(NECN: Peter Howe, Boston) - There are no indications yet it’s anything other than a bizarre, complicated footnote to a horrible Boston tragedy. But it turns out the 298 Beacon Street building where two Boston firefighters died battling a blaze Wednesday has been involved in a tangled 12-years-and-running legal battle.
That’s left the building with essentially absentee landlords and managers for years. Investigators have reported no code violations or other problems that contributed to the deaths of Lt. Ed Walsh and Firefighter Michael Kennedy, but the ownership situation at the building presents, beyond the cause and spread of the fire, another set of questions in connection with the city’s worst fire-service tragedy in years.
Boston assessing records show the owner of 298 Beacon Street is the estate of Michael J. Callahan, a Back Bay property owner who died in February 2002 at the age of 85. The estate has been the subject of a legal battle ever since still playing out in Suffolk County Probate Court, with Callahan’s daughters, Patricia and Elaine, and a small constellation of lawyers squabbling over which of three wills Callahan executed in the late 1990s should be deemed operative. New court papers in the case were still being filed as recently as March 12. Both daughters had extensive legal proceedings with and involving their father as well, court records show.
The person legally in charge of the property now is the executor of Callahan’s estate, Herbert S. Lerman, a veteran lawyer formerly based in Brookline who joined the Massachusetts bar in 1962 and now lives in Gold Canyon, Arizona. Lerman is represented locally by the Boston law firm of Lyne, Woodworth & Evarts. Firm attorney Frances Hogan said Wednesday that “to the best of our knowledge, the building is up to code and there have been no issues.’’ The four-story building has eight apartments.
Lyne, Woodworth & Evarts later issued a statement from Lerner: “As Executor of the Estate of Michael J. Callahan, first and foremost, I would like to express my sincere condolences to the families, friends and colleagues of the fallen Boston heroes, Lieutenant Edward J. Walsh, Jr. and Firefighter Michael R. Kennedy, from Engine 33. I would also like to thank every first responder for their efforts during yesterday’s extremely difficult fire. The Estate is grateful that none of the tenants was injured. Finally, the Estate is cooperating fully with all investigative efforts to determine the cause of the fire.’’
Probate court records show Lerner, on behalf of the estate, paid Franklin J. Knotts $9,820.25 from December 2012 through November 2013 to manage the 298 Beacon property, plus $877.06 in reimbursed expenses. A handful of tradesmen were paid for repairs and maintenance work, the single biggest being Jose Leon, paid $1,788.91. Lerman made $3,722.15 in executor fees in 2013 and the Lyne firm collected $59,232 in legal bills from the estate.
City of Boston Inspectional Services Department records show the building underwent a long series of seemingly routine repairs and upgrades in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including electrical upgrades, masonry and fire-escape repair, and sometime after a permit was issued in September 1996 the installation of a small elevator with a shaft from the basement to the second floor, which was used by Michael Callahan, who had diabetes and used a walker and wheelchair to get around in his later years when he lived in a second-floor apartment at the building.
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Michael Callahan’s estate became the subjects of the still-running legal battle not even four months after he died. On June 27, 2002, Eastern Bank, with which Callahan had had a trust set up, and his two daughters filed a challenge contesting the will dated January 29, 1999, alleging Michael Callahan at that time lacked the capacity to execute it and Lerman unduly influenced him to sign it. "Attorney Lerman took steps to isolate Mr. Callahan in and around the time he prepared the '99 will,’’ Pat and Elaine Callahan and the bank’s lawyer argued. “He then prepared an estate plan from which he directly benefited."
Lerman, in a response dated the same day, stated that “Elaine engaged in a history of litigation with her father" and got a judgment against him for over $1 million secured by a "blanket mortgage" against his properties. Lerman said Michael Callahan had executed a will in September 1997 cutting Elaine from his estate and leaving most of it to Patricia Callahan, then executed a new will in June 1998 creating a revocable trust, then in January 1999, after becoming alienated from both daughters, supplanted those with a third will creating a trust for his sister, Mary, of Holliston, with the assets going to charity after she died.
A flavor of how rancorous and contentious the extensive court filings get: They include a 2005 court pleading from Elaine Callahan, at that time a Massachusetts-licensed attorney, in which she assails a probate judge for “a baseless, irrelevant, inflammatory, defamatory, vile, hate-filled, atrocious, bias-laden, unconstitutional ‘finding’ … that Elaine Callahan was ‘mentally ill’ ‘’ and unsuccessfully demands that statement be expunged from the court record. Efforts to reach Elaine Callahan Thursday failed, and a phone number at her last listed address in Newton was reported out of service.
F. Patricia Callahan, who was a leading spokeswoman for the 1994 Massachusetts ballot question campaign to repeal rent control and now heads a Washington D.C. group called the American Association of Small Property Owners, said her sister and father had had “a falling out” after her mother, Frances Callahan, died in 1987. She said the biggest source of legal conflicts within the family was that her father was increasingly unable to manage his business affairs as his diabetes and mobility worsened and was being milked by lawyers for tens of thousands of dollars a year in legal fees and getting persuaded to cash out investments and properties. She said Michael Callahan earlier owned other apartment buildings in the Back Bay including 455 Beacon, 523 Beacon, and 124 Marlborough Street.
Patricia Callahan said she cannot recall having been inside 298 Beacon since before her father’s death in February 2002 but said she now wants to know more about how well the building was being managed. “You cannot own property and be an absentee landlord. You have to go do walk-arounds. You have to talk with the tenants. You have to actually see what is going on,’’ Callahan said in a telephone interview late Thursday. She also said she has many questions about how quickly and seemingly explosively video coverage shows the fire spread inside the building, which was heated by oil. “Something isn’t computing,” Patricia Callahan said.
