Elderly Bachelor’s Wedding Followed by Quick Funeral

It was a reversal of tradition: On this wedding day, the bride carried the groom across the threshold.

She had to, authorities say. The 85-year-old husband-to-be was woozy and oblivious to the surroundings as he was lugged into a storefront Harlem church in August 1993.

A “voodoo reverend” presided, conducting the first wedding of his career. The lone witness later became a police informant; he missed the ceremony but signed the marriage license anyway.

Eighty-two days later, newlywed Andrew Vlasto had swapped the marriage license for a death certificate, killed by a fatal cocktail of prescription drugs.

Vlasto’s relatives met his wife at his deathbed. They soon suspected their new in-law, Sylvia Mitchell, was responsible for putting Vlasto there.

Authorities now say they were right.

This spring, just months before the sixth anniversary of her wedding, the 33-year-old Mitchell was accused of killing Vlasto while looting his $500,000 estate.

The alleged beneficiary was an infamous Gypsy clan suspected of killing six elderly men on both coasts, then plundering their estates of more than $1 million.

The Manhattan district attorney will prosecute Mitchell, who has pleaded not guilty. But it was the dead man’s nephew who first investigated Vlasto’s death, first linked it to the other cases and then refused to let the case disappear.

“We wanted to make this a cause celebre, to show people around the country what’s going on here. These people are killers,” says the nephew, Jim Vlasto, once New York Gov. Hugh Carey’s press secretary.

Andrew Vlasto was a perfect target, his nephew says. He was elderly, reclusive, wealthy.

“It’s a business: killing people, getting their assets,” Jim Vlasto says evenly. “They know that if they act quickly enough, they can be in and out before anybody notices.”

Jim Vlasto noticed. Without him, those words could have been his uncle’s epitaph.

A Quiet Life, a Quiet Retirement

Andrew Vlasto, an immigrant who arrived from Greece in 1945, settled comfortably into his new home.

His family founded America’s first Greek-language newspaper in 1894, and Andrew Vlasto spent 29 years working there. He became prominent in the Greek Orthodox church and local politics, but stayed in touch with his family in Greece.

In retirement, he rarely strayed far from the West 24th Street apartment where he lived alone. He strolled to nearby Greek diners and cafes for a bowl of soup or a glass of wine. He always paid cash; he owned no credit cards.

He never wrote a check for more than his $250 monthly rent.

“A spartan existence,” Jim Vlasto remembers, one that belied a six-figure bank account and real estate holdings in Greece.

In 1991, in a local McDonald’s, Andrew Vlasto met a young, dark-haired fortuneteller named Sylvia Mitchell. They chatted; she apparently failed to mention her man, Ephrem Tene-Bimbo, or their two children.

Ephrem was a member of the Tene-Bimbo family, a Gypsy clan chronicled in Peter Maas’ 1974 book “King of the Gypsies.” Though most of the family lived in California, Ephrem and Sylvia--known to neighbors as Tom and Tina Goldman--had a Manhattan apartment.

It wasn’t until spring 1993, Mitchell said later, that her romance with the octogenarian bloomed. She recalled a whirlwind courtship followed by an Aug. 19, 1993, wedding. Police Detective Michael Lentini, after an investigation, noted that “Andrew Vlasto was unable to walk on his own” on the day of the nuptials.

Mitchell’s version was more romantic.

The 85-year-old “wanted very much to marry me,” she said at a deposition after his death. “He loved me, and he wanted to give me the security of marriage.”

The honeymoon? Investigators gave this scenario:

Man and wife returned home, where wife established a joint bank account and acquired an ATM card. Within a month, $70,000 was funneled from Andrew Vlasto’s account to an Atlantic City casino. Within two months, another $9,500 was withdrawn from ATMs--19 withdrawals at the maximum of $500 each.

All this was unknown to the Vlasto family, which was increasingly unable to reach Andrew. Mitchell was feeding him a steady diet of Valium, codeine and barbiturates, all provided by a cooperative pharmacist, police say.

There were no more walks through the neighborhood, no more visits to sidewalk cafes. Disoriented and disinterested, Andrew Vlasto was a prisoner in his own apartment.

In early October, Andrew Vlasto’s alarmed relatives in Greece called Jim Vlasto with their worries. On Oct. 15, he and a friend went to his uncle’s apartment.

“Andrew at doctor,” read a sign on the door.

A series of phone calls led the nephew to Bellevue Hospital. For the second time in a month, he soon discovered, his uncle was hospitalized with a drug overdose.

Jim Vlasto rushed to Bellevue’s intensive care unit, where he was barred from seeing Andrew--on orders from his uncle’s wife.

“What wife?” a stunned Vlasto remembers asking.

Jim Vlasto went to court, trying to save his uncle’s life and assets. His efforts came too late on the first count; Andrew Vlasto died Nov. 10, 1993.

His wife mourned by opposing an autopsy and staking claim to his estate.

*

Jim Vlasto, the dapper son of a Greek immigrant, was a well known and well liked New Yorker. He’d worked as spokesman for a pair of prominent local leaders, Carey and New York City Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez.

His work had introduced him to the city’s elite. After his uncle died, Vlasto called Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to lay out his suspicions about Sylvia Mitchell.

Jim Vlasto demanded an autopsy. Despite Mitchell’s protests, the hospital agreed.

After the autopsy, Mitchell shipped the body to a Greenwich Village funeral home and allowed the family just a one-hour viewing. Then Andrew Vlasto was buried in New Jersey in an unmarked grave, his nephew says.

It took five months to get the autopsy results. On April 24, 1994, it was revealed that Andrew Vlasto died from what a prosecutor later called “a cocktail of narcotic drugs”--a fatal mix of Valium, barbiturates and codeine.

By then, a nasty court battle was underway over his estate.

Jim Vlasto, the consummate public relations man, turned private investigator. He traced dozens of phone calls from his uncle’s apartment to the Tene-Bimbo home. Eventually he filled a file drawer with prescription records, autopsy reports, bank records and subpoenas.

In June 1994, in the middle of the estate battle, Vlasto read a newspaper story about a series of San Francisco deaths that echoed his uncle’s demise. The May-December romances ended with funerals for five elderly men, all wooed by younger women.

The West Coast suspects were linked to the Tene-Bimbo family, authorities said. Vlasto was the first to make the connection with his uncle’s case. In notes he kept about the probe, Vlasto wrote, “JV [Jim Vlasto] turns info from San Francisco to DA . . . DA talks to SF police . . . investigation takes new turn.”

The West Coast probe, known as the “Foxglove” case, dated from 1984. Eventually eight people were indicted for stealing more than $1 million in property and cash from the victims’ estates. The victims, between 87 and 94, were allegedly overdosed with the drug digitalis. The defendants in the San Francisco case are due back in court this October to answer the charges.

Jim Vlasto stepped up his court fight, kept feeding his evidence to the Manhattan district attorney. (Prosecutors declined to comment on the role Vlasto’s investigation played in the case.) Mitchell suddenly backed off her claim to the estate; an August 1994 agreement protected most of it, and she slipped off to Las Vegas.

Jim Vlasto felt the case was moving along.

But it took another five years, working with seven assistant district attorneys, before a 10-count indictment for manslaughter, grand larceny and perjury was returned this spring.

Why so long?

“The time between the death and the indictment came as a result of an extensive investigation,” says Sara Frank, spokeswoman for the district attorney.

Vlasto disagrees. He says the case was given low priority even though, according to advocates for the elderly, senior citizens are increasingly the targets of scams.

“This all could have been done four years ago,” Vlasto says. “The evidence is all the same.”

Mitchell, who now has four children with Tene-Bimbo, was arrested in Nevada. She waived extradition and returned to New York on June 18.

Her attorney, Barry Fallick, expresses confidence that she will be acquitted and reunited with her family. If she’s convicted, she faces up to 15 years in prison.

‘We May Have Overdosed Him’

Jim Vlasto never mentions Mitchell by name--”that woman” is his term of choice. Although he hopes for a guilty verdict, he feels that rescuing his uncle’s estate and generating public attention already constitutes a victory.

Mitchell avoided a murder charge because prosecutors believe the slaying was accidental. “We may have overdosed him,” she reportedly told a neighbor.

While Mitchell sits in a New York jail, Andrew Vlasto’s body remains in an unmarked grave. None of his relatives has visited his uneasy resting place.

Once the trial is over, James Vlasto vows, he will visit the grave, then take his uncle home.

“I’m going to fly him back to Greece,” Vlasto says, “and bury him with our family.”