MOHEGAN LAKE, N.Y. —A patch of land behind the Fieldstone Manor development that’s currently under construction has raised both ire and confusion among some residents and town officials after a recent report that the land was owned by the town but was being used as a parking lot by Fieldstone Manor developer William Catucci.
In a report on his Hudson Valley Digger Substack, former Journal News Tax Watch columnist David McKay Wilson alleged that the town has owned the property since 2019 but that Catucci was using it to store trucks, cars, trailers and other vehicles. It was unclear whether Catucci is collecting a fee for storing vehicles on the land.
Following the publication of Wilson’s first piece, the town issued a vacate order requiring Catucci to remove the vehicles. As of Monday (Oct. 27), at least 20 cars, trucks and trailers remained at the site.
What action, if any, the town can take is complicated by one thing: ownership of the land is, as Town Attorney Adam Rodriguez put it to Yorktown News, “subject to dispute.”
“It's an open question,” Rodriguez said. “It’s not clear.”
Everyone agrees that the land was, at one time, intended to go to the town—though not as a vacant, unpaved lot, but as a developed park with three tennis courts and a basketball court. This was designed to satisfy recreation requirements set a few years earlier by the Planning Board as part of subdivision approval for Catucci’s Fieldstone Manor development.
The courts were never built on the parcel between Strawberry Road and Lexington Avenue, between the Fieldstone Manor property, George Washington Elementary School and the Hudson Valley Islamic Community Center. The property sits behind Fieldstone Manor, which includes 14 single-family homes and seven apartments in the site’s restored stone mansion.
A deed transferring the property to the town was filed in 2019, a year after the death of former Town Supervisor Albert Capellini, who had served as Catucci’s attorney. While it had been signed, it was reportedly not supposed to be filed with the county at that time but was ready to go for when Catucci had met the requirement to turn the land into recreational space.
Yet according to Westchester County’s online Municipal Tax Parcel Viewer, the parcel (listed as 3650 Lexington Ave.) belongs to the Town of Yorktown.
Rodriguez noted that the filing came before his tenure as town attorney began in 2020. But as he understands it, Capellini’s widow reportedly found the deed among her late husband’s papers and filed it—unaware the transfer had not been finalized because the required tennis and basketball courts had not been built. The Town Board never formally accepted the land through a resolution—the standard step before a deeded park becomes town property.
“Al passed away, and a year later, his wife is cleaning up the office and finds a deed signed,” Supervisor Ed Lachterman told Yorktown News, calling it “normal procedure” to have documents signed in anticipation of completing a transaction.
“You file it, you accept it by your resolution, and now voilà, it belongs to the town,” he said. “That's the problem: The deed was in a file waiting for the deal to be complete. The attorney died. His wife thought, ‘Oh, I should probably get this in,’ without checking—and it went in; that was in 2019.”
Disputed or not, the transfer of ownership is reflected in the tax rolls. According to tax records shared with Yorktown News, in April 2019, when Catucci still owned the entire Fieldstone Manor property, it was recorded at an assessed value of $46,750 and paid about $7,887 in town tax. In September 2019, after the deed transferring a portion of the land to the town was recorded, the property’s assessed value dropped to $26,850.
By April 2020, the assessment showed Catucci still owned part of the property valued at $26,850, while the recreation parcel was assessed separately at $14,300. No taxes were paid on the recreation land, and Catucci’s overall tax bill decreased. Councilwoman Susan Siegel questioned how Catucci could have been unaware he no longer owned that part of the property if he was no longer paying taxes on it.
Rodriguez said the town only became aware it might own the site in 2023, after Wilson, then reporting in his Tax Watch column, wrote that Catucci lacked some permits for the redevelopment of Fieldstone Manor.
It was “the first time it came onto anybody’s radar,” Rodriguez said. “We were like, what’s going on over there?”
As for why the document’s filing went unnoticed or was filed in the first place, the attorney said:
“I can only assume [Capellini] was holding on to [the documents] because there was no intention to file them, because [Catucci] was supposed to build the tennis courts before they transferred property,” Rodriguez said. “Because why would the town want the land without the courts?”
He added that “what was supposed to happen here was [Catucci] was supposed to build the courts and then transfer title, and the Town Board probably would have done a resolution to accept the property.”
Since the courts were never built, the property was not supposed to be transferred.
What remains unclear is whether the town can force Catucci to remove the vehicles, charge him rent for use of the land or transfer it back to him and put it back on the tax rolls.
Wilson alleges that Catucci has “a side hustle” at the site and is running a “commercial parking operation on town land.” According to interviews Wilson said he conducted with several parking customers, Catucci had been charging rent to those parking there. Catucci did not respond to an email seeking comment.
If the town does, in fact, own the land, it remains unclear whether Catucci had any right to rent out space on it or park construction vehicles there.
“There has been some talk about how you can’t park commercial vehicles in a residential zone,” Rodriguez said. “That’s a different scenario than what we have here—really, he’s got an ongoing construction zone. He’s still building his subdivision.”
The town moved to issue a vacate order telling Catucci to remove the vehicles by the end of the day Wednesday, Oct. 22. As of Monday, Oct. 27, it appeared there were at least 20 vehicles still parked, some of which appeared to be in poor condition. Rather than being used to store active construction equipment, most of the vehicles seen by Yorktown News appeared to be pickup trucks, cars, trailers and vans.
Lachterman said he had visited the site, adding that he had sent emails to Police Chief Robert Noble and Building Inspector John Landi. When he spoke to Yorktown News on Oct. 24, he said some vehicles had been moved.
Rodriguez said that while the vacate order was “serious” and “the intention was exactly what it said,” the question of who owns the property remains. He added that “in the context of all of this, we’re not going in guns blazing. It might not be ours.”
The approach from the town, Rodriguez said, needs to be “step by step.”
At the Oct. 21 Town Board meeting, Lachterman said the board only learned of the town’s ownership early this year, adding that the town may charge Catucci back rent for use of the land. However, Catucci has claimed he believed he still owned the land—though that raised a question about why he stopped being taxed for it.
“If there are back taxes owed, I will, of course, insist on them being paid,” Lachterman told Yorktown News on Monday. “I just think that it is important that we follow this to completion being as cognizant of all of the issues as possible.”
According to Lachterman, the matter could ultimately become a civil legal issue, though the Planning Board would first need to address site and recreation requirements—and there must be a clear understanding of who owns the land.
Councilwoman Susan Siegel—who raised the issue in 2024—said she does not understand how long the removal process will take and is seeking clarification.
“Supervisor Lachterman said the developer’s continued illegal use of town property for a commercial, for-profit parking lot is not being ignored. He said it’s a negotiation,” Siegel said. “What’s there to negotiate? For 11 months I kept raising the illegal use with my fellow board members, and for 11 months they had no problem allowing the illegal operation to continue.”
Siegel cited an indemnification agreement signed in March by the supervisor and Catucci, individually and as sole member of Lake Mohegan Mansion LLC.
“Now that the developer has ignored the supervisor’s directive to remove all the vehicles, tractor-trailers, campers and storage containers from the property or face a trespassing charge, how many more months of negotiation will it take to clear the parcel?” Siegel asked. “How many more months to negotiate the back rent the supervisor said would be part of the negotiation?”
Lachterman told Yorktown News that Siegel also pushed for the indemnification agreement and that “she also understands that there’s a question on the ownership of the land.”
Until ownership is confirmed, it’s unclear whether town officials can force Catucci to remove the vehicles. Lachterman said Monday he is letting the attorneys handle the ownership question.
Meanwhile, town officials have cooled to the idea of owning the property for recreation.
“We don’t need another pocket park that we have to care for,” Lachterman told Yorktown News. “To replace the courts when they need to be replaced, it’ll cost the taxpayers well over $100,000. We don’t want to incur any additional operation and maintenance expense on a pocket park when we have big regional parks where we could add improvements and develop them further. That’s really where the recreation board stands. The Planning Board had a conversation about it with the Rec Commission; I think they’re on the same page.”
Rodriguez said definitive action will have to wait until all the threads are pulled together.
“We're looking to enter into a global resolution of all these issues with [Catucci],” Rodriguez said when asked what Yorktowners can expect going forward. “As I’ve laid out, there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed—we're still trying to work out those issues in a way that everyone agrees.”
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