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An appellate court has handed a partial victory to the widow of prominent Palm Beach, Fla., litigator Robert Montgomery in a dispute with her late husband's former law partner, reversing a trial court order that would have required Montgomery's estate to pay more than $100,000.
The 4th District Court of Appeal reversed a trial court order against the estate that required it to pay around $100,000 in attorney fees to former partner Christopher Larmoyeux of West Palm Beach. The appellate court found that Larmoyeux filed his claims too late and ruled they were time-barred.
But the 4th DCA affirmed an order requiring the estate to pay more than $80,000 in attorney fees to North Palm Beach attorney Eric Hewko, whom Larmoyeux brought in as co-counsel in a case originating in Montgomery's firm that Larmoyeux handled afterward. The 4th DCA also found there was no credibility to fraud claims in a suit filed by Montgomery and his counsel against Hewko. The trial court had ordered both Montgomery and the West Palm Beach law firm of Beasley Hauser Kramer Leonard & Galardi to pay fees to Hewko and Larmoyeux.
"The trial court's finding that the claims were not made in good faith was supported by competent, substantial evidence," Judge Fred Hazouri wrote. He was joined in the opinion by Judge Gary Farmer and Judge Carole Taylor.
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At memorial services, people sometimes offer up items which the deceased liked, or wanted to have, during their life. In the late former President Roh Moo-hyun's case, it was a cigarette.
Some mourners gingerly lit up a cigarette and offered it to the late President at memorial altars in his hometown in southeastern Bongha Village and other locations across the nation.
Their offerings of lit cigarettes instead of laying flowers or burning incense were prompted by the news that Roh asked for a smoke from a security guard before killing himself. . . . Mourners are apparently feeling sorry for him because he couldn't smoke at the last moment of his life.
Roh used to be a heavy smoker, going through more than two packs of cigarettes a day. He quit smoking in October 2001, but about a year later, began to smoke again as his approval rate for the presidential candidacy was only around 10 percent.
We’re told that the father once exhibited tearful gratitude at the son’s willingness to disrupt his own life to perform some caregiving, before pulling himself up and adding, “Well, I’d do the same for you.” The son’s response? “I smiled and thought, Oh no, you wouldn’t.”
William F. Buckley’s physical decline seems to have been, in its way, as prodigious as all the activity and achievements preceding it. Emphysema was his principal difficulty, and Christopher Buckley, author of the satiric novel “Thank You for Smoking” (1994), does not skimp on the ravages of all his father’s ailments. We witness his “sort of mad-professor look,” his pill-popping, his habit of uninhibited urination upon opening the car door. During one hospitalization “the most articulate man in America was speaking gibberish”; when back home he mistook the DVD player for a thermostat.
The question becomes not so much whether the reader should be spared all this, but whether the subject might be. Is this johnny-gowned indignity really necessary? Christopher Buckley himself admits preferring the words “natural causes” and “after a long illness” to the more brutal “infection” for the obituary he composed for his elegant mother.
Albert H. Gordon, who helped pick up the pieces of a shattered Kidder Peabody after the 1929 Wall Street crash and built the firm into what Forbes magazine called "a minor powerhouse on Wall Street," died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 107.
His son John announced the death.
Mr. Gordon lived to become an éminence grise of the investment community, began running marathons in his 80s and at his death was the oldest graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Business School, according to Harvard Magazine. In 1960, Fortune magazine listed Mr. Gordon as one of the 10 most powerful men on Wall Street and as the financial community's most successful underwriter and salesman. . . .
In the 1960s and 70s, Mr. Gordon offered cash rewards to employees who quit smoking.
Mallory Horne, the only person to serve as Florida's Senate president and House speaker since Reconstruction, and later was the target of a federal money-laundering probe, died Thursday after a battle with lung cancer. He was 84. . . .
Mr. Horne returned to the state capital in the 1990s, spending several years as the legal counsel for his longtime friend, the late Gov. Lawton Chiles. He was instrumental in helping Chiles with legislation that helped Florida collect billions of dollars from tobacco companies.
Popular Bollywood actor and filmmaker Feroze Khan, whose Bollywood career spanned more than four decades, died Monday after battling lung cancer. He was 69 years old.
Khan, who made a career playing the leading role of a swashbuckling and westernized man, had suffered from lung cancer for a year and had been in and out of hospitals for several months, his younger brother Sanjay Khan said.
Feroz Khan, a Bollywood actor once called "the Clint Eastwood of the East" because of his maverick roles and manly swagger, died on Monday at his ranch in Bangalore. He was 69.
Mr. Khan's death followed a long fight against cancer . . .
In a 2003 profile, the Indian news and information Web site rediff.com said of him: "Khan did not walk, he swaggered."
It went on: "A cigarette dangled from his lips, a femme fatale hung on his arm and a horse waited for his bidding. He spoke with an American twang. The Clint Eastwood of the East seems to have come via Texas, not Bangalore."
HONG KONG: Renowned football commentator Spencer Lam Sheung-yee died at the age of 74 at Ruttonjee Hospital yesterday.
Affectionately known as "Ah Suk", meaning uncle in Cantonese, Lam's career was not limited to football. He also starred in movies. . . .
He retired after doing the commentary for the 2006 World Cup for TVB. That also was the year he quit smoking at the urging of his doctors.
His smoking addiction was well known. He was surreptitiously recorded on video, smoking an entire pack of cigarettes during a live broadcast of the 1998 World Cup.
George . . . died yesterday aged 70 after a long battle with cancer . . .
His smoking was legendary. George almost always had a cigarette in hand and was often spotted in airport lounges hastily taking a last drag before boarding the plane.
His only serious indulgence was cigarettes: it was said that he had once given up for three months, but had then found himself on an official visit to a tobacco factory in Northern Ireland; the sight of millions of cigarettes rolling past him had been too much to resist.
Before the Phillies-Nationals game today, MASN cameras caught Ryan Howard taking a quick drag off a cigarette that was passed to him by Jayson Werth.
I'm not sure whether that's a normal pre-game ritual or whether it was a tribute to Phillies' announcer Harry Kalas (who certainly had the voice of a smoker). Right before the first pitch of the game, the cameras cut to the Phils' dugout as Werth was passing the lit cigarette to the 2006 MVP, who took it, cast a furtive glance around him, had a quick puff and then passed it back. It should be noted, that smoking is banned inside Nationals Park and in all Washington D.C. places of business (except, maybe, the White House). Either way, not a bad weekend for smokers. One day after a chain smoker wins The Masters, the best home run hitter in the league is seen taking a puff in the dugout. This guy would be proud.
Update: In a blow to anti-smoking crusaders everywhere, Ryan Howard has a home run and 3 RBI today.
Earlier in the day, he had been asked to react to the news of Harry Kalas' death.
Leyland knew and liked the Phillies' Hall of Fame broadcaster. In various corridors, they had snuck smokes together at banquets where smoking wasn't allowed.
There's a certain bond, it seems, between smokers sneaking smokes.
In Kalas' passing, Leyland lost a friend and baseball, he said, had lost "a true gentleman."
Autopsy results released yesterday showed that Harry Kalas died from heart disease.
A spokeswoman at the Washington D.C. chief medical examiner's office said Kalas, the Phillies' longtime broadcaster, had high blood pressure and suffered from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The ailment, in which blood flow in arteries is restricted by plaque buildup, is known to be a major cause of heart attack and strokes.
Kalas, 73, died Monday prior to the Phillies game in Washington.
Sylvia Minor, the wife of imprisoned former attorney Paul Minor, died of brain cancer as her husband sought a temporary release to be by her side, his attorney said Tuesday. She was 62.
Paul Minor's father and his attorney, Hiram Eastland Jr., confirmed that Sylvia Minor died Monday. Both said they were "deeply saddened" by her death in Louisiana. She had been under hospice care for terminal brain cancer.
Minor was one of Mississippi's most successful civil lawsuit attorneys before being sent to prison in 2007 for bribery. He and Sylvia were married 41 years.
She worked early on in his law office on the Mississippi coast, which eventually earned a national reputation and made millions from lawsuits against tobacco and asbestos makers and other companies.
Shortly before yesterday's first pitch, Shane Victorino sent out a search party. He needed a pack of cigarettes. Pronto.
Someone produced a pack and Victorino passed out a few "heaters." That's what Harry Kalas used to call them.
In the visiting dugout at Nationals Park, just as the game was about to begin, Victorino and a few Phillies teammates lit the cigarettes. They each took a quick drag and extinguished them - in honor of Kalas.
It was an unusual tribute, but Victorino said it was from the heart. Throughout most of his 39 seasons as a Phillies broadcaster, Kalas loved celebrating a win with a heater and a cold adult beverage, and the players, who considered Kalas a teammate, knew that. . . .
Lidge held on and got the final three outs for his third save.
Somewhere, Harry Kalas lit a victory cigarette.