On a spring evening in 2002, an eighteen-year-old Columbia freshman had dinner with her cousin Tom. The table was probably pleasant enough; he was the head of the family’s empire, and she was a college student who had grown up largely outside its inner circles. But the dinner was not merely social. Tom told her some things—things about the family trusts, about the money that was supposed to be held for her.
She did not argue or demand explanations at the table. She listened. A year later, when a reporter asked her to explain why she had filed a lawsuit against her own father and her own cousins, she answered in three sentences: “I had dinner with Tom. He told me some things.
I filed suit. ”
The suit was filed on the 26th of November 2002, two days before Thanksgiving. It landed in the chancery division of the circuit court of Cook County, and it asked for a billion dollars in compensation and five billion more in punitive damages. Six billion dollars, against a family fortune then reckoned at around fifteen billion.
The defendants began with her father, Robert Pritsker, in his capacity as trustee of her trusts, along with Tom and the family’s longtime lawyer, Marshall Eisenberg. Then came the relatives who were, at that very moment, dividing the family’s holdings among themselves. Leisel Pritsker, the youngest of Robert’s five children, wanted to know what had happened to her share. The story she stepped into had begun decades earlier, and it had been built, deliberately and carefully, to make her question almost impossible to answer.
The family was named Pritsker, but almost nobody knew it. For most of the twentieth century, the name on the door was Hyatt, and Hyatt was not a Pritsker at all. It was the first name of a man named Hyatt Robert Von Dehn, who, with a partner named Jack Crouch, had opened an eighty-room motel with a coffee shop on the edge of the Los Angeles airport in the early 1950s. It was a long way from downtown, and the idea of an airport motel was still a novelty.
According to Von Dehn’s obituary in the New York Times, the place was full from the night it opened. Within a year, it had added seventy more rooms, and for years afterward it ran at about 98 percent occupancy—most hotels were happy with 65. Somewhere in the middle of the decade, a Chicago lawyer in his thirties named Jay Pritsker flew into Los Angeles and took a room at the Hyatt House. He told Time magazine in 1968 that it was the first hotel he had ever seen near an airport that he would call first class.
He worked out a deal to buy it that same morning. Hyatt dates the purchase to 1957, and the price was about $2. 2 million—roughly $25 million in today’s money. A livelier version of the story has Jay sitting in the motel’s coffee shop, a place called Fat Eddie’s, waiting for a flight, overhearing that the place was for sale, scribbling a bid on a paper napkin, and sliding it across the counter.
It is a lovely story, and there is no source for it. The coffee shop was real enough, but the napkin appears nowhere in Hyatt’s own published history, nor in the prospectus the company filed in 2009, nor in Fortune’s long profile of the family from 1988. The napkin and the name Fat Eddie’s first turn up in an unsourced paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Hyatt, flagged in February 2007 as needing a citation. The story spread anyway, and grew.
By 2017, one magazine had Jay without his checkbook, and the napkin had become legally binding. If anybody in that family did deals on scraps of paper, it was Jay’s father. Abram Nicholas Pritsker, known to Chicago by his initials, was a man who always kept an envelope handy so he could jot down the terms of whatever he was offering, according to Fortune. The envelope, it seems, wandered down a generation and came out the other side as a napkin.
The Pritskers were a family of Chicago lawyers who had mostly stopped practicing law. Jay’s grandfather, Nicholas, had founded the firm at the start of the century. Jay’s younger brother Robert was out in Ohio running a factory, and the youngest, Donald, was still in law school. What the family owned, it owned mostly through trusts rather than in anybody’s own name.
So a question as plain as “who owns Hyatt” never had a plain answer. Keeping a seller’s name is ordinary enough when you buy one motel; keeping it for a whole chain and never adding your own is something else. The Pritskers did not talk about any of this if they could help it. When Fortune came to write about them three decades after the motel, Robert explained why he had agreed to talk at all: “I can live without it.
But if I don’t cooperate, I can’t squawk if you get it all wrong. ” Tom, Jay’s son, was wearier still: “When a journalist goes into a family, he creates the opportunity to generate friction that wasn’t there. ”
The family’s habit of secrecy was not an accident. It went back to the man who built the fortune, Abram Pritsker, who had started moving what he owned into trusts in the 1930s.
Taxes were a large part of the reason, and he was happy to say so: “Between me and my friends, we saved between a hundred million and $200 million in taxes. ” As the family grew richer, the trusts traveled. In 1963, the first offshore trusts were set up in the Bahamas, with a Parisian named as the settlor. A second set, in Nassau in 1971, had a Colombian as its settlor.
A Parisian and a Colombian setting up trusts for a family in Chicago—the point, as ever, was tax. By 2013, Forbes put the family’s offshore holdings at more than $3 billion, and noted that no American family could copy the arrangement anymore, because the loopholes had since been closed. Abram was born in January 1896, the second of Nicholas’s three sons. He served in the Navy in the First World War, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1920, and went into his father’s firm.
For a while, it was an ordinary law office—Arthur Goldberg, who later sat on the Supreme Court, worked there in the early 1930s. In 1936, in the middle of the Depression, Abram and his younger brother Jack walked away from the practice to invest. Chicago property could be had for very little. Abram also bought into small companies and hotels as far afield as Havana.
By 1940, the firm had stopped taking outside clients; it worked for the family. In 1942, Abram and a friend bought an appliance maker called Cory for $25,000. It made, among other things, coffee brewers. Abram was still its chairman when Hershey bought it in 1967 for $23 million—roughly 900 times the stake.
That $25,000, as it happens, is about what his heirs would say his whole estate was worth 44 years later. He was not a modest man. “A lot of people say I brag a lot,” he said once. “But what the hell?
I got a lot to brag about. ”
In 1968, Abram gave $12 million to the University of Chicago, and its medical school became the Pritzker School of Medicine. He never much liked the idea of a company owned by strangers. “We don’t believe in public business,” he said.
“We take a book loss on a building or a hotel, but how do you keep the shareholders fully informed of what you are doing? You can kill a deal revealing information. ” At ninety, he still would not stop. “My sons think I should retire because I’m 90,” he told a reporter.
“But I like to work. I don’t like to sit around on my can. ”
He died on the 8th of February 1986 at Michael Reese Hospital. By then, there were 140 Hyatt hotels.
His heirs told the Internal Revenue Service that he had left about $25,000. Two years later, Fortune put the family’s wealth at $3. 5 billion at the very least. The tax service did not believe the $25,000 either, and said the estate owed $53 million.
The argument lasted eight years. In 1994, it was settled for $9. 5 million plus interest, and Jay paid it. As part of the deal, the tax service agreed not to raise trust questions about the family’s oldest offshore trusts again.
The money had not been tucked away where the government could not see it; it had been placed somewhere else decades earlier, into trusts, and a trust is not a person. An unnamed adviser to the family put it to Forbes in 2003: “The goal in the family was to die broke. ” Abram came very close. Jay had been thinking about heirs for years.
“If we’re going to have a problem,” he told Fortune in 1988, “it’s probably going to be a generation down. ” On the 5th of June 1995, he gathered the family at his son Tom’s home in Chicago. By later accounts, the guests were Jay and his wife Cindy, their four children, Robert, a cousin from another branch of the family called Nick, and six nieces and nephews, mostly in their thirties and forties. Spouses were not invited.
Neither were Robert’s two youngest children, who were still minors. Leisel was eleven, and Matthew was thirteen. Jay and Robert had signed a letter for the occasion. Its first line said they were writing “to clarify some of the confusion that may exist about the family wealth and family trusts.
” The trusts would meet everybody’s reasonable needs, it went on, and they were meant to last until the end of their perpetuities periods—lawyers’ language for as long as the law allows, in practice generations. Then came the line that mattered: “The trusts were not intended for and should not be viewed as a source of individual wealth. ”
The letter also settled who would control the money. Tom, Jay’s eldest son, would lead, and he would be trustee of most of the trusts.
Nick and Donald’s daughter, Penny, would stand beside him. Jay died on the 23rd of January 1999 at seventy-six. It is hard to run a family by letter once the man at the head of the table is gone. In 2001, less than three years later, the cousins agreed to take the whole empire apart over about ten years.
It would be divided into eleven shares. The whole was reckoned at around $15 billion, a little over a billion a share on paper. Hyatt alone had around 200 hotels by then, and three of the cousins would run whatever was kept while the rest was sold. Robert Pritsker had five children, in two batches a generation apart.
The first three were born to his first wife, Audrey Gilbert. The eldest, Jennifer, was born in 1950, and then came Linda and Karen. That marriage ended in 1979. The following year, Robert married an Australian, Irene Dryberg, whom he had met, Forbes reported later, while she was working for a Hyatt hotel in Australia.
Matthew was born in 1982. Leisel followed in March of 1984, when her father was fifty-seven and her half-sister Karen was already in her twenties. Irene filed for divorce in 1989. The children were at the center of a hard fight, and Irene came out of it with primary custody.
Robert later married a third time. Leisel was spotted at nine in a local production of To Kill a Mockingbird. At eleven, she was in theaters all over the country as Sarah Crewe in Alfonso Cuarón’s film of A Little Princess. Sarah is a rich girl at a New York boarding school who is told that her father has been killed in the war and that his money is gone.
The film was nominated for two Academy Awards. Two years later, she played the president’s daughter in Air Force One. “Leisel is just so real,” said Harrison Ford, who played her father. “It’s like a breath of fresh air.
” She worked as Leisel Matthews, and she went to high school at New Trier in the suburbs north of Chicago. While she was making films, the grown-ups were making rules. Leisel’s complaint alleged that in the mid-1990s, about a billion dollars had been drained from her trusts. At one point, her stake in the company that owned Hyatt had gone to the family’s charitable foundation.
In September of 1996, assets in her trusts and her brother’s were bought by trusts belonging to their cousins. The price was $150 million; $30 million of it was cash, and the rest came as promissory notes at 7½ percent. A promissory note is a written promise to pay later. The people doing the promising were the relatives she was now suing.
Robert’s lawyer said the actions with respect to her trusts were “entirely proper. ” That winter, her lawyers asked the court to freeze the assets of the family foundation. In their answer, the defendants wrote a sentence that stayed with the reporters who read it: “All of the transactions at issue were authorized by the terms of the relevant trust agreements. They were made in accordance with well-established family policies dating back to 1955.
The aim was to manage the family wealth and to maintain equity among cohorts of beneficiaries of similar age. ”
Cohorts of beneficiaries of similar age. In plain English: heirs of about the same age get treated about the same. When that policy began, Robert was a young man of twenty-nine.
Leisel would not be born for almost three decades. Among Abram Pritzker’s grandchildren, the next youngest after these two had been born in 1965. Matthew came seventeen years later. Leisel came two years after him.
There was no cohort for them to belong to. Nobody likely wrote that rule with those two in mind, but a rule that sorts children by age works well in a family that has its children at about the same time, and badly in one that does not. The family pointed out that her trusts were still worth about $160 million. That is a great deal of money, but it was not an answer to the question she had asked.
Some relatives let it be known that they thought she was reliving her mother’s divorce. She had a reply ready: “My mother has nothing to gain from this but gray hair and wrinkles. ” Her father, in his late seventies, living with Parkinson’s disease, said, “I love Matt and Leisel. I’m deeply hurt by their lawsuits.
I have done nothing wrong. ” Matthew, who was twenty, hired Dan Webb, a former United States attorney in Chicago, and on the 29th of April 2003 filed a suit of his own. His papers described one sale from his trust around the same time: slices of an office building, a farm, a cement business, and a lumber company went for about $4 million, with 5 percent paid in cash. He also claimed money had been moved out of his trust at least fifty times for nothing, or for less than it was worth.
“The suit is not how I want to define myself,” Leisel said that year. Nine of her cousins put out a statement: “We do not agree with her assertions. [We remain] united in hoping for a fair resolution. ” Robert did not sign it.
The first Pritzker to come to America spent more than sixty hours of his childhood hiding in an attic. His name was Nicholas. He was born in July of 1871 in Podil, the old lower town of Kiev, down on the flats beside the river Dnieper. His father’s family came from a village south of the city called Veliki Pritsky, which is where the name comes from.
In March of 1881, revolutionaries killed Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg. Within weeks, mobs were attacking Jewish homes and shops across the south of the empire, and that spring the riots reached Kiev. By the family’s account, Nicholas, who was not yet ten, hid in that attic for more than sixty hours.
When he came down, the family’s grain store had been wrecked. There was a second reason to go. The year before, his older brother Abram had been arrested for having pamphlets the censors had not approved. They left the same year.
Nicholas went first with his father west to Brody, a border town in Austrian Galicia where refugees from the riots were arriving by the thousands. Then came a ship, and twenty-one days in steerage. In late October they landed at Castle Garden, the immigrant depot at the tip of Manhattan—Ellis Island was still ten years off. They slept on the floor there for five nights.
Somebody sent them on to Clinton, Iowa, a sawmill town on the Mississippi. There was one Jewish family there already, and it told them plainly that there was nothing for them. So in November of 1881 they came to Chicago. His mother and sisters followed the next summer, and the whole family lived in a basement.
Nicholas was ten. He shined shoes and sold newspapers while his father went door-to-door with matches and shoelaces. The family’s own history says he taught himself English from the papers he was selling, with two dictionaries—one from English to German and the other from German to Russian. In his memoir, written when he was seventy, he remembered sleeping on the coldest nights in the LaSalle Street Tunnel under the Chicago River, packing newspapers around his chest and legs to keep warm.
The paper stuck to the raw skin on his shins. He blamed those winters for the trouble that nearly cost him his left leg more than fifty years later. He carried telegrams for Western Union. At fourteen, he was an errand boy at the Union Stockyards for $3 a week.
He clerked in drugstores and went to the Chicago College of Pharmacy. One job took him to Des Moines, where Iowa had banned the sale of liquor and some drugstores sold it anyway as medicine. His employer wanted him to sign affidavits swearing that the alcohol was only for medicinal use. He refused, he wrote, and lost the job.
He was just as frank about his failures. Drugstores of his went under. In the 1890s, a silk-trimming business of his collapsed, and in the memoir he admits moving its assets to somebody else so the creditors could not reach them. A lawyer would call that a fraudulent conveyance.
He became a lawyer a few years later, starting evening classes at the Illinois College of Law on the 1st of November 1900, at twenty-nine. On the 5th of June 1902, he opened his own practice. Ninety-three years later to the day, his grandson Jay would sit the family down in Tom’s house to explain the trusts. In his first full year of practice, Nicholas made $3,800.
When his sons joined him, the firm became Pritzker and Pritzker, and the money started going into buildings. In a single purchase in 1924, the family bought eighteen apartment buildings. By the spring of 1917, he had an office in the First National Bank building. In 1934, he traveled to Berlin and came home convinced he was watching the old story again: a few people being made scapegoats for everybody else’s troubles.
He had been nine the last time. He called his memoir Three Score After Ten, the old way of saying seventy. Nicholas Pritzker died in 1957, the year his grandson bought the motel beside the Los Angeles airport. In 1954, Warren Buffett was twenty-four and working in New York for Benjamin Graham’s firm, Graham-Newman.
A Brooklyn chocolate company called Rockwood had a problem most businesses would love to have. Its cocoa beans sat on the books at the old price of five cents a pound, and cocoa had shot past sixty. If it sold the beans, close to half the profit would go in tax. The way out was a clause in the new tax code of 1954.
Rockwood would close one of its businesses and hand the surplus beans to its shareholders instead of selling them. It offered 80 pounds of cocoa beans for every share. The beans were worth more than the shares were selling for, so Buffett spent several weeks buying Rockwood stock, swapping it for warehouse receipts, and selling the beans. “The profits were good,” he wrote years later, and his only expense was subway tokens.
The man behind the scheme, Buffett added, was “an unknown but brilliant Chicagoan, Jay Pritzker,” then thirty-two. The two of them met that year at a Rockwood shareholders meeting. “Unknown” was right, and the family preferred it that way. Jay had finished high school at fourteen and gone to Northwestern.
In the Second World War, he was a flight instructor for the Navy, and he finished law school in 1947. He had one advantage and he knew exactly what it was: “Because of dad, I could get anything from the bank, even if the request was unreasonable. ” In 1953, the brothers bought the Coulson Company of Elyria, Ohio. It made casters, bicycles, and wheelchairs, and, a bit improbably, parts for Navy rockets.
The bank lent them about 95 percent of the price. Robert moved to Elyria to run it. He had taken his degree in industrial engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology at nineteen, and he was the family’s only engineer. The bicycles went first, then statistical quality control came to the rocket work, and the caster plant moved to Arkansas.
He liked to describe a business as a building where materials and people came in two doors and something of value went out the third. His friend Bob Galvin, who ran Motorola, said Robert wanted to make things, not just money. That became the pattern for half a century. Jay found things to buy and Robert made them work.
Jay insisted they were not in the business of wrecking what they bought: “Our philosophy is that we don’t buy companies to strip them of their assets. The key to us is the people who run them. ” In 1963, they bought Marmon-Harrington, an Indianapolis maker of trucks and military vehicles. The Marmon family’s name had been on the car that won the first Indianapolis 500 back in 1911.
The next year, the whole collection took the name as the Marmon Group. Robert ran it for almost fifty years and retired in 2002 at seventy-five. By 2007, Marmon was 125 businesses with about $7 billion a year in sales. Jay’s speed did not always land gently on the other side of the table.
In September of 1980, the chief executive of TransUnion, a Chicago company that leased railroad cars, came to Jay about a buyout. TransUnion also owned a credit bureau, one of the three big ones whose files lenders check before most Americans get a mortgage or a car loan. Jay offered $55 a share and wanted an answer by Sunday evening. The board met on the Saturday.
The meeting lasted about two hours. The directors said yes. Shareholders sued them. In 1985, the Delaware Supreme Court found the directors grossly negligent for approving the sale upon two hours’ consideration without prior notice.
The case is Smith v. Van Gorkom, and law students still read it. Jay was not the one the court was criticizing. He was only the man who wanted an answer by Sunday.
The family kept that credit bureau for three decades. Jay had rules for his own family too. “No one in the family has a right to anything until he has made a contribution,” he told Fortune. “Doing something and doing it well.
” Then he gave an example: “He can be a Yugoslavian poetry professor, but he had better be a good one. ”
Donald Pritzker, the youngest of Abram’s three sons, had gone out to California after law school to run the family’s hotels. His children remember a man who filled a room. His daughter Penny called him the consummate host and said he taught them to treat every person with respect, whether they were a bellman, a corporate titan, or the president.
Her brother Tony said he would walk into a room and light up the room. Their youngest brother, now the governor of Illinois, remembered it more simply for the Financial Times: “I grew up watching my mom and dad selling rooms in our motel. ”
In Atlanta, meanwhile, the architect John Portman had a problem. He was that unusual thing, an architect who was also his own developer.
He had designed a downtown hotel with a lobby more than twenty floors high, open all the way to the roof, with the rooms stacked around it on open galleries. He did not want his elevators hidden in a shaft. He wanted the elevator, he said, to be “a kinetic sculpture in the space, so people could watch this thing go up and down. ” The big chains were not interested.
Portman remembered taking Conrad Hilton to lunch at the top of the mart across Peachtree Street so that Hilton could look down on the construction. Over lunch, Hilton gave his verdict: “That concrete monster will never fly. ”
The original financing fell through with the building unfinished, and the Pritzkers stepped in. Abram said later that they had ended up with a world-beater in that hotel.
“The people who sold it lost a profit of at least $6, 7, 8 million,” he said, “because every hotel we have, we owe to that one. ” It opened in May of 1967 as the Regency Hyatt House: 800 rooms at a cost of $18 million. Glass elevator cars rose through that open lobby and out through the roof to a revolving restaurant under a blue dome called Polaris. A writer for the New York Times compared the ride to an astronaut going up the gantry at Cape Canaveral.
Portman had bet $1,000 against a cup of coffee that the place would be more than 90 percent full within three months. It was at 94. 6. Before long, the name was turned around, and the Hyatt Regency was a brand.
Two years after Atlanta, Hyatt opened its first hotel abroad in Hong Kong. Within twenty years, it had more than two dozen hotels built around atriums. Donald did not see most of that. He died of a heart attack in Honolulu on the 6th of May 1972 while playing tennis.
He was thirty-nine. Penny was barely a teenager, and her youngest brother was seven. Jay put his wife Cindy’s brother, Hugo Friend, in charge of the hotels. In 1977, it came out that the younger Hugo had used more than $300,000 of company money for personal expenses.
Jay demoted him, took the job himself, and moved the headquarters to Chicago. The next year, somebody came to the family with an idea for honoring living architects. Tom Pritzker later explained why they said yes. Of the atrium, he said, “It was immediately apparent that this design had a pronounced effect on the mood of our guests and attitude of our employees.
” In 1979, Jay took Hyatt private again, and he and Cindy founded the Pritzker Architecture Prize through the Hyatt Foundation. The first jury included Kenneth Clark, the art historian who had made the television series Civilization. The first winner was Philip Johnson, who received $100,000 and a sculpture by Henry Moore at a ceremony at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington. “Up until tonight,” Johnson told the room, “we artists have felt we were second-class participants in society.
” The prize was modeled on the Nobel. Since 1987, the winners have received a bronze medal based on designs by the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan. On the back are three words taken from the Roman writer Vitruvius: firmness, commodity, and delight. The hotels carried a stranger’s first name.
The prize carried theirs. Kansas City’s Hyatt Regency was built on the Atlanta idea: a huge lobby open to the roof, with walkways hung across it in midair. It opened on the 1st of July 1980. The building belonged to Crown Center Redevelopment, a company owned by Hallmark Cards, whose headquarters stood next door.
Hyatt managed it. Three walkways crossed the lobby on the second, third, and fourth floors. The ones on the second and fourth hung one above the other from steel rods fixed to the ceiling. On Friday evenings that following summer, the hotel held a tea dance in the lobby.
On the 17th of July 1981, the place was crowded. People danced on the floor, and others watched from the walkways. The investigators later reckoned that as many as 63 people may have been standing on the two stacked walkways. At about 7:05, the fourth-floor walkway gave way.
It dropped onto the second-floor walkway directly below. Both came down onto the people underneath. The third-floor walkway, which hung off to one side, stayed where it was. 114 people died.
More than 180 were injured. Most of them had come to dance, or to watch other people dance. What matters for the story is how small the cause was. Three days later, Senator Thomas Eagleton’s office called the National Bureau of Standards, and the bureau’s engineers were in the hotel the next day.
The mayor formally asked them to find the probable cause. Their report came out the following May. “In terms of loss of life and injuries,” they wrote, “this was the most devastating structural collapse ever to take place in the United States. ”
The original design hung both walkways from a single set of long rods running from the ceiling through the fourth-floor walkway and on down to the second.
During fabrication, that changed. The rods were split into two sets. One set held the fourth-floor walkway up from the ceiling, and the other hung the second-floor walkway from the fourth. It sounds like a small drafting decision, but it meant the connections on the upper walkway were now carrying both walkways instead of one.
The investigators found that those connections failed under a load less than a third of what a connection built to the Kansas City code should have withstood. Even the original design, they said, would only have reached about 60 percent. In 1985, a Missouri hearing officer found the two engineers of record, Jack Gillum and Daniel Duncan, grossly negligent. The decision ran to 442 pages, and they lost their licenses the next year.
A grand jury considered criminal charges and brought none. Engineering schools still teach the case. The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Times won the Pulitzer Prize that following spring for their coverage of the disaster and for identifying its causes. Hyatt was named in the lawsuits along with everybody else.
Hallmark’s company agreed to pay the victims’ compensatory damages and to set up a separate fund besides; Hallmark gave more than $6 million to local charities. The federal judge who approved the class settlement called it “most innovative and unprecedented. ” There was even a payment for people who had simply been there: 1,592 people who had been in that lobby were each granted a $1,000 claim. That number tells you how full the room was.
Hyatt did not draw the walkways and it did not own the building, but its name was over the door, and the disaster has carried that name ever since. Hyatt went on running the hotel for thirty more years, until it became a Sheraton in December of 2011. A memorial was dedicated nearby in November of 2015, thirty-four years after the tea dance. Leisel Pritzker spent the first spring of her lawsuit on a Broadway stage.
The play was Vincent in Brixton, about the young Vincent van Gogh lodging with a family in London, and she played his sister Anna. It closed in early May of 2003. In Chicago, the lawyers spent more than a year arguing over whether the case could go forward at all. On the 5th of March 2004, Judge Patrick McGann ruled.
He dismissed the complaint, but he gave the brother and sister 28 days to file a new one, and let them start demanding documents. Their lawyers could now go through the family’s own papers and question the people who had signed them. And he wrote one sentence that mattered more than the dismissal: “The allegations make out a claim for breach of the trustee defendants’ duty of loyalty. ” The duty of loyalty is the heart of what a trustee owes.
You run the trust for the people it is meant for, and for nobody else. One wire story that weekend went out under a headline saying the siblings had lost. Their lawyer read it differently. “They clearly put their best effort into getting our case thrown out, and it didn’t work,” Rainol said.
“So what are their options? Fight with us or settle? ” He and Dan Webb said they looked forward to hearing why their clients’ trusts were emptied while everyone else’s trust accounts continued to grow beyond all bounds. From then on, the case ran against three men: Robert, Tom, and Marshall Eisenberg.
The cousins’ trusts could still be made to hand assets back, but the cousins themselves were out of it. That is a strange position for a family. Your cousins are no longer defendants, but their money is. In the first week of January 2005, the family settled.
The terms were never officially announced. The figures reported at the time gave each of the two about $280 million in new cash. That was on top of trusts worth around $170 million each, which they already had—roughly $900 million between them, and less than half of what they had said was taken. By then, Leisel was twenty, Matthew twenty-two, and their father seventy-eight.
Robert’s statement said he was “extremely pleased” that the claims brought by his children had been resolved. In the very next breath, it said the allegations were “completely untrue” and that he had acted “appropriately and with integrity” as their trustee. He probably meant both. Four weeks later, a new play called Brooklyn Boy opened on Broadway.
Leisel was in the company as an understudy. It is the last Broadway credit she has. “It was when I inherited,” she told Worth magazine years later, “that the acting stopped. ” She was not sure it was the highest and best use of her time.
For the rest of the family, the settlement cleared the road. The New York Times headline said the accord enabled the breakup of the Pritzker dynasty. Tom ran that breakup, and he never pretended it was pleasant: “Presiding over the dissolution was painful,” he told the Financial Times. “In most things, it is possible to make a course correction, but this was a decision that was irreversible.
” In the last days of 2004, the family’s hotel interests were pulled together into one company. It became Hyatt Hotels. In 2006, the family sold Conwood to Reynolds American for $3. 5 billion.
That same year, Mark Hoplamazian, who was not a Pritzker, became Hyatt’s chief executive. On Christmas Day 2007, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy 60 percent of the Marmon Group for $4. 5 billion. Virtually all the rest would follow within six years.
Buffett called it the largest cash purchase in Berkshire’s history. The man behind the cocoa beans had been dead for almost nine years. Buffett wrote that the deal was done in the way Jay would have liked—with a price taken from Marmon’s own financial statements, no advisers, and no nit-picking—then a line Jay would have enjoyed: “With the Pritzkers, as with Berkshire, a deal is a deal. ”
In November of 2009, Hyatt’s shares began trading under the single letter H.
By the end of 2011, the division itself was essentially done. The Chicago Tribune put the total at around $19 billion, rather more than the $15 billion first reckoned. Robert did not live to see it finished. He died on the 27th of October 2011 in a nursing facility in Chicago at eighty-five; the cause was Parkinson’s disease.
He had given $60 million to his old college, the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he had studied as a teenager. A professor there remembered him as “very down-to-earth, a man who lived rather simply. ” His obituaries listed his wife Mayari and all five of his children. Matthew and Leisel were on that list with the others.
Robert’s eldest, Jennifer, had served for more than twenty years in the Army and the Illinois National Guard and retired as a lieutenant colonel. In August of 2013, she sent a memo to the staff of her investment firm: until then she had been known as James; from the 16th of August, she would be known as Jennifer Natalyia Pritzker. In 2003, she had built a library around eight and a half thousand books and a couple of hundred posters from the Second World War. It grew into the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Her cousin put the name on a ballot. He is Donald’s youngest son, the boy who was seven when his father died on that tennis court in Honolulu, and Illinois knows him by his initials. At twelve, with his mother ill, he went to live with Jay and Cindy. From 2002, he ran an investment firm with his brother Tony, buying family businesses, sometimes against Berkshire Hathaway.
“We have to try harder than Warren Buffett,” he said in 2018. That year, he ran for governor against the Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner and put $171. 5 million of his own money into it. At the time, that was a national record for a candidate paying his own way.
He won by almost sixteen points. In 2022, he beat Darren Bailey by more than twelve. He has his own summary of how he was raised: “Our parents taught us that we were entitled to nothing, but that we were the luckiest people alive. ”
Leisel went traveling, and the jobs she took were small ones.
She taught yoga in Dharamshala in India to people recovering from heroin addiction, and did data entry in a microfinance office in Tanzania. In 2008, she gave her mother $50 million to start a foundation which now helps small, low-cost private schools in Ghana. That is the same mother some relatives once blamed for the lawsuit. In 2012, Leisel and her husband Ian Simmons founded Blue Haven Initiative, a family office that invests for social good as well as a return.
A year later, she put her view of the money to Forbes: “I didn’t earn this money, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to screw it up. ”
On the 16th of February 2026, Hyatt announced that Tom Pritzker was retiring as executive chairman, effective immediately, and would not stand for the board again. The filing said his decision was not the result of any disagreement. In the announcement, Tom repeated a line from his letter to the board: “It has been both an honor and one of the great experiences of my life to have contributed to Hyatt’s growth.
” Neither document mentioned Jeffrey Epstein. Three months earlier, a House committee had released some 20,000 pages of Epstein’s papers. They included at least twenty friendly exchanges with Tom Pritzker between 2010 and February of 2019. In the last one, Tom wrote, “You are news.
I am quiet. ” Epstein was arrested that July. No criminal charges have been brought against Tom Pritzker. Mark Hoplamazian took the chair.
Jay had held that seat, and then Tom. This time, the name on the chairman’s door is not Pritzker. The family’s trusts still own a large part of Hyatt. The ones holding its shares are listed in the company’s filings, and most of them are not in the Bahamas anymore.
They are in South Dakota. Hyatt Von Dehn has been dead for more than fifty years. The company that carries his first name has more than 500 hotels and resorts in 83 countries, and most of the people who sleep in them have no idea it was ever somebody’s first name. The other name went everywhere except the hotels.
It is on an architecture prize and a medical school, on a band shell in Millennium Park and a military museum, and on a ballot. It is also on a court file in Cook County, opened two days before Thanksgiving by an eighteen-year-old who wanted to know what had happened to her share. Hyatt Von Dehn sold his motel in the fifties and took his money, and none of what followed was ever his problem.
