Back in the day, this woman believed that with her sister marrying a billionaire, she really didn’t need to work any longer and would be taken care of financially.

It didn’t work that way, and if you think about it, the billionaire and his wife and even his celebrity kid who all of you know, don’t seem like the sharing type.

Anyway, the sibling was on her own to make money and found a female elderly billionaire to target for a scam. Our con artist joined a cult the billionaire belonged to and ingratiated herself with the billionaire.

The billionaire was so enamored of our con artist that she adopted the woman and gave her millions of dollars.

The con artist was in line for well over $500M when the billionaire died, but was outplayed by the butler of the billionaire who convinced the billionaire to cut everyone from her will except for the butler who ended up with the billion.

Our con artist had to go to court and ended up with nearly $100M in cash and property.

Billionaire: Doris Duke

Adopted: Chandi Heffner

Butler: Bernard Lafferty


Doris Duke’s Final Mystery

When tobacco heiress Doris Duke died last October, she left a will that shocked even those who had known her best. Ignoring Chandi Heffner, the latter-day flower child whom she adopted in 1988, Duke left control of the bulk of her fortune to Bernard Lafferty, her butler of six years. As Heffner fights to undo the will, she speaks exclusively to BOB COLACELLO, who delves into the mystery of Duke’s final years

‘I loved her so much. . . . It’s so hard for me still, so hard.” Chandi Heffner choked back tears as she talked about Doris Duke, the worldly and restless tobacco heiress who legally adopted her in 1988, when Heffner was 35 and Duke was 75, and cast her out less than three years later. Duke died last October, leaving an estate reported to be between $750 million and $1.3 billion and lengthy obituaries which focused on her husbands and lovers, her houses in New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Hawaii, her collections of Oriental and Islamic art, her $5 million bailout of Imelda Marcos, and her perplexing relationship with Chandi Heffner.

“When we were together,” Heffner continued, “when things were really great, Doris was in wonderful shape. We used to joke that she’d outlive me. . . . This whole thing is such a shock.” Heffner almost broke down again. “O.K., I’m not going to see her, but. . . sometimes I can’t believe it’s real.”

Heffner was sitting in the Manhattan apartment of one of her lawyers on a Saturday afternoon late last December. Nine months earlier, she had sued her adoptive mother for breach of contract, claiming that she had promised to maintain her in the Duke lifestyle for the rest of Heffner’s life and to make her the principal heir of her estate. (After Duke’s death, the trustees of her estate became defendants in this lawsuit.)

Chandi Heffner is a small, sturdy woman with thick black shoulder-length hair and bone-white skin. Thick black eyebrows set off her striking indigo-colored eyes. She was wearing a dark-blue turtleneck, old Levi’s, cotton socks, and scruffy moccasins. As she spoke, she leaned forward like a child who is eager to please, but when she sat back and let her lawyers take over, her face lost its animation and she seemed older, harder, drained. She had just been through three days of depositions in New Jersey, where her lawsuit was filed, and had two more days to go before she could fly back to Hawaii, where she lives on an isolated 300-acre horse ranch, which Duke had bought for her on the Big Island for about $1.5 million before their rupture, and where she keeps a loaded pistol beside her bed.

This was the fifth time that Duke had rewritten or revised her will since Heffner’s banishment 26 months earlier. Much to the surprise of almost everyone who knew Duke, she named her butler of six years, Bernard Lafferty, as executor of her estate and placed him in control of the newly created Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which is to receive almost her entire fortune. The will provides Lafferty with an executor’s fee of up to $5 million, a lifetime annuity of $500,000 a year, and commissions, which could run into the millions annually, as a trustee of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and of three other closely related new foundations: the Doris Duke Foundation for the Preservation of Endangered Wildlife, the Doris Duke Foundation for the Preservation of New Jersey Farmland and Farm Animals, and the Doris Duke Foundation of Islamic Art.

The power that this will gives Bernard Lafferty is “awesome,” says one attorney. Lafferty can appoint the bank that will serve as the estate’s co-executor, and three of the four other trustees of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Only one other trustee was named in the will, Marion Oates Charles, Duke’s longtime summer neighbor in Newport, Rhode Island. Lafferty also may pay fees to and divide commissions among the trustees as he sees fit. – Read more here

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