Contacting Wita is no simple task. She’s hidden away behind imposing stone gates, with layers of helpers standing between her and the outside world. But one evening in June, something unexpected happens: Wita answers the phone.

“Hellooo…?” she warbles.

It’s after dinner, and Wita seems happy to talk, especially about John. During a rambling conversation, she makes it clear that she’s plenty proud of her children. But she perks up at the mention of her husband. “John Harbert loved construction and was a builder,” Wita tells me, listing some of his projects. “He was an engineer and built things all over the world.” She and John were philanthropists, she explains, and collected art and antiques together. “I got him interested in that,” she says.

And what about Raymond? Wita pauses and says, “I think he’s mighty hardworking.”

This spring, when Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was fending off the huns of Wall Street, a salvo was also being fired in a family dispute that has riven the Harbert clan. In 2006, Margie filed a lawsuit charging that her brother Raymond had essentially robbed her of her share of the family company. Her attorney asked the court to compel Raymond to reveal all of his company’s closely held financial information. Raymond and his lawyers have vigorously resisted his sister’s efforts. The suit is wending its way, slowly and painfully, through Jefferson County Circuit Court.

Margie and her husband, Sam Gray, an obstetrician, live with their three children in a Mountain Brook house of their own. Her suit relates to events that date back to 1990, when John decided to retire at the age of 69 and appoint Raymond C.E.O. By that time, Raymond had married his college sweetheart, Kathryn, and was serving as a vice president of Harbert Corp., responsible for mergers, acquisitions, and the evaluation of venture capital investments.

That year, Harbert Corp. found itself in dire financial straits. “We had gone into oil and gas and real estate development,” William Powers says. “Unfortunately, we also thought we could finance power plants.” The company was overextended, with money tied up all over the country and no banks willing to lend more.

Part of Raymond’s solution was to sell the construction business. He then renegotiated the company’s bank debt, culled underperforming units, and fired employees in a way that his father never would have, according to Powers. But these moves may have saved the firm.

Margie’s complaint states that Raymond then proposed starting a new company, to be called Harbert Management Corp., in which he would have a majority stake and to which he intended to transfer most of the operations of Harbert Corp. In order for Raymond to enact his plan, he needed the written approval of the family shareholders, according to the lawsuit. Those shareholders consisted of Margie and Jay.

What happened next was either an act of deception or an example of the naïveté that develops when someone has spent her entire life having everything taken care of by someone else. The original complaint says that Raymond visited Margie at her home one morning in 1994 “with an air of urgency” and asked her to sign a document that he said was the authorization of a loan for him to start his own real estate venture. The suit alleges that “in tendering the two-page document to Margie, Raymond turned the first page behind the second page so that essentially only signature lines were showing.” Margie was in her garden with a newborn baby in her arms; she signed the document without reading it, according to the suit. Jay’s consent was also obtained. (Margie sought to include Jay in the suit, which describes him as an “incapacitated person.” In John’s biography, Jay is described as suffering “developmental problems” in childhood.) By 2006, when Margie sued, H.M.C. had grown into a giant, managing more than $20 billion in investments for pension funds, endowments, and individual investors outside the family.

In a filing in response to his sister’s claims, Raymond argues that their father supported Raymond’s plan and that Margie knowingly agreed to the creation of the new company. The response further states that Margie was the recipient of $15 million in distributions over the past 13 years as a result of the arrangement. Margie declines to discuss the litigation or address her relationship with her brother.

“I’m sorry,” Wita says, when asked about the strife between Margie and Raymond. “It is too bad. But things like that happen, particularly in families that have...a good amount of wealth.” Raymond declined to comment on the lawsuit, but Har­bert Management’s executive vice president—a strapping Alabamian named Bill Lucas—made himself available.