History
In 1916, Greek immigrants Athanasios ("Arthur") and Efrosini Demoulas opened a grocery store in Lowell, Massachusetts, specializing in fresh lamb. In 1954, they sold their store to two of their six children, Telemachus ("Mike") and George Demoulas. Within 15 years, the two brothers had transformed their parents' "mom and pop"-style store into a more modern supermarket chain consisting of 15 stores.
George Demoulas died of a heart attack in 1971 while vacationing in Greece, making Mike the sole head of the DeMoulas supermarket chain. Although each brother had promised to provide for the other's family in the event of his death, a lawsuit filed in 1990 by the heirs of George Demoulas claimed that Mike had defrauded them out of all but 8% of company stock by moving assets into shell companies, such as 'Market Basket Inc.' and 'Seabrook Sales Inc.' and claiming that these were separate companies from DeMoulas itself. The ensuing legal cases threatened to require the sale of the chain, most likely to Royal Ahold's Stop & Shop. In 1994, Judge Maria Lopez ruled that Mike Demoulas had defrauded George's family out of nearly $500 million, transferring 51% of Demoulas' stock to George's family.
Mike Demoulas died in 2003 at age 82 and is buried in Andover, Massachusetts. In March 2006, Boston magazine rated George's son, Arthur S. Demoulas, as Boston's eighth wealthiest person, with assets of $1.6 billion. He was not listed in the Forbes 2008 edition. In early 2008, the board of directors elected Arthur T. Demoulas president of the corporation.
A separate company controlled by the Mike DeMoulas side of the family operated the Lee Drug chain from 1983 until it was sold to Walgreens in 1990; these stores were usually located in the same shopping center as a DeMoulas/Market Basket. The chain's corporate relationship to Mike DeMoulas's family interest in DeMoulas/Market Basket was cited in the 1990s litigation.
Read more about this topic: DeMoulas Market Basket
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“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)