$40 Million No Heirs: Holocaust Survivor Roman Blum Dies At 97 With No Heirs To Claim His Millions

Sometimes you're just too little, too late.

Mason D. Corn had finally convinced his client and friend of 30 years, Roman Blum, to agree to name beneficiaries. "I spoke to Roman many times before he passed away, and he knew what to do, how to name beneficiaries," said Mason D. Corn to The New York Times. "Two weeks before he died, I had finally gotten him to sit down. He saw the end was coming. He was becoming mentally feeble. We agreed. I had to go away, and so he told me, 'O.K., when you come back I will do it.' But by then it was too late. We came this close, but we missed the boat."

Now, Roman Blum's $40 million estate is unclaimed, and if no one comes forward in a year and a half, it'll go to the City of New York. The Holocaust survivor died in January, 2012, and his body lingered in the Staten Island University Hospital for a few days, until a rabbi at the hospital was able to track down his lawyer.

"He was a very smart man but he died like an idiot," said Paul Skurka, a fellow Holocaust survivor who befriended Mr. Blum after doing carpentry work for him in the 1970s.

His life was quite a mystery, as he always claimed he was from Warsaw, although many who knew him said he actually came from Chelm, in southeast Poland. Some people say he had a wife and a son, but they died in the Holocaust, though Mr. Bloom never mentioned them and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has no record of them in their database. Even his birthday is confusing, as records in New York say it's Sept. 16, 1914 and identity cards from a German displaced persons camp have it as Sept. 15.

He did marry for a second time, but divorced after 50 years of marriage, and most of his friends took his ex-wife's side. He grew silent and paranoid, and pushed away a lot of people who actually cared for him. In the end, he had no one. But what intrigues everyone the most, is why a successful developer, who built hundreds of houses around Staten Island and left behind an estate valued at almost $40 million, would die without a will, leaving the largest unclaimed estate in New York State history, according to the state comptroller's office.