A Wealth of Secrets : Recluse Minded His Business, Amassed Millions

Everett Reiten was a man of few words and even fewer revelations. When his family found out shortly before his death last year at age 92 that the retired Long Beach stockbroker had a fortune worth as much as $16 million, the news came from a network television show, not Reiten.

So little did the hermit-like old man have to do with his millions that he spent more than 50 years in Long Beach without owning so much as a car, repeatedly wore the same nondescript clothes stuffed full of papers and apparently lived for a time in a department store stockroom.

He took the bus from Southern California when he returned for the last time to his tiny hometown in rural Wisconsin at the age of 85 and spent his final years living with his elderly sister and her husband in a cluttered old house without a telephone.

Devoted to thrift and Howard Hughes-like secrecy, Reiten’s life became the stuff of court documents after he died without a will last summer. The riches he amassed with the help of painful frugality and stock in pet food will pass to relatives he wouldn’t even let into his rooms.

The 89-year-old sister and middle-aged nephew who will inherit Reiten’s fortune seem no more prepared to transform their simple lives with money than did Reiten. With millions coming her way, the sister still doesn’t have a telephone. The nephew, who declined to be interviewed, told an investigator that beyond seeing a tax accountant, he didn’t have any particular plans for the money and would continue building a house for his mother.

Meanwhile, Reiten’s former Long Beach stockbroker, Willard R. Walls Jr., stands accused of taking advantage of his client’s seeming indifference to wealth and is scheduled to stand trial this week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. He has been indicted on a variety of federal charges alleging that he diverted more than $400,000 from Reiten’s accounts.

In the end, it took private investigators and the Orange County Public Guardian’s Office to prove that Reiten had achieved the pre-World War II Midwesterner’s dream of striking it rich in the golden light of Southern California.

Reiten was a quiet loner who hated being photographed, never married and had no known children. His only two known addresses during a half a century in Long Beach were a now-demolished hotel on Ocean Boulevard and the downtown office building where he worked for years as a stockbroker for a small Los Angeles-based firm. He stayed so late in the office that people in the building suspected that he lived there. Later Reiten told a stockbroker who handled one of his accounts that he spent his nights in a storeroom in the old Buffum’s department store downtown.

“I don’t know how he made so much money. He didn’t have any personality,” said Charles C. Dodds, who for decades ran a barber shop on the same floor as Reiten’s office. Dodds remembers that Reiten didn’t even look like a stockbroker, much less a successful one.

In the small circle of Long Beach stockbrokers in the 1940s and ‘50s, there was nothing extraordinary about Everett Reiten. “I would have thought he had $15,000 or $16,000, not $16 million,” mused Calvert Strong, a stockbroker who also worked in Reiten’s building.

A small man, Reiten walked around in his later years with The Wall Street Journal or a bundle of financial papers stuffed inside his shirt or coat.

However unimpressive his persona, Reiten knew the stock market. Thomas Fagan, a retired stockbroker who handled an account for Reiten at Paine Webber in the 1960s and 1970s, describes Reiten as very private, intelligent and extremely knowledgeable about stocks--even though Reiten never told Fagan that he had been a stockbroker.

Instead, Reiten identified himself as an engineer or geologist from Minnesota. He also kept strict tabs on his $200,000 to $300,000 account, telling Fagan exactly what to invest in and always sticking to conservative investments. Later, Reiten benefited enormously from the not-so-conservative portfolio management of Walls, the retired Long Beach stockbroker who is accused of swindling Reiten. Reiten’s major stock holdings, heavy with Ralston Purina shares, tripled in value in the 1980s.

Even in the months preceding his death last August, Reiten could rattle off stock figures. “He was very alert and with it to the end,” said Donna Goetsch, a nurse at the Ashland, Wis., nursing home where Reiten spent the last 18 months of his life. “I was quite amazed to hear this elderly gentleman go on and on about his stocks.”

Reiten told orderlies that he was a millionaire, according to Goetsch, and he paid the $22,000-a-year nursing home bill. But “he didn’t like to spend money; that was real evident,” she said. If Goetsch asked Reiten if he wanted new clothes, he would respond, “I’m fine with what I have; no need to spend money.” Reiten once complained to her that a long-distance caller should have saved the money and written.

Nonetheless, Goetsch said Reiten “was rather liked by the staff. He was a cantankerous old man, but he was kind of cute.”

It was in 1982 that Reiten closed the circle of his life by moving back to Bayfield, Wis., a simple village of about 800 people on a scenic stretch of Lake Superior. He rented the upstairs rooms in his sister Nancy’s home, across the cobblestone street from the house where he had been born to Scandinavian immigrants.

His father, Ole, was a saloon keeper who died at age 34 from internal injuries caused by heavy lifting. Reiten, the second of four children, was 4 at the time. His mother, Hulda, then married Ole’s younger brother, who died a few years later of a heart condition.

Reiten never finished high school but studied economics at the University of Wisconsin. He was in the Army during World War I, worked in Chicago and in 1930 joined the migration to Long Beach, so favored by transplanted Midwesterners that it came to be known as “Iowa by the sea.”

He wrote home and sometimes visited, always taking the bus. Only once did he fly, when his mother died. He told his relatives little about his work, and they inevitably described him as a man who kept to himself.

When one of Reiten’s nephews visited him in Long Beach in the 1960s, Reiten wouldn’t let him into his room at the Admiral Hotel, always insisting that they meet downstairs.

At his sister’s, Reiten stayed in his upstairs apartment with the doors locked most of the time, rarely speaking to family members, sleeping during the day and tending to his papers at night. He would emerge for meals with Nancy, his only living sibling, and to make calls at a nearby phone booth, according to Phil Wigley, a retired Huntington Beach police detective who works for an Orange County detective agency hired by the public guardian to verify Reiten’s identity.

One day in 1988, when Reiten had not been heard from, Nancy peered into his apartment and found him lying on the floor with a broken arm. The lock had to be cut from his door to get him out. When a physician examined Reiten, who was unkempt and dirty, he found $1,800 in Reiten’s underwear.

Reiten was admitted to the nursing home, and it was while he was there that questions surfaced about the handling of his fat stock portfolio in the Long Beach office of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. In the process of sending a letter to Reiten, an office worker noticed that Reiten’s account statements were being mailed to the Huntington Beach home address of Walls, his Merrill Lynch broker.

According to court documents, Walls refused to disclose Reiten’s whereabouts to his superiors, portraying Reiten as an eccentric, Howard Hughes-like recluse who had no permanent address, traveled extensively out of the country and contacted Walls infrequently by telephone.

Merrill Lynch fired Walls in late 1988. Unable to find Reiten, the company went to Superior Court to have Reiten declared missing and to have the Orange County public guardian appointed conservator of Reiten’s money.

Walls insisted that the conservatorship was not necessary and that Reiten was not missing. He said that he had once been out of touch with Reiten for more than a year. He described himself as a close personal friend of Reiten and pointed out that it was under “the exceptional acumen” of his management that Reiten’s Merrill Lynch account had grown from $1 million in 1969 to about $12 million, far outperforming most accounts in the office.

Walls failed to persuade the court. In March, 1989, the public guardian was appointed conservator of Reiten’s estate, and Reiten was declared a missing person. Two months later, Reiten’s money was mentioned in an ABC television program, “Unclaimed Fortunes.”

Back in Bayfield, one of Reiten’s nephews saw the show, astounded to hear his reclusive uncle described as a multimillionaire. Questioned, Reiten admitted to his sister that he had hefty accounts at Merrill Lynch and E. F. Hutton. His relatives wrote to the firms, and investigators were sent to interview him. Reiten told them he had forgotten about his multimillion-dollar account at Merrill Lynch, said Teja W. Geldmacher, Orange County deputy public guardian.

The guardian’s office, wary of being liable for so rich an estate, was not satisfied, however, that the Reiten of Bayfield was the Reiten of Long Beach.

The search for more proof was frustrated by the paucity of photographs of the camera-shy Reiten, a transposed Social Security number in his stock records and the variety of first names Reiten assumed over the course of his life. Having never driven, he even lacked a driver’s license.

The guardian’s office hired a detective agency to get photographs and fingerprints of Reiten, but the investigator arrived in Wisconsin a week after Reiten’s death on Aug. 28, 1989. Wigley, representing the second agency hired by the guardian’s office, traveled to Bayfield last October. He plowed through roomfuls of Reiten’s chaotic papers, stacked in boxes up to the ceiling, and found thousands of dollars in uncashed dividend checks. He returned to California with a handful of photos of Reiten.

Wigley went to San Diego to show the snapshots to Fagan, the retired stockbroker, who finally identified Reiten to the satisfaction of the guardian’s office.

In December, Reiten’s heirs were appointed representatives of his estate, which is now in probate in Wisconsin.

Walls, 66, was indicted in February on federal fraud charges alleging that he diverted more than $400,000 from Reiten’s accounts. He has pleaded not guilty.

“Mr. Walls was protecting the funds,” said his attorney, Charles Wehner. “No funds are missing and never have been.” Wehner said his client put the money he is accused of taking into joint accounts with Reiten because Reiten had not been in touch and was assumed to be out of the country.

Reiten’s heirs share his penchant for privacy. A relative said they have revealed little about the millions they are due to inherit and that the odd tale of Everett Reiten’s secret riches hasn’t even been mentioned in the local newspapers.

Asked if the money would change the unadorned, small-town lifestyle of Reiten’s heirs, the relative replied without pausing: “Absolutely not.” Asked if they would spend the money, she added: “I doubt it.”