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Peter G. Angelos, shown in a 2014 photo, built a storied law firm and acquired majority ownership of the Baltimore Orioles. Now, with Angelos in ill health and having receded from public life, his law firm and baseball team are the objects of a bitter family legal fight. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark, File)
Georgia Angelos on Tuesday not only entered the fray but has chosen sides in the legal battle between her two sons over the future of their storied and ailing father’s Baltimore firm, the Law Offices of Peter G. Angelos PC, and his majority ownership of the Baltimore Orioles.
In a filing in Baltimore County Circuit Court, Georgia, 80, praised her elder son John, 55 and the Orioles’ chief executive officer, while accusing her son Lou – an attorney at the law firm – of bitterness and elder abuse by trying to sell the practice to himself.
Lou “seemed unable to live up to his father’s expectations or win the approval Lou desperately craved,” Georgia’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit they filed on her behalf against her youngest son.
“At 52, working as an employee of his father’s law firm, and never offered to make partner, Lou simply stayed and evidently stewed,” her lawyers added. “Try as she might, Georgia could not seem to placate Lou’s bitterness or his misplaced resentment of his brother John P. Angelos.”
Georgia’s filing — an assertion of her control of her 93-year-old husband’s properties — comes amid Louis’ lawsuit against John seeking judicial orders that he not interfere with their father’s law firm and that he exercise less unilateral authority over the Orioles, which Louis characterized as essentially a family business.
Georgia in her lawsuit, seeks judicial orders to invalidate any documents concerning Lou’s purported sale of the law firm to himself, to confirm her sole power of attorney for her husband, and to “remove Lou as a successor agent and hold him liable for breach of fiduciary duty, financial exploitation of Peter, an older and susceptible adult, and conversion.”
Georgia’s filing, first reported by The Baltimore Sun, also derided Lou’s lawsuit, also pending in Baltimore County Circuit Court, as a “legal ambush – now that his father can no longer defend himself, his law firm and his family.”
“Having no capacity at self-reflection, Lou instead projects his own shortcomings on John and levels upon him outlandishly false accusations, including that he has browbeaten his poor, enfeebled mother to deny Lou his expectation to inherit what he had no part in creating,” the attorneys wrote.
“What is sadly clear is that Lou resents John for his success and many accomplishments,” the attorneys added. “Ironically, it is Lou who surreptitiously seeks to abscond with Peter’s legacy. Lou fraudulently claimed he is legally empowered by Peter as his agent under powers of attorney in what amounts to an outright theft of Peter’s law firm.”
But “John and Lou are merely successor co-agents in the, for now, non-existent event that Georgia is unable to fulfill her responsibilities,” the attorneys added. “Lou abused his non-existent power as a successor co-agent purportedly to sell to himself Peter’s law firm.”
Lou’s attorney responded Tuesday that Lou’s goal is to preserve the law firm Peter Angelos built, protect its clients and safeguard his father’s legacy.
“Lou’s management of the law firm has been consistent with carrying out his father Peter Angelos’s intentions,” Jeffrey E. Nusinov said.
“As an attorney, he (Lou) has made the welfare of the firm’s clients his number one priority and has done so in full compliance with all ethical rules and applicable statutes,” added Nusinov, of Nusinov Smith LLP in Baltimore. “Non-attorneys cannot direct or control law firms in Maryland. Today’s filing shows a complete disregard for these restrictions.”
Georgia Angelos is represented by Christopher M. Loveland, of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP in Washington, and law firm partners in Los Angeles.
The case is docketed in Baltimore County Circuit Court as Georgia K. Angelos v. Louis F. Angelos, No. C-03-CV-22-003143.
