He made a fortune from a chain of retail stores and supplemented it through a series of investments in real estate and stocks.
His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who were running a pawn shop in Salt Lake City when he was born.
He then built a large retail company called Petrie Stores, which operated over 1700 discount women's clothing stores under various names, Petries, Three Sisters, Jean Nicole, Rave, Stuarts, Winkleman's, Marianne's and G & G.[1] In 1977, his $10 million investment in a consortium organized by A. Alfred Taubman to buy the Irvine Company returned $100 million.
The Minnie Petrie Synagogue at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan is named after his mother.
[13] In 1978, he married his fourth wife, a Baptist by upbringing from Greenville, South Carolina and three-times-married, Carroll McDaniel Portago Carey-Hughes Pistell Petrie.