Harry John's Holy War

By Frank Trippett

For most of their 29 married years, Harry and Erica John quietly built a life around their nine children, their devotion to the Roman Catholic Church and their charitable works. Through the De Rance Foundation, which Harry started in 1946 with an inherited 46% interest in the Miller Brewing Co., they funded everything from leper colonies in Africa to antipoverty programs in hometown Milwaukee. Residing in the unpretentious suburb of Wauwatosa, the Johns cherished obscurity as a virtue commended by the 17th century Trappist monk Armand Jean De Rance, for whom Harry named the foundation. Though De Rance became the world's largest Catholic charity, the Johns stayed out of the spotlight.

No longer. Harry, 66, and Erica, 53, are now divorced and locked in a legal slugfest in front of God and everybody: specifically, on the gritty stage of the State Circuit Court in Milwaukee. Erica and another De Rance director charge that Harry has pushed the foundation toward financial ruin by misspending close to $150 million in barely three years. They want the court to remove him as a director-trustee and take away his control of its funds. Harry insists their suit, now in its fifth week, is "a simple power grab."

Harry had long raised eyebrows with endearing eccentricities, including an aversion to doors that impelled him to remove many of them from his home. He also, according to his children, was in the habit of wearing several pairs of trousers at once in winter. (Harry calls this "absurd.") But in 1983, according to his adversaries, Harry John began to behave oddly in far more significant ways, funneling $3 million into underwater treasure hunts, paying employees $100,000 salaries and spending $100 million to launch a still inconsequential television company known as Santa Fe Communications to spread the Catholic word worldwide. Harry, says Erica, had gone "Hollywood" in 1983-84, tooling around Los Angeles in a Lincoln Continental and indulging in $500 dinners. He also moved to Las Vegas and divorced Erica, claiming "irreconcilable differences." Erica and her co-plaintiff, former Marquette University Professor Donald Gallagher, claim that Harry reduced De Rance's net worth from $188 million in 1983 to about $35 million. The De Rance board voted in August 1984 to limit Harry John's control over the foundation's assets.

Harry contends that the real motive for the lawsuit is a church effort to control his Santa Fe Communications. "The hierarchy of the Catholic Church wants to run any Catholic network," he says. Indeed, Erica has testified that in 1984, Vatican Ambassador to the U.S. Pio Laghi hinted that church recognition might be withdrawn from Santa Fe Communications "if we didn't do something right away" about Harry's antics. Erica also stated that shortly before the trial began, Mother Teresa expressed her support.

Erica's version of events is supported by the John children. Says Timothy, 27: "Mother is working hard to hold the family together and do what is best." Harry's children attending the trial are cool toward their father, a tall, gaunt figure wearing cropped hair and a baggy gray suit. Last week he tried to call over his daughter Paula, 25. "Why now," she audibly asked, with hardly a glance at her father, "with all the reporters here?" At another moment Erica murmured aloud, "Poor Harry doesn't know what's going on." Harry, in an interview, recalled an earlier day: "In the past, my wife called me a man of vision."

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Milwaukee