Sol Price Tells Jury His Son Is Spoiled and He Takes Blame

Sol Price testified Thursday that he believes that his younger son Larry is “spoiled” and that he bears the blame for his son’s behavior.

“I think Larry feels that the world owes him a living,” Price, 73, said of his 43-year-old son. “He certainly is a person who wants a lot of benefits and no burdens. I think he’s spoiled.”

Sol Price, the multimillionaire businessman who founded the Price Club discount warehouses, is being sued by Laurence for $100 million for emotional distress Laurence claims his father inflicted by interfering with the raising of Laurence’s sons.

In particular, Laurence alleges that his father took away his lucrative tire installation business connected with the Price Club because Laurence refused to accede to his father’s demand to return his (Laurence’s) children to their mother, who won custody is a divorce settlement.

Sol Price has denied that allegation and testified Thursday that the board of directors of the Price Co., which owns the Price Clubs, voted unanimously to terminate Laurence’s lease with the company because he was difficult to get along with and mismanaged the business.

‘Always a Confrontation’

Sol Price had set Laurence up in the business in 1978 after he spent two years unemployed because he refused to work for his elder brother, Robert, who was the president of the Price Club.

“Every time somebody in the Price Club wanted to meet with Larry, it was always a confrontation,” Sol Price said. “There’s no place Larry would have gone except to the sky if he had wanted to. . . . He missed a lot of opportunities in his life.”

Instead, he said, his son alienated people and could not deal with authority.

Robert Price also took the witness stand Thursday and told the jury that he, too, is estranged from his brother, whom he described as “unpredictable” and virtually unapproachable in the months before Laurence’s connection with the Price Club was terminated in 1985.

Robert Price said the Price Club had continuing problems with Laurence’s running of the tire installation centers, including his failure to show up for important meetings, his failure to resolve customer complaints and his inability to keep top managers working for him. At one point, the entire staff of the tire installation center in Phoenix walked out on the same day, Robert Price said.

“The difficulty the Price Club had in working with Larry was that everything was a fight,” he said.

Asked by Laurence’s attorney, Marvin Mitchelson, why he did not make more of an effort to discuss problems with his brother, Robert said, “I just felt there was no way to communicate with Larry. . . . To frame this whole thing in terms of nobody cared about Larry is totally inaccurate.”

Robert said his brother would “come into my office sometimes screaming” and was “always confrontational and always oppositional.”

He described an incident in 1986 when he returned from a skiing trip that included his own family as well as Laurence’s ex-wife and two sons.

“I said, ‘Gee, we had a great time on that ski trip. Maybe sometime you’ll go with us,’ ” Robert said. “He started yelling at me, and he said, ‘I’ll never go anywhere with you, and you’d better never say anything to them (his sons) to turn them against their father.’ ”

Robert said he had no idea what his brother was talking about.