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A Child of Suburban Wealth

Martin Tankleff's house was a place of luxury - and tension

By Shirley E. Perlman and Joseph Demma | Staff Writer

December 13, 1988

He was given up at birth by a woman going through a divorce who already had one son and decided she couldn't keep a second.

Three days later, he was adopted by a Long Island couple who couldn't have children, who saw him as "a gift from God" and raised him accordingly.

The boy, Martin Tankleff, became a child of suburban wealth. He had an all-terrain vehicle and piloted the family cabin cruiser. At his bar mitzvah party, there were clowns and game booths, and the hall looked like a bazaar.

He went everywhere with his parents - even to dinner with other couples - and he was groomed to take over the family enterprises. As a child, he sat in a corner at his father's business meetings, taking in the talk of deals and dollars. In junior high school, he sold so much candy that he competed with the school store and was asked to stop. In high school, with his father as his supplier, he dealt in thousands of dollars worth of baseball cards.

Some people said he bragged about the things his family's money could buy.

"I bought this," they quoted him as saying. "I own that."

And when it came to happiness, his home in Belle Terre was somewhere east of Eden.

According to friends and relatives, tensions swirled about the family. Martin and his father argued about the future. His father wanted him to go to college; Martin wanted to step right into the family business. His mother and father bickered as they had through more than 20 years of marriage. Four years ago they split up but got back together and, according to friends, never completely reconciled their differences. Coolness marked the relationship between his mother and his father's daughter by a previous marriage.

This fall, his father told members of his weekly card game that he wanted to go to Atlantic City to get away from the tensions inside the ranch-style home on Long Island Sound. He asked a player to go with him.

But a few hours later, shortly before dawn Sept. 7, Arlene and Seymour Tankleff were attacked in the $1 million home - she in the bedroom and he in the den. Their heads had been bludgeoned and their throats slit. Police said Arlene, 53, died almost immediately; Seymour, 62, lingered unconscious for a month.

Before sundown on the day his parents were found, Martin Tankleff was charged with the attacks. Authorities say the 17-year-old high school senior admitted the crimes. They say he told them he attacked his mother and father with a barbell and a knife because of the pressures of family life - fights over his use of the cars and his aversion to college and because he was frightened by his parents' talk of divorce.

Martin Tankleff claims he is innocent. He disputes the police account of the admissions and says any statements he made were coerced. From the beginning, he has insisted that Jerry Steuerman, a business associate of his father, had a motive, a contention denied by the partner and police. Martin's half-sister, aunts, uncles and cousins have rallied to his side. They say he is incapable of such crimes. They have put up $1 million bail to get him out of jail while he awaits trial on two counts of second-degree murder. And they have posted a $25,000 reward for information in the case.

Tomorrow, a State Supreme Court judge will set a date for the murder trial of the 17-year-old heir to more than $3 million - a fortune left by the parents he is accused of killing.

* * *

Martin Tankleff was born at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn at 4:58 p.m., Aug. 29, 1971. According to a Tankleff relative, his natural mother was in the process of getting a divorce. An adoption had been arranged, but the prospective mother became pregnant and new adoptive parents were being sought.

Someone suggested Arlene and Seymour Tankleff, a West Hempstead couple who were desperately looking for a baby to adopt. According to relatives, neither Seymour nor Arlene was able to have children - he had suffered from testicular cancer and she had undergone a hysterectomy. Tankleff had married Arlene, a secretary in his Hempstead insurance office, after divorcing his first wife, Viga, to whom he had been married about 22 years.

The adoption seemed everything Seymour and Arlene Tankleff had ever wanted. The baby was named after Seymour's oldest brother who had died several years before, a family member said, and was viewed as "a gift from God. Arlene wore a robe and sat in a rocking chair just like she gave birth . . . it was a wonderful event."

A Bris was held at the house in West Hempstead, where the Tankleffs were living while their new home in Belle Terre was being built on property Seymour had seen several months before during a golf outing.

About 10 months after Martin's birth, Arlene and Seymour Tankleff took in a little girl they planned to adopt. But the child was taken from them after several months when a dispute developed between the Tankleffs and the natural mother. Arlene was "devastated" by the loss, relatives said, and compensated by "redoubling her attentions on Martin."

Not that Martin was deprived to begin with. He grew up in an affluent home in an exclusive neighborhood. His parents belonged to the Harbor Hills Country Club in Belle Terre and the Port Jefferson Yacht Club. Seymour Tankleff became commissioner of constables for the village and belonged to the "After-Dinner Club," a group of about 18 men who had been meeting weekly for almost 20 years for poker.