NYC Congressman Charles Rangel left $300,000 estate
Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel — infamously known for pocketing rental income from his Caribbean cottage without disclosing it — has apparently left behind a modest estate, court records show.
Rangel, who died May 26 at age 94, had assets worth only $300,000, according to Manhattan Surrogate Court filings.
That is far less than his net worth of more than $1.7 million upon his retirement from Congress in 2017, as reported by the watchdog group Open Secrets.
The current assets of the once-powerful chair of the House’s Ways and Means Committee were not detailed in court filings.
His daughter, Alicia Rangel-Haughton, was named executor of the Democrat’s estate.
The late representative’s property is to be placed in the Charles Bernard Rangel Revocable Trust, the assets of which were not disclosed in a will signed March 31, just nine weeks before his death at Harlem Hospital.
Rangels’ financial misbehavior and other ethical questions dogged him throughout his decades-long career, long before The Post outed his business dealings in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.
He was criticized right from the start of his career when, in the 1960s, he took a low-interest loan from a New York City program meant to help the poor and used it to renovate his family’s Central Harlem home, turning the property into rental apartments — one of which he used for himself.
Decades later, Rangel was caught using four rent-stabilized apartments in Lenox Terrace for himself, including one he used as a campaign office.
He parked his vintage Mercedes for free in a House of Representatives garage; was questioned for his participation in junkets to the Caribbean sponsored by corporations and lobbyists in violation of House rules, and eventually copped to omitting as much as $780,000 in assets from financial disclosures he filed in the 2000s.
He was also slammed for using Congressional stationery to solicit donations for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York, a move which broke House ethics rules.
A week after The Post’s 2008 exposé revealed Rangel’s ownership of the three-bedroom, three-bath casita No. 412 at a beachfront resort in Punta Cana — which he rented out for between $500 and $1,100 a night — he confessed he’d failed to disclose rental income from the property.
Rangel failed to declare $75,000 in income from the sun-drenched property, he eventually admitted. He unloaded the villa in 2010 and made a handsome profit.
In December 2010, Rangel’s financial misdeeds earned him a censure from his Congressional colleagues. He retired from Congress in 2017.