Connie Milstein once co-chaired Douglas Elliman and co-founded the firm that runs her branch’s buildings; at 80, she is asking a Manhattan court to replace the trustees she says stopped her monthly cheques.
Connie Milstein knows the paperwork of inherited money from both ends. She trained as a lawyer and has spent a working life in boardrooms and property companies. She has seen at close range how a family’s holdings are arranged, divided and minded. Now she has gone to the New York County Supreme Court to have two family trustees replaced, and the court documents name her brother and both of her daughters.
Large fortunes tend to end up as instructions left by people who are no longer available to clarify them. The Milstein instructions begin in the Bronx, on a floor.
Morris Milstein lays floors in the Bronx
Morris Milstein came to the Bronx from Russia in 1919 and founded Circle Floor, a commercial flooring company. The Real Deal recorded the beginning on 9 August 2010, in its report of the death of his son Paul. Hardly a glamorous start, and conducted largely at ankle height, it is the base on which everything else in this story was built.
Flooring is a sound trade for a founder. Nobody photographs it, everybody stands on it, and nobody thinks about replacing it until they have to.
His sons, Seymour and Paul, are where the family divides into the two branches that matter here. Seymour’s children are Philip and Constance, who goes by Connie. Paul’s children make up the other branch, and none of them is a party to the present case. Their part in the story ends, for now, with the split described below.
The Milsteins buy Emigrant Savings Bank
By the 1980s the family had travelled some distance from the floor. Forbes’s profile of the Milsteins, dated 1 July 2015, says they bought Emigrant for $90m in 1986. A savings bank suits a family that made its money the slow way. Its name alone has the air of somebody’s grandmother putting coins aside.
Owning a bank teaches a family to think of money as something held on behalf of other people. Some forty years later, that idea sits at the centre of the argument between Connie and her trustees.
Connie served as a director of Emigrant. In a family company, the boardroom is where relatives’ decisions arrive already typed.
A feud leaves two branches and two businesses
The two brothers’ branches did not stay in business together. There was a feud, and once it was over the family holdings were divided between Paul’s children, Howard, Edward, Barbara and Roslyn, and Seymour’s two, Philip and Constance. That left four cousins on one side and two siblings on the other, a ratio that tends to make the smaller team close.
Seymour died in 2001, and in 2003 Philip and Connie founded Ogden CAP Properties to manage their share of the holdings after splitting from the rest of the family, as The Real Deal noted on 3 November 2017. On Paul’s side, Howard Milstein ultimately kept control of Milford Management and Milstein Properties. Paul died in August 2010.
From 2003, then, the Milstein name ran two property operations, and the name over each door told a visitor which brother’s children were inside. Only one of those operations, Ogden, appears in what follows. Anyone tempted to confuse the two branches should resist: the cousins on Paul’s side have no part in this quarrel. They have, presumably, quarrels of their own, conducted elsewhere and at their own expense.
Connie builds her own side of the business
Ogden gave Connie a company of her own making. She is a principal there as well as a co-founder, and Ogden oversaw the renovation of The Jefferson hotel in Washington, D.C., while she also co-founded Dog Tag Bakery, a venture rather easier to explain at dinner than a hotel renovation. The career adds up to someone who has always had a hand on the controls, a point worth holding on to as the story turns.
The same Forbes profile put the extended Milstein family at $3.1bn in July 2015 and said Philip and Connie control Ogden CAP, which owns and manages luxury apartment buildings such as One Lincoln Plaza. That number covers everyone with the surname, cousins included, and is now more than a decade old. It is a fair portrait of the family and no portrait at all of her.
The report that dated Ogden’s founding also recorded something more domestic. In 2017 Connie and Philip bought a West Village townhouse together for $17.9m. The buyer was the CJM 2003 Delaware trust, whose initials match those of Constance Milstein. Even the house went into a trust, which is how families at this altitude tend to hold the things they love, and also the things they will one day argue about.
Keep the picture of a brother and sister buying a house together in mind. It does not last into the next section.
Her petition dates the stop to summer 2025
Her petition says that in the summer of 2025 the co-trustees abruptly told her they had decided to stop the regular distributions of $125,000 a month from one of the family trusts. The trust is held in the name of Vivian Milstein, Seymour’s widow. Its co-trustees are Peter Grossman and James Sligar, and Connie wants both of them replaced.
The petition is careful about who did what. It says the trustees stopped the payments, and it alleges that they have been plotting against her with her brother, whom it describes as estranged, and with her own two daughters.
The court documents name her brother Philip Milstein and her daughters Abigail Black Elbaum and Joanna Milstein. Connie alleges that they are improperly attempting to seize $2.5m held in her name, along with the monthly payments. Philip, co-buyer of the West Village house eight years earlier, is now a respondent.
The arrangement has a certain cruel symmetry. Seymour’s two children left their cousins in 2003 so they could manage their own share together. The present dispute sits entirely inside that share, between people who once stood on the same side of the divide.
It is easy to underestimate what a monthly payment means to a person who has received it for years. The sum arrives, the life arranges itself around it, and the arrangement begins to feel permanent. The trustees’ answer is about exactly that feeling.
Trustees lean on a single word
A memorandum of law filed by the two men replies with an adjective. Connie, it says, is merely a discretionary beneficiary of that trust, and she has other trusts of her own. The power to remove and replace its trustees, the memorandum argues, rightly belongs to Abby and Joanna, the trust’s primary beneficiaries.
The memorandum also sets out the two men’s credentials. Grossman, the trustees say, oversees the Ogden business and knows the finances of every member of the family. Sligar’s firm, Milbank LLP, had by their account represented Connie as her trust and estate planning counsel for years. Both points are the trustees’ own, offered as reasons the men are suited to the job.
Abigail is herself a co-founder and principal at Ogden. The company her mother set up after the split now counts her daughter among its principals, and, on the trustees’ account, its overseer is one of the men minding the trust.
Her relatives reject the allegations. They say the trust was created principally for her children, and they point to some $23.5m that Connie has spent in recent years, a figure that is their claim. A spokesperson for Philip declined to comment.
DDW’s reading is that the case rests on that one adjective. A discretionary beneficiary receives what trustees decide to give. A payment that arrives every month for long enough can feel, from the receiving end, like the weather. Whether these payments were ever owed, as opposed to given, is the question at the centre of the case. A family can live quite comfortably for decades without ever needing an answer to it.
The trustees’ framing also changes what kind of family story this is. On Connie’s account, a mother has had her income removed by people allied with her children. On the trustees’ account, a trust built for the children is being run for the children, and the mother is one of several people it may help.
Morris’s great-granddaughters are named in the case
The dispute reached the New York papers in November 2026, more than a century after Morris Milstein set up shop in the Bronx.
By our count four generations of the family sit inside this one petition. Morris founded the flooring company. Seymour and his widow, Vivian, are the generation whose name the trust carries. Connie and her brother Philip come next, and Abigail and Joanna after them. The youngest of those generations, on the trustees’ reading, holds the power Connie is asking a court to use.
After the feud between the two branches, the family holdings were divided between Paul’s children and Seymour’s. The present quarrel is inside a single branch, which leaves rather less room to divide anything.
Connie’s petition asks a judge to replace Grossman and Sligar. The trustees reply that the power to choose trustees belongs to Abby and Joanna. Both are named on the other side.
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