By Will Doolittle will@poststar.com
ESSEX -- Salim "Sandy" Bonnor Lewis is 71 and tall, although he often stands in a hunch, as if listening.
His eyes are blue, the color of pool-cue chalk, and he stares at you through them over his sharp nose as he works you over with his voice.
"I am on the far, far conservative side when it comes to respecting nature," he growls. "I really think this planet is in trouble. We’ve got a mess and the APA is a particularly creative response to that mess."
He pauses.
"That’s the good news. The bad news is that the APA is influenced by the devil. Money is the devil."
His voice rises.
"This noble experiment has been thoroughly corrupted by its founders."
The ringing voice becomes a hard bark that bounces off the walls of the study in his farmhouse.
"They set about making sure the white trash got crushed. They’re trying to push them out. This is localized but it has enormous national and international implications."
He continues for an hour or more, expounding and proclaiming, until his voice weakens and he begins to cough. He excuses himself — "asthma," he gasps — and leaves the room to find and use an emergency inhaler.
Sandy Lewis, the man who dealt the Adirondack Park Agency its worst legal defeat in the agency’s 37-year existence, is infamous for his lectures on the APA, his farm, his Wall Street career, his life, and life itself.
Sometimes, he runs out of breath, but never out of words. Luckily for him, e-mails do not require lungs.
One of his e-mails, sent Nov. 10, 2009, to Robert Nutting, the owner of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise newspaper in Saranac Lake, summarized his case against the APA and included this sentence, about the head of the APA’s enforcement division: "Paul Van Cott is simply not competent."
Lewis copied the e-mail to about a dozen people, including reporters and the APA’s chief lawyer, John Banta.
Van Cott responded, to Lewis and everyone else, calling Lewis a "sociopath" and asking him to "Please shut up."
Van Cott had been in charge of prosecuting the enforcement case against Lewis Family Farm when the APA claimed the houses Lewis built for farmworkers were single-family homes that required an APA permit.
After he sent the e-mail, Van Cott was transferred into a different position.
The episode, reported throughout the region, served to confirm people’s worst suspicions about the APA — that the personal feelings of its staffers influence their on-the-job behavior — and it was an embarrassment for the agency.
The episode also fits a pattern with Sandy Lewis, in which his behavior provokes a response that proves damaging to the responder.
The enforcement case against Lewis Family Farm itself fits that pattern.
Several people, including Lewis himself, believe the case was provoked by the way he undertook his farmworker housing project.
What followed — the APA’s uncompromising prosecution — led the agency into several damaging defeats in court, which, according to Sandy Lewis, was all part of his plan.
How it started
The first time the APA came after Lewis was in 1999, about six weeks after his son, Oliver, died in a kayaking accident.
It was winter, the Lewises were out of town and, on a bitter cold day, a couple of contractors working on the farm’s drainage system dug a ditch that state officials said intruded into a state wetland.
Lewis had the contractors fix the problem, changing the outlet of the drainage system, and he signed a consent order that designated one corner of his property as a wetland.
But Lewis now speaks of the episode with fury, always associating it with the death of his son — "After my son died and they decided to attack me," he spits.
And he says he was bewildered by the APA’s aggression over a mistake made by a work crew.
"After 1999, I followed an ancient adage, ‘Don’t get mad, get even,’" he said.
When it came time for him to build housing for farmworkers, he went about it in a way that would provoke the APA, he said.
He even spread false stories about his intentions, telling people he would rent out the houses to Wall Street-types as a vacation retreat — a place where they could get a genuine farm experience.
He was trying to goad the APA, he said — "knowing full well that if I could sucker them into a fight they would surely lose, they would take on others, and I hope they lose them all."
Even allies of the APA suspect that, intentionally or not, Lewis drew the agency into a losing battle.
Ties are close between the Adirondack Council, the most prominent environmental group in the Adirondacks, and the APA. Three former members of the council’s board of directors are APA commissioners and one of them, Curt Stiles, is president of the APA board.
But John Sheehan, spokesman for the council, faulted the APA’s handling of the Lewis case.
"I don’t think we ever agreed with the legal strategy that was pursued. There were a variety of ways this could have been settled early on," he said.
Sheehan said Lewis’ personality influenced the APA’s handling of the case.
"It was an emotionally charged case and Sandy is quite adept at getting under people’s skin," he said.
Lewis’ lawyer, John Privitera, said he believed for months the APA would drop the case.
"I said to myself, I’m sure once I show them there’s a constitutional right to farm, there’s a statutory right to farm ... they certainly will see that farmworker housing is an agricultural use that is not regulated," he said.
He thought the APA would want to avoid a protracted fight against the farming community, which had rallied behind Lewis.
"I had already obtained the support from the commissioner of Ag and Markets, in words and letter," he said.
And the APA Act puts few controls on farm operations, including housing — "because it serves a broader state interest," he said.
"I took all those arguments to the full board and I was rather stunned they fell on deaf ears. They just decided they were going after this one," he said.
The motivation, Privitera believes, was personal.
"There’s documentary evidence of how Paul Van Cott feels about Sandy. That’s not what we’re supposed to do as professionals. If he thought that all along, it makes you understand what his motivation was — to punish a sociopath," Privitera said.
He characterized the APA’s refusal to compromise as "a significant legal mistake." And, he added, "It was a massive policy blunder, because the farm community mobilized."
Part of the pattern
Ron Jackson, the former supervisor of Essex and a longtime acquaintance of Sandy Lewis’, calls him "the strangest and most intelligent person I have ever known."
Lewis bought his first parcels of property in Essex in 1978, including the farmhouse and a barn, along with fields and woods to the east.
For years, Jackson had Lewis’ blessing to hunt and chop wood on his land, and he ran the farm’s sugarbush, making maple syrup and keeping some for himself as payment.
But Jackson served as Essex supervisor from 2002 to 2010 and, during that time, he had his own clash with Lewis, when the town sued him over his crushed-stone farm roads. The town argued the farm roads ran, in places, too close to the town roads, making maintenance difficult.
The town lost the case — because, Jackson says, Lewis hired an expensive lawyer who intimidated the judge.
And Jackson believes Lewis provoked the lawsuit on purpose.
"He wanted us to sue him, so he could beat us," he said.
Jackson believes antagonism toward Lewis blinded APA officials to the flaws in their case.
"My opinion is Sandy pisses everybody in the world off. The APA are people. We see a place we can punch him in the nose, we’re going to punch him in the nose," he said.
But, "I told the APA lawyers they couldn’t win that one," he said. "You’re never, never going to convince a judge or jury that housing for farmworkers is not an agricultural use."
It makes little sense that the APA, a state agency devoted to preserving the natural and human environment in the Adirondack Park, would cultivate a feud with a large organic farm.
The Lewis farm is a model of modern organic methods — using expensive drainage to promote growth without chemicals, raising grass-fed cattle.
In assembling his 1,200-acre operation over the last 30 years, Lewis has bought and cleaned up several old farms, razing decrepit buildings and removing tons of garbage.
"It’s a beautiful farm. It’s 1,000 acres of organic plants," said Anita Deming, executive director of Essex County Cornell Cooperative Extension.
When the APA’s Van Cott was making the case against Lewis Family Farm to the agency’s Enforcement Committee, he showed slides of the farm and called it "incredibly beautiful."
Showing one slide, he said, "As this picture of the Lewis Farm amply demonstrates, the agricultural use of this land is precisely the sort of open space use desired by the Adirondack Park Agency Act."
Environmental organizations like the Adirondack Council that would be expected to embrace an organic farm’s efforts to expand its operations, instead opposed them.
Sheehan, the council’s spokesman, wrote a letter to a local newspaper supporting the APA’s aggressive prosecution of Lewis.
But even Sheehan recognizes the incongruity of the Adirondack Council’s opposition to the farm.
"We would rarely come into conflict with almost anybody doing that," he said. "It is almost inconceivable that we would come into conflict with somebody doing that."
Lewis’ personality helped polarize the case, Sheehan said.
The fight was personal — as, according to Ron Jackson, it was bound to be.
"Sandy believes in punishing people and in punishing agencies, like the APA," he said. "You can’t negotiate with Sandy Lewis, you can forget that."
Coming tomorrow: Defining Sandy Lewis