9/11 widow receives, and blows, a cool $5 million

Human beings are weak. If our weaknesses and vices are subsidized, they will get stronger and we will get weaker. Turning people into sacred objects and showering them with money is one way to destroy them. Consider the pathetic story of Kathy Trant. Her husband, Dan, a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was killed in the September 11th attack. She subsequently received $3 million in private donations and another $2 million from the federal government, a total of $5 million for her personally, with her children getting an additional total of over $2 million. How did the 9/11 widow spend all this money? The New York Post tells the tale:

[She] has turned her Long Island home into a $2 million showcase, traveled from the Vatican to Las Vegas, blown $500,000 on shoes, and bought breast jobs for pals and even strangers….

She has traveled to Italy, Jamaica, Asia and Europe; taken friends and relatives on four Caribbean cruises for $50,000; taken 20 to the Bahamas for $30,000; 10 to Las Vegas for $15,000; and six to the Super Bowl for $70,000. The last couple of summers, she’s paid $13,000 to rent a 10-room North Carolina beach house for a week for her kids and all their pals.

Trant has showered those around her with obsessive generosity.

She gave one friend $20,000 to pay her bills. She gave her former housecleaner $15,000 to buy a home in El Salvador. She’s sent $1,000 checks to a friendly clerk at Bergdorf Goodman, and treated salesgirls at Saks to shoes.

After getting a facial in Las Vegas, she gave the beautician, a single mom, $4,000 for breast implants. She gave a friend $7,000 for a boob job because, Trant said, the woman “hated her breasts and didn’t want to spend her son’s college tuition money.”

The money has had the same effect on her three children. “Her daughter Jessica was 19 when Dan died and immediately got her $800,000 share. She’s already spent most of it on clothes, vacations and friends, she said.” Mrs. Trant is now down to her last $500,000 and is worried about her future. “I really don’t have the will to live,” she says.

Here’s a reaction to the above from Lucianne.com:

Reply 21 - Posted by: 1940s guy, 6/12/2005 8:36:04 AM

She sounds like an excellent choice to be the president of an African nation.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 12, 2005 03:29 PM | Send