The Family Jewels

Diamond also sees a larger crusade at work, one in which she feels allied. "No one really wants the money," she says. "They want these three bums out of there. We want a bank or some disinterested party to oversee the estate."

Schwarz, not surprisingly, sees a different motive -- but it too is removed from the legal claims. "It's not just the money," he says in a phone interview. "Mr. Paul created resentments in his life because he was such a controlling individual. People thought they were not getting their due. And people resolved to get even after he died."

In the end, though, perhaps Sonia Rollbant summed it up best. Most of time I talked to her she rambled incoherently about this or that, and when she did hit on something controversial -- the allegations about drugs -- Stanley would tell her to shut up.

But one day, she cornered me outside the courtroom and started going on about her dogs back in France. "You know they are so precious, so fragile like children," she said. "They need to be taken care of like children, protected from harm, from these terrible maladies. They need a place to play, a garden maybe, a nice garden with benches and maybe a fountain. Somewhere where they can play.

"You know," she adds after a pause, "that is why we are here.