Noted

In 2016 a bankruptcy judge ordered 50 Cent into court to explain a photograph. He had posted himself lying next to stacks of banknotes arranged to spell the word BROKE. He filed for Chapter 11 in July 2015, days after a jury ordered him to pay $5 million in a privacy case over a video he published online. With punitive damages the judgment reached $7 million. His filing listed about $36 million in debts against under $20 million in assets. The biggest creditor was Sleek Audio, a failed headphone venture, holding an $18.1 million arbitration award. Then SunTrust Bank. Then the woman from the privacy case. Through all of it he kept posting money on Instagram. His lawyers eventually put it in writing. The cash in the photographs was not real. Days after the judge ordered him to explain, he posted another one, with stacks tucked into his waistband. Sleek Audio and SunTrust accepted the explanation that the image is the business. A lawyer for the US trustee asked the court to appoint an independent examiner to go through his actual income. In July 2016 Judge Ann Nevins approved the plan. $23 million over 5 years. $17.5 million to Sleek Audio, $6 million to the privacy claim, $3.89 million to SunTrust. She said he had a significant ability to generate income. He paid over $22 million and closed the case early. Then he posted again: "Oh now I remember where I put that money." In the video below, he is asked about the filing days after it happened. He spent a year proving the money was fake, then paid $22 million of it. Was that a brand doing its job, or a man working a court?

Michelle Williams was paid $80 a day for 10 days of reshoots. Mark Wahlberg was paid $1.5 million for the same days on the same film. All the Money in the World had to be rebuilt in a hurry. Kevin Spacey was cut out of the finished picture in November 2017 and Christopher Plummer was dropped into his scenes, weeks before release. Williams said yes immediately. She told USA Today she said she would be wherever they needed her, whenever they needed her, and that they could have her salary and her holiday, whatever they wanted. She was paid the union per diem. Under $1,000 in total. Wahlberg's team renegotiated. He got $1.5 million. The same agency, WME, represented both of them. It was not only the reshoots. For the film itself, Williams was paid $625,000 and Wahlberg $5 million, with the same amount of screen time. When USA Today published the numbers in January 2018, Wahlberg donated his $1.5 million to the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund in her name. WME added $500,000. In the video below, she is asked about it and explains why the gap being that wide was the useful part. The case for Mark: he negotiated, she volunteered, and nobody hid anything from her. The case for Michelle: one agency sat on both sides of the table and only one client was told there was a table. She gave up her fee to save the film. He charged extra to do the same work. Was that a bad deal, or just a deal nobody offered her?

Nicolas Cage earned around $150 million as an actor. In 2009 the IRS filed a lien saying he owed $6,257,005 on a single year of income tax. That October he sued his own business manager for $20 million. In the filing, Cage said Samuel Levin had lined his own pockets with fees while sending him down a path toward financial ruin. Levin countersued, and his filing listed what Cage owned by July 2008. 15 homes around the world. 2 castles, one in England and one in Germany. An island in the Bahamas. 4 yachts. A Gulfstream jet. 22 cars. 47 separate purchases of art and exotic items. In 2007 alone, $33 million of property. Levin said he had told Cage he needed to earn $30 million a year just to stand still. He said he warned him the castles were falling apart and would cost a fortune to keep. "I told him not to buy those castles," his filing says. Then there was the dinosaur skull. Cage paid $276,000 for it in 2007, outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio. Years later it turned out to be stolen, and he handed it back to the Mongolian government. Cage's lawyer had a one-line answer to all of it. "You're a business manager. You need to say no." In the video below, 60 Minutes asks him about it directly, and he answers. Both lawsuits were dismissed. Cage spent the next decade taking almost every role offered to him and paid the money back. He hired a man to watch the money. The man says he watched it leave. Whose job was it to say no?

Stephen McDaniel helped search his missing neighbor’s apartment and told a TV reporter someone might have abducted her. Three years later, he pleaded guilty to killing her. Lauren Giddings was 27. She had graduated from Mercer University’s law school in Macon, Georgia, in May 2011. McDaniel was her classmate and lived in the apartment next door. After she was reported missing that June, WGXA reporter Michelle Casada interviewed him outside their building. He said nobody had seen Lauren since Saturday and described the last email anyone had received from her. When Casada asked what Lauren was like, he called her personable and a people person. Asked whether she had enemies, he said no. He offered another explanation: perhaps she had gone running and someone had snatched her. McDaniel said one of Lauren’s friends had a key and that they had entered her apartment to look for anything unusual. He described the locked door and said there was no sign anyone had broken in. Then Casada asked about the parking lot. She mentioned that police had recovered a body. McDaniel stopped answering. The reporter repeated her question, explaining that they did not yet know whether the remains belonged to Lauren. “Are you okay?” she asked. “I think I need to sit down.” Police had recovered part of Lauren’s body from a dumpster outside the building. In April 2014, McDaniel pleaded guilty to her murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

Charles Stuart made more than $100,000 a year selling furs in Boston. He shot his pregnant wife for an $82,000 insurance policy. On October 23, 1989, they were driving home from a birthing class. He called 911 from his car phone and said a man had forced his way in, robbed them of $100 and two watches, and shot them both. State police dispatcher Gary McLaughlin kept him talking for 13 minutes. When Stuart passed out, the line stayed open. Police found the car by listening for the sound of their own sirens coming through the phone. Carol was 30. She died that night. Doctors delivered her son Christopher by emergency C-section. He lived 17 days. Stuart had told police the gunman was Black. For weeks officers stopped and searched young Black men across Mission Hill. On December 28, Stuart picked William Bennett out of a lineup. Then his own brother walked into a police station. Matthew Stuart said Charles had promised him $10,000 to take a bag from the car that night. Inside was Carol's Gucci purse. Matthew threw it off a bridge. That was January 3, 1990. The next morning Charles left his car on the Tobin Bridge and jumped 135 feet into the Mystic River. His note read: "Whatever this new accusation is, it has beaten me." He had already collected the $82,000 and applied for $100,000 more. Friends said he wanted the money to open a restaurant. Bennett was never charged with the murder. In 2023 Boston's mayor apologized to him. In 2025 the city paid $150,000 to settle: $100,000 to Bennett, $50,000 to Alan Swanson, another man police had chased. In the video below, the call itself. Listen to the dispatcher keeping him talking. The story held for 73 days. He earned $100,000 a year and killed his wife and son for $82,000. Was Charles Stuart killing for the money, or did the money just give him a reason?

In 1985 a document dealer in Salt Lake City sold a letter for $40,000 that rewrote the founding story of a religion. He had written it himself, at his kitchen table. Mark Hofmann was 30 and the most celebrated rare-documents dealer in Utah. He kept finding things nobody had ever seen: lost letters from the earliest days of the Mormon church, some of them deeply awkward for it. Experts authenticated them. The church bought some and quietly filed them away. The $40,000 letter went to Steven Christensen, a businessman and bishop, who donated it to the church. In the video below, local news in 1985. Two historians who spent a year studying that letter tell the camera it is genuine, and that it gives them a fuller picture of how the church began. Every document was forged. Hofmann had taught himself to age paper and match 19th century ink well enough to beat the specialists of his day. He was also selling a collection of documents he did not have, and the loans were coming due. On 15 October 1985 he left a package wrapped in brown paper outside Christensen's office. It killed him when he picked it up. Hours later a second bomb, addressed to Christensen's former business partner, killed the partner's wife, Kathleen Sheets, 50, in her own driveway. She had nothing to do with any of it. Police were meant to read it as revenge over a failed investment firm, and for a while they did. The next day a third bomb went off in Hofmann's own car. He pleaded guilty in January 1987 and is still in prison. He later wrote that he would rather take a life, even his own, than be exposed. The documents were fake. The debts were not. Was that a forger who panicked, or a killer who had found a quiet trade?

In November 1988 police dug up 7 bodies in the yard of a boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento. The landlady was still cashing their checks. Dorothea Puente took in elderly, disabled and alcoholic tenants. Social workers sent them to her, because she was the one person in the city who would take the hardest cases. Police put her income from those tenants at more than $5,000 a month. After one tenant, Benjamin Fink, 55, disappeared in 1988, she forged his signature and collected more than $6,000 in his name, according to court records. She had been convicted in 1982 of drugging and robbing people. She served 3 years. She opened the boarding house after she got out. The checks kept arriving because the government believed the men were alive. A social worker reported one tenant missing, and Detective John Cabrera came to the house. While officers were digging in the yard, Puente asked if she could walk to a hotel for a cup of coffee. They let her go. She bought the coffee and took a bus to Los Angeles, where a man she met in a bar recognised her from the news and called police. In the video below, Cabrera walks back into that house 25 years later. She was tried on 9 counts of murder. The jury deliberated more than 3 weeks, convicted her of 3, and deadlocked on the rest. Some jurors believed the others may have died naturally. She got life without parole and died in prison in 2011, at 82. The state placed those men in her care. The state kept paying her after they were dead. Who failed them, the landlady or the system that kept sending the checks?

Patrick Stewart died this week at 86. His estranged son answered with a photograph and no caption. The picture is from 2001. Daniel Stewart is carrying his father on his back, on stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, where the two of them were performing a play together. In the video below, the BBC in 1988. Stewart is 47. He has just been cast as Picard and is about to move to Los Angeles. His wife and their two children stayed in London. He later said he saw them on Sundays, if he was lucky. In 2023, promoting his memoir, he said this: "I always put my acting work first, before my family." Both children were in their 50s by then. He said his relationship with them was practically non-existent, and that not a day went by without him feeling they became who they are partly because of him. In 1992 Daniel appeared on The Next Generation. He played Picard's son, in the episode where Picard lives an entire second life and gets the family he never had. In 2009 Patrick admitted he had been horrified when Daniel first told him he wanted to be an actor. In that same 2023 interview he also said his children seemed to have forgiven him. In the book he called it a work in progress. In 1988 he is on that sofa, explaining how he got the job. In 2026 his son posted a picture of himself carrying him, and said nothing at all.

Patrick Stewart spent most of his life hating his father. At 72 he read a medical note from 1940 and had to start the man over from the beginning. He grew up in a two-up two-down in Mirfield, Yorkshire. His father was a regimental sergeant major. The violence at home was aimed at his mother, and police came to the house more than once. Stewart was a boy and could do nothing. He has been a patron of Refuge, the domestic violence charity, for years. "I do what I do in my mother's name, because I couldn't help her then," he says. Then he went looking for his father's war record. At the Imperial War Museum he read the notes. In 1940, after France with the British Expeditionary Force, his father was diagnosed with what was then called severe shell shock. Today it is called PTSD. He was never treated for it. It never left him. A doctor told Stewart that every condition of his childhood he had just described was a textbook symptom of an untreated veteran. In the video below, a woman at a convention asks him what he is most proud of outside acting. He answers with this. He now works for Refuge in his mother's name and for Combat Stress in his father's, and says he does both in equal measure. For 70 years his father was the man who did it. He is now also a man it was done to. Is that an explanation, or an excuse that arrived 70 years too late?

Charlie Sheen was paying $55,000 a month to one ex-wife and $55,000 a month to another. In 2018 he told a court his monthly income was $2,426. At his peak on Two and a Half Men he was the highest-paid actor on television, taking in about $613,000 a month. The agreements were written when that was normal. Brooke Mueller's deal set $27,500 per twin until they turned 18, with a clause that her amount could never fall below whatever Denise Richards was getting. On top of the fixed sums, both women take 9.5% of anything he earns above $2.1 million a year. Then CBS fired him in 2011. In March 2016 he filed to cut both payments, listing income down to an average of $87,384 a month. Richards was reduced to $20,000. By 2018 he was back saying he had been blacklisted. Mueller said he was $89,398 behind. Richards said he owed $450,000. A judge had already ordered Warner Bros. to garnish $55,000 a month out of anything it paid him. In the video below, ET goes through the filings from the middle of the fight. The case for Charlie: he agreed to a number, not to a career. The case for the mothers: he set that number when he was the highest-paid man on television, and the children did not get cheaper. He signed the deal at $613,000 a month. He is still bound by it at $2,426. Should a court hold a man to the richest month of his life?

Jack Whittaker won $314.9 million on Christmas night in 2002, the biggest single lottery ticket in American history. He was already a millionaire before he bought it. He ran a construction company in West Virginia. He played the lottery only when the jackpot passed $100 million. He took the cash option and walked away with $113,386,407. Then he started handing it out. His granddaughter Brandi was 17. He gave her $2,000 a week and bought her 4 cars. Asked about it later, he said he was very proud that she had four cars. In the video below, he is asked why. In August 2003 a briefcase with $545,000 in cash was taken from his car outside a club. He said he had been drugged. It was the first of several thefts from his car, his office and his house. Brandi died in 2004, at 17. His daughter died in 2009. His wife left him. In 2016 his house in Virginia burned down and it was not insured. He died in 2020 at 72. "My granddaughter is dead because of the money," he told ABC News in 2007. The case against the money: nothing in his life went wrong until the ticket. The case against the man: he had the same money before, and he handled it fine until everyone could see it. The lottery did not make him rich. It only made him visible. Did the money destroy his family, or did it just show them to everybody?

Howard Hughes died in 1976 with as much as $2.5 billion and no valid will. Weeks later 3 handwritten pages appeared on a desk at the Mormon church in Salt Lake City, leaving 1/16 of the estate, about $156 million, to a gas station owner named Melvin Dummar. Dummar said he had met Hughes once, in December 1967. He said he found a bloodied man lying beside a road in the Nevada desert, drove him almost 3 hours to Las Vegas, and handed him a quarter before he got out. He also said he had no idea where the will came from. Then his fingerprint was found on the envelope. His story changed: a well-dressed stranger had left it at his gas station with instructions to take it to the church. His fingerprint was also found on a library book about forged Hughes documents. The book contained samples of Hughes's handwriting. In the video below, a Las Vegas station lays out how he was denied. On June 8, 1978 a jury deliberated 11 hours and ruled the will a fake. Dummar got $0. He was never charged with anything. He spent the next 40 years delivering frozen meat and telling the same story. A retired FBI agent and one of Hughes's pilots later said parts of it checked out. A judge threw out his last case in 2007. He died in 2018 still saying it happened. He may have told the truth about the desert. He lied about the envelope, and the envelope was the only part a court could measure. Was he a forger, or the unluckiest honest man in America?

Stan Lee co-created Spider-Man, the Hulk and Black Panther. At 95 he was moved out of his own house by his business manager. His wife of 69 years died in July 2017. The fight over his money started almost immediately. By June 2018 Lee had a restraining order against Keya Morgan. Police said Morgan took over his Hollywood Hills home, hired guards to keep relatives and associates away, then moved the 95-year-old into a Beverly Hills condo where, in the words of the case file, Morgan "had more control over Lee." Police also said Morgan pocketed more than $262,000 from autograph sessions Lee did in a single month. Morgan's lawyer said his client never abused or took advantage of Lee. Morgan called the reports fake news. Lee died in November 2018, before any of it was decided. The clip below is him at his Hollywood Walk of Fame star, thanking the crowd for showing up. He spent his life inventing people who rescue other people. At 95 he needed one. Was that elder abuse, or a family fight over a fortune that found a convenient villain?

Brooke Astor died at 105 with an estate of about $180 million. Her only son went to prison for stealing from it. Anthony Marshall ran his mother's money for decades. In 2009 a Manhattan jury convicted him on 14 counts including grand larceny. He was 85 and faced up to 25 years. The most serious count was a $1 million retroactive raise he signed over to himself for managing her finances. Prosecutors said he took art off her walls and had her will changed in her final years, when she had dementia, moving millions away from the libraries, parks and museums she had funded all her life. The case did not start with police. It started with her grandson. Philip Marshall, Anthony's own son, went to court in 2006 and said his grandmother was not being looked after. In the video below, ABC reports the verdict and Philip says why he did it. The case for Anthony: a decorated World War II veteran who had handled her affairs for 30 years. His neighbor Whoopi Goldberg wrote to the judge that jail would be cruelty with no purpose. The case against: the paperwork moved while his mother could no longer read it. He was sentenced to 1 to 3 years. He appealed for 3 years, reported to prison at 89, and walked out on medical parole exactly 2 months later. He died the following year at 90. A settlement cut his inheritance from $31 million to $14.5 million. About $100 million went to her charities. She spent her life giving the money away. He spent 2 months in prison trying to keep it. Was that justice, or just a very expensive way to get nothing?

Anna Nicole Smith was 26 when she married J. Howard Marshall II. He was 89, worth about $1.6 billion, and he died 14 months later. His will left her $0. She said he had promised her half of everything, out loud, many times. "He just always promised me, once we're married, half of everything is mine," she says. He never put it in writing. The sole heir was his 61-year-old son Pierce, who was 35 years older than his own stepmother. In the video below, ABC News lays out how the fight started. She filed for bankruptcy in California and claimed the estate owed her. In December 2000 that court awarded her $474 million. 3 months later a Texas jury, after a 5-month trial, ruled the opposite. The will was valid and she was entitled to nothing. One woman, 2 courts, 2 answers. Dead broke in Texas, a multimillionaire in California. It reached the Supreme Court twice, in 2006 and in 2011. Pierce died in 2006. Anna Nicole died in 2007 at 39. The lawyers kept going without either of them. In 2011 the court ruled the Texas judgment was the one that counted. Her estate received $0. In 2014 a judge threw out its last claim, for $44 million. Everything he promised her was spoken. Everything he left was written. Was she owed the half she says he promised, or only what the paper said?

In July 2022 a company carrying Usain Bolt's name went quiet in at least 8 American cities. It left behind locked e-bikes and scooters and nobody answering the phone. Bolt Mobility launched out of Miami in 2018 with the sprinter as co-founder and the face of the brand. In late 2020 it bought Gotcha Mobility of Charleston and took over its city contracts. Portland, St. Augustine, Richmond in Virginia, Richmond in California and three towns in Vermont were left with equipment they could not unlock. The vehicles only opened through the company's app. Officials emailed. They called. The customer service line was not staffed, and CEO Ignacio Tzoumas could not be reached either. "They've vanished, leaving equipment behind," a Vermont county transport planner told TechCrunch that week. Richmond, California said the company went out of business with no notice and left its equipment where it stood. A separate firm later offered to unlock the abandoned fleet so the cities could use it themselves. Three weeks later the company finally spoke. It said investors had failed to deliver expected fundraising and it had to scale back. The clip below is him unveiling that scooter in Paris, before any of this. Bolt was the name on the vehicles, not the man running them. Three months after the scooters went dark, his retirement account in Kingston still showed $12,758,181.74.

The Blind Side made more than $300 million and won an Oscar. The man it was about says he was never adopted. He had signed a conservatorship. Michael Oher was 18, over the legal age and with no diagnosed disability, when he signed papers in 2004 that he says he was told were adoption papers. They handed Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy control of his contracts and his name for the next 19 years. He says he found out in February 2023. Real footage of him breaking his silence below. The judge who ended it, Kathleen Gomes, said that in 43 years on the bench she had never seen a conservatorship granted over someone who was not disabled. She said it should have ended long ago. The Tuohys say the conservatorship was only a tool to satisfy NCAA rules so he could play at Ole Miss, where Sean had been a star. They say every family member was paid equally from the film, and that Oher received about $138,000 across 10 payments. Oher says the first time he ever heard the words I love you, it was them saying it. He also says that at 18 you let your guard down, and then everything gets stripped from you. A movie about a family giving a boy a home. A document that gave them his signature instead. Did they save him, or sign him?

Leona Helmsley was worth about $4 billion. In 1989 a federal judge sentenced her to four years in prison and told her she had been driven "not by need, but by naked greed." The case was built on expenses. She and her husband had written off personal spending as business costs. The judge called it a sophisticated scheme and said she sat at the apex of it. Four years, plus more than $7 million in fines. One line buried her in public before the verdict did. A servant testified that Helmsley had told her: "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." In court she wept and called it a nightmare. "I'm more humiliated and ashamed than anyone can imagine," she said. Eighteen years later she died, and her will made the rest of the argument for her. She left $12 million in trust to her Maltese, Trouble, and ordered that the dog be buried beside her. She left $10 million to her brother. She left $5 million each to two grandchildren, but only if they visited their father's grave once every calendar year and signed in to prove it. Two other grandchildren, Craig and Meegan Panzirer, got nothing. The will explains why in seven words: "for reasons which are known to them." Their father was her only son. He died in 1982, and she sued his estate for money she said he owed her. Reports at the time put what his children got from it at $432 each. The case for Leona: it was her money, earned and taxed and hers to give. The case for the grandchildren: she never told them what they had done. In the video below, CBS reports the day the judge handed down the sentence, and you hear the line that followed her to the grave. Was the judge punishing a tax cheat, or punishing a woman the public had already decided to hate?