He was unprepared for guardianship

Boxer who was married to mob lost control of life

This much is agreed upon.

On the day after Thanksgiving 2018, Marvin Stein’s two adult sons removed him from the home he shared with his third wife and took him to three banks, where he withdrew nearly $400,000. Then they transferred the money to a trust account that they controlled.

Within days, the sons — from Stein’s second marriage — helped him change his will to make them the only beneficiaries. Two months later, twin sisters from Stein’s wife’s family, his grandnieces-in-law, petitioned the court to declare him legally incapacitated and to appoint a guardian to manage both his person and his finances. And, they argued, they were the right people for the job. They were 23.

Here is where things become more contentious.

On a recent afternoon, Todd Stein, 56, the younger of Marvin’s two sons, showed a photograph of his father, taken shortly after that Thanksgiving, that he said revealed his father’s condition at the time. Photographed from behind, Marvin Stein, then 88, appears shirtless, his skin mottled and loose on his frame.

Is this just the body of a man in late life? Or is it, as his son maintains, evidence of potentially life-threatening neglect that his father, a lifelong fitness buff, had suffered at the hands of his wife’s younger relatives?

Had Todd Stein and his brother saved their father? Or had they, as the twins claimed in court papers, taken advantage of his frail state to kidnap him and siphon off his life savings?

In the months after the bank tour, police officers, a judge, a court evaluator, a dozen or so lawyers and two very assertive families would all throw themselves at these questions, setting the trajectory of Marvin Stein’s late years and consuming hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now Todd Stein, who runs a management company for actors, is trying to make a documentary series about the battle between the two families. He proposed calling the series “Fight of His Life: The Marvin Stein Story.” The production company that bought the rights preferred “A Mafia Marriage.”

The boxer

Marvin Stein, born in 1930, grew up poor in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where, he said, he was the only Jewish kid boxing at the Flatbush Boys Club. His father was an alcoholic who left the family before Stein was 10. Stein was small but tough, fighting his way to Golden Gloves lightweight championship titles in 1946 and 1947. Boxing brought his first contact with organized crime figures.

“These underworld characters, they wanted to take advantage of me, so they drove me to Philadelphia, and I fought in Philadelphia, and they drove me back home again,” Stein, 91, said in September, in the Upper East Side apartment where he lives with Todd and Todd’s mother. His managers had chosen Philadelphia because the betting was “very loosey-loosey,” Marvin Stein said. “Real characters.”

It was not his last encounter with gangsters.

Stein sat low in a wheelchair at one end of a table. Felicia Stein — Todd’s mother — sat in a wheelchair in a leopard-print blouse at the other end.

Marvin and Felicia Stein, who divorced in 1986, sleep in separate bedrooms, each with a second bed for a home attendant. Todd Stein had moved back to New York from Los Angeles to help care for his mother.

The conversation moved like a river, occasionally stagnating in eddies. A few years ago, Marvin Stein had two brief strokes, and he now has memory lapses that disrupt his narrative flow.

Todd Stein addressed him deliberately, enunciating each word: “Do you remember the guardianship case?”

“I know you were involved in that,” his father said.

To steer his father’s memory, Todd Stein brought out family photos. In the early pictures, Marvin Stein appears as a handsome, athletic man, prosperous through middle age. But later pictures, taken when he was in his 80s, show an emaciated figure living in a basement.

No court ever found that Stein had been abused or neglected. But as he looked at the images, he tried to make sense of the change.

“As I look back, yes, I was taken advantage of,” he said. “At the time, I wasn’t aware of being exploited. I guess I was a sucker.”

Some memories were beyond recall, even with the photos. After high school, Stein spent a year in a psychiatric institution to avoid prison. He could not remember why.

Todd Stein asked his father, “How’s your memory today?”

His father thought about it. “I look back; it’s a movie,” he said. “I’m very fortunate I’m hooked up with Todd and this apartment. When I leave here, where am I going?”

“To heaven, I hope,” Todd Stein said.

“Yeah.”

The high life

In Todd Stein’s mind, the documentary series is a sure smash. A production company, Fremantle, bought the rights. Creative Artists Agency was already pitching it to streaming services such as Netflix and Peacock. Probably there would be a bidding war for the rights, he said. The pitch included a “sizzle reel” showing stacks of money and dramatized scenes of elder abuse. It had a story with real-life gangsters and celebrities, a health club — owned by Marvin — with a vault where members checked their guns and a “sleep room” where closeted gay men met. And it had a guardianship battle, just like Britney Spears, almost.

“You couldn’t write this stuff,” he said.

Boxing never developed into a professional career for Marvin Stein, but it began his affinity for the gym. He married and became a father just out of high school, working in a fruit store for his first wife’s father.

He rode the fitness wave of the 1960s and 1970s. After divorcing his first wife, he married Felicia Ann Selvi, a former dressmaker’s model, in 1961. He managed the health club at the Shelton Towers hotel in midtown Manhattan, where celebrities tanned on the sun deck. Stein started his own Shelton clubs in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. He bought property in Amagansett — $27,000 in 1969 — and built a house.

The club in Brooklyn became a hangout for wiseguys and judges from the nearby courthouse. “They would meet in the steam room and have contacts because it couldn’t be taped,” Stein said.

The son

Todd Stein, born in 1965, attended Manhattan private schools, including the elite Professional Children’s School for young working performers. At 13, he started to land roles in commercials, soap operas and offBroadway plays.

Marvin Stein lavished his children with money, especially after he and Felicia separated, when Todd was 16. They would go shopping at Barney’s, and Todd Stein could pick out whatever he wanted. But Marvin Stein also warned his son, “Don’t let people know what you have.” That was the old Brooklyn talking.

Todd Stein, who also goes by T.J., moved to California after college, eventually starting a management company for young actors. In court papers, Marvin Stein’s future guardians said Todd and his father had little contact after Todd moved west, except when Todd wanted money, which Marvin resented. Todd and Marvin denied this. But when Marvin Stein married a woman he met at the Brooklyn exercise club in 1991, he did not tell his children or invite them to the wedding.

The woman was Anita Montemarano, who worked for New York City in social services. She was also the sister of a high-ranking Mafia captain.

The gangster

Marvin Stein’s new wife was the older sister of Dominic Montemarano, who was known as Donny Shacks. At the time of the wedding he was serving what would be a decade in prison for racketeering and extortion. The federal indictment described him as a captain in the Colombo crime family.

Relations between the in-laws were fraught. Members

of Anita Montemarano’s family and their lawyer declined to be interviewed for this article. In 2013, she wrote a scathing two-page letter to Todd Stein and his brother and their half-sister from Marvin’s first marriage. In it, Montemarano called them “a self-centered, self-absorbed, ungrateful group of adults” who enjoyed “free rides financially and emotionally” from their father.

When Montemarano got a diagnosis of kidney cancer in late 2016, the conflicts between the two families — over money, over control — escalated.

The Movies

Just before Thanksgiving 2018, Todd Stein was on a business trip to Chicago when he called his father. He thought Marvin Stein did not sound right. He flew to New York, he said, and found his father — unwashed and in poor condition — living in the basement of his Brooklyn home.

Montemarano was in the terminal stages of cancer.

“My dad was just skin and bones,” Todd Stein said, adding that he was in delirium. “He had been moving six figures out of his bank accounts over the past 20 months. He was not eating. He was not drinking or taking his proper medicine.”

In their petition to be appointed Marvin Stein’s guardians, the grandnieces described him as incapacitated, having dementia and unable to maintain a conversation or remember information told to him.

Marvin Stein said it had been his choice to live in the basement. He had a television and exercise equipment there, and a futon frame piled with mattresses. But when Todd Stein showed him the photo of himself taken shortly afterward, Marvin Stein was distressed to see how thin he was.

“When I look at it, it indicates that I wasn’t getting food,” he said, “because my bones are showing.”

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