Defending Their Dealerships

Mark Calisi says he believes he lost his Chrysler-Jeep dealership on Long Island because he irritated a company executive.

Yale King was told that his Jeep and Buick-Pontiac-GMC stores near Denver were no longer wanted, even though he regularly doubled the carmakers’ sales goals.

James Painter and his 10 children cannot understand why Chrysler eliminated the two Utah dealerships they ran successfully for decades, particularly since the company allowed their immediate neighbor to open a new Chrysler dealership this month.

They are among the hundreds of dealers from all corners of the United States fighting to get back their businesses — and in many cases their good names, tarnished by implications of poor performance — through an arbitration process that will begin next week.

Chrysler and General Motors cut loose more than 2,000 dealers last year as part of their bankruptcy reorganization, but Congress is now forcing them to justify the closures after hearing so many stories of devastated families and communities.