Through dozens of such acquisitions, Jay and Bob built the Marmon Group over a period of 50 years into a Chicago-based conglomerate with more than $5 billion in revenue. Bob Pritzker took over Colson and turned it into a moneymaker. The upscale airport hotel was born.Īfter Jay's mother nagged him to find a business for his younger engineer brother to run, Jay bought Colson Corp., a troubled manufacturer of wheelchairs and bicycles. He parlayed a 1957 purchase of a hotel near the Los Angeles airport into an international chain of Hyatt hotels. Jay, an attorney like his father, ran the Pritzker empire with panache.

It was a tradition that Tom intended to continue, but filling his father's shoes turned out to be no easy task. The sensitivity over the trust transfers can be better understood in the context of how the family has operated for almost a century, keeping its money together and discouraging individual displays of wealth. The transactions are laid out in a series of confidential documents. Some family members are still upset at discovering four years ago that two large Pritzker companies were placed in an offshore trust fund benefiting Tom and his immediate family. Some of these sources spoke on the condition that they not be identified. The Tribune spent months researching the transactions and interviewing individuals with intimate knowledge of the family's workings. That allowed the 11 heirs, which include Nick Pritzker, to proceed with a family agreement to divide the Pritzker empire among themselves.īut new details of several convoluted transactions involving family assets offer an unprecedented glimpse into the feud that has riven one of Chicago's most respected families, known widely for their generous philanthropy and support for civic and artistic causes. The dispute with the two Pritzkers was quietly settled in January, with Liesel and Matthew relinquishing their claim on family assets in exchange for $500 million each. Her brother, Matthew, later joined the suit. The daughter of Jay's brother Robert, Liesel Pritzker, filed a lawsuit in 2002 alleging that Tom and Bob had emptied her trust funds of nearly $1 billion. Its existence was revealed in a way Jay never would have imagined. Within two years of Jay's death in 1999, the Pritzker heirs decided to depart from his stated wishes and break up the family fortune into 11 shares worth an estimated $1.4 billion each.

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