Grandson of National Enquirer founder ordered to pay $138M for looting family’s NY foundation

It’s ripped from the headlines!

A Westchester County relative of National Enquirer founder Generoso Pope Jr. has been ordered to fork over a whopping $138 million in damages for pillaging his family’s foundation to play big man around town.

A judge recently ordered David Anthony Pope, 57 — the great-grandson of Generoso Pope, a construction magnate whose materials helped build the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, and grandson of the brother of Pope Jr., a media mogul who founded the scandal tabloid — to pay the massive penalty to the Generoso Pope Foundation.

During his crooked reign, David stole “well in excess of $30 million,” a lawyer for his kin accusers said — dough he partly doled out to such self-serving causes as his kids’ football and cheerleading squads, which were gifted nearly $1 million.

David — who was sued by his siblings in 2023 for allegedly raiding the foundation’s coffers to benefit himself and his family — “was willful, wanton, reckless, and indicative of a high degree of moral culpability,” county Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood wrote in ordering the hefty judgment against him earlier this month.

Marc Luccarelli, a lawyer for David’s siblings — Marie Thérèse Pope, 59, and Ted Pope, 61 — told The Post that David finally gave up control of the foundation in December and that his siblings and their mother all joined the board to try to right the ship.

“We are attempting to do everything we can to save the foundation,” Luccarelli said, noting there were no more liquid funds left in the organization for charitable causes and the only remaining asset is the building where the foundation is based.

David’s Italian immigrant great-grandfather started the charity in Westchester in 1947 to fund educational, health, cultural, human services and civic institutions.

The lawyer said the family is going to try to sell its building in Tuckahoe in the county and also try to collect on the judgment against David — which is one of the largest wins in a charities fraud case in the Empire State.

Another lawyer for the siblings, Andy Tomback, said: “Marie Thérèse Pope is grateful for the judgment but fearful that David will hide his assets and avoid being held accountable for his wrongdoing.”

The suit claimed that David convinced his grandmother to put him in charge of the foundation around 2006 and that he secured a chokehold over it after he pushed out Ted around 2007 and his sister next in 2010.

When he first came into power the foundation had $32 million but he’d siphoned those funds down to $4 million by 2019, the suit claimed. Now, there are zero funds left, Tomback said.

Part of David’s illicit largesse included him giving $780,000 to the Tuckahoe Union Free School System where his kids went to school, along with the hundreds of thousands of dollars for their individual extracurricular activities, the suit alleged.

This, all while the foundation’s own rules barred funds going toward its members.

David also took in a much higher salary than his predecessors: His grandfather drew a mere $60,000 salary for several years before him while David raked in $198,193 by 2017, the suit claimed.

From 2005 through 2019, he was paid $2.36 million.

David also tripled the grant money for the Westchester Italian Cultural Center by 2008, giving it $1.19 million, a place he also drew a salary from and employed his wife and two sons at low-show jobs.

In fact, the WICC received $6.5 million in grants from 2005 to 2019 while David was earning $50,000 a year for a measly hour of work a week on top of the salary he drew from his family’s foundation, the suit alleged.

David’s lawyers quit representing him in June, and David never got a new lawyer. He then failed to show up for his deposition in the case and to a one-day trial held last month in front of Wood.

Just weeks before David’s legal team dropped him, Robert Castro, the foundation’s longtime accountant, gave damning testimony during a June 9 deposition.

Castro admitted that David wrote out a series of checks to himself for $325,000 from the foundation. Castro said he assumed David “bought a new house, he had more expenses,” according to a transcript of Castro’s deposition. These checks weren’t including David’s salary or the salaries of his family members, Castro said.

“Under the stewardship of [David], the foundation became a vessel through which he lined his and his family’s pockets at the expense of the charitable organizations the foundation had previously (and properly) served,” the suit charged.

“The self-serving course he set for the foundation would have outraged Generoso,” the filing claimed.

David did not return Post messages seeking comment Tuesday.