This is the awful truth. There's always someone in
the family that's pushing it. This lady does not deserve
to be taken advantage of. Especially at your age,
with your own grandchild. Yeah. My grandma is having to sue them. I'm testifying against them. Nobody's talking. They're one floor below right now. I get afraid to go on the elevator. It's sad that it had to devolve to this. It's like a soap opera to me. It's a very sad thing. It's a family feud. A family feud. Here's a family that on
paper you would think has the wealth that so many people seek, yet at the end of the day, it seemed to sort of rip everybody apart. My name is Tom Schoenberg. I'm a senior reporter
here at Bloomberg News. Cover financial enforcement. I was approached by someone close to the Schottenstein family and asked whether or not I
would be interested in writing about Beverly Schottenstein
and this case that she had against JP Morgan. And it was immediately clear that there was a great
story here to be told. So I started just assembling
all sorts of documents that the family made available to me. That included a diary that
Beverly had begun writing when she started having suspicions about what was actually
going on with her money. Beverly obtained her wealth from the Schottenstein retail empire that has at times included
Big Lots, Value City, American Eagle Outfitters, DSW Shoes. Beverly's husband died, and at which point they sold off their
portion of the company, bringing them an enormous
amount of wealth at around 1990. Estimates of her wealth
were around $90 million. She for many years had that pool of money being managed by outside advisors. Her grandsons in the late
2000s had both graduated and were becoming financial advisors. She gave them a little bit to work with, and over time her grandson,
Evan, became the trustee of entire estate. Managing family money is not a conflict. In fact, some ways in wealth management, it's kind of how you get your start. It's kind of the seed that
you need to sort of get going in the business. But Beverly started having suspicions that something was wrong
probably in around 2016. Well, there were suspicious
things, but taken separately without everyone talking
about their own experiences, it was hard to really put it together. She had written a check
to her caretaker, Dawn, that bounced. So she went down to
their local Chase branch to sort of find out what was going on. She wasn't getting paper
statements in the mail. So she asked them to print
out a number of her statements having to do with her checking account and her credit card account. So we went to the bank and
asked for the statements and she got a whole year and going through all of
them page by page by page. And it was there she
saw all sorts of charges that she said she didn't
authorize or didn't know about. I was becoming very, very suspicious. I was starting to look in the money part and that's what bothered me more when I saw that money was going
and I was not a big spender. Around the same time, Dawn, she starts noticing Beverly's son, who live in the condominium below her, came up with Evan with a shredder and started grabbing
papers in her office area, including some with JP Morgan letterhead, and just started sitting
at the kitchen table just shredding documents over and over. Yeah, they came in one morning. They used to do it the back. Through the back door, and they brought this shredder inside. And then they went into
the drawers in the office and took out all the papers,
and they start to doing it. I was very suspicious because
I know you don't go around and getting destroying papers. Beverly said that they had done this many times before. That's when she said to me, "You know, Dawn, "I'm going to write my
feelings in this black book." A diary. It's a diary and she
started writing each day. She would write a little at a time. Around the holidays of
2018, a package had arrived, a FedEx package, and in it were materials about a venture capital fund based out of the Cayman Islands. Dawn and some other family
members take a look at this and they see that Beverly
is signed up for this fund to the tune of $5 million over
the course of several years. And that was really the beginning of it. That was sort of the tip of the iceberg when it became obvious that
something was going on, that my grandmother really
wasn't aware of this fund. Beverly started to panic. She just got really upset and called JP Morgan's
headquarters in New York and asked for Jamie Diamond. She said she was told
someone would call her back, but she says that that never happened. She wrote a letter to Evan and Avi, and in there, she laid
out a number of things that were concerning her, unauthorized trading,
the checking account. She had bought a million
dollars worth of jewelry in a safe deposit box. And that her son Bobby
had the key to that box. And that that jewelry had gone missing. All this was kind of packaged in this five-page handwritten
amendment to a will and trust. There's such an evolving narrative about why the jewelry was taken. The only truth we really know
is that the jewelry is gone, but why it happened, there've been a lot of different stories. You just don't take your
mother's wonderful things and hand it out. And they emailed that note to JP Morgan to cease all activity on her account. And it ended up setting off
a fire storm after that. As soon as they got this email that there was a cease and desist and that she wanted to send her money and change brokerage firms, they were actually vacationing
one floor below downstairs. They're there right now. The next day, Beverly's in her place. The granddaughter's still
in her place visiting. Dawn is there, and up comes Bobby kind of barging through the door. And he's screaming about what
was sent to the JP Morgan. They're now investigating them. And he's furious, takes his mother, and sort of puts her into a
chair, gets pen and paper. And she says physically forced her to write a retraction letter. They were pushing me around. It was a scary time. I was really afraid too. I had to take her to the doctor, and she did an x-ray because
she was in so much pain. The locks had to be changed. The phone number had to be changed. I really thought we were
going to have to hire guards to be outside just for protection. Oh, it was terrible. Horrible scene. Beverly brought her case
before the financial industry regulatory authorities,
usually known as FINRA. It took several months of hearings. She sees all sorts of
transactions that's going on. Hundreds of them that she claims
that she never knew about, never authorized, but yet were
logged to JP Morgan's files as having been direct requests from her. That included the sale of a
large amount of Apple stock worth several million dollars, as well as all her stock in Big Lots. Over the course of their
time with JP Morgan, Evan and Avi were making
all sorts of trading on her account that was
generating millions of dollars in commissions for themselves in the bank, yet she was not sort of getting
any of the type of gains that you would expect
an $80 million account in a bullish market to be able to get. They issued a ruling entirely in her favor finding that her grandsons
as well as JP Morgan, they were liable for violating
their fiduciary duty, misrepresenting themselves. And they also found that
the bank and her grandson, Evan, were liable for elder abuse. Evan and Avi, they were
fired from JP Morgan. They issued an award of about $19 million. I reached out for comment,
and JP Morgan emphasized that Evan and Avi were
no longer with the firm and that their actions do not represent the values of the bank. I reached out to Even and Avi,
heard back from their lawyer and saying that they disagree
with the law and the facts that FINRA used to decide
the case against them and are seeing if they
can have it withdrawn. Her son, Bobby, wrote her a letter. He said his sons weren't criminals. And he also admits to taking her jewelry, and he says he needed it to pay off some bad business debts he had. They never once came up to say I'm sorry. If there had been an
apology and some acceptance and asking for forgiveness
from my grandmother, I don't think we'd be in the
position that we are now. Since the piece came out, we've received dozens
of messages from people, many of whom are telling
their own personal tales of financial advisors gone bad or family members who
got control of an estate and abused those within. Seems sad. It's really resonated
with a lot of people. I keep hearing a lot of
feedback about Beverly and how a lot of people feel
she did the right thing. You're never too old to
stand up for yourself and try to right an injustice. She was adamant that she
wanted to stand up for herself, and at the end of the day, they did wrong. It's a painful life lesson. Beverly taught them that
you don't mess with grandma.
