The Defender Saga: A New Hero Emerges

Last May, when Marshall was the only bidder, I wrote that if everything proceeded smoothly he could take over the company during the summer. Marshall, who owns a string of media properties based in Texas and had been interested in the Defender from the get-go, described himself then as “the last person standing.” He might still be Lowry’s preference, but financially he’s now laid out in the back room. “My problem has been the markets have softened up to the point where all my investors are really skittish about doing anything,” says Marshall. “I have not been able to move as expeditiously as I would like.”

Picou’s aunt Myrtle married John Sengstacke, and their son Robert is Picou’s cousin. The elder Sengstacke was once Picou’s guardian, and Picou, who’s 58, says he and the slightly younger Robert think of each other as brothers.

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Which makes theirs a closer relationship than Robert Sengstacke has enjoyed with his zealous daughter over much of the past four years, when Myiti held her father responsible for the collapse of the Barden deal. The obvious candidate to organize a family bid, Picou stayed on the sidelines in large part because the family wasn’t united and he wasn’t sure it ever would be. “The squabbling didn’t solve much,” he says. “The concentration should have been on securing the company. You can always dicker over control later.”

Myiti Sengstacke makes it clear she’s in Picou’s corner. “If you look at the history of this institution,” she says, “everything everyone on the outside has tried to do has fallen through. Some things are just meant to be, and it’s meant that the Sengstacke family keeps Sengstacke Enterprises.”

Picou was a teenager when he first went to work for the Defender. He later traveled with the Cubs and White Sox as a baseball writer back when the Defender still had a traveling baseball writer, rose to editor and then to president of Sengstacke Enterprises, and left the company in 1984. “We had problems over management concepts,” he says. “You couldn’t win if John Sengstacke said, ‘I’ve made up my mind.’ He wanted me in Chicago, and I said I couldn’t be in Chicago because of these circumstances. I guess we stopped talking for about five years.”

Lowry tells me, “We’re willing to make an adjustment in the original offer price.”