Court filing sheds light on mystery man who had Tony Hsieh’s will
The lawyers who filed Tony Hsieh’s will in court want to remove his father from overseeing the Las Vegas mogul’s estate.
They also shed some light on the mystery man who had possession of the will, producing his death certificate from Pakistan, but said they still don’t know how he knew Hsieh.
Law firms McDonald Carano and Greenberg Traurig filed court papers Monday seeking to admit Hsieh’s will to probate and have Nevada attorneys Robert Armstrong and Mark Ferrario appointed as co-executors of the late former Zappos chief’s estate.
As part of the filing in Clark County District Court, they requested an order to remove Hsieh’s father as administrator of his son’s estate, and an order for the dad and his legal team to turn over records and files related to the estate.
Attorneys for Hsieh’s father did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Armstrong, a trusts and estates lawyer with McDonald Carano, and Ferrario, a real estate litigator with Greenberg Traurig, were named executors in Hsieh’s recently discovered will.
However, they were surprised to learn they had been named to that role, as they had not worked on Hsieh’s estate-planning documents and had never even met him, according to a court filing this month.
Discovery of will
Hsieh, the former CEO of online shoe seller Zappos and face of downtown Las Vegas’ economic revival, died on Nov. 27, 2020, at age 46 from injuries suffered in a Connecticut house fire.
He was unmarried and died with a massive fortune, having sold Zappos to Amazon in a $1 billion-plus deal and assembled a sprawling real estate portfolio in the Fremont Street area and the wealthy ski town of Park City, Utah.
His father, Richard Hsieh, is the court-appointed administrator of the estate, and the dad’s legal team has stated multiple times in court filings that the younger Hsieh died without a will.
However, in what has proved to be a surprising and bizarre turn of events, McDonald Carano and Greenberg Traurig filed court papers in April with a copy of Tony Hsieh’s seven-page last will and testament — dated March 13, 2015 — and a letter explaining how it was found.
It was discovered in February in the personal belongings of the late Pir Muhammad, according to the letter, which stated Muhammad suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and was not aware Hsieh had died.
The letter did not say when Muhammad died or where he lived, nor did it provide any details about his career or his association with Hsieh.
Balochistan
According to Monday’s court filing, Armstrong and Ferrario never met Muhammad and “have no knowledge” of his relationship with Hsieh.
But they included a heavily redacted copy of Muhammad’s death certificate in the filing, without explaining how they learned of it.
McDonald Carano and Greenberg Traurig did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The death certificate was apparently issued by the government of Balochistan, a western province in Pakistan. It shows that Muhammad was a Pakistani national who was born in 1931 and died in October 2022 — more than two years before Hsieh’s will was discovered among his personal possessions.
Muhammad’s address, place of death, and other personal information were redacted.
In his will, Hsieh had named Armstrong as co-executor with Muhammad and stated that if either of them failed to act, he appointed Ferrario as his contingent executor.
He also gave Muhammad “exclusive possession” of the original, in part to prevent anyone from destroying the will, the document indicates.
But several people who knew Hsieh have said they never heard of Pir Muhammad, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal found nothing that linked the name to Southern Nevada or confirmed who he was.
The newspaper previously found more than 1,000 profiles on Facebook with the name Pir Muhammad. Many of them said they lived in Pakistan.
A person named Kashif Singh wrote the letter describing the will’s discovery, though no contact information or details on Singh were provided in the initial filing in April.
According to a court filing this month by McDonald Carano and Greenberg Traurig, Muhammad was Singh’s grandfather.
Singh had mailed a copy of the will to Armstrong and called his office to discuss the document, given that the attorney had been named in the will, the court filing indicates.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.
