CHICAGO Squabble splinters wealthy family

A plan to divvy up the Pritzker fortune has sparked lawsuits.
CHICAGO (AP) -- Jay Pritzker couldn't imagine that something as crude as money would ever tear apart his tight-knit billionaire family.
To be a Pritzker was to understand that the family fortune, built over the years through investments like the Hyatt hotel chain, belonged to all. Heirs were expected to accept the complicated series of trusts and philanthropic ventures that had long kept hold of the money.
"If we are going to have a problem, it's probably going to be a ne'er-do-well," Pritzker told Fortune magazine in a rare interview in 1988. "No one in the family has a right to anything until he has made a contribution doing something and doing it well."
That credo was beginning to wear thin even before Pritzker's death in 1999. And now an agreement among members of the family's fourth generation to carve up an estimated $15 billion fortune has gone sour, exposed by a 19-year-old cousin who claims she was left out of the secret deal.
A household name
Pritzker is a household name in Chicago, the city where penniless Russian immigrant Nicholas J. Pritzker made his home in 1881, raising three sons who helped build a vast family fortune.
Testaments to the family's philanthropy are everywhere. There's the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, the Pritzker Legal Research Center at Northwestern University and the Pritzker Galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The family also sponsors the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the profession's most prestigious award.
Intensely private, the Pritzkers rarely speak publicly and, until recently, made sure someone with the last name Pritzker headed their privately held businesses, including Hyatt and Marmon Group.
Lawsuit
But that privacy took a blow last November when Liesel Pritzker filed a lawsuit against her father, Robert Pritzker, and other relatives.
The 19-year-old actress, who has appeared in the films "Air Force One" and "A Little Princess," claims her father drained her trust funds of more than $1 billion in the years following his divorce from her mother, Irene Pritzker. The money ended up with other cousins and the family foundation, she says.
The lawsuit also claims the family unfairly cut Liesel and her 20-year-old brother, Matthew, out of a 2001 deal to divvy up the Pritzker empire.
That agreement, she says, promised $1.3 billion in assets and $30 million in cash to each of the 10 other surviving grandchildren and one nephew of Abram Nicholas "A.N." Pritzker, the son of Nicholas J. Pritzker credited with expanding the family fortune into the billions.
The deal includes Robert's three children from his first marriage but excluded Liesel and Matthew -- both decades younger than their cousins and half-siblings -- treating them as members of the fifth generation. Matthew filed his own lawsuit against the family, claiming his trust funds also were looted of more than $1 billion.
Both sides said they had worked for months to avoid the lawsuit.
"Unfortunately, Matthew's decision to sue virtually all of his closest Pritzker relatives has caused only more pain," Robert Pritzker said in a statement. He said his actions with the trusts were "entirely appropriate" and he still hoped to reconcile with his children.
Differences arise
Jay Pritzker was trying to avoid exactly this type of problem when he called relatives together in 1995 to chart the Pritzker future, said Mel Klein, a longtime business partner and friend.
The oldest son of A.N. Pritzker, Jay struck gold for the family in 1957, founding the Hyatt chain to cater to business travelers. He became the family's leader after his father's death in 1986.