Sister Says She Didn’t Know of Recluse’s Riches

The 89-year-old sister of a reclusive, penny-pinching multimillionaire from Long Beach testified in federal court this week that she never knew him to have a checking account or even use credit cards.

“He was a very thrifty person. He held onto his money,” Nancy Bainbridge said, referring with a chuckle to her late brother, Everett Reiten, who died last year in a Wisconsin nursing home at age 92.

“He gave me $50 for my birthday and $50 for Christmas--no large amount. I didn’t want large amounts,” said Bainbridge, who was flown from a remote corner of Wisconsin to Los Angeles to testify this week in the U.S. District Court trial of Willard R. Walls Jr., a former Long Beach stockbroker accused of diverting more than $400,000 from Reiten’s stock accounts over about three years. Walls faces varied securities and mail fraud charges.

Bainbridge, stooped but lively, recited dates and details about Reiten without pause. She said she had no idea that her brother was a millionaire until his wealth was mentioned last year on a network TV show about unclaimed fortunes.

“Ever was a private person,” she said. “He minded his own business.”

In recent years, Reiten’s stocks soared in worth to as much as $16 million, but he lived the life of an impoverished recluse, keeping his wealth a secret and spending as little as possible.

After returning to his native Wisconsin at age 85, he lived with Bainbridge and her husband, renting their upstairs apartment for $75 a month. They had no phone, so when Reiten made calls, he had to walk down the street to a pay phone.

“He had me pick up quarters at the bank, so he had them for his calls,” recalled Bainbridge, who was brought into court in a wheelchair but climbed into the witness stand on her own.

Reiten moved to Long Beach from the Midwest in 1930 but did not return to Wisconsin for a visit until 1953, Bainbridge said, adding that he returned to his hometown regularly after that.

The prosecution contends that Walls--Reiten’s stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith--took advantage of Reiten’s eccentric habits by having Reiten’s account statements mailed to Walls’ Huntington Beach home, forging Reiten’s signature to various documents, then siphoning money from Reiten’s accounts.

Walls has acknowledged moving some of Reiten’s money into accounts held in the Walls’ and his wife’s name but said he made the transfers because he did not know where Reiten was and wanted to protect the money from seizure by the Internal Revenue Service, which was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.

In statements to investigators last year, Walls, 66, portrayed Reiten as a Howard Hughes-like character who traveled extensively out of the country, had no known address and prized his privacy above all else. He said his only contact with Reiten was through infrequent phone conversations, when Reiten would call and give him instructions about his stock portfolio.

In other conversations with investigators, Walls said Reiten had lived with him in Huntington Beach for a time in the mid-1980s.

But Bainbridge testified Tuesday that Reiten was in Bayfield, Wis., from 1982 until his death and “didn’t travel at all.” She also said that in 1987 and 1988--when Walls has said he was being phoned by Reiten--Reiten made no phone calls.

When Merrill Lynch discovered that Reiten’s account statements were being mailed to Walls’ Huntington Beach home, they began an investigation, fired Walls and made abortive attempts to find Reiten.

Reiten’s money was placed in a conservatorship with the Orange County Public Guardian’s Office, and Reiten was declared a missing person.

It wasn’t until Reiten’s relatives saw the network TV show about unclaimed fortunes and contacted Merrill Lynch on Reiten’s behalf that officials discovered where Reiten was. He died a few months later, in August 1989.

In December, the guardian’s office dissolved the conservatorship and transferred the estate to Bainbridge and a nephew, the prospective heirs. The estate is in probate.

Walls flew to Wisconsin and visited Reiten in a nursing home last summer, a few months before he died. He also talked to Bainbridge, who testified that she then told Walls that “he could get in serious trouble over this. He said that was so, but he would take the blame.”