To see a man with really bad tax troubles, look no further than the East Haven Nursing home in the Bronx, home to a retired judge who owes more than a million dollars in taxes.

For the last six years, April has come and gone without a tax return from John Phillips, who was for decades a prominent political figure in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.

Mr. Phillips, 84, suffers from dementia and is hardly a tax cheat. Since 2001, the responsibility for his taxes has been with a string of law guardians appointed by the state court since 2001.

But for reasons that are not yet clear, the lawyers involved in the case never filed tax returns.

Mr. Phillips, who is neither married nor has any heirs, was put under the care of a legal guardian at the request of the office of the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes. Prosecutors had begun to suspect that Mr. Phillips’s real estate holdings were being fraudulently stolen, and that Mr. Phillips was no longer able to care for himself, Mr. Hynes has said in the past.

One of the main purposes of such a guardianship is to put the financial affairs of the person in order. That duty includes paying taxes, elder law attorneys say.

Mr. Phillips has said he wants to leave the Bronx nursing home where he lives and return to Brooklyn. But that prospect seems unlikely, given the current state of his financial affairs, a friend of Mr. Phillips, John O’Hara, said.

Mr. Phillips was once a colorful political figure in Brooklyn, where he ran a political club that doubled for a martial arts studio. He ran for office as the “Kung-Fu Judge,” and won a term to the civil court bench in 1976. He ran for a judgeship again in 1992, despite being rated “not approved” by the Bar Association. He retired in 1995 at the mandatory retirement age, although his supporters, including Mr. O’Hara, urged him to run for district attorney.

Mr. Phillips was once quite a wealthy man. He owned two movie theaters and nearly a dozen apartment buildings. Many of Mr. Phillips real estate holdings were sold at unauthorized auctions and it is not clear what has come of the proceeds, a lawyer close to the case says.

As of February, Mr. Phillips’s bank accounts were worth $807, 587, according to a report by the new court-appointed guardian for Mr. Phillips, James Cahill, Jr. But Mr. Phillips’s debts far exceed that amount. He owes taxes for capital gains on real estate sales and the rental income he was receiving. Those taxes, Mr. Cahill wrote in his initial report, “may exceed one million dollars in view of an extend period of non-payment.”

Mr. Phillips case has been passed down an unusually long line of guardians. Mr. Cahill is the fifth. All of them have been lawyers.

“This is a monumental failure by our court system,” Mr. O’Hara said. “If it can happen to a former judge it can happen to anyone.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Cahill has filed a tax return this year. It also was unclear whether Mr. Phillips was up to date on his tax payments prior to 2001, before his first guardian was appointed.