Dick Snyder says he doesn’t need the money, and it’s tempting to take him at his word. After all, to get to his home office, you must first walk up a spiral staircase and then down a hallway lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases that hold, among many others, first editions of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. The office itself, on the second floor of his 8,000-square-foot townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is furnished with English antiques.

What Snyder does need, he says, is for a wrong to be made right, and the reparation he seeks is $100 million from a man he once considered a friend, Edgar Bronfman Jr. Both men are legendary—notorious, actually—in their fields: Snyder in the book trade, Bronfman in music. Both have dealt in fortunes. Snyder has made (and lost) them for his investors; Bronfman has made (and squandered) a few of his own. And both are known for their outsize egos. Hardball, not always played cunningly, is their game. They’re playing it again, this time over what Snyder says is a handshake agreement gone bad.

In April, Snyder filed a lawsuit against Bronfman in the State of New York ­Supreme Court. Over the past two hours, he has systematically laid out the thinking behind it. For someone who was known as Dick “Nice Guys Finish Last” Snyder during his days at Simon & Schuster, the publishing giant he built, he seems calm, almost philosophical. Still fit at 74 years old, Snyder gives the impression that he could still get up for a fight, though the only unnerving thing about him is the baritone of his speech, something a longtime friend once described as “the deepest register I have ever heard in a white man’s voice.”

The gist of his court case is this: A partnership of two and a half years con­ceived on a beach on the Caribbean island of Anguilla culminated in Bronfman’s grabbing control of Warner Music Group and installing himself as C.E.O. Yet for all his labors, Snyder says, he received a kick in the pants. It’s quite the story, redolent with corporate intrigue: a top-secret merger meeting in Westchester County, New York; a deal spoiled by an inept double cross; board members leaking company strategies; an emptied office; and a stolen computer. It also happens to be a story that Edgar Bronfman Jr. says is patently untrue.

What is true is that the purchase and subsequent initial public offering of Warner Music made its original investors (including both Bronfman and ­Snyder) a lot of money in a short period of time. So the deal might have brought redemption for both. Bronfman went after Warner Music to exorcise a career tinged with failure. But he is accused of denying a similar opportunity to Snyder, who could have used a little good news of his own after some tough sledding in the wake of his ouster from Simon & Schuster. The complicating factor: Some think the Warner Music deal may prove to be a mistake, that Bronfman actually took an inexorably deteriorating asset off Time Warner’s hands. In that light, this court case ­offers the added attraction of two largely unsympathetic characters fighting over credit for an iffy deal—two men, whose specialty is spectacle, making a spectacle of themselves.