By Eric Francis Coppolino
When Mohonk Preserve, a respected 8,000 acre land conservation organization based in New Paltz, NY, wants to expand its land holdings, they often depend on the services of a man named Robert K. Anderberg. He is a former trustee of the Preserve and currently general counsel of the Open Space Institute (OSI). [The Preserve recently lost another case involving an attempted land acquisition; see related story.]
Anderberg’s land acquisition playbook includes purchasing the mortgage out from under a neighbor and foreclosing on them, setting up front companies to do transactions, buying land from someone who doesn’t own it, claiming land by adverse possession (squatter’s rights) and setting the Preserve’s neighbors up for costly litigation, sometimes pitting them against one another.
There are many examples of this over the years where Anderberg acted as land acquisition agent for Mohonk Preserve. Several of them focus on one particular property formerly called Smitty’s Dude Ranch. Once owned by Wilbur Smith, it was for decades a mecca for hippies and nature lovers, who would turn out in droves every weekend and hang out naked by the stream. But by the mid-1980s, Smith was in foreclosure and was facing the potential auctioning off of his land. The end of an era was drawing near. Mohonk wanted the land and was watching carefully.
When I interviewed Smith for Woodstock Times, he told me that at the time, he was exhausted from repeated attempts by the Mohonk Preserve to take his property or prevent him from using it. He didn’t have the money or the skills to defend himself, so he sold the ranch to Karen Pardini and Michael Fink, his old friends who were frequent visitors to Smitty’s. Ultimately they saved him from foreclosure and made sure that he got at least some money from the sale of his property rather than none at all.