A Will That Cooked Up a Tangled Web

The last will and testament of Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke--with its eight codicils, seven executors and three different instructions about what his son and widow would get from the estate--is a messy document that could make it difficult for Cooke’s family to maintain control of the football team, according to lawyers who have studied it.

“It’s the most bizarre will I’ve ever seen,” said George Albright, a trusts and estates lawyer at Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge in Washington and former chairman of the Virginia State Bar’s trusts and estates board of governors.

Visible behind the dry legal text of the will is a portrait of a mercurial man who, until the very end of his life, kept changing his mind about those closest to him.

Among the questions that are puzzling lawyers: Why did Cooke choose to leave the bulk of his money and his prized football team to the foundation, instead of to his son, John Kent Cooke? Why did he cut his widow, Marlene, out of the will only weeks before he died? And why did he delete the names of others who were included in earlier versions of the will?

Interviews with dozens of people who knew and worked for Cooke, as well as with lawyers who did not, shed some light on this unusual will and the difficult man who shaped it. These interviews suggest that Cooke, like many another will writer, may have assumed that he would have more time to change his mind, to tinker yet again with the details of his final testament.

The biggest problem with the will--affecting the ability of John Kent Cooke to buy the team--is the challenge being mounted by Jack Kent Cooke’s widow, Marlene Ramallo Cooke.

If she can prove in court that the premarital agreement she signed with Cooke in 1995 is unenforceable, under Virginia law she would receive one-third of the estate. If the agreement is enforceable, she would receive whatever amount was specified in that contract, the details of which still are secret. If the agreement is valid but she breached it, she gets nothing.

Sources close to John Cooke said he is worried that if Marlene gets one-third of the estate, her lawyers would insist that the Redskins be sold on the open market to the highest bidder so that she would get as much money as possible. That might drive the price higher than John Cooke could afford.

Even if he gets past Marlene’s challenge, John Cooke faces the practical problem of raising the $200 million estimated value of the team.

In an interview, John Cooke said he believes he can buy the team and the stadium, but he declined to give any details of how he plans to do so.

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Jack Kent Cooke was fanatical about keeping the worth of his empire secret. Although he wanted people to believe he was a billionaire, he refused to tell even the bankers who were lending him the money for his stadium the exact value of his assets. He told “only enough to make us comfortable with the loan,” one said.

The executors of Cooke’s estate are similarly in the dark and are working with appraisers to assess its value--a job that likely will take several months. Estimates range from $500 million to $800 million. The most valuable assets in the estate are clearly the Redskins and the new Jack Kent Cooke Stadium, with a combined value of $400 million or more.

Not all of Cooke’s investments turned to gold. The Chrysler Building in Manhattan, for example, is probably carried on the estate’s books as a debt. He bought it in 1978 for $80 million and refinanced it in 1987 for $250 million. Currently, the Cooke estate is being sued by the lender, Fuji Bank Ltd., because his holding company, JKC Inc., is millions of dollars behind in payments.

The bulk of Cooke’s estate, whatever its value, will go to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which will give out academic--not athletic--scholarships and support schools for underprivileged children. In addition, Cooke left a number of direct bequests, including $10 million in cash and $34 million in trusts to his son and daughter, other family members and friends. But the size of those gifts changed over the years.

Milton Gould, a New York lawyer who knew Jack Kent Cooke for decades, laughed as he remembered the many changes of heart in his old friend and client’s will. “That’s Cooke. He had a loose-leaf will,” Gould said. “As people pleased him or displeased him, it would be reflected in his will. . . . He’d put you in and take you out.”

What else could explain having an eighth codicil--the one that cut his fourth (and fifth) wife, Marlene, out of his estate--that read like a memo to the file and was never notarized. No lawyer reviewed it to insert the appropriate legalese. And when Cooke died and the will was filed with the court, the witnesses to the codicil had to rush to the courthouse to attest to its authenticity.

Some say the hard-headed Cooke wouldn’t even listen to his own attorneys.

“It’s absolutely true,” said Sanford Schlesinger, a New York attorney who was Cooke’s lawyer on some estate issues over the years, but had not worked with him since 1993. “But he was usually right,” he added with a chuckle. “He was a very bright man.”

Cooke’s messy and capricious will already has spawned a tangle of litigation over his fortune. Lawyers including Dan K. Webb, a former Chicago prosecutor who handles big trials and is representing Cooke’s executors, and Washington litigator Brendan Sullivan, representing the widow, are girding for the battle over what--if anything--Bolivian-born Marlene Cooke will get.

“From time to time her conduct dismayed and disappointed him,” said Gould, who was not involved in drawing up the codicils or the prenuptial agreement that are in dispute in Marlene Cooke’s case. Cooke was particularly incensed, sources said, about the 1993 incident in which she drove through Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood with a young Belgian waiter on the hood of her Jaguar.

Cooke, who died April 6 at age 84, was not blind to all of the transgressions of his much younger wife, who is 44. He knew when he married Marlene that she had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine and served 5 1/2 months in prison. She has since been trying to avoid deportation in exchange for testifying against drug dealers.

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Cooke gave his son $10 million outright and $15 million in trust. Even that total was changed several times. At first, he had stipulated that John and his family would receive $50 million in trust. Later, the bequest was changed to $15 million outright and $10 million in trust. And then it was changed again.

But there is no stipulation that John would own the football team. The original will, drawn up in October 1988, states that trustees should “use their best efforts to have my son, John, manage and operate Pro-Football Inc. (the corporate name for the team) during his lifetime.”

But later, in the fourth codicil, he deleted that and asked simply that executors and trustees “defer to my son with respect to” Pro-Football Inc.

In the seventh codicil, the final word on John’s relationship with the team, he directed that “John will serve as president of the Redskins, so long as JKC’s estate or foundation controls Pro-Football Inc.” (Under federal tax laws, a foundation cannot own a business. Its assets must be converted to cash or securities within five years.) That same codicil sets John’s salary at $250,000 a year, to be adjusted only by the cost of living.

Others also were told that they would get more of Cooke’s largess than they did in the end. Suzanne Martin Cooke, Cooke’s third wife, said the daughter she had with Cooke, 9 1/2-year-old Jacqueline, had been told by her father in numerous letters that she would be one of the richest little girls in America and that he had referred to the stadium in those same letters as “our stadium.”

Cooke left Jacqueline a trust fund of $5 million--no paltry sum, but a small percentage of his total estate.

Even the number of executors of Cooke’s will speaks emphatically about his nature. Instead of having one or two executors, Cooke appointed seven. Cooke looked at the seven as a sort of board of directors to execute his wishes and run his foundation, sources said.

The bottom line is this: It will take a long time to sell the assets, settle with Marlene Cooke and get the foundation operating.

And it will keep Jack Kent Cooke’s name in the papers--something he would have liked.