DIVIDED DYNASTY

Until recently, Washington's Haft family was known more for the matching pompadours of father Herb and "Hair Apparent" Bobby than for the business savvy that led them into the rarefied air of the Forbes Four Hundred list of wealthiest Americans. But this year the Hafts suddenly turned against one another in a series of public screaming matches and boardroom power plays. In exclusive interviews with the family, BRYAN BUR ROUGH sorts through the saga

BRYAN BURROUGH

Near the height of a withering Potomac summer, when the threats, the screaming middle-of-the-night calls, and the sense of danger grew too much to bear, Bobby Haft took his wife and three young children and fled the big red brick town house on Washington's Embassy Row. Bobby's father, Herbert, the Haft family's white-pompadoured, 73-year-old patriarch, had declared war on Bobby and his mother, Gloria, firing them from posts at the family's $1.2 billion Dart Group, and the family warfare was growing nastier by the day. Already Herb had sealed his son's suburban-Maryland office and seized millions of dollars' worth of Bobby's stock certificates from a family vault. A prototypical "nice Jewish boy," who was as popular in East Coast business circles as his father was reviled, Bobby was still stunned by the discovery that Herb had drilled his mother's safedeposit box, allegedly to steal a decade-old blackmail note one of Herb's paramours had mailed her.

By June, Bobby felt certain his father was having him followed, and he suspected even more sinister intrigues. Amid their countless arguments, he thought he had heard Herb use snippets of the exact language he was sure he had breathed only in bedroom conversations with his wife, Mary, as the couple lay awake at night, agonizing over the family's disintegration. Fearing his father might have installed electronic eavesdropping devices in his house, Bobby hired experts to sweep for bugs, and one found what he thought might be evidence of tampering on a phone line. He couldn't be sure. The bug man told Bobby his father might even be using long-range microphones to pick up sound waves off his bedroom windows. ("That's ridiculous," says one of Herb's spokesmen, "and it seems to reflect a paranoia that seems bizarre.")

Around Bobby's breakfast table, where Herb had frolicked with his three grandchildren, each morning seemed to bring new examples of Herb's vindictiveness and, Bobby felt, his instability. In a letter, Herb claimed he was being stalked by "unkempt men" in "dirty cars" and had received death threats; he warned Bobby to stop it.

At Harvard Business School, Bobby had become friends with Sam Shoen, the eldest son in Arizona's feuding U-Haul dynasty, whose wife was murdered under mysterious circumstances, and the two had recently spoken in worried tones about the possibility of violence breaking out in the Haft family. "My father does have firearms," Bobby told friends, vividly recalling how, during Thanksgivings at West Virginia's Greenbrier resort, Herb had enjoyed blazing away at targets on a rifle range and bragging how he hadn't "lost the eye" he had gained during World War II. (Herb says he recently turned in his only gun to Washington police, out of concern for his own safety.)

Finally Bobby packed up Mary and the children and retreated to their mansion in Nantucket. There he took long walks on the beach, trying to decipher how the family's luxurious fabric had unraveled so suddenly. In time he grew convinced Herb's behavior could be explained by what he delicately termed a "medical answer." Bobby had read Gail Sheehy's Vanity Fair article on male menopause, which detailed how aging men who couldn't perform in bed—as his mother, Gloria, was hinting in her separation struggle with Herb— often took out their frustrations on those around them, boosting their masculinity by surrounding themselves with younger women, exactly as Herb, a notorious womanizer, had been doing for months. Bobby called his father's latest consort "the lead peacock."

In Nantucket, Bobby sat for hours alone with Mary as they sought solace in their respective faiths. A savvy, opinionated former television producer, Mary is a blonde, blue-eyed "shiksa" who attends the Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, and she has relied on a circle of friends who send her Bible passages every day through what they call the "Christian Fax Network." "The only word to describe what's happened to us is 'evil,' " she told one acquaintance. "You never expect to find evil in your own family. . . . The only thing that comforts me is knowing that one day Herbert will die, and he will face God. I know he will have to face judgment. He will have to answer for this evil."

But in quiet moments Bobby admitted there was no way to defeat his father, who controlled a majority of Dart's stock. He told Mary, "We're in God's shadow now."

Bobby's warm, secure life had been destroyed in one searing flash of his father's famous temper. Until this spring, Bobby had spent weekdays working alongside Herb at Dart, evenings cooing at his newborn daughter or holding quiet dinner parties with the likes of Art Buchwald, and weekends playing soccer with friends near the Lincoln Memorial. When I saw Bobby this fall, I was shocked. The boyish, bouncy enthusiasm millions knew from his famous television commercials touting Dart's Crown Books division had been blasted away. Just 40, with streaks of white coursing through his hair, he needed a shave and his face was blotchy. A double-breasted suit swallowed him like a toga. He looked utterly defeated. "I lost my father," he said, "I lost my brother, my parents are getting divorced, I lost my business career, a large chunk of my financial assets, and it's all this great public spectacle."

Until recently, Washington's Haft family was known more for Herb's and Bobby's infamous pompadours than for the business acumen that had helped them to build three major retailers—the best known is Bobby's 250-store Crown Books chain—plus a lucrative archipelago of strip malls scattered across the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Moonlighting as corporate raiders during the 1980s, the secretive father-and-son team racked up $130 million in profits, disclosed next to nothing about anything, and, thanks to Herb's relentlessly combative ways, earned the ire of seemingly every retailer, supplier, tenant, banker, and lawyer they encountered. Herb Haft is the kind of angry, litigious businessman who doesn't have partners, he has sparring partners, and as a result much of corporate Washington wanted little to do with the family.

"This has gone beyond the business world now. This is about madness

Today, Washington can't get enough of the battling Hafts. Since their travails burst into public view this summer, the family has dominated gossip among the power-lunch crowd at Duke Zeibert's, where Herb and Bobby could once be seen diagramming deals. The papers, especially The Washington Post, have had a field day chronicling the feud's every twist and turn, and the family combatants have grown so well-known that The Washington Times has already cast the movie. The villain, in Washington's eyes, is Herb, the tyrannical little druggist—he stands no more than five feet five even when blow-dried— who has spent his life engaged in one furious fight after another. He battled the drug-industry giants who sought to quash his pioneering discount strategies in the 1950s, then his brother, sister, and parents during the 1960s, a legion of competitors in the 1970s, the Fortune 500 during the 1980s, and now, almost inevitably, his own family. "Believe me, if you find anyone in the Washington area that has a good word to say about him, it would be a first,'' says Thomas McNutt, a regional labor leader who has wrangled with Herb for years.

The "hero" is Bobby, once known as "the Hair Apparent," the yuppified elder son who engineered Dart's transformation from a regional drug chain to a national presence in discount books and auto parts, helping found the Trak Auto chain as well as Crown, whose omnipresent ads and commercials in which he starred ("Books cost too much") made him a camp success story. "I don't think Bobby has a mean bone in his body," says Chuck Farkas, a Boston consultant whom Herb forced off of Dart's board in June. "He may occasionally be naive, but he is never malicious, and he's done a terrific job of running this company."

Bring out handkerchiefs for any scenes starring matriarch Gloria Haft, Herb's tiny, well-mannered wife of 46 years, who endured a humiliating procession of her husband's affairs—including two that allegedly led to multimillion-dollar blackmail attempts—only to find herself, at 66, sleeping behind locked doors in the Northwest Washington mansion she and Herb still share, fearful her husband will attack her. Meanwhile, a colorful supporting role is reserved for Gloria's "baby," her younger son, Ronnie, a 34-year-old chipmunk who gave up his Hollywood acting aspirations, but not his Laguna Beach house, to replace Bobby at his father's side. (The Times suggests Andy Garcia for the part.) Last comes the inspiring story of 43-year-old daughter Linda Haft, the quiet, withdrawn mother of two teenage girls, who, after years of alleged domination by her father, has asserted her independence by siding with Bobby and Gloria. "It's great to see Linda standing up for herself," says a family member. "By her doing so, some light is finally being shed on the dark cloud we've all lived under with Herbie all these years."

"This is all because of Herbert's twisted mania," The cinematic tales of abuse, invective, and espionage emerging from the family's capital-area mansions and town houses stand in sharp contrast to the whimsical, almost buffoonish image the Hafts conjured on the national business scene. Since they first made headlines as blustery greenmailers in 1985, there has always been a cartoonish quality to Herb and Bobby, whose feeble takeover raids were ridiculed as often as their hairstyles. Wall Street types still burst out laughing when recalling the pair's prowess with comb and brush. "We called them the Coif Brothers," jokes one veteran deal-maker. "Whenever we went into a meeting, they would go into the bathroom and Herbie would turn to Bobby and say, 'Give me the brushes.' Bobby would take out this little pouch with all these brushes, Herbie would comb up his hair, then hand the brushes back to Bobby, and he would comb his up. It was amazing." During Herb and Gloria's separation hearings in August, spectators couldn't stop staring at Herb's majestic pouf; the Post even ran a detailed analysis of how Herb's do is done, including breathy comments from his suburban hairstylist, Diego Paez, who gushed, "In my next life, I want Herbie Haft's hair." says Gloria. "It's like a vendetta for no reason."

When Herb consented to give me his first interview on the family strife, I too couldn't quit staring at his snowy mane. As he reclined in the back of a black stretch limousine cruising through the Washington suburbs, his great cloud of white hair seemed poised to fall and smother his humorless leprechaun face. Lacing his conversation with odd, mirthless giggles and meandering soliloquies on the minutiae of strip malls and discounting techniques, Herb dismissed Bobby as a wayward son who, like some promising Thoroughbred, sadly had come up lame. "Why it came to this I'll never know," he told me. "During the war I was shot at in North Africa. I was bombed in Italy. I was in a boat in Okinawa about to go ashore. I was lucky they dropped the atomic bomb and I went ashore in Japan. You want to know something? I've seen a lot of things happen in this world. And I know one thing. There's no rational answer to irrational behavior." He let out another strange chuckle. ''You know what he's like?" Herb said, leaning forward and stabbing a tiny finger in the air. ''Robert is like Reverend Moon, and Gloria and Linda are his disciples."

Until this summer, the Hafts appeared to be a rich, loving family. All five worked for Haft companies, with the management team of Herb and Bobby each overseeing his own sphere of influence. Until they moved into the city, Herb and Gloria had lived in sideby-side homes with Linda in the Maryland suburbs. Their $4 million Washington villa, which has echoed with the din of slamming doors and nighttime screaming matches in recent months, is just a short walk from Bobby's Massachusetts Avenue town house, and neighbors frequently saw Bobby leading his kids to Herb's for a swim or dinner; Ronnie lives a few blocks away. The family vacationed together, at the Greenbrier, in Europe, or at Herb and Gloria's $2 million home in Boca Raton. Often Herb and Bobby could be seen taking in a movie with the family at Dupont Circle, while Sunday evenings Gloria and Herb treated Bobby's kids to Mexican food at Cactus Cantina on Wisconsin Avenue.

The very public implosion of so tight a family has thawed the hearts of even Herb's enemies. ''I feel so sorry for those people," says Mike Herman, who fought with Herb during the sale of his and his father's stake in an area grocery chain. ''Any ill will I had, and I had some, they've taken care of by ruining themselves. It's just so very tragic to see a family blow apart like this."

''This is all because of Herbert's twisted mania," Gloria'Haft told me in her first public interview. ''It's just very unfortunate that he has turned on his son, his daughter, on me, on the grandchildren. It's hard for me to believe myself. It's very difficult for me. He's taken Ronnie with him. It's very painful to me, very painful. Ronnie's still my baby. It's like a vendetta for no reason. We don't understand it ourselves. The whole situation is more than a 66-yearold woman can bear."

For the most part, the press has portrayed the Haft-family saga as a struggle between Herb and Bobby for the helm of publicly held Dart, an image Herb continues to invoke during the blizzard of litigation that now engulfs the family. In fact, that was just the starting point. What began as a misunderstanding over succession seems to have degenerated into a crusade by a vengeful Herb to wrest control of the family's private fortune from Bobby, Gloria, and Linda. When Bobby and his mother objected, Herb followed through on his threats to throw them out of all the family businesses. ''At the heart of everything is money, not pride," says Chuck Farkas. ''Most people have focused on the public company, Dart, but the real issue is the private company, Combined Properties—the real estate. That's where the money is."

But a family member disagrees, saying, "This has gone beyond the business world now. This is about madness."

No one alive knows for sure when Herbert Haft engaged in his first fight. His older sister, Sylvia, who loathed him, died some 20 years ago not having spoken to Herb in years. His brother, Leonard, a respected Washington architect, went 15 years without speaking to Herb before Bobby reconciled them one night in the 1970s. Family members say Herb even warred with his late parents.

As one of the Washington area's largest landlords, Herb looks for any excuse to eject tenants with low, long-term rents, according to one former aide. "If some poor old guy is paying $8 a square foot and Herb thinks he ought to be paying $18, he looks for any reason to kick the guy out," says the aide. "He'll put tenants in default on the littlest thing, a garbage can in the wrong place, an electrical socket in the wrong place—anything." Herb's reputation for litigiousness is so widespread that it's difficult to find anyone who will discuss him. Spokesmen for one discount retail chain that sued him, Price Club, wouldn't even tell me where the suit was filed. "I have no interest in saying anything about Herbert Haft, on or off the record," says Joseph Santarlasci, a former Dart Drug vice-chairman. "Life is too short."

Herb's legend has grown thanks to episodes like his legal war with his neighbors in Potomac, Maryland, over a massive hedge he chopped up despite a protective covenant that barred him from doing so. Highlights include the time Herb allegedly denounced his neighbor Tyler Abell as a "sissy" and called his wife "ugly." Abell, a Maryland blueblood who was President Johnson's chief of protocol, fired back, in court and in the newspapers, calling Herb an "absolute nut" and the "meanest, toughest son of a bitch in the world."

Herb's contribution to Wall Street lore came late one night in 1987 when, on the verge of cementing his first major acquisition, Supermarkets General, he stormed into a Manhattan conference room and ignited a furious and inexplicable confrontation with famed takeover attorney Joe Flom, during which he called Flom "a son of a bitch." Those inside the room stared incredulously as a red-faced Herb single-handedly killed the deal.

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"They were very difficult people to deal with," says a Wall Street pro who advised the Hafts on one deal and turned down a multimillion-dollar fee to handle another. "I'd get calls at three in the morning, screaming and yelling. Herb could be irrational. He would get a bee in his bonnet that someone was trying to cheat him. It was all about him not feeling he was being treated fairly."

Herb Haft was bom the son of a Russian-immigrant pharmacist who moved to Washington from Baltimore after he lost everything during the Depression. Armed with a pharmacy degree from George Washington University, Herb enlisted in the navy after Pearl Harbor, but was discharged because of a severe overbite. Reenlisting in the army, he ran medical depots in New Guinea, Libya, Italy, the Philippines, and ultimately Japan, then returned to Washington to marry Gloria, a cosmetology student, in 1948. Shortly afterward, the young couple opened their first drugstore, on Connecticut Avenue. Herb was smart—he discovered condoms sold far faster when brought out from behind the counter—and realized that lower prices were the key to bringing in customers.

In 1954, borrowing money from his family and selling his children's savings bonds, Herb opened the first Dart Drug, which cut prices on everything from pills to paperweights. Customers loved it, but Dart's competitors marked Herb for extermination. They recruited their industry allies, and, one by one, month after month, year after year, they sued. Bobby's earliest memories include accepting papers from process servers at the front door of the family's little tract house in Chevy Chase, Maryland. After years of legal fights, during which Herb enlisted the support of the Justice Department, the government took his case to the Supreme Court and won.

No sooner had Herb beaten the drug industry than he opened a new front— against his family. By 1960, Herb had built enough Dart stores to take them public, raising $1 million through the sale of stock. But he didn't share the proceeds with his original partners—his father, Abraham, who had invested $5,000 to stake him, and his brother-in-law, Alvin Shapiro, a dentist who had also invested $5,000 after marrying Herb's sister, Sylvia. Herb insisted the two had invested only in the original store, not the chain. Shapiro, backed by Herb's parents and brother, Leonard, sued, and six weeks later Herb was forced to hand over much of the money. He remained irate for years, claiming he had retained only $50,000 of the $1 million. He never spoke with his sister again.

"I came from parents who told me, 'If you're going to go through this world, you gotta do what's right,' " Herb told me by way of explaining his combativeness. "My mother came from Ukraine. You know people were downtrodden there under the czar. At 14 she was handing out pamphlets. She was a fighter. And at 14 they came for her and she left and came to America. Can you believe it?" He paused. "Those companies? They filed over a hundred lawsuits against me. I lost 'em all. But I never gave up. I always believed I was right. If you believe in something, you've got to do what you believe is right."

In the early days, talk at the Haft dinner table always revolved around business. Bobby, as the elder son, was toted along to trade shows as a toddler; when he was three The Philadelphia Inquirer printed his picture as the "youngest conventiongoer" at a cosmetics show. Later he tagged along with Herb to meetings with Dart's bankers and suppliers. By 10, Bobby was spending Saturdays riding shotgun in Herb's car as he scouted new Dart locations across the Washington suburbs. "My father didn't play ball with me, my father didn't buy me a baseball mitt," Bobby remembers. "If I wanted to see my parents, I went along with them. We would just travel the freeways scouting real estate."

At Harvard Business School, Bobby, a wiry, active student, lay on the roof of the library at night, dreaming about the business he outlined in his thesis, a chain of discount bookstores. After graduating he returned to Washington and made the dream come true, opening his first Crown Books store in 1977. One of the first calls Bobby received was from an irritated Alan Mirken, president of Crown Publishing in New York, who asked him to change his store's name. Bobby politely declined, but Mirken was so impressed with his publishing savvy he became one of Bobby's biggest customers. "Bobby's not only a nice guy, he's the most effective long-term operator in publishing," says Mirken, who went on to become a vice-chairman at Random House.

In 1984, Bobby, seeing the rise of other discount druggists, persuaded his father to sell Dart Drug to its employees. The timing was excellent; Dart went bankrupt within five years. The deal put $160 million in the Hafts' pockets just as Wall Street's merger machine was shifting into high gear, and in no time Herb and Bobby began eyeing acquisitions just as they had once eyed roadside real estate. Herb and Bobby first made aborted runs at the May Department Stores of St. Louis and Jack Eckerd, then the nation's second-largest drug chain, chalking up $11.5 million and a quick reputation as greenmailers.

It was the beginning of a pattern of twobit takeover attempts that enshrined the Hafts as laughingstocks on Wall Street. They made careers careening wildly at big corporate targets that Herb had no intention of buying, chasing their prey into the arms of "friendly" leveraged buyout artists such as Henry Kravis and pocketing hefty profits on the resulting stock runups. The Kravises of the world loved the Hafts—Herb and Bobby hounded both Stop & Shop and Safeway into buyouts that put more than $100 million in Kravis's pockets—but everyone else laughed. Because Herb ripped up investment bankers like canceled checks, the Hafts bounced from firm to firm, wearing out their welcome at numerous houses, including Smith Barney; E. F. Hutton; Prudential-Bache; Drexel Burnham; Kidder, Peabody; Paine Webber; Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette; and First Boston, where Bruce Wasserstein's minions termed them "the Poodle and the Puppy."

After their raiding days ended, Bobby turned his attention to friendly acquisitions, but Herb axed dozens of candidates. Tensions rose over whether to expand into real estate, as Herb wished, or into retailing, as Bobby and Dart's board desired. Some observers noticed friction between the two as early as the mid1980s, when Bobby bought and renovated his large town house a few doors down from the former Omani Embassy. As Crown's chairman, Bobby began hosting parties for authors such as William Manchester and inviting Washington power players such as Ben Bradlee and Jim Lehrer; later it grew clear how much these gatherings sparked envy in Herb, who took to calling Bobby and Mary "Mr. and Mrs. Washington."

"The first fault line I saw was going to a party there and listening to Herb as he looked around and made little comments," says a former Dart director. "Herb, I think, was feeling upstaged. So, in a matter of months, he bought this huge house right around the comer from Bobby's." (According to one of Herb's spokesmen, "Herbert Haft doesn't define himself or the success of his life by the size of his house.") The Dart director recalls, ''Herb drove us over to the home to see it, and he says, 'Don't get attached to it.' And literally within a week he bulldozed it. That's when the neighbors went nuts."

Herb's purchase and demolition of one of Washington's grandest homes, a stately 30-room Tudor built for financier James Scott Appleby in 1926, prompted an outcry in the neighborhood off Embassy Row. The mansion had featured stained-glass windows, pink marble mantelpieces, and Philippine-mahogany paneling. ''One of the nicest houses I've wrecked in years," the demolition-team leader quipped at the time.

Life inside the Haft family was never as wonderful as it appeared. On both sides of the Beltway, gossips still cluck over the infamous 1981 episode when a Combined Properties vice president named Vana Martin slapped Herb with a $50 million lawsuit during a severance dispute, alleging the two had had an affair going back to 1965. Aghast when the suit surfaced in the papers, Herb quickly and quietly paid Martin $3.5 million to settle, family members say, and Gloria stayed with him only after he swore to remain faithful. Herb says he paid Martin $2 million, and only to buy out her Combined stock.

As Bobby and Gloria see it, the family's current plight can be traced to the day in the early summer of 1991 when Herb was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat. Millions suffer from similar disorders, and doctors told Herb his condition was easily treatable. "Everyone told him not to worry about it, but it completely freaked him out," Bobby tells me. "He thought he was going to die." Herb experienced troublesome side effects from the drugs doctors prescribed. "He was walking around like a zombie," says another family member. "He had to go to the bathroom 20 times a day."

As Herb's anxieties intensified, the family rallied around. Bobby took him to visit specialists in Philadelphia. Gloria helped him see one of President Bush's cardiologists. "He was sick, and we were all taking care of him—that's what makes all of what's happening now so egregious," says Bobby. "We all thought he was dying." Eventually, Herb swore off the drugs that had caused the worst side effects. "When he stopped taking the drugs," Bobby recalls, "that's when all this started." (Herb's lawyer Michael Klein denies any suggestion that Herb is not completely stable and clearheaded. "Herbert was examined by a leading local forensic psychiatrist, who not only gave him a perfect report, but told me and Herb he was interested in investing in him.")

The first change his wife and children noticed was as startling as it was embarrassing: Herb, throwing discretion to the winds, began openly dating other women. Gloria, whose lawyer says she hadn't had sex with Herb since his medical problems began, watched as her husband escorted pretty young things to her favorite restaurants, like Bice and Georgetown's Cafe Milano. Linda Haft was amazed to see her father in a restaurant laughing with two young women. Previously, insists a family member, he "was not a known womanizer. He would just go out from time to time, but he would always come back remorseful. Now he was just blatant about it."

Meanwhile, some felt Herb was losing interest in the niceties that had made him bearable in the past. "He was always a mean man; over the last 10 years, he has lost his charm," says a family member. "Now there wasn't even a pretense. He didn't try anymore. It was just 'Fuck you, fuck you. I've got the power and you don't.' "

Early this year, Herb initiated a bizarre campaign against another local retailing legend, Israel "Izzy" Cohen of the Giant Food chain. Giant held exclusive rights to a brand of wine, Napa Ridge, that Herb coveted for a pilot store Dart had opened in Chantilly, Virginia, named Total Beverage. When Cohen wouldn't hand over the rights, Herb ran full-page advertisements in the Post and suburban papers, complete with Cohen's picture and phone number, excoriating Cohen for refusing to sell him the wine.

The first whiff of family strife came last year. Ironically, it centered on Linda Haft, the petite, quiescent divorcee invariably described by family members as "emotionally fragile." Extremely close to her mother, Linda raises two daughters alone in a big house in Potomac. Like Bobby, she went to work at Dart, starting out as a cosmetics buyer in the 1970s and now supervising investments at a financial subsidiary. For years she and her husband, Gary Rappaport, a soft-spoken Long Islander, remained in a tight orbit around her parents, living next door and vacationing with them. But in 1982, after 11 years of marriage, Linda asked Rappaport for a divorce, which he didn't want. Herb intervened, giving his son-in-law a lucrative employment deal after he agreed to a quiet, 60-day divorce. A brief second marriage ended in annulment, drawing Linda even closer to her mother. "For Linda her family is her whole life," says a friend. "She's been sheltered by her father for so many years, though, she's never really had a chance to stand on her own, to build confidence."

While family members portray Linda as a woman controlled by her father, her lawyer is prepared to allege far worse. "From everything we have learned, she was abused by her father both emotionally and mentally," charges Stef Tucker, who represents Linda in her suit against Herb and Ronnie. "For some reason she was always Herb's target. She was always beaten on by Herb. Bobby was the favorite, not Linda. Linda's smart. She was near the top of her class at Syracuse. But she had a father who continually harassed her. This is a very sensitive, fragile person who's been made that way by her father. And her brothers never stood up for her." (Ronnie Haft, speaking for Herb, denies his father ever abused Linda in any way.)

Trouble began when Linda discovered her father had paid her brother Ronnie a $4.6 million bonus from the real-estate company, Combined Properties, which Ronnie ran under Herb's supervision. Linda learned of the bonus only when Ronnie brought her a portion of the money and asked her to invest it in treasury bills. Linda didn't mention her discovery to either Bobby or Gloria. But after mulling it over, she decided she deserved some money herself. "Herbie kept saying all his kids were equal," says Tucker. "You ever read Animal Farm? All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others? That's how Linda felt."

Linda summoned the nerve to ask Ronnie for $1 million of her own from Combined. "He just went berserk," says a family member sympathetic to Linda. "He was yelling, 'It'll cost us so much money— we need the money to buy shopping centers.' [Herb] had always sort of verbally abused Linda. Now she was standing up for herself, saying, 'I'm a competent person, I deserve the money.' They wouldn't give it to her, and they flaunted it. It was like 'We run everything, and you don't.' At that point, she started talking about wanting to get out. She wanted no more of their business." Linda eventually got her $1 million, going the route all three children traveled when their father said "No": she got it from her mother.

Linda's fights with her father did not go unnoticed by Bobby, who began to feel Herb's tirades were turning both Dart and the family into pariahs. Their relationship had always worked because Bobby tirelessly rebuilt the bridges his father burned; Herb, in turn, lavished praise on his son's business skills. But after Bobby turned 40 last November—at his surprise party Herb planted a huge kiss on his lips—he was impatient to succeed his father as C.E.O., as they had always planned. He spoke with his mother, who quietly encouraged him to discuss the matter with Herb. Gloria hoped that easing her husband into retirement would revive her flagging marriage. She envisioned Herb taking her on a cozy trip to Wimbledon that spring and renting a summer house in the French countryside.

Bobby broached the idea during a dinner with his parents at their home in early March. To Bobby's relief, Herb said he was ready to step aside as long as his salary remained the same. "I think that would be entirely appropriate," Bobby replied, ''and I'm sure everyone else will feel the same way."

"Then let's do it," Herb said, as Bobby and Gloria tell the story. "We can do it at the April board meeting. You take care of it." But a week or so later, Bobby was sitting in his office at Dart when his father called and reopened the question of succession. "I'm not sure I want to do this," Herb began. He ticked off excuses why the time wasn't right, including the new tax laws and Hillary Clinton's health-care reform. A series of sharp arguments ensued, but Bobby realized it was useless trying to change Herb's mind. His father controlled 57 percent of Dart stock and could do what he wanted. Friends say Bobby did a poor job of hiding his disappointment, complaining about his father's dictatorial ways to Dart executives and directors.

Afterward, Herb began grumbling that it was time to make changes in his life, perhaps spend more time buying real estate with Ronnie. He even mentioned the possibility of Bobby stepping down as a controlling, "general" partner of Combined-all five family members were general partners—and becoming a passive, "limited" partner, a less profitable position that Bobby objected to. In an effort to soothe her husband, Gloria coaxed Herb into spending several days with Bobby's wife, Mary, and the grandchildren in Boca, thinking he might relax and change his mind about Bobby taking over. He didn't. Back in Washington, the mood remained tense, but the family managed to make it through Passover dinner at Bobby and Mary's without Herb blowing up.

The uneasy peace lasted until Dart's April 19 board meeting. The monthly conclave, held around a large black marble table in the boardroom across from Herb's and Bobby's offices, hummed along as usual until Herb raised the question of two new locations for Total Beverage, the pilot store, whose steady losses were making board members nervous. "Excuse me, Dad," Bobby interrupted. Expanding Total would be premature, he said. They hadn't perfected the approach or hired professional managers, and Bobby questioned whether the two new locations were too close together. To one side, Gloria saw the coming confrontation but held her tongue. One director watched her scribble on a notepad: "Do not speak. Do not speak. Do not speak."

Finally Herb could take no more. "I can't deal with this," he said, his face reddening. "This is obstructive . . . this is destructive . . . this is impossible. ... It can't go on like this." Finally he said, "Let's adjourn."

Herb stood and left the room. Two directors, Chuck Farkas and one of Bobby's old Harvard professors, Claudine Malone, followed Herb into his office, which was lined with photos of his children and grandchildren. "This just isn't going to work," Herb railed. "Robert is trying to destroy the company. The problem with him is, he wants to be friends with all these important people." Herb termed Bobby too "fancy" for the rough-andtumble retailing world and contrasted his yuppie lifestyle with Herb's own upbringing. "I made Crown, I made Robert," Herb continued angrily. "I built this company. Now Robert is trying to destroy it."

When the meeting resumed, Herb moved to vote on the two new stores, and all the directors—who seldom stood up to Herbvoted "Yea." Except Bobby. "Well, you can all pass it," Bobby said, "but I'm going to vote no, because I just don't think it's the right thing to do."

This was too much for Herb. "Well, I'm not going to have anything that's not unanimous," he blurted, then rose and turned to Bobby. "You've killed Total Beverage. And you're killing the company. This meeting is adjourned." With that, Herb stormed from the room and out into his waiting limousine.

After four tense days, everything blew apart. On Friday morning The Wall Street Journal published a profile of Dart, focusing almost solely on Bobby. The story began, "There is life for Dart Group Corp. after Herbert Haft," and went downhill from there. Herb called his son in a cold fury, ranting that the story insulted and demeaned him, and that his life was over. Seven months later, he still hasn't calmed down.

That, at least, is the way Bobby and Gloria see things. Herb, of course, agrees with none of it. As he recalls events, heart medicines left him fatigued but never affected his mental faculties, his philandering was "irrelevant," his attack ads were business as usual, and he never, ever promised Bobby he would step aside as C.E.O. What Herb remembers is that his son tried to topple him, and when that failed, Bobby and Gloria threatened to disrupt the family's cash cow, Combined Properties. Why mother and son would harm Combined, where their interests are inseparable from Herb's, is unclear.

What is clear is that Herb retaliated with a reign of terror that ultimately left his family disoriented and broken. The day of the Journal article, Herb fired off a letter to Bobby accusing him of "insubordination" and ordering him to "cease immediately any and all communications" with not only reporters and analysts but also Dart's own shareholders, customers, suppliers, and employees. The letter all but fired Bobby, who in a panic began phoning board members and exhorting them to defend him. They did, directing a Dart attorney to calm Herb and remind him that only the board could fire Bobby. They also hired their own attorney. "It was at this point that we said, 'Whoa! This is spiraling out of control, and we need some advice,' " recalls Chuck Farkas.

The following Tuesday, Bobby, Linda, and Gloria convened at Combined's downtown offices for a previously scheduled meeting. Herb stormed into the conference room and, waving a sheaf of papers, began shouting, "I now have the proof that my son stole from me." An anxious Linda Haft, desperately trying to maintain civility, implored her father to leave Dart matters at Dart. "You can't bring up the public company in this private meeting," she said. "You can't."

At that point, Linda picked up some papers her father had thrown on the table. Herb tried to grab them back, but Linda held fast, igniting a furious tug-of-war between the 72-year-old father and his fivefoot-one-inch daughter. Gloria leapt to her daughter's aid. "He began to pull at her, and there was a lot of screaming in the room," Gloria remembered. "And I got up to help her, and he was tugging and pulling at both of us." Eventually, amid much shouting and threatening, Bobby stepped in and managed to end the bizarre tussle.

Family relations disintegrated totally after that. A series of shouting matches broke out at Herb and Gloria's house on 30th Street Northwest, Herb alternately facing off against his wife and Bobby. In the heat of one argument, Bobby accidentally broke a Baccarat goblet. Herb later claimed his son said, "I'll break Combined, and I'll break you too!"—a threat Bobby dismisses as "pure fantasy."

But stated or not, Herb fervently believed Bobby and Gloria were intent on ruining Combined. He unleashed an escalating series of threats and ultimatums. He demanded that Combined pay him huge sums of money and that Bobby and other family members step down as general partners, leaving him and Ronnie in control. If not, Herb vowed, Bobby would be fired at Dart. "First [he wanted] $25 million, then it was $50 million," says Bobby. "Then it was Linda was going to become a limited partner, then Linda and me, then Linda and me and my mother. Then I was going to be fired. Then he was going to call loans to ruin me. Then he was going to take control on his own. He tried everything." At her separation hearing in August, Gloria testified, "He would be at me every day, every morning and every night. Herbert [can] zero in on something that he's working on, and all else is forgotten. ... He zeroed in on me as I had seen him do in other business deals with other people. But I had never known that it would come back at me."

Behind Herb's seemingly irrational demands was a very real glitch in his estate planning. In the mid-1980s, he and Gloria had signed papers passing on all appreciation on their assets to the three children. The family also agreed never to sell their Dart stock to outsiders. While Herb received $1.5 million or more in salary, the effect was to restrict access to his own assets. "Herb really had no way to get at his money," confirms his attorney Michael Klein. "If he wanted to buy a boat or a painting or go to Paris, well, they had spent the last decades of their lives giving their liquidity to their kids, and now they wanted some of it back."

Bobby's "disloyalty" touched off a frantic financial insecurity within Herb, who reacted not only by demanding money but by attempting to gain outright control of Combined. "What really provoked Herb was not the run Robert made at him," says Klein, "it's that in order to get what he wanted, what Robert began to do was use his power as a general partner to screw up the business at Combined. The reason for all Herbert's efforts was to preclude [Bobby and Gloria] from doing what they threatened to do to Combined."

"The nightmare scenario," Herb acknowledged to me, "was that after all these years, if Robert had taken over and cut me off, I'd have had nothing." The fear of losing his fortune led to several strange scenes in which Herb, who by all accounts is worth several hundred million dollars, wept that he didn't have enough money to live. "My father said that he was poor and didn't have any money," recalls Bobby. "There was one meeting where he broke down and said he never got a corporate jet until he was 70 years old. There was another where he cried [and said] he didn't have enough money to buy a vacation house." In private, several family members say, Herb vowed to bankrupt Bobby if he didn't go along. "He even told Bobby that [Mary] would leave him if he was broke," says one intimate. (Herb denies threatening Bobby with bankruptcy, insisting his son threatened him with financial ruin. Of Herb's remarks about a corporate jet and vacation home, Ronnie says, "He was just speaking in a generality. He wanted protection for the future.")

At first, Bobby couldn't fathom his father's demands. Herb was free to borrow from the family's private partnerships, as they all were; by Bobby's count—a count his father disputes—Herb had borrowed $30 million in recent years, while he and his mother had borrowed about $ 13 million each. Eventually Bobby came to suspect that his brother, Ronnie, in a maneuver to replace him, was secretly egging Herb on. "It had to be Ronnie," Bobby told one acquaintance. "He got to my father somehow. I think my brother took an opportunity when my father and I were having this dispute."

In Bobby's mind, betrayal became his younger brother's first significant contribution to the Haft businesses. Ronnie, who is 34, looks as fresh-faced and puppyish as a ticket taker at Disneyland. In the course of our interviews, his most evident strength seemed to be an unfailing willingness to flatter his father. A graduate of Wharton business school who later dropped out of U.C.L. A. School of Law, Ronnie still spends long periods at two homes in Los Angeles, one in Laguna Beach. In his 20s, family members say, he was an aspiring actor, taking lessons and assembling a photo portfolio he maintains to this day. (Ronnie denies he was ever serious about acting.) Until their alliance against the rest of the family, others say, father and son fought regularly. "Ronnie talked continually about going back out to California," a family member says. "Prior to this thing, I think he was going to go out there and do some acting. He and [Herb] fought over that all the time. They fought about everything."

Family members say that Herb also seemed to be upset by the fact that Ronnie, like Herb's own brother, Leonard, is gay. "Herbie was embarrassed by Ronnie's gay ness," says one. "He would never talk about Ronnie being gay. It was like some deep, dark secret. They would even act like he was going to be married." (Ronnie denies his sexuality has ever been an issue with his father. One of Herb's spokesmen charges that Bobby has threatened to "out" Ronnie and name his lovers, a charge Bobby wearily laughs off.)

Today, Ronnie seems to be his father's best—some say only—friend. During our afternoon together, he ceaselessly brownnosed Herb; "Dad, you're such a pioneer.

. . . You've improved the lives of millions of consumers. . . . You're happy to let others glow in the spotlight—that's the kind of guy you are, Dad. . . . Dad, I'll never bet against one of your dreams.

. . . It's like I always say, either Herb's got to get older or I've got to get younger to keep up with him!" At one point, as the two volleyed accolades, Herb kissed his son on the lips. "I know you're proud of me, Dad," Ronnie said, glancing in my direction. "Now let me keep proving it to you every day."

Nine years ago Ronnie took over Combined from Linda's ex-husband, Gary Rappaport, though the company remained firmly under Herb's supervision. Ronnie, the titular chairman, spent long periods in L.A. or traveling, often with his mother; the past three summers he rented a boat to cruise with Gloria off the Cote d'Azur. In recent years, Ronnie nagged his father to let him buy strip malls in California. Herb relented only after Ronnie went to his mother and pleaded to be allowed to buy two L.A.-area centers. Now, with Ronnie's credentials in question, Herb gives his younger son all the credit for Combined's growth during the 1980s.

"At least 75 percent of my life in recent years has been this business," insists Ronnie in his spare little office at Combined. "The other 10 to 15 percent was being a good son to my parents. I set up vacations for them. We did art classes together. And the other 10 or 15 percent was for me! Just my own life. My mother would say, 'Hey, take some time for your own life—enjoy life!' And I did."

"Ronnie was always the child closest to Gloria," says Mama Tucker, Gloria's attorney. "Every day Bobby would be with Herb at work, and Gloria spent that time with Ronnie. He was her baby. That's why this hurts so much. That's the cut to the heart." A family member agrees: "Cracks only appear in Gloria's fa9ade when someone brings up Ronnie. She always protected him. He needed the protection. Anything he wanted, she made sure he got. Frankly, she'll never get over the loss. And to think, he did it all for money. You could just put a stamp on Ronnie's head: BOUGHT."

Ronnie's indignation flares at the suggestion. "I have great integrity," he tells me. "I have money. I don't need this. I could go out to live in Laguna Beach." Further, Ronnie denies ever scheming to replace Bobby. "Absolutely not—my father asked me. I did not go looking for this." Sitting in the limo beside his father, I ask whether he feels he has betrayed his mother. Herb interrupts with a giggle. "That's not factual. It's a business thing. " Ronnie thinks a moment and says, "I very much love my mother. I believe I'm doing what's right for all of us. I'm standing up for what she taught me to do. She understands I'm standing up for these businesses. ' '

The month of May brought a series of attempts to reunite the family. Working on the board's behalf, Claudine Malone offered two peace plans to Herb. Both were rebuffed. Oliver North's attorney, Brendan Sullivan, who gained a measure of fame by telling a congressional committee he wasn't a "potted plant," accepted Bobby's request to mediate the dispute. Herb wouldn't hear of it. According to family members, Herb also refused the entreaties of his oldest board member, 81-year-old Warren Tydings, the scion of a wealthy Maryland family, whose entry onto the Dart board in 1960 brought Herb early credibility.

Bobby, who was close to Tydings and knew he was dying, took a commemorative plaque and a handsome watch down to the Tydings house in southern Maryland late one evening in May. "Warren, you're 81 years old and I'm 40 and I'm coming down here because I want you to give me some wisdom," Bobby said. "You've been my father's friend for so many years. Help me."

"Bobby," began Tydings, "I've never been your father's friend. I was on the board for 33 years, but I was never your father's friend. There is no wisdom I can offer you."

Bobby drove home that night alone, deeply depressed. When Warren Tydings died five days later, Bobby wrote a poem in his honor that he read at the next meeting of the Dart board.

At that meeting, on the morning of May 24, Gloria Haft stopped dead in her tracks as she entered the room. Both Herb and the directors had invited their attorneys. "What's going on here?" she demanded. "Who are these people?"

When Herb said nothing, Gloria launched into an impassioned speech, pleading with her husband to end the crusade against his family. "Herbie, don't do this," she said again and again. It was the first time the family's turmoil had been aired so openly in front of outsiders. "It was completely from the heart," says Chuck Farkas. "It wasn't 'I'm mad at you'; it was clearly 'I've been your partner in life for 46 years, why this, why now, why are you so set in this direction that is so destructive?' I wanted to crawl under the table."

Herb whispered to his new attorney, Michael Klein of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. "Klein was ice water," says a director. "No compassion. No warmth. Cobra-like." When Klein explained he was merely there to protect Herb's interests, Gloria stomped from the room. It was after Bobby cajoled his mother into returning that Herb sprang his surprise. When it came time for the routine renomination of Crown's board members—who were also Dart's board members and who were united behind Bobby—Klein stopped the meeting cold by announcing that Herb was reserving the right not to back the slate.

"What do you mean, you reserve the right?" Bobby asked.

As the meeting dissolved in confusion, the attorneys started discussing the implications of Herb's pronouncement. During a series of adjournments, Herb summoned Gloria and Bobby to his office and repeated his threats to fire them if they didn't agree to limited-partner status at Combined. "Dad, don't do this," Bobby pleaded. "I don't know if I can say this later, but I'll tell you now, I love you. Don't do this."

"Why, Herb, why?" Gloria repeatedly asked.

After a heated argument, Bobby and Gloria rose and paused at Herb's door. "If you walk out of this room now," Herb promised, "it's over."

They left, having settled nothing. Afterward Bobby drove two and a half hours to Warren Tydings's funeral. When Gloria returned home, she found Herb in a rage. At the height of the ensuing argument, Gloria claims, Herb threw her down on their bed, ramming her into the headboard, aggravating a bad disk in her neck. The incident left Gloria shaken, and she began sleeping in another bedroom with the door locked; after more arguments, she insisted that a maid sleep upstairs as well. Gloria moved back into the master bedroom a week or so later when Herb disappeared over a long weekend. Upon his return, she says, he slept in another bedroom rather than join her. Then one night he strode back into the master bedroom and, she says, chased her into the hallway, shouting, "Get out! Get out of here!"

On subsequent nights, Gloria says, she was awakened by Herb screaming threats at her through her locked door. One night, two family members say, Herb became so enraged he pulled a phone from the wall, prompting Gloria to call 911. By the time police arrived, Ronnie had whisked Herb to his house, and Gloria assured the officers everything was fine. Bobby and Linda begged her to move in with them, but Gloria, clinging to hopes that Herb would come around, refused.

Herb not only denies striking his wife, but insists Gloria struck him. Ronnie told me his mother is a liar. "This is one of the toughest things to deal with in this thing, and it's one of the saddest," he says. "My mother told me, 'No one can win against your father. If I have to allege physical abuse, I will.' "

"You're saying she made all this up?" I asked.

"Yes, she did," Ronnie said. "This is a horrible allegation I'm making, but it's true."

While his parents grappled behind closed doors, Bobby finally realized the danger of his own plight. For weeks he had assumed that, however furious their fights, he and his father would ultimately make up. Now, as it became clear Herb was poised to fire him and the board, Bobby began working around the clock to forge a truce. He says he grudgingly agreed to become a limited partner at Combined. But working in Michael Klein's law offices nonstop from the morning of June 5 until almost dawn on June 7, Bobby was unable to get his mother to do the same. Gloria wasn't willing to place their futures in Herb's, and eventually Ronnie's, hands.

When he returned home, Bobby still felt he could piece together a compromise. But shortly before noon he was stunned to learn time had run out. A Washington Post reporter called and told him that Herb was putting out the word that both Bobby and his mother were going to be suspended from Dart—as they in fact were later that day. Herb had also requested and received the resignations of Dart's outside directors, who had incurred his wrath by writing him on Bobby's behalf.

Herb's next strike was against the family's weakest link, Linda. Late the next night, Herb telephoned her and asked to talk about Combined. As Linda later described the evening to two family members and her lawyer, Herb warned that Combined was in dire financial trouble, on the verge of having loans called, and he pleaded with her to sign papers that would allow the loans to be refinanced. When Linda warily consented, she drove to Ronnie's house on California Street, where her father awaited with a notary public. "Herbie's in tears, [saying] if she doesn't sign they'll go into bankruptcy," says a family member who heard the story from Linda the next morning. "He appeals to her sense of family. Plus, Linda is financially dependent on Herb. She's incredibly dependent. Herb makes all these promises, [saying,] 'Everything will be fine, just sign.' She keeps saying, 'Can I have an attorney now? Don't I need an attorney?' "

Assured by Herb that she didn't, Linda signed the papers without reading them carefully. "So then she goes home and sits down after midnight and reads them, and it's not at all what he said," the family member continues. Linda realized she had unwittingly signed over a wide-ranging power of attorney, giving Herb the crucial third vote (out of five) he needed to control Combined. Incensed, she raced to her father's mansion, where she shut off the security alarms and bounded up to his bedroom. "She came in at two in the morning, screaming and yelling, shook Herb awake—I mean physically shook him—and scared the hell out of him," says one of Herb's spokesmen. Linda demanded the papers back. Soon she was joined by Gloria. "Linda's going, 'Give it back! Give it back!' " the family member says. "From what I heard, Herb's reaction was basically 'Ha-ha, you're screwed.' "

In desperation, Linda drove to Ronnie's. But Ronnie, warned by Herb, refused to let his sister in the house. Instead

he handed her a bottle of water and told her to wait outside on the steps. Minutes later, Herb and Gloria pulled up in separate cars, igniting a wild scene among husband, wife, son, and daughter in front of the house. Their tirades could be heard up and down the street. Gloria, referring to Linda's power of attorney, repeatedly screamed at Herb, "Give it back!" Herb bellowed at Linda, telling her at one point, as Linda recalled in court papers, "Go to the end of the world! Go to insolvency!"

While confirming most details of the incident, Herb's spokesmen deny Linda was misled into signing the power of attorney. One of Herb's lawyers says Linda signed because she wanted peace, then turned on him because she is "emotionally unstable." Asked why Linda would change her mind, one of Herb's spokesmen replied, "Why? She's a bat-shit broad. I have no idea."

That same night, around three, Herb phoned Bobby's town house, demanding to speak to his son and unleashing a string of obscenities at Mary Haft when she refused. "Don't you speak to me that way!" Mary shouted back. "Herbie, quit lying, quit acting like this!" The calls left Mary and her visiting twin sister deeply shaken. Bobby unplugged the phones and double-checked the locks. "There was a real sense of menace that night," says a family member. "We were petrified. We were very worried about personal safety."

The next morning, when Bobby and Linda convened at her lawyer Stef Tucker's office, Linda was a red-eyed wreck. "She was just shaking," says a family member. ' 'To have your father do this to you, it's just staggering. It's just staggering on so many levels." Tucker phoned Michael Klein, demanding the return of Linda's power of attorney. The lawyers worked out a compromise in which Bobby, Linda, and Gloria gave Herb limited power to run Combined until the family quarreling ended.

If this was to be war, then Bobby and Gloria believed they had a secret weapon. But when Linda walked into the First American Bank in Chevy Chase the next day, she found that the safe-deposit box where Bobby says it was kept had been drilled open—by Herb. "He was after the second blackmail note," Bobby told me. "Around the time of the Vana Martin case, a second woman had sent a note to my mother. She wanted $5.5 million or she would tell the world [about their affair]. This was really ugly. This was one of [Gloria's] best friends.

The letter claimed she had slept in [Gloria's] bed when she was gone."

A family member says the letter, received shortly before Bobby's marriage to Mary, had threatened that details of Herb's affair, including compromising photographs, would be mailed to Mary Haft's parents, strict Catholics who lived in Pittsburgh. "Mary's mother," says a family member, "would have died 1,000 deaths." According to a family member, Herb said he intended to give her the $5.5 million, but Bobby had ruled out any payments, and the threats were apparently never carried out.

Still, a decade later, Bobby's camp says Herb remembered the letter and drilled Gloria's box as well as a box Linda maintained. (Though Herb and Ronnie didn't have keys to either box, they were able to gain entry because they had once signed the respective signature cards.) The alleged blackmail letter was gone, as well as letters from other women Gloria had received over the years. Gone from Linda's box, a family member claims, were the adoption papers for one of her daughters, a matter that is sensitive to Linda. "Herb knows that's really a killer for Linda," this family member asserts. Spokesmen in Herb's camp admit that Herb and Ronnie drilled the boxes. "But there was no blackmail note," Michael Klein told me. "It never existed. They took nothing that wasn't exclusively theirs."

Herb maintained the upper hand in the weeks to come. He sealed Bobby's office at Dart and changed the locks at Combined. He named Ronnie, who had no significant retailing experience, to replace Bobby at Dart. Then, as Bobby retreated to Nantucket, Herb allegedly amended Combined's bylaws, granting himself and Ronnie gifts of new stock. When Linda found out they had used her power of attorney—apparently one she had signed long before—she sued. In court papers, Linda claimed that Ronnie had offered to boost her salary at Dart if she joined them. Meanwhile, Gloria, fearing she had signed a similar power of attorney, ran a classified ad in the Post indicating that no one should honor any agreements Herb or Ronnie might sign in her name.

Friends say her family's disintegration has broken Gloria's heart. One morning in late summer, as Herb prepared to leave for work, Gloria mustered the courage for a last desperate appeal. "I thought if we could have dinner together perhaps we could, you know, put all of this behind us, maybe straighten it out, maybe, maybe, we could [make] one last attempt," she testified at her separation hearing. "Because he wouldn't talk to me, I went down [as] he was getting ready to leave, and I got into the limousine. When I got into the limousine ... he got out, he went back into the house."

Inside, Gloria joined Herb on a bench in the front hallway. ''He wouldn't speak with me, and I begged him, 'Please, for our family.' And [still] he wouldn't speak with me," she testified. ''When he got up to leave, I got up and he took my arms and pushed me and I went to the floor and hurt my leg." Bobby says his mother walked with a limp for days afterward.

On August 10, Gloria filed for a legal separation. Her lawyer, Mama Tucker, asked a Washington judge for the extraordinary measure of appointing a fiscal agent to oversee the couple's joint assets. After several days of hearings, the request was denied. Accompanied by Ronnie, Herb came to the courtroom wearing a smile, chitchatting with reporters, and handing out little raspberry candies from a tin. He had reason to be happy even before the verdict. On the eve of the hearings, Herb had amazed the rest of the family by transferring his Dart stockholdings to Ronnie, shielding them from Gloria's grasp.

Gloria's testimony was poignant and pugnacious. ''I'm a proud woman," she said, ''[but] after so many young women, I don't think that I would ever want to be with someone who doesn't want me as a person and as a woman." The audience was dotted with Gloria's friends and relatives. ''She's an intensely private woman," said one. ''For her to lay bare her life in court like this, it's killing her. Everything she holds dear has been destroyed."

Court filings flew like confetti during September. For now at least, it appears Herb has triumphed in the strange blitzkrieg he launched against his family. When not holed up with his lawyers, he busies himself by planning the openings of several additional Total stores his new board has approved. He shows few, if any, signs of strain or guilt. ''This is fun—don't you see, business is fun!" he chortled as we toured a Haft-owned strip mall.

Herb continues to live under the same roof as Gloria, who remains in exile in her own wing of the family mansion, laying out her clothes the night before in order to scurry from the house in the early morning and avoid Herb. After rabbis at the Washington Hebrew Congregation preached the importance of family and forgiveness at Yom Kippur, Gloria ran from the temple in tears. Linda Haft still drives to work at Dart headquarters in Landover, Maryland, each morning, though rumors fly daily that she is about to be fired.

Meanwhile, Bobby returned from Nantucket and began spending his days at home, weighing job offers from other retailers and filing and receiving a growing mountain of legal papers. Neither he nor Mary can shake the fear that violence may yet erupt within the family. Herb's process servers seem to lurk around every comer: one startled Mary by sticking papers in her face as she loaded the kids into the car one morning. The phone still rings at all hours of the night; when Bobby picks it up, no one is on the line. "The calls literally leave a prickly sensation on the back of my neck," Mary told me. "I am actually trembling as I say this. I just can't believe this is happening. I can't believe it."

"I still love my father," Bobby wearily told me recently. The previous day, he had seen Herb for the first time in three months, sitting across from him in a marathon deposition. His father barely glanced at him all day. "I'm looking for healing in my family," Bobby says, "but this is my father wiping the rest of us off the map." There was little hope in his eyes as he completed the thought. "But I'll never give up on my family."