In 1977, Lewis Berman, a New York veterinarian to the stars, bought an old potato barn and tractor shed in the Hamptons hamlet of Water Mill. With his wife, Amanda, he renovated the property and turned it into a summer house. Seventeen years later, Paul Manafort moved next door. “We had a fight with him before we even knew him,” Berman said, standing beside the tall hedge that separates his yard from what is now the property of the U.S. Marshals Service. Berman, who is eighty-four, was walking his dog, Smudge, a deaf and arthritic Jack Russell terrier. “Manafort built his house three and a half feet taller than what the zoning allowed, and he got away with it,” he said. “So now we have this monster house in front of us. We used to have a view of the sunset.”

This summer, Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, will be living in a cell at Rikers Island. He has committed many federal crimes, but what first attracted public attention was a complaint by another neighbor, this one in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. In 2017, a blogger named Katia Kelly noticed a dilapidated house in her neighborhood. She researched the house’s history and uncovered its negligent owner—Manafort—as well as evidence of a money-laundering scheme: Manafort had taken out a mortgage far exceeding the value of the house.

Two years, two criminal trials, and one Russia investigation later, it’s come out that Manafort enjoys “a long caviar story” (one of the weirder details in the Mueller report) and that he’s guilty of conspiracy and bank and tax fraud. He forfeited the Brooklyn house, along with four other properties, to the government. (Manafort’s seized assets are estimated to be worth more than forty million dollars—enough to pay for the Mueller probe and then some.) The Marshals Service recently listed Manafort’s SoHo loft, which he’d been renting illegally on Airbnb, for $3.66 million. The other properties include a three-bedroom in Little Italy and a condo in Trump Tower.

Then there’s the ten-bedroom mansion next to the Bermans’, on Jobs Lane, which is valued at six to ten million dollars. When he was under house arrest, in Virginia, before his trial, he asked a judge if he could go to the Hamptons for Christmas. She said yes. The feds have not yet listed the property, which has a waterfall, a putting green, a basketball court, and a moat, as well as a bed of red-and-white flowers planted in the shape of an “M.” A sign on the door reads “No Trespassing. Property of USMS.”

Lewis Berman has not been missing his neighbor. Once, Smudge got sick from eating spaghetti she had fished out of the Manaforts’ insufficiently secured garbage can. “I was furious,” Berman said. “I went over there, and he opened the door before I even knocked. He just stood there, looking at me.” He added, “Laws, values—they meant nothing to that man.”

Berman has experience dealing with difficult neighbors. He used to live down the street from Ivana Trump and her children, in Manhattan, after her divorce from Donald. Berman was the family vet. (He also took care of Andy Warhol’s dachshund Amos, Henry Kissinger’s Labrador Tyler, and Lauren Bacall’s Cavalier King Charles spaniel Blenheim, as well as Goldie, a poodle belonging to Lillian Ross, a writer for this magazine.) Ivana had a black poodle named Chappy. In her book “Raising Trump,” she wrote that the kids “adored Chappy. Even when he smelled bad,” but that her ex-husband and Chappy had “issues.” Trump’s kids, their mother, and their nanny would bring Chappy to the vet. “Ivana was a little scary to me,” Berman said.

Chappy broke his leg twice. The first time was on the family yacht, the Trump Princess. When Berman advised that a titanium plate be put in Chappy’s leg, Ivana balked. “Dr. Berman, I don’t want no nails in my dog,” he recalled her saying. “She said, ‘Do you know who I am? Did you know I’m an Olympic skier? I’ve had every bone in my body broken. I have no nails in me.’ ” (Ivana Trump was never on an Olympic ski team.)

Back in Water Mill, Smudge snoozed by the pool where Berman and Amanda do aqua aerobics twice a week. Amanda described the last time they saw the Manaforts: “There were all these people over there; I assume they were the F.B.I., in their suits and with their phones.” She saw Manafort’s wife, Kathleen, get into a car. “And then I saw him, at the front steps, holding up a camel-hair jacket. He said, ‘Do you want this?,’ and the answer from the car was ‘Yes.’ ” Then they drove away.

Berman said that, when he opened his house this spring, he and Amanda had coughing and sneezing fits. The grass next door was ten inches high. One thing that Manafort had done right as a neighbor was keep the lawn mowed. Berman called the number posted on the front door and reached a contractor, in Texas, that had been hired by the U.S.M.S. “They said that a vender was supposed to be mowing every week to keep the pollen count down,” he said. A gardener arrived the next day.

Over the phone, Berman was told that the Marshals are still waiting for permission from the Attorney General’s office to put Manafort’s house on the market. “If we had the money, I’d buy the property and tear the house down,” Berman said. “See the sunset again.” ♦