A Dynasty of Closed Ranks

He started on the ground floor, selling homes in suburban subdivisions. Despite a shy disposition ill-suited to sales, he flourished and drew the notice of businessmen looking for young talent to help build shopping centers.

All along, the Lerners have focused on projects in their home town and refrained from taking the company public. In a 1975 letter to The Washington Post, Lerner wrote that this had to do with the "enormous personal challenge" and "feeling of accomplishment" that came from working on his own, in his own community. Real estate development, he wrote, "is one of the few remaining areas in our economy not dominated by large corporations where individual initiative can still function."

The Lerners are very private -- a mix, they say, of modesty, distrust of the media and a calculation that, until now, there hasn't been reason to spend time on publicity. They say they realize that they will need to take a more public role as team owners but express uncertainty about how to do so and still maintain control over information.

One sore spot with the family is the acrimony between Lerner and his brother, Lawrence.

In the 1960s, Theodore Lerner invited his brother, a pharmacist seven years his junior, to enter into partnership managing properties. But Lerner fired Lawrence as a company director and officer in 1983 after the older brother became concerned about his sibling's work, and Lawrence started to send mean-spirited letters to him and Mark Lerner, according to court testimony.

Since then, there have been 17 lawsuits between the siblings in which Lawrence has claimed that his brother conspired to deprive him of tens of millions of dollars from shared ventures. Theodore Lerner has spent $2 million in legal fees, according to testimony, and members of the two branches of the family have not spoken for years. The Lerners declined to comment on the dispute and cited it as their reason for granting only one interview for this article.

Theodore Lerner's attorney, Albert Brault, noted in an interview that no finding of fraud had ever been made. Cohen testified in a 1999 trial that the dispute is more a deeply-rooted personal matter than a business disagreement. He said Lawrence received $28.4 million in company distributions over a 10-year period.

"One of the points of the litigation was to embarrass Ted as much as possible because it was based in hate," Cohen testified. "It wasn't a money issue. It was vengeance and hate."

Larry Lerner's attorney, Jeremy W. Schulman, disagreed. "Larry's only goal is and has been to be treated equitably, to be given access to information to which he's entitled and to participate fairly in businesses that he has worked hard to build and grow," Schulman said.

The feud sits in stark contrast to the unity of Ted Lerner's immediate family. Many who have worked with the family say they expect that little will change as more power goes to the next generation. The family is so cohesive, Cohen said in the interview, that he hadn't even bothered to study closely the legal papers being drawn up for the eventual full handover of the company to the families of Lerner's children.

"I can't tell you exactly what those documents even say," he said.