← The Probate Archive
— How it went wrong · 33 cases
Taxes & timing
For the overwhelming majority of Florida families, probate is not a tax problem at all. For the rest, when you die and where you are domiciled can be worth more than anything you do while alive.
— The Florida law this runs into
Florida has no estate tax, by constitutional design.
Declaration of domicile — the filing that helps establish Florida residency.
IRC §2010(c)
The federal exemption and portability — which must be elected on a timely return.
Apportionment of estate taxes among beneficiaries.
— Where it happened
No will, six years, half to a stranger· 9-min read
Prince
He controlled his masters, his name, and every frame of video shot at Paisley Park. He did not leave a will. Six years later a judge signed off on a settlement handing half of it to a music-rights company he never met.
The best-timed death in American tax history· 7-min readFlorida
George Steinbrenner
For exactly one year — 2010 — the federal estate tax did not exist. The Yankees owner died in Tampa on July 13th of that year, with a fortune reported above a billion dollars, and his heirs paid nothing.
The estate that was built before the death· 9-min read
Agatha Christie
Her personal estate probated at about £106,000, which tells you nothing. Twenty-one years before she died she put the rights into a company, and along the way she handed individual works to individual relatives outright. Fifty years on it is still trading, and still in the family.
Convicted of paperwork· 9-min readFlorida
Al Capone
The federal government never proved Al Capone did the things he is remembered for. It proved he had not paid his income tax. He died on Palm Island in Miami Beach in 1947 still owing that government money — and the house everyone calls Capone's mansion was bought in his wife's name.
The estate that worked· 8-min readFlorida
Arnold Palmer
In the twelve months after he died, Arnold Palmer's estate earned about $40 million — roughly what he had earned in his last year alive. Thirty-nine licensees, a drink most Americans think is a beverage rather than a man, and no public estate fight at all. This archive is mostly failures. This is the other kind.
$6 million sold for $2.25 million· 8-min read
Billie Bob Harrell Jr.
A Home Depot shelf-stocker won $31 million on Lotto Texas in 1997 and took it as 25 annual payments of about $1.24 million. Less than two years later he signed away ten years of those payments — worth over $6 million gross — for $2.25 million in cash. Twenty months after the win he was dead, and the cash was gone.
The year the tax did not exist· 8-min read
Dan Duncan
For one calendar year — 2010, and only 2010 — the United States had no federal estate tax. A Houston pipeline billionaire died on March 29 of that year worth about $9 billion, and his heirs are reported to be the first American billionaires to pay no estate tax since the tax was created.
Fourteen years, three jurisdictions, one will nobody could find· 9-min read
Errol Flynn
He died in 1959 leaving a 1954 will, an ex-wife who said there was a 1957 one, a bank he had not paid, a tax authority that wanted its share, and real property in three countries. The estate stayed in probate for about fourteen years. One beneficiary was declared dead in 1984.
The Marcos estate, across four decades· 10-min readStill open
Fugitive fortunes
Two candidates: Robert Vesco, who fled with an estimated $220 million and died in Havana in 2007 with none of it recovered, and Ferdinand Marcos, whose estate has been litigated on three continents since 1989. We chose Marcos, because Vesco left no paper and Marcos left an enormous amount of it — including an estate tax bill that has grown from ₱23 billion to ₱203 billion.
Seven days short of ninety· 9-min readStill open
Gene Hackman
Two people died in the same house within about a week of each other in February 2025. Her will said her husband had to outlive her by 90 days. He outlived her by roughly seven. That gap, and not a single word of either document, decided where the money went.
The estate with no paper trail· 8-min readFlorida
H. Wayne Huizenga
He built three Fortune 500 companies and owned three professional sports franchises. Forbes put him at $2.8 billion. When he died in Fort Lauderdale in 2018, the public record produced a probate file, a deed, and an auction result — and essentially nothing else. That is not an accident. It is Florida law working as designed.
The richest man to lose everything· 9-min read
Jack Whittaker
He was already worth $17 million when he won a then-record $314.9 million Powerball jackpot at Christmas 2002. He took $113 million in cash, funded a foundation, gave away roughly $50 million — and faced more than 400 legal claims. By 2007 he said the money was gone.
An NFL team, and no cash· 9-min readFlorida
Joe Robbie
He founded the Miami Dolphins and built the first entirely privately financed stadium in America. He died owning almost all of both and almost nothing liquid. Within four years the family had sold the team, the stadium, and the name on the building.
The estate nobody got to read· 8-min read
John F. Kennedy
The most examined presidency in American history left an estate almost nobody has seen. Kennedy used a revocable living trust with a pour-over will, so the inventory never had to be filed. The money underneath it sat in trusts his father built decades before Congress wrote a rule for them.
The house nobody would take· 9-min readFlorida
Marjorie Merriweather Post
She left Mar-a-Lago to the United States as a winter White House, Hillwood to the Smithsonian, and Camp Topridge to New York State. All three institutions handed the gifts back. The richest woman in America could not give her houses away.
Half a billion XRP, and a will that never mentioned it· 8-min read
Matthew Mellon
A Mellon and a Drexel by descent, he put $2 million into XRP and Forbes reported it had become a billion. When he died, his estate had one asset, no instructions, and a contract that limited how fast it could be sold.
The fortune nobody could find· 9-min readFlorida
Meyer Lansky
Federal investigators spent decades certain that Meyer Lansky had roughly $300 million hidden offshore. He died in Miami Beach in 1983, and what anyone could actually document was a bank balance under $35,000. Reputed wealth and provable assets are different things. Probate only deals in the second.
What is a name worth the day it dies· 10-min readStill open
Michael Jackson
He left a will, a trust, and two executors — the planning most estates never get. It still took twelve years, because the IRS said his name and likeness were worth $161 million and the estate had reported $2,105. The Tax Court split the difference at $4.15 million.
Philanthropy as the estate plan· 9-min readStill open
Paul Allen
The Microsoft co-founder died in 2018 holding about $20.3 billion, two professional sports franchises, and a Giving Pledge. His four-page will said almost nothing, because everything ran through a trust he signed in 1993. Eight years on, the liquidation is still going.
Forty-two, and no warning· 8-min readFlorida
Payne Stewart
Stewart won the US Open in June 1999 and was dead by October, at 42, in an aircraft accident that made no sense and gave nobody any time. What follows a death like that is not a will contest. It is a wrongful death action, and in Florida only one person on earth is allowed to file it.
The will that stopped in 2004· 8-min read
Philip Seymour Hoffman
He signed a will when he had one child and never touched it again. Two more children arrived. He declined the trusts his accountant recommended, and he never married the mother of all three — which left the Internal Revenue Service a very clean shot at roughly $35 million.
The estate that owed more than it had· 9-min read
Redd Foxx
The IRS took his Las Vegas house and seven cars while he was still alive. Two years later he collapsed on a soundstage and died with a reported $3.6 million in tax debt and no will. A friend paid for the funeral, and the estate stayed open for another fifteen years.
The plan that predated the money· 9-min read
Sam Walton
In 1953 a variety-store operator in Arkansas put everything he had into a family partnership and gave his four children 20% each. Nine years later he opened the first Wal-Mart. By the time he died the fortune was measured in tens of billions — and most of it had never been his to tax.
Five minutes is enough· 9-min readFlorida
Simultaneous death
Two people die in the same accident and nobody can prove who went first. Most states solved this by requiring an heir to outlive the decedent by 120 hours. Florida did not. Here, surviving by five provable minutes moves an entire estate into somebody else's family.
The estate with no file· 8-min read
Steve Jobs
He died in 2011 holding a reported $7 billion. There is no probate docket, no inventory, no will contest, and no public accounting of who got what. The only trace the plan left in the public record is a single SEC form filed seven weeks later.
What a company is worth on the day nobody can run it· 10-min readFlorida
The founder with no successor
The owner dies. The estate tax is due in nine months, in cash. The personal representative has four months of statutory authority to keep the business trading. The buyer knows all of this. This is the most common six-figure mistake in Florida estate planning, and it is entirely preventable.
A promise is not an instrument· 10-min readStill open
The Giving Pledge
Since 2010, more than 250 billionaires have publicly promised to give away most of their wealth. The pledge is explicitly not a contract, and fifteen years of data show most signatories are considerably richer than when they signed. This is what the paperwork behind a philanthropic estate plan actually does.
Three generations, no agreement· 9-min read
The Gucci family
Guccio Gucci left his company to his sons in 1953. By 1993 not one share was owned by anybody named Gucci. Nothing exotic caused it — no forged will, no missing heir. Just an ownership structure that split every time somebody died and a family that never wrote down how to disagree.
Twenty-nine years is a long time to stay alive· 9-min readFlorida
The lottery annuity after death
Take the annuity and the state owes you thirty payments over twenty-nine years. Die in year six and the remaining twenty-four are an asset of your estate — taxable at their present value, non-assignable without a judge, and paid on a schedule nobody can accelerate.
Where the dog lives· 10-min readFlorida
The snowbird domicile fight
You can move to Florida and still owe New York. Domicile and residency are two different tests, states apply both, and auditors decide the first one by asking where you keep the things you would grab in a fire — the photographs, the jewellery, the dog. One Illinois couple fought a $1.8 million assessment over a fourteen-day difference and won.
The estate that could not pay· 9-min read
Thomas Jefferson
He died on the Fourth of July owing about $107,000. Six months later his executors sold the contents of Monticello, the farm equipment, and 130 human beings over five days in the cold. The house went in 1831 for around seven thousand dollars. The principal was not cleared until 1878.
The address is the plan· 9-min read
Tina Turner
She left Tennessee for Switzerland in 1995, took Swiss citizenship in 2013, and signed away her American citizenship at the embassy in Bern that October. When she died in 2023, one question decided everything about her estate — and it was not what her will said. It was where she lived.
A will older than her daughter· 9-min read
Whitney Houston
She signed her will on February 3, 1993. Her daughter was born on March 4, 1993. Nineteen years and a divorce later, the document was still the one that governed — and it still described Bobby Brown as “my husband.”
— The other ways it goes wrong
Died without a willHandwritten willsCapacity & undue influenceTrustee & fee warsPetsStrange conditionsRemains & final wishesBlended families
Every case on this page is somebody else's. If any of it sounds like your situation, the fix is almost always cheaper and duller than the case was.
These are not our cases. Everything on this page is drawn from published court records and news reporting, cited below. It is general information about how probate and trust law works — not legal advice, and not a prediction about any case. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Other states' law differs from Florida's, which is usually the whole point of the story.