CONCORD – Elizabeth Tamposi has dropped her challenge to a ruling that cut her off from her family’s fortune, court staff said, which makes her ongoing divorce case “like fighting over a carcass,” her former husband’s lawyer said Friday.

The Supreme Court upheld most of Tamposi’s divorce decree on Friday, but sent the case back to Hillsborough County Superior Court for reconsideration of the $50,000 annual alimony she was ordered to pay her ex-husband.

Theodore Goodlander, 67, of California, and Tamposi, 56, of Gilford, separated in 2006 after nearly 25 years of marriage, and Goodlander filed for divorce in 2007, citing irreconcilable differences.

They were a wealthy couple, and their divorce “was highly acrimonious and expensive,” Hillsborough County Probate Court Judge Gary Cassavechia wrote last year in a ruling that disinherited Tamposi from her family’s fortune.

Settling a dispute between Tamposi and her brothers over management of the family trusts, Cassavechia found that she had violated the terms of her father’s will and trust, and thus forfeited any right to benefit from it.

Cassavechia’s ruling was issued around the time the Supreme Court heard arguments in the divorce case, Goodlander’s lawyer, Charles Douglas III, said Friday.

While Tamposi appealed the probate ruling, fighting to keep her share of the family trusts, Goodlander argued at the Supreme Court that a portion of the Tamposi fortune was owed to him.

However, on Feb. 14, Tamposi notified Hillsborough County Probate Court that she had withdrawn her appeal, essentially accepting Cassavechia’s ruling, staff there said Friday.

“Had the Probate Court ruling gone in her favor, this would have had a bigger impact,” Douglas said of the ruling Friday. “Because she was stripped from Sam’s trust, it’s like fighting over a carcass. There’s not much left in terms of assets.”

Douglas said he believes Tamposi withdrew the appeal so that any remaining assets in her trust could be transferred to her children in advance of a change in federal estate tax laws.

“She chose to withdraw the appeal,” Douglas said. “It was in the interests of her family to get it over with ASAP because of a change in the estate tax.”

Tamposi’s lawyer, William Brennan, couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.

Goodlander had appealed Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Diane Nicolosi’s 2009 decision on the couple’s divorce, arguing he should have received a greater share.

Goodlander also argued Nicolosi shouldn’t have allowed the couple’s adult children to get involved in the divorce case, but the Supreme Court rejected that argument and most of his other claims in its ruling Friday.

Both Goodlander and Tamposi were millionaires when they married, but neither has worked for a long time, court records show.

Goodlander owned a computer company, Cab Tech, and later Storage Computer Corp. and Kristiania Corp., a real-estate holding company.

Tamposi worked in the Tamposi family real estate empire until 1989, when she left to serve as assistant secretary of state for consular affairs in Washington, D.C. She left that post in 1992, forced to resign as a result of a scandal involving politically motivated searches of passport records.

“It is undisputed that Goodlander has generated no steady income since 2003 and that Tamposi has not been steadily employed since 1992,” the Supreme Court’s ruling states.

Goodlander and Tamposi have three children, ages 26, 23 and 19. In the course of their divorce, Nicolosi “found that both Betty and Ted had taken liberties with assets of their children,” Cassavechia wrote.

Tamposi was ordered to pay back $320,000 into their children’s trust fund and to take personal responsibility for $765,342 in debt as part of the final divorce decree.

Goodlander was found to have withdrawn $898,480 from the children’s custodial accounts, which he managed, and taken $80,000 from his wife’s bank account in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep Storage Computer Corp. afloat, the Supreme Court’s ruling states.

The Supreme Court found that Nicolosi ruled rightly that Goodlander wasn’t entitled to any share of any ongoing, future income that Tamposi might receive from her family’s trusts – a point that Cassavechia’s ruling seems to have rendered moot – finding that because she has no control to direct distributions from the trust, she had no “vested” interest in it.

However, the court sent the case back to Nicolosi, ordering that she reconsider her ruling that Tamposi pay Goodlander $50,000 a year in alimony from her trust income – contingent upon her receiving trust income – up to a total of $1.5 million.

In awarding him alimony, Nicolosi found Goodlander had “no funds with which to support himself in even a modest lifestyle, which is not what the parties enjoyed during the marriage.”

The Supreme Court ruled Nicolosi was wrong to award alimony for only Goodlander’s “most basic needs,” and should instead try to assess both his “reasonable needs” and Tamposi’s ability to support him.

The court also found that the alimony payments shouldn’t depend on whether Tamposi received distributions from her trust.

The Supreme Court upheld Nicolosi’s other rulings, however, including her decision to give Tamposi their Gilford home and split $4,818,310 in “non-trust assets” nearly evenly, with Goodlander getting 51 percent and Tamposi 49 percent.

Goodlander argued he should have received a greater share because his wife had her trust funds, but Nicolosi settled on the near-even split, and the high court upheld her decision.

Justice Carol Ann Conboy wrote the decision, and was joined by Justice James Duggan and specially assigned retired Justice Sherman Horton.

Andrew Wolfe can be reached at 594-6410 or awolfe@nashuatelegraph.com.