11.11.2024

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Contrarian Boston exclusive: In dark side to fairy tale, Boston-area heirs to an aristocratic Czech family’s castles, forests and priceless art work cut poor relations out of their rightful inheritance, lawsuit contends

Shipped across the Atlantic during the darkest days of World War II to live with a family friend in Dover, the only hint of the young Czech boy’s unusual background were the letters relatives addressed to Prince Martin Lobkowicz.

A chagrined Lobkowicz soon ordered his relatives to stop addressing him as prince on the envelope of their letters, which, he noted, was the name of a popular local spaghetti brand and “quite embarrassing to me,” noted a 2008 Boston magazine profile of the family.

Martin Lobkowicz went on to forge a life that appeared anything but aristocratic. He served as an infantry officer in the Korean War, married a woman from Kentucky, and worked as a stockbroker while raising a family in suburban Dover.

However, in the early 1990s Lobkowicz’s life took a dramatic and unexpected turn back toward a past that he and his family seemed to have firmly left behind.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly free Czech Republic passed a restitution law, enabling families who had property seized in the communist era to reclaim ownership.

And, as it turned out, the Lobkowicz family had lots to claim.

When Martin’s father fled to England with his family following the Nazi takeover of what was then Czechoslovakia in 1939, he left behind a business empire amassed over 700 years by the House of Lobkowicz, one of the country’s leading aristocratic dynasties since the 1300s.

Firmly ensconced for decades in Boston’s suburbs, Martin, his wife Brooks, and his son William, among others, threw themselves into the legally arduous process of reclaiming the family’s Czech patrimony. Worth an estimated $1 billion, it includes a palace in Prague.

Lobkowicz Palace in Prague

But over the ensuing decades, the fairy tale morphed into a Dickensian tale of greed, with other, less-favored family members cheated out of their rightful inheritance, contends a new lawsuit that was reviewed by Contrarian Boston.