A Downtown attorney said Wednesday he will represent the daughter of late Tribune-Review publisher Dick Scaife in a dispute over one of Scaife's former trusts.
William Pietragallo, founding partner of Pietragallo Gordon Alfano Bosick and Raspanti, told Allegheny County Judge Kathleen Durkin he will replace Charles Avalli, who asked to be removed from the case because of a potential conflict of interest.
Jennie Scaife, 51, of Palm Beach, Fla., and her brother, David Scaife, 48, of Shadyside, want an accounting of a trust their grandmother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, set up for their father in 1935. Sarah Mellon Scaife was an heir to the Mellon industrial and banking fortune.
Her son spent the trust before he died July 4.
Lawyers for the Scaife children have 30 days to respond to court filings that say Scaife's mother granted trustees broad discretion to spend the money. The three trustees are longtime Scaife lawyer H. Yale Gutnick, Scaife relative James J. Walton, and PNC Bank. Gutnick is chairman of the Trib's board of directors.
Scaife's children allege he exhausted the trust, which once contained more than $210 million, to deny them the money and to cover operating losses at the Trib. The trustees say the money also paid for acquiring new newspapers and building the Trib's printing facility, NewsWorks.
Scaife didn't leave them money from this trust because he believed that another trust worth $560 million was enough to support them, Gutnick has said. The opposing teams of lawyers are negotiating over whether to provide the Scaife children an accounting of the 1935 trust, David Scaife's lawyer, James Mannion, told Durkin.
Attorney General Kathleen Kane's office also entered the case Wednesday to protect the interests of charities that received more than $250 million in donations from Scaife during his life. A filing says the office is getting involved in its “parens patriae” role, which refers to the office's power to protect public interests, including charities.
“In this case, Scaife's estate includes gifts to charity, and under the applicable law and rules of procedure, we were required to receive notice of the existence of the charitable interest,” said Carolyn Myers, spokeswoman for the Attorney General's Office. The office gets about 1,800 such notices each year, less than 5 percent of which involve formal litigation, she said.
E.J. Strassburger, Gutnick's lawyer, said it's not unusual for the Attorney General's Office to get involved in cases like this, and he expects that involvement to be limited.
Mike Wereschagin is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-320-7900 or mwereschagin@tribweb.com.
