Tony Petrello found his way to the farm in the summer of 1992 through his best friend, Mike Burrows. The two had worked as up-and-coming lawyers at Baker & McKenzie in New York. Burrows, who’d rented one of the cottages since the 1970s, tipped off Petrello that the camp next to his had come free. “The model”—so called because it had been built on the side of Route 27 as a model-house display in the early 1960s before John White bought it and hauled it out to the dune—was just 650 square feet, but no one could fail to be charmed by its new location.

Petrello had grown up in a lower-middle-class Italian neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of immigrants. Gifted in math, he won a full scholarship to Yale and went on to Harvard Law School. At 31 he was named managing partner of Baker & McKenzie’s New York office. At 37 he accepted an offer from one of his clients to be day-to-day head of Nabors Industries. It was a ticket to wealth—considerable wealth—but it did mean living in Houston. For Tony and his Connecticut-born wife, Cindy, a former soap-opera actress and TWA flight attendant, renting “the model” was a way to escape the Houston heat and see their families back East.

The Petrellos joined a casual fraternity of White-farm cottage dwellers. All were quite successful, but life at the beach was low-key: cocktails and moonlit barbecues. “It was like the beach version of how I grew up,” recalls Petrello, “where everyone knew each other, you hung out on your stoop … ” When word went around in the summer of 1995 that Tony and Cindy had bought the southwest corner of the field, including one of the cottages, the fraternity was delighted, especially Mike Burrows.

White was no hayseed. For years, he’d weighed various plans to subdivide the field. But Petrello was no country lawyer. By the time they met on the porch of “the model” one August day in 1995, they’d haggled quite a bit to reach a deal. Petrello would commit to buying roughly 11 acres for $2 million, a not unreasonable price, given that the whole field had just been appraised for $6 million. But Petrello would pay more than that. The field first needed to be subdivided; he would front those costs. Only when the subdivision was done would the deal actually close.

A festive air suffused the porch meeting as Tony and Cindy Petrello, along with John White and his son Jeffery, then in his late 30s, reviewed the memo of sale Petrello had drawn up, the field unfurling majestically from where they sat. The only sensitive point was the size of the house the Petrellos would build. John White wanted to be sure they wouldn’t erect one of those “monstrosities” that had begun to pop up all over. Cindy told White that she and her husband would live happily in a house the size of “the model” if they could own on the beach instead of renting. But Petrello’s lawyer, David Berg, now says, “It is just silly for anyone to say that Cindy was committing to a house the size of the model.” It was a passing remark, not to be taken seriously.

The Petrellos did tell the Whites they admired designer Calvin Klein’s oceanfront house, a hulking, shingled mansion originally owned by Pan Am founder Juan Trippe.

Later, John White would take it upon himself to measure the house, saying it was roughly 16,000 square feet. Large indeed for the time. But had the Petrellos said they hoped to build a house like Calvin Klein’s in size? Or just style? Later, the Whites would say Petrello gave them repeated assurances his house would be modest in size; he just couldn’t put that in writing, they claimed he told them, because it would limit the size of the mortgage a bank would grant. (Petrello denies he ever said that.) The contract did say that if the Whites chose to sell any more acreage, Petrello would have the right to match the highest offers they got. John White could pass the property directly to any of his descendants, but any other plan would trigger this right of first refusal. After all, Petrello was like family now. If the Whites needed to sell any land, he should be able to buy it—to keep it in the family, so to speak.