The bride was the founder of an interior design studio; the groom made his money buying and selling real estate. They were exactly the kind of people whom Marc Rowan, one of the richest men on Wall Street, thought Duryea’s Lobster Deck was made for. And they had chosen to hold their rehearsal dinner here, enjoying the views from a 1,400 sq ft wooden deck perched on the edge of the Long Island Sound.
The schleppy little kitchen had stood here, enduring hurricanes and worse, for the better part of a century. Local regulations do not allow the place to call itself a restaurant, so for decades Chip Duryea ran it as a picnic shed, slinging cheap baskets of lobster and coleslaw. Food arrived at a service window on polystyrene plates, and the only cold drinks available, unless you brought your own, were soda and apple juice. It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a fairytale venue, even if the sunsets were mesmerising. Until, that is, Rowan arrived.
For the couple’s rehearsal dinner one evening last August, the tables were dressed with cut flowers and citrus. Glowing orbs hung from the rafters, enmeshed in rope, like buoys. The decor — farmhouse chic with a maritime twist — had not been a purely aesthetic decision. The town council wouldn’t allow Rowan to tear the place down after he bought it from Duryea in 2014. So Rowan, who had always planned to keep the name, decided to keep the building, too, and his wife Carolyn crafted a refined look out of whitewashed walls, distressed wood and hemp rope.
In its new incarnation, Duryea’s catered to people who wanted to be seen in Montauk, more so than the people who lived here. Beyoncé and Jay-Z sometimes moored their yacht at the refurbished dock; Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon was a summertime patron. The patio thrummed softly with electronic dance music and the wait staff, some of whom had European accents, balanced trays festooned with $96 lobster Cobb salads and $795 bottles of Dom Pérignon. Guests that night came by car, snarling the thin road that snakes between the bay and Tuthill Pond with traffic. The bridal party arrived under darkening skies, and it soon began to rain. “Duryea’s was left with the choice of cancelling a long-planned wedding rehearsal dinner or moving some seating inside,” hospitality manager Steven Jauffrineau later testified.
It seemed like a small thing, when you put it like that. But the locals had been fighting Rowan for years, at one stage persuading a state judge to sign an order that had the effect of requiring his patrons to eat their seafood salads outdoors. As far as they were concerned, moving a wedding feast indoors was a brazen act of lawlessness.
Looking at the storm clouds, the wait staff made the call to move the dinner inside, regulations be damned. “I continue to believe that Duryea’s acted appropriately,” Jauffrineau later told the judge, perhaps unsurprisingly, since Jauffrineau worked for Rowan, the one-man hurricane already bearing down on the hamlet of Montauk.
Only 40 miles separate the East End of Long Island from the Shinnecock Canal, where the Hamptons begin, but the drive on NY State Route 27 can easily take two hours. Making it means passing through an elaborate social order etched on to this congested spit of sand. The road begins just after Westhampton, a suburb of million-dollar houses that is also known as Wronghampton, because it is on the cheaper side of the canal. It passes through Southampton, where magnificent coastal estates built by New York’s earliest English settlers have long since been carved up to cater to the Wall Street nouveau riche. (Rowan paid $27mn for a beachfront “cottage” here, on Gin Lane.) Next comes Bridgehampton, with Long Island’s only Kmart. Then showy East Hampton, home to Jerry Seinfeld and Steven Spielberg. After Amagansett, where Sarah Jessica Parker spends her summers, lies what is sometimes called the anti-Hampton, a hamlet of rickety wooden houses that wants no part in this gilded hierarchy. This is Montauk.
The Duryea family made the journey out here back in the 1920s looking for fish, which Perry Duryea loaded on to trains bound for Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan. Duryea’s son inherited his father’s dock and his easy manner with the trawlermen, and became a successful retail politician. A blue-collar Republican who hesitated to send rural tax dollars to the aid of New York City’s ruined subway, Perry Jr was what passed for a folk hero in the state capitol. But after he lost a 1978 run for governor, he “never left Montauk again”, according to his son, Perry “Chip” Duryea III.
By then, fishermen eating at the Duryeas’ cookhouse were outnumbered by visiting surfers and affluent newcomers. Artists and bohemians had been trickling into the East End since Jackson Pollock moved his workshop here in the 1940s. As New York City reached its nadir, they were joined by writers, teachers and professionals craving distance from metropolitan squalor.
Jeffrey Bragman arrived in 1985. A veteran of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, he installed himself in East Hampton and turned his legal talents to zoning regulations, which cover everything from the nitrogen content of septic tank discharge to the maximum permissible height of handrails. It is a maddening and contradictory body of law. In Bragman’s hands, it is also an effective weapon.
With his well-made suits, his sprawling house in the woods and his weekends spent kayaking, Bragman was the archetypal yuppie, a species the local clammers greeted with about the same enthusiasm as invasive marine algae. Still, the new arrivals lived quietly enough. They had been attracted by the area’s low profile, after all. Through the end of the 1990s, the East End gentrified but remained relatively sheltered from the Wall Street wealth transforming the waterfront further west.
In fact, Bragman helped. Over the past four decades, he has fought against just about every kind of annoyance that outsiders can muster: unruly beachgoing, unsightly shopping centres, noisy aircraft. In one celebrated case, he thwarted a music festival organiser who wanted to revive the spirit of the 1969 festival at Woodstock. “My crowd looks at this and says, ‘Who needs it?’” Bragman told a Wall Street Journal reporter. “It is a major infringement on the peace and tranquillity of the town.”
In 2017, Bragman ran for a seat on the town board, whose five members govern East Hampton and Montauk, leaning on his record of thwarting new developments. “I’m very concerned about not having two East Hamptons,” he thundered, to anyone who would listen. “One for the ultra-wealthy. And one for everybody else.” Bragman won easily. A month after the election, he learnt about the Manhattan billionaire with big ideas for remaking the local lobster deck.
Everyone in Montauk seems to have exchanged pleasantries with Rowan, and they guard their impressions of him like a lethal secret. “He was very dapperly dressed,” said a person who goes kayaking here, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He’s charming,” confided someone who lives near Duryea’s and who also asked not to be named. “I have to be very careful,” said someone who forbade us from describing any distinguishing features of the kitchen in which we spoke. “The reason he’s so successful,” this person confided, “is that he is incredibly smart.”
Rowan made his billions on Wall Street at the top of private equity firm Apollo Global Management. His speciality was making big companies bigger and more profitable. In 1991, Apollo gained control of a company called Gillett Holdings, which owned a motley collection of assets, including a meatpacking factory in Wisconsin and a television channel in Florida. But the two that caught Rowan’s eye were ski resorts in the Colorado towns of Vail and Beaver Creek. “Everybody was really concerned when Apollo bought it,” Vail mayor Rod Slifer told an interviewer years later. “They were skiers, but they weren’t real skiers.”
A few thousand people lived in the resort town at the base of the Vail Mountain. Apollo came in with aggressive expansion plans. Under Rowan, the company absorbed a competing resort nestled alongside Beaver Creek on the 11,218ft Arrowhead mountain. If skiers spent their off-hours drinking, eating and playing laser tag, then Apollo would make sure it owned those establishments, too. When that formula worked in Vail, Rowan thought it would work wherever there was snow. Apollo bought another four ski resorts and plastered the Vail name all over them. Long accustomed to blizzards and avalanches, residents of towns where Apollo operated ended up viewing the company and Rowan as just another force of nature.
In 1997, the US Department of Justice blocked further expansion in eastern Colorado on antitrust grounds, and Apollo ultimately locked in large profits by floating the business on the stock market. Still, by the time Apollo sold its last Vail shares in 2004, Rowan had created the biggest ski-resort chain in the world. “Marc was really very different from other investors,” says someone who has worked closely with him. In Apollo’s headquarters overlooking Central Park, other partners decorated their offices with sophisticated art or expensive sports memorabilia; Rowan proudly displayed a model of a ship belonging to Norwegian Cruise Line, where he was on the board. “He had a lot of interest and a surprising amount of expertise in the nitty-gritty of hospitality,” the executive says. “His eyes would light up when talking about this stuff. How do we create the essence of luxury? What’s the carpet going to look like? But also, he seemed to understand that when you select carpets for a hotel room, you are in part trying to make sure that it’s easy to clean.”
In 2008, on the eve of the worst financial drought in Las Vegas history, Apollo bought the Caesars casino empire in its biggest-ever deal. Rowan tried everything to pay back more than $20bn of debt that Apollo had taken out to fund the acquisition. He called up celebrity contacts like Arnold Schwarzenegger, hoping to create a revival of Planet Hollywood. He shut down the 1970s-era Imperial Palace, with its sticky carpets and neon-lit Chinese dragons, and reopened it as The Linq, a hotspot for millennials with the Strip’s only Ferris wheel. Nothing worked. So Rowan turned to fighting.
Courtroom confrontations had been part of the Apollo playbook since a Colorado court had granted Rowan dominion over the ski slopes of Vail Mountain. As the recession wore on and it became increasingly unlikely that Caesars would be able to pay its debts, Rowan shuffled billions of dollars’ worth of real estate and intellectual property into vehicles that lay beyond the reach of the hedge funds whose staggering loans and bonds had enabled Apollo to buy the gaming company in the first place. It was breathtaking in its brazenness, as courts typically frown on conflicted directors shifting valuable assets out of an insolvent company. In effect, Apollo was betting that the creditors either would not dare sue or could be outwitted in court.
The gamble almost sunk Rowan. As Caesars admitted it could not pay its debts, a bankruptcy court in Chicago crawled over every casino sale and asset transfer that the directors had approved in the years before. When one crucial ruling looked like it was going the wrong way, Rowan went to Washington to ask future Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy, among others, whether Congress could narrow the rights of creditors by retroactively modifying federal law.
While Caesars burnt, Rowan was busy assembling a personal hospitality portfolio far away. He began on Main Street in Sag Harbor, buying a historic building where a restaurant named Doppio leased the ground floor. After a litigation dispute that was eventually settled, Doppio left the premises. Then Rowan hired Philippe Corbet, a chef who had grown up in France but lived on Long Island, and sent him to Tel Aviv for five days with instructions to dine at 20 restaurants and master the Mediterranean style.
When it reopened in 2017 as Lulu, with plush leather booths and a zinc bar, the restaurant received rave reviews. Corbet had returned from Israel with a cocktail containing star anise and hibiscus, and a recipe for dry-aged duck roasted over an open fire. The only hitch was the traffic. For patrons who arrived by boat, though, it was just a five-minute walk from the town marina to the wood-panelled dining room. And Rowan was already at work on another idea: a restaurant right on the water, with clear views of the sunset and a big enough dock for a 100ft yacht.
Tuthill Pond Bay, Montauk, was the perfect spot. In early 2014, Rowan sat down with Chip Duryea to discuss terms. “I didn’t want any lawyers in the room,” Duryea told us. “I was obviously emotionally invested in the business. I had run it since I was 12 years old.”
If anyone could overcome the objections of local conservationists, then surely it was Rowan. His personal lawyer used to be a state Supreme Court judge. He was pals with a local politician. Soon after the meeting broke up, Rowan paid $6.3mn for eight acres, of which six were underwater.
When word reached the East End that the new owner of Duryea’s was on the board of a cruise line company, locals feared he would turn Montauk into a marine terminal for massive ships. Rowan called this “ludicrous”, insisting the water was not deep enough. The controversy subsided, but not for long.
An application for a building permit filed on Rowan’s behalf in early 2015 called for every structure on the Duryea’s site to be razed to make way for a new restaurant and open deck for 350 diners. The house across the road, which Chip Duryea had lived in for decades until the 2014 sale, would be demolished to make way for a car park, and beneath it, a septic tank would drain into the fragile wetland of Tuthill Pond.
Rowan’s neighbours were outraged, sometimes beyond reason. “If Marc Rowan was on fire,” one told the FT, “I wouldn’t piss on him.” The small number who had legal training were merely puzzled. Few waterfront businesses have opened here since the town passed its zoning law in the 1980s, and, although long-established places like Duryea’s are allowed to stay open, the town code forbids them from making even minor changes. “To begin with, [Rowan] didn’t seem to understand the environmental constraints that were on the property,” says a local lawyer. “And when he did understand it, he thought he could get out of it by making a deal.”
Confronted with these legal realities, Rowan withdrew the raze-and-rebuild plan after less than a week. Instead, he set about remaking Duryea’s as a luxe dining spot within its rickety four walls. By the time the 2016 season started, the lobster tanks were gone. In place of plastic patio furniture, there were wooden tables, where diners sat under canvas shades cut to look like sails. Next to the bar, there was a boutique general store where diners could buy Duryea’s branded socks, lobster-shaped stuffed animals and jewelled beanie hats stamped with the logo of Carolyn Rowan’s fashion brand.
When the locals caught sight of the expanded operation, it dawned on them why Rowan had also bought two motels in town. The expanded Duryea’s employed chefs, line cooks and people to wash the dishes, bartenders and wait staff, a maître d’ and dock hands to help moor the customers’ yachts. Spared from demolition, the former Duryea family home across the road was converted into a makeshift dormitory for employees.
As his high-rolling clientele poured in, Rowan tried to mend fences with the neighbours, treating them to beer, canapés and a lengthy presentation about his “vision”. “I am not in the restaurant business,” he told a local real estate reporter. “If Duryea’s makes a dollar more or a dollar less, that doesn’t matter to me. I’m doing this because I want to do it, because I love that place.”
The outreach was not just about making friends. Rowan still wanted to build a new septic tank. More importantly, he wanted to offer waiter service, so that the investment bankers and celebrities who now dined at Duryea’s would no longer have to line up at a service window, in forced homage to the artists and bohemians who had picnicked here years before. Before he could do any of this, he needed approval from the town board.
Among the privileges of wealth, influence was the one Rowan prized most. On Wall Street, rivals hung on his words, hoping for clues about the formula that made Apollo the world’s second-biggest private equity firm. When financial markets were shaken by the global pandemic in 2020, officials at the US Federal Reserve were grateful for his counsel, while at the University of Pennsylvania, he surpassed the generosity of dozens of other billionaire alumni by making what was, at the time, the biggest donation in the school’s history. Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, once even received Rowan in Damascus to discuss the possibility of peace with Israel.
Yet try as he might, Rowan could not get a hearing in Montauk. Some of the neighbours refused to talk to him. (“No offence to you,” one told him by email. “Although I always enjoy your company . . . it would be a waste of time.”) By 2018, officials at town hall still hadn’t dealt with his long-outstanding permit applications. Having failed to charm the locals, he turned to their elected representatives instead.
Peter Van Scoyoc had served on planning boards for years but he never looked entirely at home in the town supervisor’s office. A broad-shouldered man with a deep tan from his decades running a construction business, he wore a goatee that was almost as white as his over-starched shirts. When Rowan came to see him on Valentine’s Day that year, Michael Sendlenski, the town attorney, was there too, stationed along the back wall.
Rowan was also surrounded by sympathisers. One was David Lys, a councilman he knew from kayaking. Another was Edward Burke, the former judge who Rowan had hired as his attorney. The conversation turned testy. “My frustration level with the town was high,” Rowan later told a court. Burke put forward a theory that the state of New York, not the town, controlled the underwater land on which Duryea’s dock was built. He pointed to a “patent” signed in 1930 by the deputy secretary of state that seemed to grant ownership to Duryea’s business partner, Captain Edwin Tuthill. “My response was that the town did not believe that the patents gave that authority,” Van Scoyoc later testified.
Rowan remembered it differently, according to an affidavit he submitted as part of his lawsuit. In his telling, after complaining about politics and public pressure, Van Scoyoc, who was the most senior elected official in East Hampton, asked Rowan to sue his own town government. “[He] asked [me] to file suit,” Rowan claimed, “to provide the town board with political cover.” (Van Scoyoc and the town board strenuously deny this account.)
However it came about, Rowan litigated, and he spared no expense in his legal assault on the town. The first lawsuit arrived in March, followed by two more that same month. By the end of 2019, the town had been hit with no fewer than nine lawsuits filed by Rowan.
It fell to town attorney Sendlenski to mount a defence. A Southampton native who attended Harvard before training as a lawyer, he got the job, in part, by quoting Billy Joel during his interview. (“There ain’t no island left for islanders like me,” he crooned.) Still, Sendlenski took the job seriously, never shrinking from what amounted to a tough fight. He once took on a local summer camp owned by a prominent local politician, claiming it had crammed 40 camp counsellors into a single dwelling. “Before we got here,” he told a local newspaper, “I don’t think code enforcement had done a search warrant in decades.”
Now, Sendlenski prepared himself to go up against a billionaire’s lawyers. Burke was flanked by a Montauk attorney named Michael Walsh, who served as the billionaire’s local voice in court, later joined by a heavy-hitting firm from Manhattan, which turned out legal briefs by the dozen.
Sendlenski, on the other hand, seemed to have his work cut out for him. The town could not even field its full complement of five staff lawyers, two of whom recused themselves from the case citing personal conflicts. (“That’s what happens when you work in a small town,” Sendlenski shrugged when he offered to explain himself in a town meeting later.)
Everyone in Montauk has their own theory to explain what happened next. Perhaps the case was just unwinnable. Or perhaps Van Scoyoc really had been looking for “political cover”. Whatever the reason, Sendlenski, the self-proclaimed tough guy of town hall, folded before the fight even began. Almost a year after the Valentine’s Day meeting, and before there had been a single court hearing, Rowan signed a settlement agreement with the town that gave him everything he wanted: a septic tank, a permit to run a restaurant with waiters and an official agreement that his dock would never be subject to the town’s laws.
Bragman learned about the town’s capitulation to Rowan in an email from Sendlenski. “This stipulation culminates years of negotiation and litigation,” he wrote. It “has been so-ordered by the court.” This was odd, Bragman thought. In the US, courts do not order people to settle lawsuits, and the town board would have had to approve a settlement with Rowan before the town supervisor could sign it. If there had been such a vote, Bragman would have known.
The rest of Montauk received the news at a public meeting a few days later. The venue was a barn dating from the 18th century, which local conservationists had moved and rebuilt, at a cost of $6mn, to serve as the East Hampton town hall. A sparse room with bare wooden walls and rows of chairs arranged like pews, it would have made a likely setting for a Salem witch trial. Today’s accusations concerned the town government itself. They were levelled by a softly spoken resident with an unusual interest in obscure court filings, who introduced himself as David Buda.
“It came as a great shock,” Buda began, “to happen upon the fact that the town has settled a series of three cases [involving Rowan] without a single word having been uttered in public session.” He added that he was startled to see that the town supervisor “had not even signed”, suggesting that Sendlenski, the town attorney, may have overstepped his authority so far as to make the settlement unenforceable.
The town council, seated on a dais in the front of the room, now divided into factions. Bragman spoke first. “I don’t think we fought hard enough for Montauk,” he said. “I think I don’t like this agreement. I’m not prepared to vote for it.”
Lys, who had been Rowan’s kayaking guide, defended the deal. “What is the potential uses of that dock if we don’t sign the stipulation under the patent?” he asked, setting up an easy question for the town supervisor. “Hypothetically, ferries could go in there?” Van Scoyoc confirmed that the settlement would forbid it.
Sendlenski lumbered towards the podium. He wore a crumpled shirt and a tie so short in comparison to his oversized frame that the thin end barely extended to the bottom of his chest. Sendlenski’s signature appeared twice on the disputed settlement document, once in his capacity as town attorney and again purportedly on behalf of the town government. His defence took the form of attack. “I won’t sit here and have people tell me that my office doesn’t work hard enough,” he said, jabbing a pen against the wood for emphasis. “I especially won’t do that,” he was shouting in the direction of Bragman now, “when a councilman who refuses to meet with the town attorney’s office, blows [me] off time after time after time . . . I won’t sit quietly and let him besmirch my office.”
The East Hampton government would later claim in court that it had never authorised Sendlenski to sign any papers. It urged Judge David Reilly to tear up the settlement agreement that he had brokered and press ahead with a full trial. At a hearing in 2019, the judge put off making a decision, instead ordering everyone involved to swear an oath and answer a version of the question that defines every American scandal: What did the town council know, and when did they know it? In the meantime, he ruled that the court, rather than the town’s building inspectors, would oversee the operation of Duryea’s until the dispute was resolved. Although Rowan would be forbidden from making any further changes until then, he also would not be penalised for any breach of the town code.
Sendlenski left his job at town hall soon afterwards to set up his own law practice, explaining that he could no longer afford to support his college-age children on a government salary. Today, the Sendlenski law firm represents billionaires whose plans for home construction or renovation are impeded by bureaucratic obstacles thrown up by the town government. Recent clients include Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner, who sat on Apollo’s board until 2021. Sendlenski’s office, located in a mock-Tudor mini mall next to a liquor store and a nail salon, is a few doors down from Walsh, the local attorney who represented Rowan in his battle against East Hampton. Reached there by phone, Sendlenski declined to discuss his previous work defending the town against Rowan’s lawsuit. “I don’t want anything to do with this story,” he said. “Not even fact-checking.” Then he hung up.
Montauk has changed in the five years since Rowan’s shortlived victory. The traffic is worse, and helicopters buzz over the highway, shuttling weekend visitors from Manhattan to short-term rental cottages that the town government does its best to shut down. There are other nightspots to complain about, not least the Surf Lodge, a former motel that under new owners has become a party haunt for Wall Street yuppies.
Chip Duryea steamed his last lobster claw in 2016, two years after the deal with Rowan closed. After that, he found a job at the nearby state-run golf course, where he enforces etiquette and hurries along slower players. He admired the transformation that Rowan had wrought on the lobster deck — “reminds me of something in the French Mediterranean,” he said — but he hadn’t been back to eat there. More than most longtime locals, Duryea seemed to accept that Montauk was no longer entirely the possession of Montaukers. “People may pine for the old days where things were simpler, when the cost of living here was less, where there wasn’t this big infusion of people and money for four or five months of the year,” he told us. “But on the other hand, this is what we need to survive. We are now a tourist town.”
The pandemic brought new residents and new voters. Bragman left the town board in 2021. Then, when Van Scoyoc retired last year, local business owners sensed a change at town hall. “Until last year, East Hampton was the land of no,” says one. “But the tone is becoming . . . more business-friendly. The demographic of East Hampton has changed, whether the locals like it or not. You can’t put your head in the sand and expect that the world’s not going to progress.”
Rowan, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was spending less and less time in Montauk. In 2021, he cut short an open-ended “semi-sabbatical” to return to Manhattan, where a messy succession battle at Apollo put him in charge. Now in control of a $696bn asset management firm that is one of the most powerful financial institutions in America, he has more sway than ever. In October 2023, after a wave of pro-Palestinian protest across US campuses, Rowan, a prominent figure in Jewish philanthropy, demanded that administrators at his alma mater resign over what he called their indifference towards antisemitism. By December, Penn’s president and board of trustees chair had both departed.
Residents watched new houses go up on the land Rowan had bought, and traded rumours about who he might persuade to sell next. (“Other than things like supporting the Montauk Playhouse Community Center,” his spokesman said in a statement, “Marc has not been actively involved in the community for about five years.”)
A dedicated few kept a watchful eye on Duryea’s, looking for some transgression that they could take to court. Judge Reilly did show a flash of impatience when Instagram posts showed a wedding party enjoying a seafood dinner indoors in violation of his order, although he declined to impose a finding of contempt. Five years had passed since the town’s uprising over the settlement signed by Sendlenski, but the judge still had not decided whether to accept Rowan’s version of events or theirs. The dispute has so far cost the town close to $600,000 in legal fees according to people who have seen the bills. Yet Duryea’s remained in stasis, with Rowan unable to offer indoor seating or table service and the local government unable to send building inspectors to enforce the town code.
Bragman claimed vindication from the ruling, arguing he had blown the whistle on a bad deal. “I saw how big money easily finds allies in a small town,” he said. “Awaiting a decision, I’m betting on the law.”
None of the locals wandering near Duryea’s on a rainy afternoon last August held much hope of thwarting its billionaire owner. Some had lived here for decades, others their whole lives. As guests began to arrive for dinner in their expensive cars, one woman paused for a moment to view her home as Rowan might see it. “Do you know what?” she said, seeming to surprise herself with the thought. “My perception is that he actually believes he has elevated Montauk.”
Mark Vandevelde is an FT reporter and 2024 Moynihan Public Scholar at the City College of New York; Sujeet Indap is the FT’s Wall Street editor
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