A New Jersey widow brushed off by JPMorgan in a bitter battle over her husband’s $53,000 pension received a surprise check for the entire sum — from a pair of strangers “touched” by her plight, The Post has learned.
Elaine Silverberg, 73, has been embroiled in a 13-year feud to recoup the money from the nation’s largest lender, which refused making the payout because of a clerical error by her late husband.
The Teaneck, NJ grandmother’s David-versus-Goliath battle — reported exclusively by The Post in November –– caught the attention of two insurance executives more than 600 miles away in North Carolina.
Roy Messer, a 57-year-old health insurance broker from Charlotte, and his business partner Bill Rice, also 57, said they were shocked by the penny-pinching from the bank run by Jamie Dimon and took matters into their own hands.
“I couldn’t believe for such an amount of money that they wouldn’t want to do the right thing. There is no doubt that her husband would have wanted that money to go to her and his kids,” Rice said.
“I imagine that for Jamie Dimon this is like a nickel falling out of his pocket. I would like to believe that he just doesn’t know (about this).”
Messer, who served in the Marine Corps between 1986 and 1989, said he was “touched” Silverberg’s story and that wiring her the money was “the right thing to do.”.
“I don’t know her and I could have very easily just turned the page. But when something like that reaches out and grabs you, I looked at it and thought: What if that was my mother?” he told The Post.
Silverberg was left stunned by their gesture, saying it “restored my faith in mankind.”
“In this crazy world we live in, it is remarkable that such kindness also exists. I am flabbergasted at their extreme generosity,” she told The Post.
JPMorgan declined to comment, but a senior source inside the bank said the rules governing its pension fund ban any exceptions from being carved out.
JPMorgan insiders then told The Post in December that the bank would never back down after Grinches at the bank denied Silverberg’s repeated pleas to hand over her husband Mel’s $331-a-month pension pot.
According to Silverberg, a former government administrator, the fully vested cash pile is worth an estimated $53,000.
But JPMorgan bean counters said Mel, a former system analyst with Chase Manhattan Bank until 1979, failed to fill in the necessary forms before he unexpectedly died at the age of 43 from multiple organ failure in 1988.
Chase Manhattan went on to merge with JPMorgan in 2000. The Wall Street giant posted record profits of $58.5 billion last year, with Dimon raking in $39 million in compensation.
The Ronald Reagan administration passed the Retirement Equity Act in 1984 so spouses like Silverberg would automatically benefit if their loved ones died.
JPMorgan insists it wrote to Mel on three separate occasions asking him to elect survivor coverage after he stepped down. His widow says none of that correspondence ever arrived at the family home.
She said pension managers can only dig up documentation that they say proves they contacted Mel in 1990 — two years after he died.
Silverberg even once enlisted New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and ex-Bronx Rep Eliot Engel to convince the firm to change their mind, to no avail.
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