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Peter G. Angelos, center, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, sits in the owners box at Ft. Lauderdale Stadium with his son Louis and wife Georgia during his team’s spring training baseball game against the Boston Red Sox on March 18, 2007. (AP Photo/James A. Finley)
The Angelos versus Angelos legal saga has come to an end, at least for now.
In a joint filing obtained by The Daily Record, Angelos brothers Louis and John and their mother, Georgia, agreed to drop a set of dueling lawsuits that aired a long-brewing dispute between Louis and the rest of his family.
The filing does not offer any details of what agreement the parties reached, if any, in order to end the lawsuits. In lawsuits between private parties, it is common for settlement details to remain secret.
The joint stipulation of dismissal does require both parties to bear their own attorneys’ fees, which are likely to be sizable given the army of lawyers the case attracted.
Lawyers handling the case could not immediately be reached for comment Monday morning.
The contentious family dispute first came into view last summer, when Louis Angelos filed a lawsuit against his brother alleging that John had manipulated his mother and was exerting unilateral control over assets belonging to his father, the legal magnate and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, Peter G. Angelos.
RELATED: Judge appoints conservator to take over Angelos law firm
Peter Angelos has been incapacitated by illness and unable to manage his business interests since 2018. Louis Angelos, the younger son, continued running his father’s storied Baltimore law firm since then and claimed in June to have sold himself the firm at a price to be determined later.
John and Georgia Angelos disputed the sale and argued in court that 93-year-old Peter Angelos wanted his law firm to be shut down after he could no longer run it. Georgia Angelos sided with John, the Orioles’ chief executive officer, and sought to assert control over her husband’s assets in a countersuit filed in August.
In an amended complaint filed last month, Louis Angelos escalated his claims and accused John and Georgia of siphoning tens of millions of dollars out of Peter Angelos’s personal bank account in an effort to shield the money from potential creditors connected to a pending malpractice lawsuit against the law firm.
But Louis Angelos also gave up management of the law firm late last month, agreeing to the appointment of a conservator who will handle the firm’s business from now on. Baltimore County Circuit Judge Keith R. Truffer appointed lawyer William J. Murphy as the firm’s conservator last week.
Court filings in the lawsuits were characterized by personal swipes between the brothers and often included provocative details about the family behind Baltimore’s Major League Baseball team.
In the original complaint, Louis Angelos claimed that John intended to “maintain absolute control” over the Orioles, including keeping the option to sell the team or move it to Tennessee, where he has a home.
John Angelos quickly responded with a promise to keep the Orioles in Baltimore.
“As I have said before, as long as Fort McHenry is standing watch over the Inner Harbor, the Orioles will remain in Baltimore,” he said in a statement in June.
Louis Angelos also claimed that his brother wanted to close down his father’s law firm, which was built on decades of asbestos-related litigation because it served as a reminder that John had never lived up to his father’s expectations.
“The friction between them over John’s lack of professional standing was internecine,” the complaint stated. “With Mr. Angelos now disabled, John intends to have the final word. He has set out to dismantle the legal empire his father built.”
Louis has also argued that John and Georgia wish to distance themselves from the law firm because of a pending class-action malpractice lawsuit.
The firm’s former clients sued in early 2021, claiming that Peter Angelos cost them a multimillion-dollar recovery by failing to file an enforcement action and fraud claim against an asbestos company before a deadline to bring the claims expired. John and Georgia moved Peter Angelos’s money out of his personal bank account in an effort to shield it from potential creditors stemming from the lawsuit, Louis claimed.
Georgia Angelos stepped into the fray soon after Louis filed his lawsuit, countering with a complaint that claimed the legal dispute stemmed from Louis being “unable to live up to his father’s expectations or win the approval (he) desperately craved.”
“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 wrote.
The dismissal brings an end to the ugly legal fight but not to questions about the family’s plans for the Orioles. The team did not exercise a one-time, five-year extension to their lease at Camden Yards as of last week, when the deadline for the option passed, but negotiations between the Orioles and the Maryland Stadium Authority can continue as the end of their lease approaches. The team and Gov. Wes Moore announced a joint commitment to they called a “multi-decade, public-private partnership” to revitalize the Camden Yards sports complex.
