By Will Doolittle will@poststar.com
ESSEX
Marco Turco, farm manager for the Lewis Family Farm, was driving around the 1,200 acres Sandy Lewis owns, land that curves toward Lake Champlain on the east side and slopes down to the Boquet River on the west.
Turco drove past organic crops growing in long strips across the landscape - alfalfa, Italian rye grass, wheat.
He drove past four gleaming silos and past the quarry where they dug out stone for the miles of farm roads that circle the property.
He parked by a pasture where about 30 of the farm's 134 cows had been placed with bulls for breeding.
Turco is Italian but grew up on a sugar cane farm in South Africa. He lives in a house on the Lewis farm with his wife, two daughters and his wife's sister.
Of dozens of people who talked about Sandy Lewis - his farm and his feuds - Turco was the only one unperturbed and unawed by Lewis.
He did not laugh nervously, as others did, when asked about Sandy Lewis' personality.
He did not say, as others did, "I don't want to get sued."
He did not wax on for a quarter of an hour, as some did, about Lewis' brilliance and his generosity.
He, Turco, runs the farm - Lewis is not a farmer, he said. But Turco appreciates his boss.
"You always know exactly where you stand with him," Turco said. "Sandy may lack social filters, but what is great is he always tells you straight."
Lewis' honesty - helpful, intrusive, bullying - is his touchstone.
"I do not lie," he proclaims.
But he does browbeat and bully, as his lawyers could tell you.
He does cut and cajole, as the many journalists he corresponds with via e-mail could tell you.
He does intimidate, as Ron Jackson, the former supervisor of Essex who lost a fight with Lewis over construction of his farm roads, will tell you.
He does humiliate, as Paul Van Cott, the former head of enforcement for the Adirondack Park Agency who was transferred after calling Sandy Lewis a "sociopath," could tell you.
He does manipulate, as officials at the Adirondack Park Agency discovered when they pursued Lewis in an enforcement action that became, last year, one of the most significant legal defeats the agency has suffered in its 37 years of existence.
Why does Sandy Lewis inspire fear and awe? Why do some describe him as a bully while others talk about the great lengths to which he has gone to help them?
If you ask his neighbors, they'll tell you why.
A beautiful place
"In my opinion, Sandy Lewis' operation does not qualify him to be called a farmer," said Tim Burke, one of Lewis' neighbors. "He has some sort of major industrial operation going here. He tore out hedgerows and turned his fields into huge monolithic fields. He put in drains so runoff goes quickly into the Boquet River.
"It's industrial agriculture, but I certainly don't call it a farm."
Burke worked from 1991 to 2001 as the executive director of the Adirondack Council, the most prominent environmental advocacy organization in the Adirondacks.
He dislikes Lewis, but said his criticisms are not based on Lewis' personality.
"His personality is in fact obnoxious," Burke said, "but I think it's more important to look at what he does. I think what he has done here is, on balance, a negative for the environment and damaging to local businesses."
Some other local people agreed with Burke about Lewis' personality, although no one else criticized his farm.
"Sandy is abrasive, we know that," said Mark McKenna, who worked for years as Lewis' farm manager. "I had to have awful tough skin to work for the man for 15 years."
But, in assembling the farm, Lewis transformed several decrepit, struggling farms into one gorgeous, productive property, McKenna said.
"He really cleaned up that community up there," he said. "This guy even removed the telephone poles. He buried the lines at his own expense."
Anita Deming, director of Essex County Cornell Cooperative Extension, which offers training and advice to farmers, said she was "very pleased" Lewis won the lawsuit against the APA.
"He's doing a great job, he's got a good product. He's got a beautiful operation," she said.
Deming praised the drainage Lewis put in throughout his property - miles of pipes laid at least 4 feet down to drain water out of the soil and allow plants' roots to push deeper.
The drainage keeps the soil aerated, making for healthier soil and healthier plants.
"It's not cheap," she said. "It's about $1,000 an acre."
The drainage cleans the runoff that streams into the Boquet River and Lake Champlain, because the water pours through several feet of soil first, instead of running over the top of saturated ground, she said.
The properties Lewis bought were in terrible shape, according to another neighbor, Jim Lloyd, who retired in 2006 as the Essex County director of veterans affairs.
"Junked cars, trash, horrible old barns," he said. "He bought up some places that were really bad and cleaned those all up."
McKenna said manure from one farm was "actually running across the road," and there were "trailers all over the place."
Now, the Lewis farm is a favorite with photographers. Even the former head of the APA's enforcement division called it "incredibly beautiful."
Teresa Sayward, the state assemblywoman from the Essex County area, said what is most important about the way Lewis has managed his land is what he has not done, which is develop it for housing.
"Someone else could have gotten that property," she said. "When you look at that land that he owns and the surrounding areas and you think, ‘Wow, what could have happened here.' I would have thought the Park Agency would have been falling all over themselves to help him."
A friend in deed
Martina Baillie, 31, is the lawyer for Lewis Family Farm and lives on the property.
She is close to Sandy and Barbara Lewis - Sandy has been a mentor for her and her twin sister, Helena, since they were teenagers, she said, and he helped them through difficult times.
"I wouldn't be the person I am today without Sandy. It's not an overstatement to say he saved my life," she said.
Lewis has been shaken by the fight with the APA, she said.
"People think he's somehow impenetrable because he's wealthy, and he relishes the fight. That's really unfortunate. People make all kinds of assumptions about Sandy because of his gruff exterior. The APA forced him into a very defensive position and made life hell," she said.
Lewis has a long history of helping people with addictions, a passion he had time to pursue in the late 1980s when he was forced by a criminal indictment to leave his Wall Street career and perform community service at Daytop Village treatment center in Mendham, N.J.
In the late 1990s, when Lewis proposed bringing a Daytop treatment center to Essex - locating it in the old county home, which borders his property - Michael Pratt was a member of the Town Board that passed a development moratorium and blocked the project.
"What was interesting was that, not too long after that, I found I had thyroid cancer," Pratt said recently.
Lewis found out about the cancer and used his personal contacts to help Pratt get expert care.
"He simply put aside any thoughts he had, not knowing me, and assisted me in getting into Beth Israel Hospital in Boston," Pratt said.
Before Lewis got involved, Pratt had already been to the hospital in Albany, where doctors had told him they could fit him in for surgery in two months.
"I happened to tell Sandy and, within three days, I was in Boston and I had surgery right away," Pratt said. "I don't know how he did this. I am amazed at the people that he knows and the connections that he has."
Pratt thinks people often judge Lewis prematurely.
"I don't want to emphasize that, but he is volatile,"
Pratt said. "He's a very generous and very kind person, too."
The future
Sandy Lewis has plans. Sometimes, it seems, he dreams them up in the middle of a conversation.
He has suggested forming a corporation to buy up huge sections of the Champlain Valley that would be leased out piecemeal to farmers, for example.
Other plans, such as making his farm the premier supplier of grass-fed beef to high-end restaurants in the eastern U.S., are well on their way to being realized.
He has plans for other people, too - friends and acquaintances he is badgering into giving up cigarettes, young people whose careers he is promoting.
And he has plans for the country. A year ago, an essay he wrote with William Cohan, a writer and a former banker, was published as a full-page op-ed piece in the New York Times. In the piece, which seems prescient now, they warned that the underlying causes of the financial collapse were not being addressed.
"The storm is not over,
not by a long shot," they wrote.
Lewis has plans for the APA, too, but is just as pessimistic on that subject as he is on the economy.
"The money will prevail," he said. "The APA will be the real estate broker and sole provider."
Marco Turco, rolling between the summer crops crowding the Lewises' fields, said he fears that Sandy, at 71, lacks time to accomplish all his ambitions.
"I think he's just going to run out of life," he said.
