Joe Allbritton's bank near the White House is classically bankish: a Greek temple on the outside, a marble sanctuary on the inside, with Ionic pilasters, heraldic shields, gold trim. The air smells like antique bronze and old money. You know this place, the flagship Riggs Bank. Look at the back of that $10 bill in your wallet. That view of the Treasury Building is one you can see from Riggs's granite front stoop, looking across Pennsylvania Avenue NW. It's a Riggs-centric perspective, engraved on the nation's currency, befitting Washington's most fabled bank and its storied banking family.
Turn the view around and peek back inside the temple. There is turmoil. Investigation. Mortification. A $25 million fine. Also, to make it all more complicated, the passing of a torch to a new generation. There's a feeling that the perspective could soon shift dramatically, or vanish altogether, leaving only the $10 bill as a record of how the world once looked. But for the moment, as Washington's spring thickens into summer, time seems to have slowed, paused. A dynasty and a bank and even a piece of the Washington soul stand poised between a singular past and what comes next.
Once upon a time, establishment Washington dismissed the patriarch as "the little Texan." Joe Allbritton, not much over five feet tall, was acquiring establishment icons, especially Riggs, the "bank of presidents." Over the years, 21 First Families had deposited their money there. Allbritton made it the bank of embassies, too, the bank of limousines and large withdrawals on jet-set weekends. Always it was the bank of trust funds and legacies, generational nest eggs carefully acquired, conservatively nurtured, faithfully compounded. The Riggs name was gold, and before long no one was more established than quiet, private, philanthropic, board-sitting, art-buying, horse-racing Joe Allbritton.
Meanwhile, outside his window, a growing list of homegrown icons disappeared beneath the riptides of business and fortune: Garfinckel's, Woodies, Hechinger, Peoples Drug, the Washington Star.
Not Riggs, Joe Allbritton said more than once. He would never let go of his icon.
Now the Texan is riding into the sunset, and one morning inside the temple across from the $10 tableau, a meeting is being run by his son -- the only child, the scion, custodian of the interwoven legacies of the father and the bank. He is Robert Allbritton and the meeting is the annual shareholders gathering on the last Thursday of May.
Robert Allbritton is not classically bankish. He is 35, close to six feet tall and lanky, with brown hair neither thinning nor graying. Among the wrinkled bank directors, the boyish chairman and chief executive officer looks like a college kid trapped with the trustees of his alma mater on graduation day. He is animated, informal, unafraid to lighten the mood.
"This is the part where I always say, 'The SEC made me do it,' " he cracks before reading some mandatory boilerplate from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
He speaks of the "refreshing and contemporary face" he wants to give Riggs. In style, at least, it won't be his father's bank anymore. He is dumping the embassy business. He is wooing less elite customers -- regular people -- by adding branches and extending hours.
A shareholder asks Allbritton a fundamental question: In its current turmoil, will Riggs be sold to a big out-of-town bank?
The son dodges the question -- but later the bank confirms that, yes, purchase offers will be considered.
As old as Greek theater is the theme of the son trying to forge his own identity from -- and apart from -- the legacy of his father. This son seems to think he can both honor the past and embrace the future.
Closing the meeting, Robert Allbritton tells shareholders, "Thank you for your investment in Riggs -- a Washington tradition.
"Now open on Saturdays and Sundays, too."
The Apprentice
Pressures may be piling on his slender shoulders, but Robert Allbritton appears to carry them lightly.
Federal regulators declared Riggs a "troubled institution" earlier this year, after finding Riggs failed to heed money-laundering rules requiring big transactions to be reported. Tens of millions of dollars moved in and out of accounts of foreign embassies, including Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea. Riggs was just fined a record $25 million.
"It is clear that Riggs Bank needed to act more quickly to adapt to regulatory changes that took place after September 11," Allbritton told shareholders at the meeting. "We regret that we did not. We have made changes, and we will make more."
A few mornings later, his suit coat is slung over a chair in a bank conference room. He is self-deprecating. He tells the story of his inauspicious beginning in banking a dozen years ago, when the government major from Wesleyan University was casting about after graduation.
"I didn't have a clue," he recalls. "So if you've got family businesses, you do the obvious thing. 'Okay, Dad. Put me in, coach.' "
The father put the son in the department that managed investments.
As the son remembers it, "You're kind of young, you're idealistic, and all of the sudden I'm doing analysis work on whether Philip Morris is a good buy or not. It's just kind of mentally repugnant. I didn't have anything against Philip Morris, it's just that's where you were in life. You know you're in the wrong place when you're looking up at the clock going, is it 5:30 yet? I did that for about 90 days and finally went back to Dad and said, 'I can't do this.' "
He had about $10,000 in savings, and being just out of college, he could make that last a long time.
"And so for the next two months my Dad would call me up every single morning at 6 a.m. and let the phone ring until I picked the thing up.
" 'Son?'
" 'Yeah, Dad.'
" 'What's it like to be your age and retired?' "
Robert Allbritton chortles at the memory. "Just to torture me about the whole thing!" he says with affection for the old man.
He joined another family business -- television. Allbritton Communications owns WJLA -- named with Joe's initials -- and NewsChannel 8 in Washington, plus stations in six smaller markets. For two years, Robert spent months at each station doing every job from engineering to soliciting ads to operating cameras.
His father put him in charge at 25. "I spent a full year walking into every meeting apologizing for my age," Allbritton says. Former employees say he was more engaged in operations than his father. He was especially adept at the technical side. He devised a way to add a station in Birmingham by acquiring the television towers of smaller stations outside the city and blanketing the area with a merged signal. He tried to take the long view in an overnight ratings-obsessed business, investing $20 million in high-tech facilities in Rosslyn.
"He was disarming to people, he was very low-key," says John Hillis, former president of NewsChannel 8.
"He was very personable," says Gary Wordlaw, former news director of WJLA. "This was a guy who was heir to a billion-dollar fortune or whatever they have, but he was just one of the guys in the station."
But his leadership chafed on some employees. Former WJLA anchor Paul Berry has a bittersweet memory of Robert visiting the station as a boy and asking for candy from the jar in the anchor's office. In 1999, a grown-up Allbritton sat in the office with corporate lieutenant Fred Ryan, offering Berry a contract renewal that Berry considered inadequate to the point of insulting. Rather than sign, he left WJLA after 28 years.
"I never believed Robert had the heart to do that kind of thing," says Berry. "They looked at people as just parts of an assembly line. They're interchangeable."
Without discussing particular personnel moves, Allbritton says, "Every employee of mine is important and I try to treat them all fairly and with respect. That said, decisions on personnel have to be made based on what is best for the business."
He says the first outlines of his contribution to the Allbritton legacy -- the imprint of the son -- can be detected in the improved and enlarged operations of Allbritton Communications. "It's this nice little company that keeps on chugging, that keeps on performing, that keeps on doing the right thing in the community," Allbritton says.
Joe Allbritton, during his son's years at the stations, would sometimes ask if he wanted to join the bank.
"He'd keep on coming over here and saying, you know, 'Why don't you be the senior vice president for widgets at Riggs?' " Robert Allbritton says. "And I'd keep on asking myself, 'Out of loyalty, I want to help you, but why do I want to give up running the show over here, where I'm king of my own castle, to come over and work for you?' "
But by early 2001, Robert says he was ready for a new challenge. Already a director of the bank, he attended a Riggs management retreat and sensed executives were ready for a new generation, a new style. And for the first time, over lunch in the bank dining room, Joe Allbritton said he was ready to step aside.
Was his son interested in being not merely senior vice president for widgets, but the boss?
Robert Allbritton, then 32, became chairman and chief executive officer. His father became vice chairman. Last month, his parents relinquished their positions as directors. If it seems like the fulfillment of a succession plan hatched when the son was in the cradle, it isn't, according to father and son.
"My parents said all along, 'You don't have to go into the family businesses,' " Robert says.
Joe Allbritton, 79, declined to be interviewed, but supplied written answers to questions.
"To follow in my footsteps was his decision," he says. "I was very pleased at that. He had the opportunity, but not the obligation."
But how do you follow an act like Joe Allbritton?
"Don't think about following an act," says Robert. "If you think about the size of the shoes that you're filling, you're going to drive yourself crazy. So don't do that. At the end of the day, people are going to judge you based upon your own actions anyway. If they're sitting there saying, 'Oh, yeah, that's X person's son,' that's because enough time hasn't gone by.
"Or you haven't done enough with your own life."
Coming to Washington
Joe Allbritton was a self-made millionaire by the time he was 33.
He had been born in the company hospital of a timber outfit in D'Lo, Miss., where his father ran the company store. The family migrated to Houston. College was interrupted by the Navy, then came law school and a shingle with his name outside a small office.
"The first month I made money," Joe Allbritton recalled later. "The second month I relaxed a little and lost money. I haven't relaxed since."
He began buying and selling land, took the proceeds and invested in banks, insurance, a chain of mortuaries.
"Joe was always looking three furlongs down the road," says Jack Valenti, an old Houston friend who became head of the Motion Picture Association and a director of Riggs. "Joe was always seeing clearly in this veiled thing we call the future."
He had a courtly Southern manner and would spin byzantine tales with friends into the night.
"He could charm the rattles off the back end of a rattlesnake," says Gibson Gayle, a friend and Houston lawyer.
A bachelor until his early forties, he married Barbara Balfanz, 13 years his junior, daughter of a Houston pharmacist. Their son was born in 1969.
"His greatest pride is in his son," says Tom Johnson, a close friend and former chairman of CNN. "From the day of Robert's birth he has worked to convey his wisdom and judgment and training."
"I grew up where any time my dad was talking business, as far back as I can remember, he would say, 'Come on in, listen to this, you might pick up something,' " Robert says. "So all these old business stories, I kind of felt I was a witness to them from the very earliest age."
Soon came a dramatic fork in the family's forward march. Mr. Allbritton went to Washington.
His decision to buy the Washington Star in 1974 was mysterious. Why at midlife suddenly plunge into an unfamiliar social and political scene clear across the country, and spend $35 million for a business with which he had no experience?
Allbritton says his reasons were simple: "The opportunity to buy the Star came to me around the time I was selling my interest in First International Bancshares, the largest bank holding company in Texas. I was ready for a change and our analysis indicated we could continue a family newspaper with a great tradition by bringing new energy to it."
But many couldn't help noticing that he unloaded the paper four years later to Time Inc. (which closed it after three more years), but held on to the television stations that came with it. Now, counting a few additions in smaller markets, the stations' estimated value of $1.2 billion seems like a stunning return. It has enhanced the legend of Allbritton, the business seer. Was the Star merely an ink-stained appendage to a golden television goose?
"You have to remember that at that stage, television stations were not terribly profitable," Allbritton says. "I reasoned at the time that profitability in television was going to rise -- and it developed that way."
Those who know him say the romance of being a newspaper publisher in the nation's capital was a potent lure. It also gave him entree to Washington's nexus of power and high society.
Owned for more than a century by the Noyes, Kauffmann and Adams families, the paper was losing $1 million a month. Star employees were thrilled at the prospect of new energy and deep pockets. At one point, when Allbritton's purchase negotiations appeared to falter, the late Mary McGrory, a celebrated Star columnist, sent him a note:
"Say it ain't so, Joe."
Allbritton replied with three dozen yellow roses: "It ain't so. Joe."
"The difference between the Allbritton and the Noyes-Kauffmann style was pretty palpable," says former Star reporter Duncan Spencer. "It was old-school-tie boys and horses and Princeton versus the little Texan." He "crashed into town like a tiny thunderbolt."
"One thing the little cowboy did do," Spencer adds, "is he brought a new fresh spirit. He didn't come to be a loser."
But it became clear that Allbritton didn't understand the folkways of newspapers.
President Gerald Ford invited Joe and Barbara to watch the bicentennial July 4 fireworks from the Truman balcony of the White House. Soon afterward, Allbritton ordered space reserved on the front page for an editorial endorsing Ford in the primary campaign against Ronald Reagan. He supplied the editorial himself.
His editors realized this was wrong in so many ways they hardly knew where to begin. Finally editorial page editor Ed Yoder suggested to Allbritton that a front-page editorial during a primary was akin to lending half the capital of your bank to an unreliable borrower.
"Now you're talking my language," Allbritton told Yoder.
A revised editorial backing Ford ran on the editorial page.
"Joe is a maverick politically and otherwise," Yoder says. "He answers to no stereotype. There's a big streak, I think, of the small-town Mississippian in Joe."
A kind of yearning infuses many recollections of Allbritton in the Star years. When former top editor Jim Bellows interviewed McGrory for his 2002 memoir, "The Last Editor," she offered a telling sketch of the owner:
"I would watch him come into the newsroom and see all these losers in their unpressed suits, and they were all having such a good time!" McGrory said. "When you take banking and mortuaries, that is not the place where people have a very good time. But here he was at a place where all these people were working for a declining paper, not getting much money, and reveling in it. I always felt that was what Joe was looking for -- to be accepted in this absolutely weird world, where people didn't wear good suits and plainly weren't going anywhere. . . . And he could see they had something he didn't have."
Allbritton restored the Star to a slight operating profit but could not reverse gloomy trends in circulation and advertising. After failing to get a government waiver to own a TV station in the same city, he sold the paper -- but not the broadcast properties -- to Time for $20 million.
"Joe Allbritton loved the Washington Star," says Dean Singleton, one of Allbritton's former lieutenants who now runs a newspaper chain that includes the Denver Post. "For the first year after selling the Star, he was almost in grief over it."
High-Flying Banker
Allbritton's money was decidedly less welcome at aristocratic Riggs than it had been at the desperate Star.
When Allbritton bid $70 million for 40 percent of the stock in 1981, some on the board of directors viewed it as a hostile takeover. Director Mandell Ourisman expressed the fear of establishment Washington: "Since he bought the Star and then turned around and sold it at a large profit, the first concern would be that the same thing would happen to Riggs."
But Allbritton did not want to defy the old-line Washington tradition represented by Riggs, at the time the region's largest bank. He wanted to be part of it. Since its founding in 1836, Riggs's place in history included financing the Mexican War and the purchase of Alaska.
Allbritton maintained the bank's cultured profile and specialty of catering to wealthy clients, and he launched what would become the signature advertising slogan: "The most important bank in the most important city in the world."
"One thing he prided himself always in was his relation with foreign embassies and foreign governments," says Calvin Cafritz, chairman of the Cafritz Foundation, who was on the Riggs board for a while. "That was business he fostered himself. He flew all around the world in the Gulfstream, meeting with heads of state. He would tell people at the [board] meetings about meeting with such and such a leader in such and such a country."
Allbritton also cultivated connections to elite circles in business, media and politics he had established as publisher of the Star. He became active in the Alfalfa Club, which holds an annual dinner for the Washington aristocracy. He is typically seated at the best table, the one closest to the president of the United States. The day after the dinner, Allbritton and his wife, Barbara, host a tented brunch including Texas chili at their home on Foxhall Road.
Guests say they have admired paintings by Monet, Mary Cassatt and others hanging in the home. A Toulouse-Lautrec used to adorn his Riggs office. ("Why do I like the impressionist period?" asks Allbritton. "It is just the best period of art that the world has seen.") He paid a reported record $5.72 million for a Matisse in 1988 and $17 million for a van Gogh in 2000.
He bought a horse farm in Upperville, where he breeds and raises descendants of equine celebrities like Secretariat and Seattle Slew. Allbritton's Hansel won the Preakness and Belmont Stakes in 1991.
He has been active on the boards of the Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan presidential libraries (never mind that Gerald Ford editorial). He donated the portrait of Reagan that hangs in the White House. Former president George H.W. Bush has attended Allbritton's post-Alfalfa brunch. When George W. Bush's inaugural parade passed the Riggs branch on Pennsylvania Avenue, he spotted Allbritton and said, "Hey Joe, how are you doing?"
But Allbritton has never sought to enhance his public profile. He rarely publicizes his extensive philanthropy, which can be gauged only by checking publicly available IRS documents. He has endowed a $9 million art institute and his foundations give more than $1 million a year to an eclectic list of recipients, including churches, hospitals and schools. "I do not think of myself as shy," he says. "However, I think the things I've done . . . can speak for themselves."
His role at the bank was inevitably more public. Bank analysts think he missed opportunities. In 1985, interstate banking became legal, and large out-of-town banks invaded the city and suburbs, grabbing customers and gobbling up smaller banks. Riggs slipped to the fifth- or sixth-largest bank in the region.
"We still shake our heads and say, 'Boy, what could have been done with that franchise?' " says Rockville-based bank consultant Arnold Danielson. "They thought getting on airplanes and flying to England was what it was all about, and they didn't recognize that Fairfax County and Montgomery County were where it's at."
Joe Allbritton answers the analysts this way: "Having had experience in expanding bank holdings in Texas, I did not find it attractive to try to be the biggest bank in several states. That was not my motivation."
The recent regulatory scandal -- a blow to Riggs's golden reputation -- has been painful to the family.
"They've just been devoting 24-7 trying to clear that up and nothing has been enough," says Charles Hall, a Houston friend and lawyer of Joe Allbritton's. "He wants to support his son. It's causing him great pain, what's going on. . . . And that his son is sitting there in the middle of it."
Sale: A Four-Letter Word
Robert Allbritton purposely chose an office on the other side of the corporate suite from his father. It has a minimalist decor, with a curving glass-topped desk. No French impressionists here. A couple of modernist posters were chosen to fit the color scheme, he says.
He just celebrated his first wedding anniversary. (Two months before the wedding he had a serious skiing accident. "You want to have an interesting experience, call the fiance. 'Hi, honey. I'm out here with the guys skiing. They just hauled me off the mountain, and I think I might have broken my neck.' ") He and his wife, Elena, a resident in dermatology at Washington Hospital Center, were married in a chapel of the Washington National Cathedral. He recently chaired the American Heart Association's fundraising gala. He serves on the dinner committee of the Alfalfa Club.
Allbritton says he and his father have different styles as chief executives. He calls his own approach "more team basis. Less lone-warrior basis." He admits his knowledge of banking may not be as deep as his father's, but he says he knows what he doesn't know and can delegate.
He just launched an advertising campaign touting "the new Riggs." The new Riggs revolves around your needs, not the other way around, according to the ad copy.
"That's the nonbanker speaking, honestly," Allbritton says. "Every other business that deals with the public offers an infinitely higher level of convenience than banks as an industry do."
To make the bank more convenient, Allbritton is adding 30 branches. He is keeping many branches open seven days a week, extending hours to 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The father has supported most of the changes, says the son. But some moves the son has had to present gingerly to the patriarch, such as getting out of most embassy and international banking -- the very areas Joe Allbritton personally promoted.
The Riggs Gulfstream jet -- aboard which Joe Allbritton used to travel the globe -- is now for sale.
Analysts have generally applauded the innovations. In addition to pulling out of embassy and international banking, Robert Allbritton's response to the regulatory scandal has included overhauling technology to make compliance easier and hiring senior executives with regulatory expertise. Some officers have been fired, including a diplomatic account manager. No top executives have been charged with crimes.
The new Riggs has something in common with the old Riggs, according to the ads. It is "a strong, independent bank that's served the Washington area for over 165 years."
Maybe not for long. Now that the heretical word "sale" is in the air.
Joe Allbritton still controls about 41 percent of the Riggs stock -- worth about $270 million -- and has an effective veto over any sale. The son won't say much about the possibility of selling his father's bank.
"You've got to do the right thing," he says. "That's a very complex equation and it's very difficult to determine exactly what the right thing is."
The former television executive still tries to look beyond the overnight ratings.
"You're going to be judged by your actions, not necessarily immediately but over the longer term. In 100 years we're all going to be dead. We're going to have something carved on the tombstone and the only thing that's going to be left are the memories that people have of what we did. . . . You want to be fairly well remembered at the end of the day. That does not necessarily mean being the biggest either. I think some of the people who are best remembered are those who weren't necessarily the biggest."
