MEDIA, Pa. — Slight, scholarly and enigmatic, H. Beatty Chadwick is doing this day what he has done for the past 4,093: He is sitting in a county jail outside Philadelphia.
It is a place meant for run-of-the-mill crooks just passing through on their way to comparatively luxurious state prisons. Certainly not for anyone to stay 11 years — not for the central figure in one of the most bizarre divorce battles in American history.
It hinges on a charge of civil contempt designed to force Chadwick to turn over $2.5 million the courts say he hid overseas all those years ago. Except he won't. Or can't, depending on whom you believe.
So Chadwick sits.
"He's an anomaly," says his lawyer, Michael Malloy. "They don't know what to do with him."
The case has produced an Everest of court papers — a dozen pleas to the Delaware County courts, nine to state appeals courts, nine to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 12 to federal courts, two of those to the U.S. Supreme Court.
People are also reading…
But before all that, there was a marriage: Chadwick, 39-year-old successful corporate lawyer, to Barbara Jean Crowther, just 22, in 1977. Not surprisingly, they disagree about the very nature of their union.
H. Beatty Chadwick insists the marriage was placid, happy — at least until she became depressed in their later years together. He says he loved her very much. He smiled on her newfound hobby of painting.
But in past interviews, she has described a home life controlled intensely by her husband, with rationed toilet paper (six sheets per bathroom visit) and sex (7:30 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays).
She told Philadelphia magazine in 1994 that he once kicked her and caused her to fall down a flight of stairs and lose a child she had been carrying for 18 weeks.
H. Beatty Chadwick says it is all fiction, much of it dreamed up by his ex-wife's high-powered divorce lawyer, Albert Momjian.
Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick is now Bobbie Applegate — she made up the last name — and from her home in Maine politely refuses to discuss the details of the marriage, for fear of being sued by her ex-husband.
But she will talk about the day during a vacation to the south of France when she announced she would leave Chadwick. She says he vowed she would never see a dime. He used a term unfamiliar to her, she says: Scorched earth.
"It sounded so comical to me," she says. "It's when you burn everything so that the enemy gets nothing." She filed for divorce in Delaware County on Nov. 23, 1992.
Methodical lawyer
This much is undisputed by everyone who knows Chadwick: He is intelligent, precise, careful with words.
Carl Fernandes, a retired North Carolina lawyer who met Chadwick in the Air Force four decades ago, describes him as an excellent, methodical attorney.
"He was always very well-prepared, no hyperbole," Fernandes said. "He had a very good reputation as a lawyer and as a human being. She has destroyed that."
Chadwick's son Bill, a 38-year-old data manager in King of Prussia, Pa., who dismisses his stepmother's claims, says his father was also a conservative investor, slowly building a personal fortune of several million.
Which is why Chadwick's explanation for what happened to the money seems to strain credulity — and Chadwick himself smiles at the suggestion.
His explanation: He pledged a $5,000 investment in 1990 in a limited partnership called Maison Blanche, designed to invest in the hot European real-estate market and run from the British territory of Gibraltar.
He says the catch was that the investment carried a risk of $2.75 million: Investors like Chadwick would be liable for that much if the Maison Blanche partners issued a capital call.
He says a capital call is exactly what happened — in January 1993, two months after his wife filed for divorce. The obvious question: Why on earth he would put up $5,000 to a partnership that would later call in $2.5 million?
Chadwick first flashes his penchant for precision: It was $2.502 million, he corrects.
"It was $5,000 to play," he says. "And I anticipated there would be more requested, but it was never even in my wildest imaginations what they ultimately wound up asking me for."
In July 1994, the Delaware County courts ordered the $2.5 million sent back, into a court-controlled account, while the divorce played out.
Momjian showed the courts documentation that Chadwick's money wound up in Gibraltar, with some of it briefly returning to accounts in the United States, and eventually to Luxembourg and Panama. But that was 10 years ago. Momjian says the cash could be anywhere by now.
Chadwick insisted he couldn't pay up because the cash was no longer his. A county judge found him in contempt, and on Nov. 2, 1994, he was ordered imprisoned. The deal from the courts: Give up the money and go free.
Chadwick failed to show up for court. Then, the following April, he kept a 7 a.m. dental appointment in Philadelphia.
The hygienist had seen a Philadelphia magazine piece about the marriage, recognized Chadwick and alerted sheriff's deputies. He was arrested in his dentist's office.
Biding his time
More than 4,000 days later, at the Delaware County courthouse, Chadwick's image pops up on a small television screen from the prison nearby. Prison rules prohibit an in-person interview.
Traces of silver hair on either side of his head, his image is wan, his arms thin, but he looks healthy. He is wearing a blue prison-issue shirt, a white bracelet on one arm and a black wristwatch on the other.
He talks about biding his time — he reads The Economist and The Wall Street Journal and just finished a biography of Su-preme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. A melanoma victim, he frets about rampaging infections in the cells.
He talks about his case. If he is lying, he knows his story by heart.
"It's been written frequently that I could get out of jail if I only told where this money is," he says. "And that's never really been an issue. Everybody knew where the money went.
"The issue has always been whether I have the power to get it back. I've maintained that they have to prove that I had the power to get it back. I can't prove that I didn't."
Ever the lawyer, Chadwick busies himself with research and brief-writing on his own behalf. Time and again, frustration: He was denied at every turn, on overturned on appeal when he caught a break from lower courts.
And then, a lightning bolt: A. Leo Sereni, a former president judge of Delaware County appointed to follow the money with two accounting firms working for him, said he could find no trace of the money beyond where the former Mrs. Chadwick's lawyers had traced it — to Maison Blanche, and a small fraction back into some U.S. accounts. But most of it … nowhere.
Sereni said Chadwick should be set free. But the Delaware County courts ruled this February that Sereni overstepped his bounds and found that Chadwick had failed to fully cooperate.
Sereni stands by the report. "After 10 years, it's fruitless," he says. "It's 11 years now. My God — if he had stolen $2 million, he would have been out a couple of years ago."
These days the former Bobbie Chadwick lives with her new husband, a retired mathematician, in a modest home in the fog-shrouded village of Thomaston, Maine. Barefoot and curled up in a chair in her art studio, she discusses the matter over ginger ale.
She says she doubts she'll ever see the money — in any case she owes an enormous chunk of it to her lawyers.
Still: Why? Suppose Chadwick does control the money — a sum that, responsibly invested, has probably grown past $8 million by now, the courts estimate. Why not give it up and get out?
His ex-wife likens it to days-long silent treatments she says he would give her during their marriage.
"This is just Beatty to a T," she says. "It's the biggest tantrum you'll ever see anyone throw. And he's real good at throwing tantrums. He can't — just like he couldn't let me go — he can't let a single penny go. It's his."
"After 10 years, it's fruitless. … My God — if he had stolen $2 million, he would have been out a couple of years ago."
A. Leo Sereni
former president judge of Delaware County
