The sleazy divorce package

The Nov. 13 cover story in Forbes is headlined "Divorce - Dirty Tricks" and yeah, there are lots of them. Much of the coverage involves really rich guys who claimed that they were merely rich at the time of the divorce filing. And asset hiding is no longer just a game for mega-millionaires and billionaires.

Not uncommon: husbands who give interest-free loans to their girlfriends or have their businesses hire their love interests at unreasonably high salaries. There was the fellow in Missouri who stopped paying the mortgage on a property he owned with his wife, let the banks seize it and then had his parents buy it back at the foreclosure sale. The wife won custody of the children, child support, maintenance and attorneys' fees, plus her share of the marital assets. A husband in Illinois stopped soliciting new clients for the couple's cleaning business, driving it to the wall; he was, at the same time, attracting clients to his new competing business.

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How common are asset-hiding tricks today? Marilyn Chinitz, a divorce attorney in New York, guesses that such schemes occur in at least half of all divorces. If the lawyer for one spouse suspects that the other spouse is playing dirty, he and a forensic accountant might spend years in legal discovery pawing through tax records, accounting ledgers, credit card bills, bank statements and share transfers. At every step of the way a foot-dragging spouse can try to wear the other side down with delays. This is not something lawyers necessarily object to, since their meters are ticking.

And guess what - the laws are typically stacked against the financially weaker spouse. The Forbes package includes five billionaire divorces, three of which involve local folk. Of course, there's Lisa Burkle's claims that then-husband Ron was hiding assets (the court turned that down). Then there was Kirk Kerkorian's then-wife Lisa who wanted $4 million a year in child support (she ended up with $50,000 a month), and finally Sumner and Phyllis Redstone, whose 55-year marriage ended in 2002. Phyllis apparently got stakes in Midway Gaming and WMS Industries, but Sumner held onto his Viacom stock. The latest Forbes estimate has him at $7.5 billion. And he has since remarried.