Thursday, December 17, 2009
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Frank “Boy” Pestaño
Chessmoso
ONE point five million Euros. How much is that worth?
Approximately P100 million. This is what Jinky Young is expected to get as her rightful inheritance from her father, chess legend Bobby Fischer, not counting the gold holdings deposited at the Landsbanki Islands .
Add to that the expected royalties from the forthcoming movie “Bobby Fischer Goes to War” and you have quite a sizeable fortune. The movie is directed by John McDonald and stars Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck.
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There are three other claimants to this fortune—Alexander and Nikolas Targ—children of his late sister, Joan Fischer Targ and Miyoko Watai, his alleged wife.
Early this month, Jinky took a leave from school to visit her father’s tomb in Iceland with her mother, Marilyn Young. They were accompanied by Eugene Torre, Bobby’s best friend and Jinky’s lawyer Samuel Estimo. After Iceland, all four went to London for the filming of a documentary by BBC-HBO on the life of Fischer.
The last time mother and child saw Fischer was in September 2005 in Reykjavik, when the chess legend had a three-week rendezvous with them.
Bobby died on Jan. 17 ,2007.
Marilyn recalls, “There was not a day that Bobby didn’t call us, sometimes three to four times, except when I was in school. He would always ask for Jinky, who would say, ‘I love you, Daddy.’”
Torre acted as Bobby’s second during his return match with Boris Spassky in 1992 in Yugoslavia. It was then under sanction by the United Nations and the USA for the civil war in Bosnia Herzegovina .The US Government pursued him until he was jailed in Japan in 2005.
Iceland granted him a special citizenship and he was transferred there much later.
Eugene introduced Marilyn to Bobby and Jinky was born in May 2001 in Baguio City.
Samuel Estimo and a lady Icelandic lawyer accompanied Jinky last Dec. 2 to a Reykjavik hospital where her blood samples were taken for DNA testing. It turned out that it was the same hospital where Fischer died.
Estimo and Thordur Bogason of the law firm who will handle the claim, are optimistic about Jinky’s chances of getting her due from the estate of her father.
“The Magistrate of Iceland will uphold Jinky’s claim, which means that she will get two-thirds of Fischer’s estate,” said Bogason.
“That is on the assumption that Ms. Miyoko Watai’s supposed marriage to Bobby Fischer will be affirmed by the Icelandic Supreme Court. Otherwise, Jinky will collect the whole of Bobby’s estate,” concluded Estimo.
In an e-mail to me dated a few days ago, Estimo said ,“In a decision dated Dec. 8, 2009, the Supreme Court of Iceland thumbed down the marriage of Japanese Miyoko Watai to Bobby for failure to submit the original copy of their alleged marriage contract after several directives to submit the same.”
Per Icelandic law, the presence of a child cancels also all claims of the Targ brothers, who are mere collateral relatives.
Watai is a Japanese women’s chess champion and the general secretary of the Japanese Chess Association. She is also a Woman International Master. She has been a friend of Bobby since 1973.
Joan Fischer Targ is a celebrity in her own right and is a pioneer in computer education and has a prominent family, who are all achievers.
Young Joan started it all when she bought a chess set from a candy store and gave it to her younger brother Bobby on fifth birthday.
Husband Russell Targ is an author and a physicist, and a pioneer in the earliest development of the laser.
Their late daughter, Elisabeth, was a psychiatrist and is best known for her research on the healing powers of prayer.
Brother Alexander is a prominent Palo Alto anesthesiologist.
So it seems, that the Targ family are well-off.
(boypestano@chess.com, www.chessmoso.blogspot.com)
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