Media and News
Florida grandma heats up $10 million fight against former JPM brokers – her grandsons
by Lynnley Browning
Read the article on FinancialPlanning.com
Beverley Schottenstein, right, and her granddaughter Cathy Schottenstein Pattap in Bal Harbour, Florida, on Dec. 30, 2020. Bloomberg News
A wealthy Florida grandmother has intensified her legal battle to force two former brokers at J.P. Morgan Securities — her grandsons — to pay her at least $10 million as ordered by regulators for unauthorized trading in her accounts.
The grandsons, who are brothers, handled Beverley Schottenstein’s roughly $80 million account when they worked as brokers at the Wall Street bank. In recent months, they’ve been trying to force their 95-year-old grandmother into court-ordered talks to slash the amount of money that an industry arbitration panel ordered them last year to pay her.
But in a Feb. 24 ruling, a Florida judge said no dice to the grandsons’ effort, ordering that Schottenstein’s lawsuit against them proceed without court-driven mediation. Read more
Schottenstein Settlement Nixed by Judge as High-Dollar Family Fight Rolls On
by Jake Martin – Read the article on AdvisorHub.com
Beverley B. Schottenstein in Bal Harbour, Florida won a Finra arbitration award last year for $19 million against her grandsons, Evan and Avi Schottenstein, and their former employer, J.P. Morgan Securities.
The dispute between retail matriarch Beverley Schottenstein and her grandsons, former J.P. Morgan Securities brokers Evan and Avi Schottenstein, last week entered a new chapter that revived the threat of higher liabilities for the two brothers fighting with their grandmother.
Judge Beth Bloom, who has presided over the multimillion-dollar intrafamily battle in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, denied the younger Schottensteins’ motion to enforce a settlement they claimed to have reached last year with their nonagenarian grandmother that would have significantly reduced their liability in the $19 million arbitration award at issue. Bloom based her February 22 order on the recommendation of a magistrate judge. Read more
Growing Up Schottenstein: The Blessing and Burden of Belonging to Columbus’ Last Dynasty
The inside story of Columbus’ most extraordinary family and the challenges facing its next generation.
Dave Ghose – Read on ColumbusMonthly.com
Saul, Jerome and Jay Schottenstein in their store in 1987 Columbus Dispatch File
The photo helped break the ice.
Cathy Schottenstein noticed it right away when she entered the beachfront condo in Surfside, Florida. On a wall near her second cousin David Schottenstein’s kitchen, she saw a framed image of her grandfather Alvin and his three brothers: Leon, Saul and Jerome. Cathy had never seen this particular photo—the four Columbus retail pioneers, looking young, handsome and sharply dressed—and it helped her connect with David, Leon’s grandson, whom she’d never met before, even though both grew up in Central Ohio. It reminded her of their shared lineage. “There was something nice about that,” she says.
The photo also was a memento of a more united time. Starting in the early 1980s, relatives began to splinter in her branch, fighting over the Columbus-based business empire that the foursome had built from a single discount department store that their father, Ephraim Schottenstein, founded on Columbus’ South Side. Now, a new internecine dispute had emerged: Alvin’s widow, Beverley, Cathy’s grandmother, was accusing two of her grandsons, Evan and Avi Schottenstein, of mishandling her roughly $80 million fortune in their roles as her financial advisers.
The Schottenstein Family Tree: How the various branches of Columbus’ sprawling last dynasty connect to each other
On this February 2019 morning, David, a retail entrepreneur and investor, explained to Cathy why he’d asked to meet with her. As they talked over coffee and pastries, David—pronounced “da-veed,” the Hebrew elocution—didn’t make any specific demands of Cathy, who was supporting her grandmother’s efforts to pursue a complaint against her cousins with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, the nonprofit that disciplines registered broker-dealers in the U.S. Mostly, he offered to help the two sides start communicating again. He wanted to avoid a protracted public battle that might embarrass the family, the kind of discord that had become too common in recent decades. “I think he saw himself as a peacemaker,” Cathy says.
Indeed, David did seem to occupy a unique space in the family. As a child, he told Cathy, he made friends with estranged cousins, and he continued to build relationships with them and other relatives as an adult, bridging the divisions within the family. He even became close with Jay Schottenstein, the head of the family’s vast network of retail and real estate interests (and the son of Jerome, who waged a bitter legal battle against David’s father and uncle, Tom and Bill). Read more