Roman Blum: when $40 million goes to the state because no one knew you

What happened

Roman Blum was born in Poland in 1914. He survived the Holocaust, lost his entire family during the war, and eventually emigrated to the United States in 1949. He settled in Brooklyn, married briefly, divorced, and spent the rest of his life quietly building a real estate business. He developed apartment complexes in Staten Island and, by the accounts of his lawyer and a small handful of acquaintances, lived modestly relative to the size of his holdings. He died in January 2012 at age 97.

When the New York City Public Administrator's office began the process of settling Blum's affairs, they found a man of substantial means with almost no documentation about what he wanted to happen to it. There was no will. There was no trust. There were no signed instructions of any kind directing how the estate should be distributed. There were also no obvious heirs: he had no children, no surviving siblings, no nieces or nephews, and his lone marriage had ended decades earlier with no offspring.

Under New York intestacy law, when someone dies without a will and without identifiable relatives, the state is required to undertake a heir search before any escheatment can occur. Professional firms — often called "heir hunters" — are retained to comb birth records, immigration documents, military files, and overseas archives looking for anyone with a legal claim. In Blum's case the search was particularly fraught: most of his family had been killed in the Holocaust, and reconstructing distant Polish relatives from fragmentary 1930s records is the kind of detective work that often produces nothing.

Three years passed. No heirs surfaced. In 2015, after the statutory waiting period and exhaustion of all reasonable heir search avenues, the entire estate — roughly $40 million in cash, securities, and the proceeds from Blum's real estate holdings — was turned over to the New York State Comptroller's Office of Unclaimed Funds. It remains there today, technically still claimable by any documented heir who might emerge but, after a decade, effectively absorbed into state coffers.

"He was an intelligent man, very organized about his properties. We just don't know why he never made a will. He told me more than once he was going to. He just never did."

— Paul Skurka, Blum's longtime accountant, quoted in the New York Times, 2013.

The story attracted national attention partly because of the dollar figure and partly because of who Blum was. A man who had survived the worst of the twentieth century, who had rebuilt a life and a fortune in a country that took him in, ended up with that life's work distributed by default to a government he had no particular relationship with — not because he chose that outcome, but because he made no choice at all.

Where it went wrong

Blum's case is unusual in scale but completely ordinary in mechanism. The same chain of events plays out, at smaller dollar amounts, thousands of times every year. Three specific failures combined:

• No will, despite intent. By his accountant's account, Blum had told people he intended to write a will. He simply never did. This is the most common failure mode in estate planning — not active refusal, but indefinite postponement. Roughly 60% of American adults die without one, even among those who say they intend to make one.
• No designated beneficiaries on individual accounts. Many financial products — life insurance, retirement accounts, payable-on-death bank accounts — allow a named beneficiary to bypass probate entirely. Blum had not designated such beneficiaries on most of his holdings, which meant they all flowed through the intestacy process by default.
• No record of preferences. Even absent a formal will, there exist mechanisms for documenting non-binding preferences — letters of intent, charity gift forms, statements to attorneys. None of these existed for Blum. There were people who thought they knew what he might have wanted (charitable causes related to Holocaust remembrance and Jewish education came up in interviews), but nothing he had written down or signed.

Together those failures meant that when the legal machinery began turning, it had nothing to act on. Probate is not a creative process. The court does not improvise a distribution based on what someone seemed to care about during their life. It applies the rules. If the rules say "no traceable heir means the state takes it," then the state takes it.

The "I'll do it later" wealth class

A peculiar feature of Blum's case is that it is not a story about poverty or disorganization. He was meticulous about his real estate. His accountant described him as sharp and detail-oriented well into his nineties. He simply treated the question of what happens after he died as a problem for later — and later eventually became too late.

This pattern is everywhere. People who carefully optimize their portfolios, refinance their mortgages, comparison-shop their insurance, and track their net worth in spreadsheets routinely have no documented plan for what should happen to any of it. The competence is in the asset accumulation; the gap is in the succession layer.

"It would have gone to the right people anyway"

The most common reaction to stories like Blum's is some version of: "Well, my kids will inherit it. That's fine. I don't need a will." This is sometimes true and often not. Intestacy laws assume a fairly standard family structure and produce results that can range from "what you would have wanted" to "the opposite of what you would have wanted" depending on the actual configuration of your relationships.

Even when intestacy produces the right legal heirs, it does not produce the right operational information. Your daughter may be the legal beneficiary of your TD Ameritrade account, but if she does not know the account exists, the brokerage will not proactively call her. After several years of dormancy, the account will be flagged as unclaimed property and transferred to the state. That transfer is exactly the escheatment mechanism that ate Blum's fortune — applied at a smaller scale, to ordinary families, every single day.

What "good" looks like

A working personal estate setup has three layers, and most people only have one. From bottom to top:

1. Legal layer. A will, possibly a trust, beneficiary designations on every account that allows them. This is what attorneys help you build and what determines legal disposition.
2. Information layer. An inventory of what you have and how to reach it. Credentials, account numbers, custodian contacts, location of physical documents, safety deposit box keys. This is what Deadman Secrets handles.
3. Intent layer. Personal letters, preferences, context for your decisions, instructions for tricky situations the legal layer didn't anticipate. This can live alongside the information layer or be separate. It often matters as much to your family as either of the other two.

Most people have the legal layer or have planned to "get to it eventually," and have neither of the other two. Blum had none of the three. The state took the money because there was nothing else to act on.