Malcolm I. Glazer may be Baltimore's best hope for regaining professional football.

The Palm Beach, Fla., businessman is smart. He's scandal-free. And most of all, he's rich.

Just don't ask his sisters for character references.

For 12 years, Mr. Glazer has fought with his four older sisters in a bitter legal dispute over their mother's will. On paper, the dispute is over their mother's estate -- an estimated $1 million, a paltry sum for him. Under the surface, he says, is old-fashioned sibling rivalry. It's never too far from the surface. One spat erupted in the family home while the Glazers mourned their mother's death.

Exhausting a string of lawyers, Mr. Glazer has frustrated judges and irritated opposing attorneys. He has brushed aside efforts to settle the dispute, which may be years away from a conclusion.

"Should I have done something different? No," Mr. Glazer, 63, says. "I've never done anything in my life I was ashamed of."

He will harness that same clear-eyed determination in his bid for a National Football League expansion team for Baltimore.

He says he can write a check for $150 million if that's what it would take. In the next breath, he refuses to ante up $50,000 to help the city and state promote Baltimore during the expansion sweepstakes. Mr. Glazer explains that it's not in his budget.

In so many words, Malcolm Glazer says he's the one to bring a football team to Baltimore, and who can doubt it? The record shows that he usually gets what he wants, particularly if it's for sale.

Mr. Glazer's work consumes him. He monitors his far-flung businesses "from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed."

In his world, none of this is exceptional. "You show me a man who is highly successful, and I'll show you a guy who works 80 hours a week," he says.

Even the football team is viewed first through the business prism. Let Leonard "Boogie" Weinglass and novelist Tom Clancy, Mr. Glazer's local competitors for the NFL franchise, wax poetic about the good old days of John Unitas: He focuses on the economics of the deal. The conversation is peppered with references to computer runs, stadium leases and, if he gets the team, profits.

"It's not as good as other investments we've made," Mr. Glazer says of the NFL. "But I'd be satisfied."

The color of money

Mr. Glazer says he would be able to pay cash for an expansion football team. It would be an unusual move for a man who has gotten rich buying things with as little of his own money as possible.

That was the principle he used buying $6,000 houses in Rochester in the '50s and years later when he made a $7.6 billion bid to buy Conrail from the federal government. The 1984 bid by First Allied Corp. -- Mr. Glazer's holding company -- was the highest of 15 submitted. The offer, it turned out, included only $100 million in cash. Most of the rest of the purchase price would have been paid back with Conrail profits.

U.S. officials knew nothing about the man who wanted to take over the huge railroad. "What does First Allied do?" an official with the Federal Railroad Administration asked a Rochester reporter.

Mr. Glazer's diverse financial empire includes mobile-home parks and nursing homes in several states, a television station in Laredo, Texas, and half of a bank in the town of Savannah, N.Y., one of the few investments in which he has had a partner.

Lately, he has become a minor player on Wall Street, buying and selling significant chunks of companies he believes are undervalued. A hostile takeover bid for Formica Corp. in 1988 failed, but Mr. Glazer took home a substantial profit when he sold his 10 percent share.

In 1989, he tried to buy Harley-Davidson Inc. The company rebuffed him and the plan fell through. Mr. Glazer sold his stake in the company for a quick profit of roughly $11 million. But his takeover effort left some observers unimpressed.

"In this particular case there could have been a lot more homework done," says Timothy P. Reiland, research director at an institutional brokerage firm that helped Mr. Glazer. "I think there was a lot of naivete on his part."

Mr. Glazer says he doesn't know what he's worth. Even if he did, he wouldn't talk about it.

When he made his pitch to the NFL last month, Mr. Glazer kept representatives of the Greater Baltimore Committee and the Maryland Stadium Authority out of the meeting. Likewise, he has not shared his financial data with Maryland officials.

But people who know Mr. Glazer are confident that he was not exaggerating when he said he can come up with $150 million in cash to buy the team.

A budding businessman

"He's an American success story," a friend says. No question about it.

Born in 1928, Mr. Glazer was a child of the Depression, the son of Jewish immigrants. His father, Abraham, fixed watches and served as a pawnbroker. Malcolm helped his parents in their store on Main Street in Rochester.

In 1943, in the middle of World War II, Mr. Glazer's father died abruptly of cancer. Malcolm, the oldest son, assumed a new role, role he admits was weird.

"My mother would always say to me, 'You are my husband, my son, my everything.' My mother had a way of manipulating me," Mr. Glazer says. Two weeks after the funeral, when he was only 15, he set off by himself on a Greyhound bus, selling watch parts out of a suitcase.

Mr. Glazer says he felt "inferior" to the academically minded kids in school and almost flunked out of high school. He lasted six weeks in a small college near Rochester -- not surprising, since he was out selling watch parts every night after classes.

But he discovered the wonderful world of monopolies early. A friend told him about franchises that were available at a nearby Air Force base. Mr. Glazer, then 21, negotiated a contract to open a watch-repair shop for the soldiers.

Business was only fair. But he and his mother made enough money to begin investing in real estate.

They began buying houses in Rochester, then mobile-home parks. By 1956, Mr. Glazer was out of the family jewelry business for good.

One big family squabble

Malcolm Glazer is one of seven children -- five sisters and two brothers. Few are on speaking terms today.

To hear Malcolm tell it, the trouble began when they were children. "I never went anyplace with my sisters. They never took me," he said. "My mother would say, 'Take him to the movies,' and they would say no. My mother would say, 'Why not? You're going to sit next to a stranger anyway.' They'd said, 'We don't care, we're not taking him.' "

The Glazers are older now, but no closer. Since 1980, they have been locked in struggle over the estate of their mother, Hannah.

Problems were obvious soon after her death. The family was at her home sitting shivah, the mourning ritual practiced by Jews. As they grieved, an argument erupted. There was some physical contact, according to Malcolm's brother, Jerome, his only ally in the lengthy dispute.

"My brother and my brother-in-law had a disagreement," Malcolm said. "It was nothing."

From there, the Glazers took their dispute to the surrogate court of Monroe County, where, for the past 12 years, they have battled over who gets what from an estate that, before the lawyers' fees decimated it, was worth roughly $1 million.

For his part, Malcolm Glazer said he believes his sisters simply are resentful because he was closer to their mother.

"I am very sorry my mother and I had a close relationship like we did," he said, his words tinged with sarcasm. "I am not sorry, but we did. In my next life, I am not going to be so close to my mother, and my sisters will be happy. I'm sorry I made my mother wealthy."

At first, Mr. Glazer said the effects of the family rift were "devastating."

"I thought, 'My God, I did all these things for Mother, and she was our mother.' Then I began to realize, it was my mother but I don't know if it was their mother. I don't think they were very happy that Mother got a new Cadillac every year and they had to use an old car."

The suit is far more complicated than a case of unresolved sibling rivalry, court records suggest. The case has centered, in large part, on court efforts to obtain records of his business dealings with his mother. Judges have ordered Mr. Glazer to produce records from those businesses, but the courts haven't accepted the accountings he has given.

In 1982, after being served with a court order, Mr. Glazer delivered 103 cardboard boxes filled with bank statements, rent receipts and other records. The papers were in disarray and not arranged in any logical sequence, according to court records. It took a staff of five office workers about three weeks to put them in order.

There are other examples of Mr. Glazer's apparent evasiveness. During a three-day deposition in 1982, in which he was questioned repeatedly about business dealings with his mother, answered questions with "I don't remember" more than 250 times, and either "I don't know" or "I don't understand the question" another 70 times.

During one break in the deposition, Mr. Glazer was left alone with his lawyer and a court stenographer. Unaware his words were being recorded, he said, "We have to keep going until there is no money left in this estate." (He later explained that he meant his sisters were intent on depleting the estate.)

In 1982, Judge Raymond E. Cornelius wrote that Mr. Glazer "beyond a doubt has acted in bad faith" in failing to turn over an adequate accounting of businesses owned with his mother.

Four years later, Judge Lyman H. Smith, citing Mr. Glazer's "intentional and prolonged non-compliance with the court's reasonable orders," told him to pay various lawyers' fees of $268,299.

"After a while, human beings become bitter and determined. That's apparently what happened here," said Justin L. Vigdor, a Rochester lawyer and Glazer family acquaintance who tried to ++ negotiate a settlement in 1980 and 1981.

The Glazer sisters declined to be interviewed for this article. But a lawyer for one of them, Rosalind Glazer Klein, said: "The case goes on because we believe we have not gotten an appropriate accounting."

Mr. Glazer insists he has done nothing wrong: "I think most disputes within families are people getting even with people over things that happened when they were 10 years old. I really do."

'I do nothing but work'

Looking to escape icy Rochester, Malcolm Glazer paid $2.5 million four years ago for a house on the oceanfront sand in Palm Beach, Fla., perhaps the most exclusive strip of beach on the East Coast.

He has yet to go swimming in the ocean there. He hasn't even ventured into his swimming pool.

"Since I do nothing but work, please forgive me -- I look at the ocean," he says.

He spent several million dollars rebuilding the cream-colored house and a separate guest house, which between them have seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms. There are two fireplaces and a tennis court.

"I've always lived in a nice house," Mr. Glazer says nonchalantly. "I'm a guy who goes home. I go to work, I go home. So please, I want to have a nice house."

It's one of the few apparent frills in his life. Another is his car -- a white Corvette. It's "youthful," he says.

Mr. Glazer does little except work. He hasn't taken a vacation since a 1984 trip to China.

Despite being one of Rochester's most successful businessmen, his profile there was razor-thin. He joined a country club but was there so rarely that the staff mistook him for a visitor. About the NTC only thing he does for fun is go out to dinner with Linda, his wife of 35 years.

"I would say Malcolm is very well-known but nobody knows him," says a friend, Neil Norry, a Rochester developer. "I like Malcolm. He just doesn't pretend to be anything other than he is."

He is, by most accounts, a skilled, tough negotiator, with a good eye for lucrative investments.

"He's tough but I don't think he's entirely unfair," one associate says.

In conversation, Mr. Glazer is engaging and direct. He pulls in a listener by asking questions. ("Is your father alive?" he asks a reporter.) A wispy, sandy-colored beard gives him a scholarly, distinctly uncorporate look. His hairline is receding. His body is "shrinking," he jokes. The suit is conservative and expensive.

It seems that nobody in Palm Beach has heard of the new multimillionaire in town. "He's not a pompous nouveau-riche Palm Beacher," says the man who sold him his oceanfront house.

Money talks

By all accounts, Mr. Glazer has few close friends. He is, however, close to his six children, who range in age from 22 to 31. All have worked in the family businesses. Bryan, 27, and Joel, 24, head the football division. They persuaded their dad that football was a good deal.

"I want to say for the record . . . I've got children who absolutely have done things for me that I was not able to do myself," Mr. Glazer says. "They have absolutely made me a lot smarter and helped me a lot financially. Age doesn't mean anything."

In 1990, they persuaded him to pursue a major-league baseball team. The Glazers made an imaginative but quickly dismissed ** pitch to land one of the two National League expansion franchises.

The plan: one team with four hometowns.

"America's team," Mr. Glazer suggested.

As he and his sons envisioned it, the team would have been an owner's dream, reaping profits from ticket revenues and broadcast contracts in four cities instead of one.

The idea generated lots of publicity but little else. When the National League sliced its applicants list to six from the original field of 18, the Glazers were left out.

"We didn't spend a lot of time on it," says Douglas Danforth, chairman of the expansion committee.

In their baseball travels, the Glazers did learn a valuable lesson, one they've put to work in their NFL bid. They saw that sports owners like to deal with single investors and love to deal in cash.

"We learned a guy with the checkbook, a single person, ends up with the team," Mr. Glazer says.

In baseball, the guy was Blockbuster Video mogul Wayne Huizenga, an acquaintance of Mr. Glazer's and the man who single-handedly won a team for Miami.

In football, Mr. Glazer may be the most liquid potential investor. He's certainly the most willing to talk about how he'll pay for his team.

"To remain silent on that would be foolish," he says.

Even with his checkbook poised, he doesn't seem to be a shoo-in.

He isn't a household name yet, particularly in the households that count. "I don't know a word about him. And that seems to be the consensus [among NFL owners]," says Robert Tisch, a part-owner of the New York Giants.

Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell hasn't met or spoken with Mr. Glazer, either. He did say Mr. Glazer's plan to pay cash would be "a consideration," if not a determining one.

"A lot of people can write checks," Mr. Modell said.

Since he announced his bid last fall, Mr. Glazer has visited Baltimore several times and made the rounds of business leaders and elected officials, including Gov. William Donald Schaefer.

The relationship between Mr. Glazers and local leaders is businesslike, and some who have met him say he is thoughtful and committed. However, the perception among some leaders here is that Mr. Glazer has not joined the Baltimore team.

Recently, the Maryland Stadium Authority asked the three potential ownership groups to contribute $50,000 each to Baltimore's football war chest. Only the Glazers refused.

Why? Simple, Mr. Glazer says: "We made a budget, and we've been following it."

He has been more of a team player recently, including an appearance with two of his sons at this month's pep rally for next fall's NFL exhibition game in Baltimore. Mr. Weinglass and Mr. Clancy were absent but sent representatives.

Sitting quietly next to Mr. Glazer were his sons, Bryan and Joel. He says he will let them make most of the decisions about the team.

Would that include signing quarterback Joe Montana of the San Francisco 49ers to a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract?

"I'll be wide awake on that one," Mr. Glazer says.