A 97 year-old Staten Island real estate developer and Holocaust victim has left behind an estate valued at $40M with no apparent will, no surviving blood relatives, and no known heirs.
The NEW YORK TIMES (http://nyti.ms/11ONB1h) is reporting that Roman Blum, who died in 2012, had only a former wife, who died in 1992, and that his unclaimed estate becomes the largest on record in the history of the state.
Blum and his wife, Eva, were both Holocaust survivors who came to the U.S. and settled in Forest Hills, Queens, in 1949.
The Public Administrator’s office assigned to handle Mr. Blum’s estate on behalf of the Richmond County Surrogate Court is in the process of liquidating Blum’s many properties, and also plans to use money from the state to fund an in-depth search for a will, as well as hire a genealogist in hopes of finding relatives.
Failure by the county to successfully find an heir would result in Mr. Bum’s estate eventually being turned over the the state’s comptroller’s office.
Longtime friends and associates of Blum have called it “odd” that a shrewd business man like Blum would die without leaving a will, and are hoping that either Blum or his former wife have a distant relative back in Europe.
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