Corporate Welfare: The Empire Of The Pigs

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All this welfare has helped propel Seaboard into the front ranks of American pork producers. As recently as 1989, the company did not own a single hog. This year it's the No. 5 producer in the country--and about to vault higher. Seaboard plans to build yet another processing plant, capable of slaughtering 4 million hogs a year, thereby doubling its output.

So who really profits from all of this? A secretive Boston family of millionaires.

Seaboard's stock is traded on the American Stock Exchange, and last week it closed at $387 a share. Some 75% of that stock is owned by another company, called Seaboard Flour Corp., and 95% of Seaboard Flour is owned by brothers H. Harry and Otto Bresky Jr., their sister Marjorie B. Shifman and family trusts. All told, the family's stock in Seaboard is worth $425 million.

And who are the Breskys? A Boston Business Journal article published in February 1993 described them this way: "The Bresky family could teach J.D. Salinger a thing or two about maintaining a low profile... Try [to] find anyone in Boston who has even heard of the family, and you draw nothing but blanks... The Breskys have never held memberships with local Chambers of Commerce or positions on the boards of local companies and nonprofit organizations." Two months later, in April 1993, the Kansas City Star published a similar report: "Seaboard declined to be interviewed for this article, following a standard practice for at least a decade. That practice has helped Seaboard avoid press coverage almost totally.

"'We kind of like it that way,' said Marshall Tutun, a Boston lawyer who is Seaboard's corporate secretary. 'We're modest, humble, unassuming folk, and our stock is rather thinly traded.'"

Indeed, Seaboard's offices in Chestnut Hill, Mass., are a testimonial to anonymity and modesty. The executive offices of the company with annual sales of $1.8 billion are confined to several small rooms on the third floor of a frayed four-story building in a strip mall on the western edge of Boston. With stained orange carpets, faded paint and a warren of empty offices, the building is home to a number of small businesses, including a hair and nail salon, a furrier, a jeweler, a facial salon, an electrologist and a marketing firm. Notes are affixed to unmarked office doors advising delivery people to "put envelope under door."

It is from this location, as well as a suite in the San Carlos Hotel in midtown Manhattan, that 72-year-old Harry Bresky masterminds the day-to-day business operations of the family's global empire.