Lawsuit Dims Future : Flashlight Magnate Talks About Regrets, Uncertainty He Faces in Wake of $84-Million Palimony Case He Lost

The millionaire businessman who lost the largest palimony suit in legal history talked Friday for the first time since the verdict about the impact the $84-million judgment is having on his life and his businesses.

Although 63-year-old Anthony Maglica says he continues to be mystified by the verdict, he insists that he harbors no animosity toward his former companion of 23 years.

“She helped me a little bit with English, but I have no problem now even without that. I manage. And business has increased,” Maglica said Friday.

An Orange County Superior Court jury last month found in favor of Claire Maglica, 60, the executive vice president of Mag Instrument Inc. and Anthony’s longtime companion. When their relationship became troubled, she filed suit, seeking half of the $400 million she said the company was worth. She also alleged they built the company together from a hole-in-the wall machine shop and that she had promised to share everything with her.

Although the pair were known by politicians and socialites as married, they never did.

Dressed in sneakers, faded jeans and a spotless cotton shirt, Anthony Maglica proudly showed off the 11-building Ontario plant Friday that he said he knows “in his dreams” by every lathe and screw--the business he said he poured years of work into and lives in fear of losing.

“When the verdict came in, I wasn’t thinking about the money. All I was thinking was, ‘Oh, no. Here I have to do it all over again. All the blood went out of my face. It drained out and went down to my feet.”

These days, Claire is nowhere to be seen at the Ontario plant. Anthony said he has not changed the locks on Mag’s doors or at the Anaheim Hills home where he now lives with the blinded Bosnian boy the Maglicas rescued from the war zone last year, and the boy’s mother and sister.

Although the jury ruled that Claire and Anthony had no oral agreement to share everything, as Claire contended they did, it found that he nevertheless had breached his financial duty to her and had failed to compensate her for her years at the company.

The $84-million award is the largest of its kind in the nation and probably the world, legal experts said.

Anthony Maglica’s attorneys are appealing and filed new trial motions Friday. They will be back in court by late July, said John W. Keker, Claire Maglica’s attorney.

She has declined interviews on Keker’s advice.

Anthony said Friday that he sends Claire a regular paycheck, “just like what she was making before,” and insists he harbors no ill will toward her.

“If I wanted to, I could make her so miserable, but I haven’t done that. Her clothes are still in the house,” Maglica said.

And although Claire’s son and son-in-law have quit their jobs at Mag since the trial ended, he said he still sees them from time to time.

“I still help them. I still make sure they have groceries every week,” Maglica said. “My attorney says, ‘Cut them off,’ but I just can’t do it.”

The legal proceedings have put his dream of expanding the company on hold, Maglica said. Those 30 acres sit empty near the Ontario flashlight complex, which “makes me feel like hell,” he said. “I can’t even believe it’s happening. It just can’t be.”

Maglica said he needs to keep $126 million in the bank to cover the $84-million judgment against him, so the new 600,000 square-foot plant, complete with day care for his 600 workers, will have to wait.

“This litigation might take five years, 10 years before it’s settled, and I don’t have that many years,” Maglica said, as he surveyed a warehouse cramped full of inventory.

“This is why I’m angry more than anything,” he said. “This litigation has kept me from being efficient.”

Anthony Maglica insists, as he did before an Orange County Superior Court jury and thousands of Courtroom TV watchers across the country, that he did nothing wrong.

“All these years, the reason I didn’t want to get married was because I didn’t want to lose control. I didn’t want this to happen,” he said, recalling the bitter fights with his first and only wife, who received half of the couple’s property in divorce proceedings two dozen years ago.

“I never wanted to go through that same thing again. I just felt, ‘I’m going to treat the lady like a goddess, but I’m never going to divide my property again.’ It’s like, if you’re building a castle and almost get to the top and someone comes and cuts it in half, and then cuts it in half again,” Maglica said.

“I’m 63 years old. I can’t start all over again.”

Maglica said he is surprised that it went this far.

“I had a trust in her and believed in her, and never thought it was possible for anything like this to happen. I had no intention to ever mislead her or put her out on the street,” he said. “Honestly, I believed it could be settled and we could still be together.”

Looking far more relaxed than he did during weeks of trial, Maglica took a visitor on a tour of the company that made him a millionaire, explaining with a feverish detail each automated assembly system and cleverly designed machine, and proudly showing off the lasers that inscribe the head of each Mag-Lite flashlight with a trademark.

“I wish I could have the jury come over here and go through the plant and see what it really takes to do this,” Maglica said.

“If it were that easy, everybody would be doing it,” he said, shaking his head at the jury that could have believed Claire’s work at Mag was equal to his own.

Claire Maglica headed the personnel department and was in charge of marketing and purchasing.

But Anthony Maglica on Friday derided her contributions, pointing out cases of orange pumpkin flashlight heads that Claire had thought up as a Halloween gimmick.

“I sound conceited, forgive me, but it really takes a vision,” he said of the work, peering intently at a graphic rendition of a magnified flashlight switch on an employee’s computer screen.

Maglica stopped Friday to share a mango with a worker and chatted with a tool grinder who dresses up yearly as the company Santa Claus.

But any mention of the love he feels for his grown children from a first marriage, his mission to repair the sight of 13-year-old Sead Bekric, or his memories of his own mother, whose tiny framed portrait decorates his desk, and his eyes filled with tears.

It was Claire, he added, who framed the small picture for him and took it out of a drawer where Anthony had refused to look at it.

“I have to thank Claire for one thing she did for me,” Maglica said. “She helped me get over my mother’s death.”