. During his prison stint, Chadwick has worked in the prison library and has been instrumental in helping inmates prepare and file various legal documents.

Malloy mentioned that among the documents Chadwick signed concerning the search for the missing money gives authority to keep the funds if any are found.

"He signed an authorization for Judge Sereni that any money he locates in any manner whatsoever, Judge Sereni can immediately seize and retain for the court," said Malloy.

"They’’ve exhausted a tremendous amount of time trying to find it, and they haven’t found the first dollar. In the end, there is the possibility that it isn’t there," he said.

"And he’s going to die in prison."

7 Years for Jailed Pauper
Or Is It Millionaire Schemer?

By Francis X Clines
March 24, 2002

THORNTON, Pa. —— Julia Child cheers up the inmate, so he hunts for her cooking shows on his cellblock television set.

"I take very extensive notes so when I get out of here I can put together my own little book of ideas and sauces," said H. Beatty Chadwick, 65, a lean, patrician-sounding prisoner who seems the model of the Philadelphia lawyer he once was.

Ramrod erect as he talks, Mr. Chadwick is stoically completing his seventh year in prison, not as a criminal but on an order of civil contempt of court. This is unusually long for civil jail time and is an open-ended judgment rooted in a standoff over a bare-knuckle alimony fight.

"I can almost taste it," Mr. Chadwick, once a millionaire in the world of corporate law, said of the freedom he envisions in even greater detail than a well-whisked beurre blanc.

Mr. Chadwick's is one of the longest civil imprisonments on record, a face-off of time versus money, in effect, that began in 1992 with a court order to produce $2.5 million in potential alimony assets.

Mr. Chadwick said he lost control of large sums of money years ago in an overseas investment that went bad. Although the courts have sided against him time and again in this contention, he depicted himself as living a Dickensian nightmare in a modern-day debtors' prison.

Through her lawyers, Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick said her former husband had stashed his wealth in a maze of overseas accounts, and was holding out in prison in a scheme to reap assets that might already be worth $6 million.

Law experts note that domestic-relations bouts can be among the most visceral for parties stubbornly digging in. Mr. Chadwick has set the Pennsylvania record for civil jail time served. Ten years is the national record. But 18 months or less is far more typical for civil contempt.

Mr. Chadwick thought his freedom was secured in January when Judge Norma L. Shapiro of Federal District Court ordered his release on a habeas corpus petition. She ruled that the original 1994 contempt order was valid, but that Mr. Chadwick's refusal to comply across 80 months and counting "renders unreasonable the belief that continued incarceration will have a coercive effect," as intended under civil law.

But the order was stayed before Mr. Chadwick's cell door opened. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, granted Mrs. Chadwick's motion to keep her former husband behind bars while the court considered the appeal of Judge Shapiro's order.

Otherwise, he would flee, Mrs. Chadwick's lawyers contended, even as Mr. Chadwick insisted otherwise.

"I would have thought debtors' prison was abolished long ago," Mr. Chadwick said in an interview here at Delaware County Prison. He begins his eighth year behind bars April 5.

"He's a very stubborn man," said Kevin C. McCullough, a lawyer representing the former Mrs. Chadwick, an artist who filed for divorce in 1992 after 15 years of marriage.

As he sits in prison working on habeas corpus writs and reading Bon Appéétit magazine, Mr. Chadwick seems not at all amused by the accusation that he is trading off his dwindling lifetime against the promise of hidden money.

"I miss being able to have friends of my own choosing and being with them," said Mr. Chadwick, taking a break from his job in the prison law library. "I keep fighting all the way."

Do not be fooled by appeals to pity, his former wife's lawyers warn. "His motive is clearly still there: he wants the money," Mr. McCullough said.

Mr. Chadwick said that the original contempt order was issued before the divorce case and alimony payment were settled, so that he could not technically appeal it under state law. His only resort, he said, was habeas corpus.

"The power of contempt, I think, is a vestige of the old king," said Mr. Chadwick of one lesson he has learned. "They never have been able to establish that I have the money stashed away."

But Mr. McCullough noted that the courts apparently saw enough evidence presented by Mrs. Chadwick's private investigators, who traced the money to Panamanian and Swiss accounts, then lost the trail.

Another hard legal lesson, Mr. Chadwick said, has been the vastly differing courts he has experienced, first as a corporate lawyer in Philadelphia, then in a divorce case when he was residing in Bryn Mawr, where the county courts, he said, can run roughshod over an individual's civil rights.

"They never would have done this in Philadelphia," Mr. Chadwick lamented. "I try to make the best of what circumstances I'm in," the inmate said, marshaling his patience as his appeal wends its way in the courts.