The sprawling manor house, even more than the picture-perfect family inside of it, stood out as a testament to Hamptons high-society success. Manicured gardens, a pond and a pool stretched across the 2.2 acres of 59 Middle Lane in tony East Hampton, the property’s centerpiece a gabled six-bedroom pile modeled after an English country estate.
The address was emblematic not only of New York wealth but also seemingly domestic bliss; millionaire R. Theodore Ammon and his wife, Generosa, planned to watch their twins enjoy their childhoods on Middle Lane. Eight years after purchasing the home, however, it took on a new and more sinister identity: crime scene.
It was here that Ammon was found bludgeoned to death in October 2001 – and the idyllic setting would soon prove an irresistible contradictory backdrop for tabloids dissecting his life and his family. Images of the East Hampton home were splashed across front pages and news programs for years as the story took seemingly limitless tragic and sensational twists, from Ammon’s murder to the trial of his wife’s handyman new husband to Generosa’s own premature death from breast cancer.
More than a decade after his father’s murder, Ammon’s son Greg used the address for the title of his 2012 documentary – 59 Middle Lane – in an effort to make sense of the trauma and confusion that he and his twin had endured as children.
Because, as socialites and city vacationers were enjoying the Hamptons summer 20 years ago, the swanky spot was also abuzz with gossip in the run-up to the murder trial of the man Greg’s mother had married three months after Ammon was found naked and fatally beaten in the master bedroom.
Daniel Pelosi – the Long Island contractor/electrician who’d overseen the installation of the 59 Middle Lane security system and one of the few to know about its existence – had finally been arrested in March 2004, charged with second-degree murder in the death of his lover’s financier husband. And the revelations and allegations that emerged throughout the trial would be even more salacious – outlining love affairs, secret espionage, wild overspending, conspiracies and even mystical spells.
It remains one of the most infamous Hamptons scandals to this day.
Ammon originally hailed from New York, but almost 500 miles away from Long Island’s sweeping beaches; he was raised with one sister, Sandi, outside of Buffalo, then majored in economics at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
“He entered Bank of America’s executive-training program straight out of Bucknell,” New York reported in 2003. He married another member of the program but parted amicably from her about a decade later, she told the magazine.
Ammon passed the bar without ever attending law school and forged a blazing path through law and private equity before becoming a multimillionaire, thanks to his role in the highly publicized RJR Nabisco takeover in the late 1980s. By the time of his death, he’d donated $15m to his alma mater and become chair of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
He was also going through a nasty divorce from his second wife, Generosa, an artist from California who met Ammon in 1983 through her day job as a rental agent. He’d been looking for a new apartment on the Upper East SIde but failed to appear for an evening appointment with the seven-years-younger blonde; she called the next day to admonish him, and he asked her out.
They married three years later, and Generosa – who said she’d been raised after her mother’s death in the California foster system, losing her only sister to a hit-and-run when she was a teenager – threw herself into the role of high-society wife. The couple tried to have their own children and pursued in vitro procedures but eventually turned to international adoption.
“You know how your mom found out about you guys, right?” Generosa’s best friend - and her children’s godfather – tells her son in his 2012 documentary. “She was at her doctor’s office, and behind his desk was a picture of these two babies, and it was you guys.
“And she said, ‘Who are those kids?’ And he said, ‘Those are kids that are orphaned in the Ukraine. And that started the process.”
The Ammons adopted the toddler twins they named Gregory and Alexa in 1992, the same year the couple purchased 59 Middle Lane. They told an oft-repeated story about how, on a drive to East Hampton, one of the children spotted a sunflower and exclaimed “Big flower;” Ammon subsequently named a new business venture Big Flower Press.
By 1999, the gamble had paid off to the tune of $2billion – but Ammon’s marriage was following the opposite trajectory. His relationship with Generosa was souring; she accused him of affairs and other betrayals, while her behaviour became increasingly sharp and unhinged, friends and colleagues reported. The couple moved the family to England for what was widely seen in their circles as a last-ditch attempt to make the marriage work, but they returned to America and began living separately in 2000, initiating divorce proceedings.
Ammon bought and moved into a tenth-floor apartment on Fifth Avenue in addition to purchasing a nearby townhouse for Generosa and the children; she moved into the Stanhope Hotel with personal staff and the twins as $1million renovations were being completed on the new digs.
And those renovations would bring a smooth-talking electrician with a rap sheet into the Ammons’ lives – culminating in the extinguishing of one of them just over a year after his whirlwind entrance.
Daniel Pelosi was married with three children – and had a long history of battles with substance abuse and the law – when he began his affair with Generosa. He began spending huge amounts of time around his new lover and the twins in the Stanhope Hotel, eventually winning over both Alexa and Greg, they explain in his 2012 film.
Generosa began not only pursuing sole custody but also poisoning the children against Ammon. Her estranged husband, meanwhile, took a huge financial hit in dot-com stocks around 2000; much of the fortune she insisted was there was, in fact, vanishing.
He was still a wealthy man, however, and still included the East Hampton home in his property portfolio. He was also dating, though no relationships had been serious enough to introduce a new woman to his son and daughter.
“We thought, at first, this was going to be a really good thing – and not necessarily a permanent thing – but they were both seeing other people, and that was the way it should be … not realizing that the ending was so dark,” his sister says in 59 Middle Lane.
Ammon had gone out to East Hampton on the second-to-last weekend of October 2001; when he failed to show up to work on the Monday, his business partner took a helicopter from the city to Long Island and discovered the 52-year-old’s body. Police determined there had been no sign of a break-in.
A murder investigation was underway. And Generosa, still legally Ammon’s wife, was set to inherit everything.
Three months after the killing, she married Pelosi in a half-hour ceremony at Queens Borough Hall. Then the newlyweds decamped with the children to the same 22-room, 17-acre estate in England where Generosa and her late husband had tried to salvage their own love just a few short years earlier.
Pelosi’s legal tussles soon brought them back Stateside, however; he returned to face driving-under-the-influence charges and served four months in jail. The new family moved into a $700,000 home Generosa bought in Pelosi’s home town of Center Moriches, Long Island.
Tragically, she was diagnosed with breast cancer the year after their marriage – and the relationship deteriorated along with her quickly-declining health. By July 2003, she’d moved the twins back to Middle Lane and essentially written Pelosi out of her will; she was dead the following month.
Generosa never admitted to knowing anything about her husband’s killing, and authorities had still not publicly named any suspects at the time of her death. A custody battle ensued between the children’s English nanny and Ammon’s sister, who wanted the twins to come and live with her in Alabama, where she and her doctor husband had already raised three children. Aunt Sandi eventually prevailed.
Pelosi received $2m and the deed to the Center Moriches home as part of a postnuptial agreement signed a day before Generosa finalized her will, The New York Times reported. His decision to almost immediately bring Generosa’s ashes to the Stanhope Hotel bar – where he ordered her favorite drink, a Cosmopolitan, toasted the ashes with a beer and chatted to a New York Post reporter – set tongues wagging.
But not as much as his March 2002 arrest for Ammon’s murder did – though the trial would manage to become even more salacious.
Over eight weeks in the fall of 2004, the prosecution painted Pelosi – who welcomed another child with a new fiancee in the weeks before the trial’s start – as a “a hard-drinking, hard-gambling, hard-luck thug who had romanced Ms. Ammon and killed Mr. Ammon to get at his $80 million fortune,” the NYT reported. “The lead prosecutor, Janet Albertson, scowled at Mr. Pelosi and called him a sadist who had enjoyed beating Mr. Ammon to death.
“This was not a whodunit,” Ms. Albertson told jurors, gesturing at Pelosi. “It was that man.”
His own father testified against him; Pelosi’s sister, meanwhile, insisted he’d driven from the city to Long Island that night to retrieve items from her house.
Pelosi said he and a friend, Chris Parrino, went out to buy beer in the early morning hours of October 21, when Ammon was believed to have been killed. The electrician’s niece testified that he returned home between 3-4am (Parrino was charged as an accomplice and, when he eventually took a plea deal in 2006, gave the only direct evidence of Pelosi’s guilt – testifying that they’d gone to Middle Lane, where his friend emerged “disheveled and had blood on him, some of which got on the car … I asked him what happened and Danny said, ‘I had a fight with Ted and I think he’s dead.’”)
During his murder trial, however, none of this came out, and Pelosi steadfastly maintained his innocence as the defense tried to point out a number of other possible suspects and theories, alleging gaps in the prosecution’s case. The trial more than once veered into the absurd; at one point, the defendant’s lawyer testified the Pelosi family “believed the Generosa cast a mystical spell that caused the death of” another family member.
Prosecutors, however, had “no eyewitnesses, no damning physical evidence and no confessions to the police to tie Mr. Pelosi to Mr. Ammon’s death,” the NYT reported. “(Three people, however, did testify that Mr. Pelosi told them he had committed the murder.) Prosecutors offered no evidence during the trial to place Mr. Pelosi in East Hampton on the night of the murder.”
Despite that, jurors still returned a guilty verdict in December 2004 – and Pelosi was sentenced the following month to the maximum of 25 years in prison to life.
He called himself in court a “victim of the media and circumstance” and directly addressed the Ammon twins, then 15.
“I never lied to you two,” he said . “I am telling you to your face: I didn’t kill your father.”
Then Pelosi headed to prison, where he remains, while the young Ammons receded from the spotlight – until Greg brought out his documentary in 2012. His twin also studied film, graduating from USC in 2017.
They put Middle Lane on the market the same year; it sold that December for just under $11million. Greg has also tried to resurrect the Big Flower brand, for a time operating an apparel line and shop in a now-closed East Hampton venture.
Greg occasionally pays tribute to his late parents on social media – as well as to his own wife, Stacy, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in an unfortunate mirroring of his late mother’s health battle. Stacy, thankfully, successfully finished chemo in 2022 – prompting the Gregory R. Ammon Family Foundation to bestow $200,000 to the hospital that treated her.
“I started the foundation as a way to give back and to help our community,” Gregsaid in a 2023 press release announcing the donation. “Cancer is close to our hearts – not just because of Stacy’s experience, but also because my mother died from cancer when I was young, so it is a cause that we are always going to support.
“But the foundation also aims to help the community in a variety of different sectors – whether its education, health care, entrepreneurship, research, the list goes on. Giving back to the community as a whole is what’s most important to us.”
Also important, clearly, is examining his own family’s legacy. In 2021, a few years after the release of his documentary, Greg marked the anniversary of his father’s death on Instagram in a post addressed to the late financier.
“Since your murder the lines in the story have been drawn … twisted and manipulated,” he wrote. “Fingers have been pointed. Narratives have been formulated and confusion forced, while judgements have been quickly passed. To most our story has already ended or they aren’t even aware of a beginning.
“The groundwork of your legacy was set in glass, not in stone. I will break through it and shine light on your truths.”
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