By Will Doolittle will@poststar.com
ESSEX -- Sandy Lewis' voice was ringing through the rafters in his elegant farmhouse on Whallons Bay Road as he ranted about the Adirondack Park Agency.
Lewis, who speaks, when he's angry, in sentences that slash and jab, was talking about the agency's mission and the way, he believes, its officials have corrupted that mission.
Now a farmer but formerly a securities trader who ran his own Wall Street firm and was indicted by Rudolph Giuliani, pardoned by President Bill Clinton and exonerated by a federal judge, Lewis is known for his brilliance and his abrasiveness.
For an hour or so, he attacked the APA from all directions.
Then, with the window-glass still trembling from Lewis' shouts, his wife Barbara leaned into his study with a single word on her lips: "Coffee?"
When he paused, she sidled to his side and slid her arm around his shoulders.
"Shhhh," she said.
Sandy Lewis looked at her, then he looked sheepish. He smiled and his blue eyes shone with affection.
But when Barbara left to get the coffee, he launched back into his argument: "Do you know what I called the appeals court before they got the case? Five ham sandwiches," he said, and he was off.
The fight
In the fall of 2006, the state Adirondack Park Agency became engaged in a fight with Sandy and Barbara Lewis over permits for three farmworker houses they were building on their 1,200-acre organic farm.
APA officials said the case was straightforward: The Lewises needed permits to build the houses under the APA Act, the zoning code the agency administers in the Adirondack Park.
And, early on, the Lewises agreed. They said they would apply for permits, as long as the APA dropped a $10,000 fine it had levied against them.
APA officials refused to drop the fine. That refusal to compromise was the APA's first step into an extended struggle waged in courtrooms and newspapers, oral arguments and e-mails, over the next four years. By the time it was over, the case had become a legal and public relations fiasco for the agency.
At its core, the case was a fight over definitions.
The APA said the buildings were single-family homes and, thus, subject to its jurisdiction. The Lewises said they were homes for farmworkers and, therefore, exempt from APA jurisdiction because their primary use was agricultural.
But the struggle over definitions became, over time, something much more, as the case wound through motions and cross-motions, in and out of various courts and across thousands of pages.
It became a fight over the integrity of the APA - to prove or disprove the critics who had argued almost since the agency's inception in the early 1970s that its officials, in seeking to assert the agency's authority, strayed from the law.
The APA has a decades-long history of backing up its enforcement actions with victories in court, where the agency is represented by the state attorney general. The APA, as North Country Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward said, is known as being "6 feet tall and bulletproof."
But the APA had never fought someone like Sandy Lewis, someone with not only the will but the financial resources and the political savvy to match the agency move for move, in court and out.
Lewis hired a top Albany law firm to fight the state's legal team, and he matched the advocacy of environmental groups like the Adirondack Council with his own provocative press conferences, phone calls and mass e-mails.
One of his long e-mails, sent out to at least a dozen officials and journalists, provoked the agency's top enforcement lawyer into an e-mail temper tantrum that led to his transfer into a different job.
The publicity surrounding the case spurred the New York Farm Bureau - an organization with almost 30,000 member families - to assign its own lawyers to join the case for the farm, and moved the state's commissioner of agriculture to write a letter endorsing the farm's housing plan.
The APA ended up losing in court three separate times.
The judges' rulings forced the APA to recognize strict limits on its authority over farm operations; and the rulings set a precedent, empowering people who win cases against the APA to sue it for legal fees.
Essex County acting Supreme Court Judge Richard Meyer first decided the farmworker housing case in Lewis' favor, on Nov. 19, 2008.
The APA appealed but on July 16, 2009, the Appellate Division judges ruled 5-0 in favor of Lewis Family Farm.
"The APA's interpretation would require this Court to disregard the clear statutory language," they wrote.
And they added, "Nothing in any of these provisions suggests, as the APA argues, that New York's strong pro-farming policy should apply differently to farms within the Adirondack Park than to farms elsewhere in the state."
Soon after the appellate ruling, Sandy Lewis sued the APA for his legal fees under the state's Equal Access to Justice Act, something which had never been done.
Under the act, the state had to show the APA's position had been "justified to a degree that could satisfy a reasonable person" or had a "reasonable basis both in law and fact."
But the APA was unable to meet that standard. On Feb. 3, Judge Meyer ruled again for Lewis Family Farm.
He wrote, "... the APA not only failed to consider all applicable statutory definitions but also went beyond the clear and unambiguous statutory language in an effort to assert jurisdiction ..."
With this third ruling, the APA's defeat - in the court of law and of public opinion - was complete.
State courts had not only decided against the APA but had declared its actions unreasonable.
Longtime opponents of the agency say the enforcement case against Lewis Family Farm fit a pattern of unjustified prosecutions that Sandy Lewis, unlike other defendants, had the resources to expose.
"What really troubles me, and it always has, is that the APA wins many cases because property owners don't have the money to fight," said Fred Monroe.
Monroe is chairman of the Warren County Board of Supervisors and head of the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board, which is made up of local government officials and was established by the state as a counterweight to the APA, but with advisory powers only.
"People shouldn't lose their case if they're correct on the merits for lack of money," he said.
The case fits another pattern, however, that has nothing to do with the APA - a pattern of provocation and response, of prosecution and vindication. To see that pattern, you have to take a closer look at Sandy Lewis.
The vigilante
Lewis is the son of Cy Lewis, who for almost 30 years was the managing partner of Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street's leading investment banks, and who retired in 1978 and died shortly afterward. Bear Stearns collapsed 30 years later, in the financial crisis of 2008.
Lewis worked on Wall Street himself as an arbitrageur and investment banker, starting his own firm - SB Lewis & Co. - in 1980. The firm was successful, but Lewis, known for his honesty and outspokenness, made an unlikely and, he says, reluctant wheeler-dealer.
"I did so spectacularly well because I figured out the street is dishonest," Lewis said. "The risk arbitrage business is compulsively dishonest."
In May 1986, infuriated by a short-selling practice that was later made illegal, Lewis worked with the head of a securities brokerage firm to frustrate the short-sellers by buying up stock in a company they had targeted.
Later that year, Rudolph Giuliani indicted Lewis on 22 counts of securities law violations for what a court would later call his act of "market vigilantism."
In 1989, under pressure from family and friends who feared he could be sent to jail if convicted at trial, Lewis pleaded guilty to three charges.
He was fined and sentenced to 3 years of probation and community service at Daytop Village in New Jersey, a drug treatment center. Lewis has worked extensively over the years to help people with addictions - especially young people - at institutions like Daytop and in his personal life.
In 2001, Lewis received an unconditional pardon from President Clinton.
In 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission vacated a lifetime trading ban against Lewis. That same year, U.S. District Judge William Conner vacated an injunction against Lewis that grew out of the securities case, completing his exoneration.
"Not only has Lewis received a presidential pardon, but federal regulations now outlaw the very practice that his actions were designed to thwart," Conner wrote.
In his order, Conner also referred to Lewis' "uniqueness," writing that he was a man who "has devoted his life to the selfless service of others."
In the meantime, Sandy and Barbara Lewis had moved full-time to their farmhouse in the Adirondacks. One of the things that drew them was the Adirondack Park Agency, Lewis said.
Lewis calls the APA "a noble experiment" and points out that, in its charter, it accepts the presence of the park's year-round residents and pledges to work with them, to "help them to live in harmony with the park and respect nature."
"Most good people would, I think, create the APA pretty much as it is," he said, "to protect the environment and show respect for our surroundings."
But Lewis believes the APA's practices fall short of its mission, that it is run by "bureaucrats" who have perverted its charter and who work to justify their jobs through unfair prosecutions of longtime local landowners, whom he calls "the indigenous."
"It's a zoning board looking to impair the titles of the indigenous population to keep themselves employed. It's a cabal," he said.
He was just the person to challenge the APA and force it to change, Lewis said. As it happened, a lot of people agreed with him.