David Corn: How a Top Conservative Strategist Ended Up With More Than $200,000 in Shady Money

How a Top Conservative Strategist Ended Up With More Than $200,000 in Shady Money

Whitney Ball, who oversees a conservative fund of $100 million, benefited from her father's unethical handling of an elderly woman's estate.

—By David Corn

| Mon Oct. 27, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

Whitney Ball is one of the most important money people in the conservative movement. Though she receives little public notice, she controls DonorsTrust, a fund that over the years has distributed more than $400 million to underwrite a host of right-wing operations, including the National Rifle Association, the Heritage Foundation, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity. A self-described libertarian, Ball set up this fund in 1999 as something of a cash box for wealthy conservatives who wanted to be sure that the money left behind when they died would not be used by liberal-minded heirs to finance their own favorite political causes. So before they expire, these millionaires and billionaires direct their assets to Ball's fund in the comfort of knowing that her group will responsibly manage their wealth in accordance with their ideological wishes. The priority for DonorsTrust, Ball said in a 2005 interview, is to "safeguard donor intent." But a few years ago, Ball became involved in an unseemly estate controversy, when her father, a lawyer in West Virginia, unethically handled the wills of three elderly people and Whitney Ball and her brother personally benefited from his misconduct, with nearly half a million dollars deposited in their bank accounts.

According to a ruling by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which conducted a disciplinary proceeding regarding the matter, in the mid-1990s attorney John Ball prepared wills for two octogenarian sisters, Vivian Michael and Gladys Davis, who were long-standing clients of his. The will he arranged for Michael bequeathed a car she owned to Ball, and the wills of both sisters left all their personal property to Ball's wife.

In April 1998, four months after Michael died, Ball took Davis to a bank where she changed the beneficiary of an annuity she owned. That person had been her sister Vivian, but "while at the bank," according to the court ruling, "Ms. Davis designated Mr. Ball's two adult children, Whitney L. Ball and John P. Ball, Jr., as the new beneficiaries of the annuity." Ball, the court said, knew that Davis was going to make this change and had provided her with the addresses and Social Security numbers of his children. When Davis died three years later, the annuity was valued at $487,783.13. The money was distributed in equal amounts to Whitney and John Jr.

Ball, who was the executor of the wills for these two sisters, also arranged to receive a fee of 7.5 percent of the total value of the estates—though, the ruling noted, "the generally accepted maximum charge for administering an estate" was 5 percent. He pocketed nearly $1.6 million in fees for handling both estates. The wills he had drafted left money to the West Virginia University Foundation and stated that as executor Ball would help oversee the donations of these funds and be allowed to charge the foundation a fee. He netted $337,000 for this, after negotiating with the foundation an annual fee of 1 percent of the $18,400,000 the sisters left to the school. The court ruling notes that Ball also set up a will for another state resident who wanted to leave the bulk of his assets to the West Virginia University Foundation, with Ball awarding himself a 7.5 percent fee. (The court did not determine if Ball actually collected that fee.)

More:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/whitney-ball-donors-trust-money