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Judge Phillips freed!

By Dana Rubinstein and Harry Cheadle
for The Brooklyn Paper
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The Brooklyn Paper / Tom Callan

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Six years after he was declared mentally incompetent under murky circumstances, and two years after he had been locked down in a Bronx nursing home, former Civil Court Judge John Phillips was finally freed to move into a Park Slope assisted living facility on Wednesday.

At about 4:30 pm, a burgundy sedan pulled up in front of Castle Senior Living at 1 Prospect Park West, and Phillips, a former borough resident, got out and surveyed his new digs (see photo).

“It feels good. It feels like home,” he said.

It’s not quite Phillip’s native Bedford-Stuyvesant, but it’s a far cry from his residence of the last two years: a dingy Bronx nursing home that his lawyer Ezra Glaser described as a place “where people go to die.”

Phillips’s has been meandering through a labyrinth — both physical and legal — since 2001, when the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office declared him incompetent, expressing concern that his then-considerable assets would fall prey to unscrupulous hangers-on. Since then, Phillips, now 84, has actually been at the mercy of court-appointed guardians, including a lawyer who admitted to taking at least $187,000 from Phillips’s estate.

Phillips’s move to Brooklyn may be a “milestone,” but Glaser said more work remains to be done, including “wrangling over” the missing money so that the former millionaire can make ends meet.

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper

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