Lawsuit Exposes Bitter Feud Between Sol Price, Son

The bitter dispute between Sol Price, one of the wealthiest men in California, and his estranged son began to unfold in a San Diego courtroom Thursday, with one man painted as a tyrannical father and the other as a petulant and ungrateful son.

“You can’t defy Sol Price. You can’t go against him,” said Los Angeles attorney Marvin Mitchelson, who represents Price’s 43-year-old son, Laurence. “If you do, you’re going to pay a price until you know your place.”

“Laurence was a problem from a very young age,” countered Gerald McMahon of San Diego, who represents Sol Price. “He was a problem in school. He had terrible trouble with authority. . . . He was really a worry for his parents.”

The airing of the family dispute comes in an unusual case in which Laurence Price is suing his father for $100 million for “emotional distress” he claims his father caused by interfering with the raising of Laurence’s sons, now 17 and 15.

Contract Canceled

Laurence Price has charged that his father, founder of the Price Club discount warehouses, threatened to and eventually did cancel his lucrative contract to operate tire-installation concessions at Price Clubs around the country because he refused to obey his father’s orders regarding the handling of his sons.

As the trial began Thursday in Superior Court, Mitchelson told the jury that Sol Price, 73, refuses to speak to his son and “won’t even shake his hand.” As a result of his father’s rejection, Mitchelson said, Laurence is “an empty shell filled with hopelessness and helplessness. . . . It’s a case of reaching out, wanting to be loved, wanting to be accepted by your family, and then being rejected over and over again.”

A psychologist will testify that Laurence is “pre-psychotic” because of his father’s actions, Mitchelson said, and that Sol Price inflicted “tremendous emotional child abuse.”

Outside the courtroom Thursday, Mitchelson, who set a precedent with the first successful “palimony” case a decade ago, said the Price litigation is a “cutting edge case” because few emotional distress cases are brought against family members.

Mitchelson said he believes Price has a net worth of $350 million to $500 million.

Mitchelson told the jury that a key event occurred in December, 1984, when Laurence Price, who was divorced, received a call from his sons, who were living with their mother. “They were extremely agitated,” Mitchelson said. “They were crying. They were upset with their mother--something about the mother drinking and her boyfriend.”

Call From Father

After two more calls, Laurence drove to their home in the Del Cerro neighborhood and took the pajama-clad children to his own home in the same neighborhood, Mitchelson said.

Several days later, Sol Price called his son and said, “Get those kids back right away or I’ll take your business from you,” Mitchelson said.

About eight months later, the board of directors of the Price Club voted to terminate Laurence Price’s lease, which contained a clause that permitted the Price Club to end the lease for any reason with 60 days’ notice. That decision was later upheld by an arbiter.

“It was terminated because Larry Price would not do what his father told him,” Mitchelson said. “That’s the kind of threat, the kind of control, Sol always used. He used it with his family, and he used it with people who disagreed with him.”

In his opening statement to the jury, McMahon related a markedly different version of events.

“Emotional distress is a two-way street,” McMahon said. “ . . . It really is a case about emotional distress, but it’s the wrong plaintiff.”

McMahon portrayed Sol Price as a self-made man whose parents died when he was 18 and who put himself through law school during the Depression of the 1930s. He has been married to his wife, Helen, for 51 years and they have another son, Robert, a Price Club executive who is several years older than Laurence.

‘Great Compassion’

In the early 1950s, Price founded the FedMart discount stores in San Diego, which he sold in the 1970s and later started the hugely successful Price Club, which has grown to 20 stores in several states.

“He’s a man of great compassion,” McMahon said. “He believes with gifts come responsibilities.”

Against his father’s wishes, Laurence, a high school dropout, married when he was about 20, McMahon said. Sol Price offered Laurence a job at Price Club in 1976, but Laurence quit and did not work at all for two years because his brother had been given a better position with the company, McMahon said.

During that time, Laurence was supported by his father, who sent him monthly checks and helped him buy a house.

In 1978, Sol Price came up with the idea of putting tire-installation centers at the Price Club warehouses, which sold tires, and offered to put Laurence in charge of the project. Laurence agreed and went back to work.

Things went well for several years, but Laurence Price’s marriage began to fail and the tire-installation business began to fall apart, leading to the termination of the lease, McMahon said.