NEW YORK CITY — He’s a wanted man.
A mysterious 67-year-old known for living off the grid in the woods and for sporting cowboy duds, a black hat and a curly mustache has been the subject of a three-year hunt by lawyers, private investigators and long-lost relatives hoping to hand him $820,000.
Russell Eliot Reif, a former Upper West Side resident, has a big payday coming to him courtesy of New York state — but his lawyer, Jack Ingber, has been unable to track him down despite canvassing three upstate towns and a former Manhattan address.
In fact the only person who seems to have some contact with Reif is a state assemblywoman from Monticello who speaks to him sporadically via cell phone, but she apparently doesn’t know where he is either.
The bizarre story is all due to the estate of Reif’s dead dad.
For unknown reasons, the dead father’s cash sat in the care of the state comptroller’s office for the past 20 years in a fund for unclaimed money.
About four years ago, Reif moseyed into Ingber’s law office in upstate Monticello and asked for help in retrieving the money.
Ingber, 89, recalled that first meeting for DNAinfo New York, describing Reif as “a little unusual in his makeup.” He said Reif didn’t explain much about himself or why he hadn’t come forward sooner.
“I never knew who he was. I had no information where he was. He just came in,” Ingber said.
Nevertheless, Ingber agreed to take the case, not knowing the extent of money owed to Reif.
Despite limited contact with Reif, the attorney successfully tracked down about $1 million in unclaimed funds that the state comptroller’s office had been holding and was owed to his client.
Around May 2012 Ingber gave Reif checks totaling $986,646.
“Then he disappeared,” Ingber said, noting Reif never contacted him again.
But there was a problem — the attorney continued to get money from the comptroller’s office.
Ingber collected about $820,000 more, but he had no way of reaching Reif.
Over the following two years, Ingber searched for Reif, but he had very little to go on.
Ingber knew Reif was the only child of Nathann Reif, a Manhattan dentist, and Estelle Block Reif, a homemaker, but both died more than two decades ago. Reif also has living paternal cousins, but he hasn’t been in contact with them for more than 30 years.
Ingber knew that Reif and his parents had lived on the Upper West Side. But when he visited a possible address on West End Avenue in December 2012, he came up empty. A doorman at the building told Ingber the landlord evicted Reif 10 years ago for not paying rent.
Ingber also chased leads upstate.
Reif was known to frequent fast-food joints in Monticello and neighboring towns of South Fallsburg and Kiamesha. On his way from his home to his office each day, Ingber would drive past the commercial area in Monticello keeping an eye out for the mystery man.
Ingber also hired retired Monticello police officer David Weiner to keep a “steady lookout” for Reif.
Weiner checked with post offices in three towns, but he was told that Reif had no mailing address with any of them. For three months he staked out a McDonald’s in Monticello and other local fast-food restaurants, but the missing man never surfaced, he wrote in his affidavit.
Weiner did come up with one lead, when he discovered a Jan. 3, 2011, police report about Reif in Fallsburg, N.Y.
The report stated that a landlord had complained to Fallsburg police that Reif was his tenant and he had not paid rent nor been seen by anyone in two months.
When officers visited Reif’s address, they nearly had to breach the door before Reif answered it, the report says.
The officers wrote that they smelled a strong odor of propane and trash from his home.
“Mr. Reif was in good physical health, but lacked mental comprehension,” the report said.
However, when Weiner visited the address, he found the building boarded up.
After hitting dead end after dead end, Ingber gave up his search in December 2012.
No longer wanting to be in charge of the $820,000, Ingber petitioned a Manhattan Surrogate’s Court judge to be compensated for his services and let the Manhattan public administrator’s office oversee the funds.
He explained that after Nathan Reif died in 1990, his will was filed in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court in 1993 and Russell Reif was named administrator of the estate.
In March 2014, a judge signed off on Ingber being paid $77,000 for his services and expenses. The $820,000 was also handed over to the public administrator’s office.
But the hunt for Reif has continued.
Three paternal cousins from Pennsylvania who haven’t spoken to Reif in more than 30 years have been trying to find him in hopes of reconnecting.
“They lost communication with Russell a number of years ago,” said Michael Landis, the son-in-law of one of the cousins. Landis is also a lawyer who has been representing the family on legal matters connected to their search.
“They were trying to track him down. They got me involved at various points along the way,” he said. “I eventually found out about the Nathan Reif estate.”
Landis told DNAinfo that his family knows very little about Russell Reif’s life. They have no pictures of him, nor do they know what he did for a living.
In fact there is little trace of Reif anywhere.
Court records show he sued a company called Maco Publishing in 1974, and he was involved in a tenant-landlord dispute in the 1990s.
He barely has any online presence, but appears to have been a photographer at some point. A web search shows that one of his photos appeared in a 1970s album by avant-garde composer John Cage.
He also appears to be a lover of words, having sent in etymology musings to William Safire’s “On Language” column for the New York Times. The musings were included in two of Safire’s books about words.
Landis said the little information his family has gleaned about Reif came mostly from a phone conversation he had with state Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther, who represents Monticello.
Landis had been in contact with Ingber about the estate, and he learned that one document Ingber had listed Gunther as a point of contact for Reif.
Landis called Gunther. He said she was reluctant to provide information, but told him that Reif had been seen around Monticello, that he was lucid and he had a cell phone. He also learned that he was living off the grid.
“He apparently knows he has this money coming to him, but for whatever reason, he is not interested in claiming it,” Landis said.
A Jan. 15, 2015, court filing by the public administrator’s office also reached the same conclusion. Peter Schram, a lawyer representing the public administrator in the case, spoke to Gunther’s assistant, who said Reif lived “off the grid in the woods” near Monticello but “could be anywhere.” The assistant said Gunther had “sporadic contact” with Reif through July 2013, but didn’t know where he was.
Gunther declined to talk for this story.
If Reif doesn’t claim the $820,000, it will go back to the unclaimed funds overseen by the state comptroller’s office, according to lawyers for the public administrator.
The comptroller’s office oversees $13 billion in unclaimed funds. People can enter their names on the office's website to see if they're owed money. The office said it returns about $1 million a day to people.
While Reif’s $1.8 million in unclaimed funds seems like a lot, the highest amount the comptroller’s office ever returned to one individual was $4 million in 2008.
If Reif were to die without a will, his cousins could make a claim for the $820,000. But Landis said the cousins are searching for Reif because he's family — not because they want to cash in.
“They’re not out for the money and they’re not trying to grab it from him,” Landis said. “[But] I would hate to see it go back to the state if he doesn’t want. That’s just a shame.”
