Dan's Papers - October 26, 2007 - Quogue Mayor Hit With New Lawsuit

It's been my experience that Mayors in our small eastern towns are given wide latitude when it comes to running their villages. For example, a Mayor of Southampton some years ago - not the current Mayor - embarked on a campaign that many felt was designed to drive a flamboyant Spanish born artist named Gines Serran-Pagan out of town. Serran-Pagan had bought an old farmhouse in what was now a residential area just off Main Street and had converted it from an office and machine shop for Koral Brothers Builders into a residential farmhouse, stocking it with goats, chickens and various other farm animals.

It was an open secret that Serran-Pagan's immediate neighbor was the father of the Mayor who disliked the Spaniard and his crazy ways. In the end, after many visits, warnings and summonses from ordinance inspectors about petty violations, Serran-Pagan just picked up and left.

The case wound up in Albany before a board of Mayors who judge other Mayors' behavior. Nothing came of it.

What is happening in Quogue, however, may be a different matter. Last week, a Westhampton Beach developer named Rocco Lettieri filed a lawsuit for $25 million not only against the Incorporated Village of Quogue, but also against, by name, Mayor George Motz, and other members of the Village government. The essence of the lawsuit is that a proposed real estate development in Quogue, perfectly legal, was squashed by the Mayor who, according to Lettieri, told him outright and to his face that the proposed project "is not happening in our town" because "we are not like you people from Westhampton Beach." So he might as well give up because no other proposal would be accepted. And then, of course, none was.

"Mr. Lettieri understood that he was being discriminated against...for being a gentleman of Italian descent and ancestry, with a name like Rocco, who catered, by sheer happenstance, to persons of the Jewish faith - something defendant Mayor Motz did not want in 'his town,'" the complaint reads.

The matter involves the Inn at Quogue, a three hundred-year-old masterpiece of WASP heritage that is all porches and wood shingle and thick-paned windows that sits in the very center of downtown Quogue. It remains open on weekends as this is written, both the Inn and its restaurant across the street. It will probably close up for the winter.

In 2005, Lettieri bought the Inn part of the 4-acre property, which is apparently not listed in the New York State Registry of Historic Places, although it should be, and he has proposed to close the Inn down and build ten condominiums around it, while keeping the Inn as a centerpiece but only available to the condominium owners as a sort of historic clubhouse.

Whether this proposal was legal under Quogue law I do not know, but after a two year battle in the planning boards and architectural review boards, the plan was shot dead and with it Lettieri's $7.4 million investment. And maybe rightly so. Taking a village treasure, shutting it away from the public and bringing in condominium owners is certainly about the worst thing imaginable as the fate for the Inn at Quogue. But keeping the Roccos and the Goldbergs out to do it? One is on very shaky legal grounds if that is what they did and if those who had it done to them can prove it.

Mayor Motz said that he had no bias against anybody. On the other hand, he also said "In Quogue, we try to keep a certain ambiance in this community - that's very important to us."

That word "ambiance" could mean almost anything. Lettieri believes it means WASPS in, Italians and Jews out, and that it's a code word. And so he is suing.

It's also true that Mayor Motz and other Quogue officials have been in the news about other civil rights matters, including one very large lawsuit by a woman named Barbara Williams who had been in a car accident on a snowy winter day several years ago. She was in front of her house, she was going about 15 miles an hour according to her testimony and she skidded on the ice and into a pole. Injured, she went into her own house to call to report the accident, after which it had been her intention to seek medical help for injuries she was suffering, when police burst into her home, ripped the phone out of her hand, handcuffed her and took her down to the stationhouse on charges that she had been drunk driving.

Whether she had been drinking that morning I do not know, but if you're a cop and you see a car wrapped around a telephone pole, and you recognize that the car came from a house just behind it, you don't go bursting in without a warrant to arrest the homeowner for a crime you never saw committed.

Mrs. Williams remained chained to a pole in the stationhouse lobby for three hours with, it turned out, a broken wrist and a torn knee ligament because of the accident. She has lived in Quogue for 30 years. Everybody knows her. She has few enemies. And this is how she was treated.

There's a whole group of people who live in Quogue who say they are followed when they drive around, that they are pulled over for driving even one mile an hour over the speed limit, that their teenage children are harassed when they are bicycling home in the afternoon from, say a horseback riding lesson, and that they are now afraid to venture out. There's a website where you can read about what these people say are Gestapo tactics. See www.quoguemire.com. On the other hand, maybe this is the "ambiance" the Mayor wants to keep.

Well, a majority of Quogue residents elected Mr. Motz, a wealthy New Yorker. So there you are.

In an unrelated matter, Mr. Motz is under investigation by the Security and Exchange Commission for, they say, using his investment firm to commit fraud by illegally enriching himself at the expense of others.

Well, they elected him. And his wife was elected the Village Judge. And as I said, the State of New York gives Village Mayors wide latitude to run their communities as they see fit.