Tom Carvel had a special knack for promotion—and self-promotion. He sponsored Little Miss Half-Pint contests for young girls and made franchisees attend an 18-day course he called the Carvel College of Ice Cream Knowledge. His raspy, ad-libbed appearances in the company’s commercials were ridiculed, but they were memorable and sales soared. The idea of the C.E.O. as pitchman would catch on and influence other company heads, like Frank Perdue and Lee Iacocca. In his ads, Carvel seemed benign, but in real life, he was no Mister Softee. He battled franchisees all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, winning the groundbreaking right to require them to buy all ingredients and supplies from him, even the napkins.

Despite his wealth, Carvel lived simply. He wore polyester suits and hectored subordinates who didn’t drive modest American cars like he did. Visitors to the Carvels’ Ardsley home were amazed to find couches protected by plastic slipcovers. His office was an oversize motel room with furnishings that would have gone begging at a lawn sale. Yet T.C., as friends called him, could be generous; each Christmas, he gave gifts of $10,000 (tax free) to dozens of nieces and nephews.

By the late 1980s, however, Carvel’s fortune had become a burden. By then, he was in his eighties. Without children, he wondered what would happen to all he had accumulated. After wavering for months, he reluctantly sold his ice cream operations in 1989 to Investcorp, a Bahrain-based company that owned Tiffany & Co. and Gucci. “He didn’t trust anybody in his family or in his executive group to grow the brand,” Kornacki says. “The company was his legacy, and he didn’t want it to die.”

Carvel put his personal affairs in order too. One cold Saturday night in February 1988, Tom and Agnes excused themselves from a dinner party to sign identical wills naming the Thomas and Agnes Carvel Foundation as the beneficiary of their fortune after their deaths. Carvel was quite clear about how he intended to bestow his estate. If he died first, Agnes was to receive all the income his estate generated, plus quarterly payouts from a trust fund. The Thomas and Agnes Carvel Foundation was to receive all that was left—once Agnes died.

Overseeing this estate would be seven executors, Arcadipane and Davis­ among them. That number is unusual, but Carvel was convinced that the seven would serve to check and balance one another, safeguarding his money. One of the people who helped fashion the plan was Davis, his lawyer. Whether Carvel was steered into this plan by unscrupulous advisers or driven to it by his own fears about the fate of his fortune is an open question. But he had not been dead for more than a few months before one thing became clear: The elaborate plan, rather than creating checks and balances, set up factions that came to feud over and feast on Carvel’s fortune. It was turning into an estate disaster of monumental proportions.

The wild card in Tom Carvel’s life seems to have been Mildred Arcadipane. A slight woman, she began working for Carvel in the early 1950s, fresh out of secretarial school. Her job was her life; in the 38 years that she was employed by the Carvel corporation, co-workers recall her taking off just two days—to attend her father’s funeral. She never married, choosing instead to care for her elderly mother at home. By the 1980s, evidence in the many court cases shows, she had become a force inside the company. The accounting and payroll departments had begun to report to her. She “knew the nuts and bolts of the company,” and with her “hot temper” and “iron fist,” she knew how to get things done, Kornacki recalls. She could also be despotic. Some employees complained that underlings who crossed Arcadipane might find themselves without a job or that their health insurance had lapsed.

She had her way with Tom Carvel too. Arcadipane often cursed and shouted at the boss and locked him out of his own office dozens of times, a longtime driver for Carvel testified. On three ­occasions, Carvel sent him to New York City to buy jewelry as a peace offering. “When she lost her temper,” the driver said in the deposition, “it would require almost a straitjacket.” Asked why he kept Arcadipane on, Carvel once said cryptically that she had him “over a barrel,” according to another affidavit. Employees whispered that Carvel and Arcadipane, far from being just close business associates, might once have had an affair.
Pamela Carvel was close to Tom too. She grew up in Queens, New York, the eldest daughter of Tom’s brother Bruce. Tom and Agnes treated her like the child they never had. As a teenager, she spent her summers living with them and serving ice cream at their Hartsdale shop. Tom took care of her college tuition bills and hired her to make inspections of Carvel stores. When her uncle died, Pamela, who was working and studying abroad, “got a call to come home,” she says. “My aunt told me she needed help.”