The pissing match between Wall Street millionaires Pete Dawkins and Mickey Gooch gobbled up another three hours of valuable Monmouth County court time yesterday, according to today’s Asbury Park Press.
And if the judge was amused, it was largely because of the way lawyers for the two Rumsonites “strained credulity” with their arguments, the Press reports.
Dawkins, vice chairman of a unit of Citigroup, former Heisman trophy winner (1958) and onetime U.S. Senate candidate, wants to build a 2,750-square-foot caretaker’s cottage on his Navesink River estate.
Next-door to Dawkins is Gooch, majority owner of an inscrutable Wall Street firm and author of a charmingly inane column in the weekly Two River Times, which he owns with his wife, Diane. (This week’s clunker is about the “tremendous success” of a fundaiser for the Count Basie Theatre at which the main honoree was none other than Diane Gooch.)
Gooch objects to the Dawkins plan because it would increase the size of an existing cottage by fifty percent, and would result in a “monstrosity” of a stucture (the Press’ word) a mere 205 feet from the property line dividing the two River Road fiefdoms.
The dispute, almost two years old, is now in the hands of Monmouth County Superior Court Judge Alexander Lehrer. Yesterday, according to the Press, Lehrer could barely contain his sense of the ridiculousness of some of the arguments.
From the story:
When [Dawkins’ lawyer Roger] Foss tried to suggest that the caretaker’s house might qualify as affordable housing under the state’s Council On Affordable Housing law, the judge glared at Foss incredulously.
“You were doing great with this argument, until this,” Lehrer said. “Mr. Foss, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
