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Hennessy owns a real estate company on the East End, this part of the world where they somehow keep finding new potato fields to sell off, as if the rows between those spuds are still paved with gold—the same high-end properties that Rob Jacobson once represented.
Hennessy and Jacobson are longtime friends. As members of the ultra-exclusive Maidstone Country Club, golf partners, guests at the same parties, boldface-name guys in the same gossip columns and inHamptonsmagazine, they, along with their wives, feel like kings and queens of the world.
When I finished my pretrial interview of Hennessy, I asked him why he thought he was being called as a witness for the prosecution.
“Counselor, I can’t lie to you.”
“You sell real estate, Gus. Force yourself.”
He grinned. “Your guess as to why the guy is calling me is as good as mine.”
“You’ve got nothing that can hurt him?”
“Only a better golf game and even better listings most of the time.”
Ahearn begins by taking Hennessy through his friendship with Jacobson. Hennessy even uses the line about his golf game. I’m listening but wondering where Ahearn is actually going with this.
Finally, almost offhandedly, Ahearn asks Hennessy if he is aware, knowing Rob Jacobson as well as he clearly does, of any prior relationship between the defendant and Mitch Gates before the night of the murders.
“Well,” Hennessy says, “I did see them together the one time on the beach, having a big argument.”
Wait…what?
I casually shift in my seat so I can shoot a quick look at my client. But he’s staring straight ahead at Gus Hennessy. His buddy, in what sounded like a buddy movie just a few minutes ago.
I asked Hennessy the same pretrial question, almost word for word. About a prior relationship. He said no, they’d never met as far as he could recall. Now he’s changing a story that only he and I knowwashis story with me. But why? And why now? How does changing his story help him? Because it sure as hell doesn’t help my client.
I suddenly remember an old line I read once about the boxing promoter Bob Arum, after Arum had been caught in some lie.
“YesterdayI was lying,” Arum said. “Today I’m telling the truth.”
I knew I could work Hennessy over on cross. But there is nothing much I can do for the moment, which is not making me a happy girl.
“It was about a week before the shootings,” he says. It’s like he’s trying to look anywhere in the room except at our table. “It was the beach behind our house in Amagansett. My wife and I are lucky to live on the water.”
Good for them.
“Go on,” Ahearn says.
“It was early evening,” Hennessy says. “I’m on my deck when I suddenly hear loud voices. And when I look down the beach, I see that it’s Rob and Mitch Gates.”
Jacobson leans over and whispers to me, “This never happened.”
I ignore him, my focus on Gus Hennessy now, knowing nothing good can come of this.
And does not.
“I hate to say this about a friend of mine,” Hennessy says.
Now he looks over at our table, and shrugs, almost apologetically.
“But they were going at each other pretty hard,” he continues, “right up until Rob said that if he, meaning Mitch, didn’t back off, he was going to kill him.”
My client is up and out of his seat before I can stop him.
“That is a goddamn lie and you know it, Gus!”
Judge Jackson Prentice III’s voice is even louder in the moment.
