Former Chicago Board of Trade Chairman Patrick Arbor changed the locks on his Water Tower Place condo the day his wife filed for divorce. It had nothing to do with the property itself, he told the court during divorce proceedings. Rather, it had to do with the fact that his then-wife had “looted” about $400,000 from his safe. His wife, Antoinette Vigilante, responded that he had not told her about the safe.
How she got into the safe is just one of many mysteries swirling around the couple’s divorce. Another was how they could maintain any semblance of a relationship when they rarely lived under the same roof. He had his condo, and she had a house in Lake Geneva, just across the Illinois state line.
As we said in our last post, she had borrowed against the Lake Geneva home but had been unable to keep up with the payments. During the divorce proceedings, the court ordered Arbor to make an $80,000 payment to stave off foreclosure.
It may have become clear to Arbor then that he was in for an expensive divorce. A different judge confirmed the feeling last week by determining that Vigilante’s share of their marital estate would be $10 million, not including the $8 million Arbor would pay in maintenance.
Court records show that Vigilante’s version of the couple’s life together was a little more conventional. She explained that she was a homemaker, managing the couple’s homes in Chicago and elsewhere, as well as Arbor’s caregiver during his 2010 bout with cancer.
This time, it was Arbor who disagreed. We’ll finish up the story in our next post.
