One source, who cryptically signed his name as "DT" (er, Deep Throat?), explained it in an e-mail to the Houston Press: "Don't expect any person with any ties to a service provider (legal, architectural, financial, etc.) to talk with you on the record. Keeping quiet provides real rewards and the downside from talking includes getting sued or just knocked out of the business."
Another person familiar with the Shadyside lawsuit initially spoke on the record, but called the next day, crying and frantic. The source pleaded for anonymity and expressed regret for talking. "I am naive — I'm very naive," the person moaned. "You're scaring me. You're scaring me. You don't understand how dangerous Petrello is. You need to promise me you're not going to put me in harm's way."
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Photo by Patrick Bertolino
Tony Petrello's house (left) and Rahul Nath's home (right) have little space between them. If Petrello ultimately succeeds in buying Nath's house, he'll have the largest estate in Shadyside.
Photo by Patrick Bertolino
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There may be good reason to be scared, said a woman sunning in her front yard on a recent Friday in Shadyside. "After that Vanity Fair piece, you can imagine why no one wants to talk about Tony Petrello," she said.
In July 2011, Vanity Fair published a 4,700-word article about a lawsuit Petrello filed against a 90-year-old potato farmer named John C. White, whose family has owned and tilled the oceanfront land east of New York City since 1695. Yes: another real estate problem. Tracking more than a decade of bitter disputes between Tony and Cindy Petrello and the Whites in Sagaponack, New York, the story framed Petrello as an archetypal .001-percent villain intent on wringing land from a diffident, hog-tied farmer.
Though Mayor Donald Louchheim says the real tale was more nuanced than that, it's continually regurgitated as some epic, metaphoric clash straight out of the testaments. "Classic story of David versus Goliath," said Michael Wright, who reported on the dispute for the Southampton Press. It all began in 1998, when Petrello, originally from a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Newark, signed a contract to buy 9.56 acres from John White, a man he apparently loved, for $2.1 million.
Though that's a lot of money, the Whites are worth substantially more. Son J.N. White estimated his family's net worth at around $10 million, but it's tied up in real estate. "We don't have very much cash," he said.
Petrello first discovered the farm in the early 1990s, around the time he left his New York job as a managing partner at Baker & McKenzie, a spot he'd snared after — whatever else people may think of the guy — some remarkable collegiate achievements for a Newark neighborhood kid. Petrello finished the requirements for his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at Yale by age 19, before attending Harvard Law School, and landing at Baker & McKenzie. But his tenure there was not devoid of controversy.
In 1986, a Baker & McKenzie associate named Geoffrey Bowers, who later died of AIDS-related illnesses, said he was fired after exhibiting skin lesions. He filed a discrimination complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights, which in 1993 awarded his family $500,000. According to a 1988 Newsday article, Petrello, who denied at the hearings that Bowers's condition spurred his termination, was nonetheless a "key figure in the dismissal of Bowers." The film Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks, was partly inspired by the Bowers saga.
More than a decade later and 100 miles away in Sagaponack, the Petrellos' relationship with the Whites was unraveling.
Here's what happened: The "Titans of Wall Street," as Louchheim calls them, had arrived. Property prices in the Hamptons went bonkers. Castles soon rose over the dunes. And Petrello's $2.1 million started seeming paltry, not even enough to cover the White farm's estate taxes, said J.N. White. So the potato farmers asked Petrello for more money and help restructuring their estate plan, stalling the deal's closure.
Now, Petrello — if his lawsuits are any indication — isn't a man who takes delay well. So he brought the hammer, suing them in federal court in 2001 so they'd fulfill their contract and for damages he'd allegedly incurred because of the heel-dragging.
It began a ten-year legal cluster fuck Petrello eventually won — the court completely ruled in his favor — though it ruined his friendship with the Whites. Even today Petrello's revised complaints haven't slowed, an additional summons hitting the Whites in early August. "If Tony thinks he's been screwed, he will fight all the way," said close friend Sam Stubbs, a Houston attorney. But, really, there may be more to it than that.
What becomes apparent after reading through Petrello's complaints and depositions is that, in a sense, he's still that Yale mathematician he once was. And that meticulous nature, which has made him profoundly rich and successful in the law and business, also emerges in his civil suits. He evidently cannot abide broken contracts. That's why he sued the Whites over land. That's why he sued Enrique Senker over an alarm system. And that's why, in 1999, he sued Chandler Robinson over an addition to his house.
"Obviously he knows the legal profession very well, knows what he can do with it," said Robinson, whose lawsuit with Petrello was settled out of court. Afterward, Robinson wrote a letter to the Petrellos, copying dozens of local construction and landscape crews, saying the couple was "honorable." But today Robinson's got a different story. "Petrello uses (the law) as a cudgel to get his way," the builder said. "To me, that's evil, what he does to people."
