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Well-known member
ByEllen Gamerman
EDWARD BURKE JR. spends most of the year handling drug cases, traffic offenses, larceny and white-collar crime. But during the summer, when this criminal defense lawyer’s stretch of eastern Long Island turns into a playground for the rich, his focus is on clients arrested for driving while intoxicated—an offense he calls a “Deewee.”
“It is,” he says, “the ‘it’ charge.”
When the Hamptons wealthy have their uh-oh moments, getting behind the wheel after an evening of popping corks and downing cocktails—when they Deewee all over a good time—it’s Burke’s never-silenced cellphone that rings. Last year, after Justin Timberlake was nabbed in Sag Harbor on suspicion of driving while intoxicated, Burke was in a suit and tie at Timberlake’s side in the police station by 4 a.m.
“Eddie Burke Jr., how can you help me?”
Burke, 60, says on a recent morning in his office on Main Street in Sag Harbor, miming a typical client. He has a habit of playing all the roles in the conversation. “I’m going to tell you, Mr. and Mrs. Client, that we’re going to be OK. In my professional opinion, I feel that there’s a way through this.”
When the Hamptons wealthy have their uh-oh moments, it’s Burke’s never-silenced cellphone that rings.
Calls like this are piling up. In 2024, DWI arrests hit a record high in Suffolk County, which encompasses the East End of Long Island. Meanwhile, the Hamptons are getting more crowded, with the population in the towns of East Hampton and Southampton alone jumping more than 34 percent and 22 percent, respectively, from 2010 to 2023, according to census data, and visitors turning the area into a year-round destination.
Making a relatively straightforward, non-injury, first-time drunk-driving charge all but disappear in the Hamptons—no jail time, no criminal record—costs Burke’s clients a minimum of $7,500. A more complicated case can exceed $50,000, including litigation, expert witnesses and other fees. Through plea bargaining with prosecutors before a judge in simpler cases, he often is able to talk down the charges to something like a traffic ticket. All of this adds up to high-six-figure summers for Burke.
Framed tabloid stories decorate his waiting room. The first such case, involving socialite publicist Lizzie Grubman, helped the lawyer’s career skyrocket. In 2012, Burke worked out a plea deal for Jason Kidd when the NBA star landed a DWI charge after driving his Cadillac Escalade into a telephone pole in Water Mill.
He defended celebrity chef Todd English and then-Nascar chairman Brian France when they faced drunk-driving charges in the Hamptons. Burke denied any wrongdoing by English and France and said both matters resulted in noncriminal traffic violations. Staring out sheepishly from a framed courtroom drawing near Burke’s desk is his highest-profile client: a bleary-eyed Timberlake.
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Framed news stories about Burke and his clients decorate the lawyer’s waiting room.
Burke has salt-and-pepper hair and a snaggle-toothed smile with a small scar on his right cheek courtesy of a flying attempt with a towel cape as a little boy. The son of a former local and state judge, he practices what he calls “country lawyering”—which here can mean charging $1,000 an hour and dressing in Brioni suits and Hermès ties. For Burke, it’s about waving at passing police cars, understanding a byzantine system of local courts and, most of all, not ticking off the wrong people.
“Hey, client,” he says, now as Lawyer Burke, “mind your p’s and q’s.”
BURKE (OR “WOODY” TO SOME FRIENDS) was raised on Long Island in middle-class Uniondale and moved east to Sag Harbor when he was 8. His father, Edward Burke Sr., started as an ironworker, switching to law after injuring his hip on the job and watching a personal injury attorney negotiate a deal for him. Burke Sr., 83, now runs a law practice where two other Burke children work.
Though the younger Burke thought about a career in restaurants—when he was growing up, his family ran the Sag Harbor seafood place the Salty Dog—he attended St. John’s University’s law school in Queens and worked for seven years as a prosecutor in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. He joined a Sag Harbor law firm, where he met jet-setters and played what he calls “local quarterback” on their real-estate deals and other headaches.
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Then Grubman backed her father’s spanking-new Mercedes SUV into a crowd at the Southampton nightclub Conscience Point Inn, injuring 16 people and fleeing the scene. Grubman famously cried on Burke’s shoulder amid the tabloid maelstrom, getting canceled before anybody called it that. She pleaded guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges connected to the crash and, though she faced a maximum eight-year prison sentence, spent just 38 days in jail after Burke reached an agreement with prosecutors. Anyone caring an iota about the case knew Burke’s name by the end of it.
Former Suffolk County Court Judge Stephen Braslow, who retired this year, dealt with Burke on dozens of felony DWI cases. “He never got a different result than other lawyers when he came in front of me,” he says. Though each case must be considered on its own merits, he says, people who accept they have a problem and take responsibility tend to get a better deal. “Ed Burke was very good at reading people the riot act at the time he was retained, and most of them got into drug and alcohol treatment,” he says.
‘You have to know the microcosm that is the East End,’ says Burke’s mentor William Condon. ‘You’ve got to know people, you’ve got to know the political lay of the land. He does.’
During the Timberlake trial, Burke insisted his client was not intoxicated. The judge, calling some of the lawyer’s comments to the press inappropriate, threatened to impose a gag order. Burke says he got scolded for “advocating for your client in a zealous fashion.” He worked out a plea deal that reduced Timberlake’s DWI to a noncriminal traffic violation. Timberlake did not respond to requests for comment.
Celebrity cases that generate tabloid coverage can make it seem as though a first-time DWI is a crime without serious consequences.
“That’s not the message we send,” says Christopher Brockmeyer, chief deputy sheriff in the Suffolk County sheriff’s office. He says the county has a dedicated DWI team. “If you drive drunk or drive under the influence of some sort of drug, we’re going to find you, we’re going to arrest you, and you’ve got to sit behind bars for the night and see a judge in the morning.”
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The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment, citing active cases with Burke.
Burke’s record is not without controversy: Under pressure, he stepped away from a high-profile East Hampton case involving the 2001 fatal bludgeoning of Wall Street financier Ted Ammon after almost becoming a witness for the prosecution. Burke was defending murder suspect Danny Pelosi, a Long Island electrician having an affair with Ammon’s estranged wife. Burke was accused of enabling the cleaning and hiding of a car suspected as potential evidence against Pelosi.
He says he took possession of the car several months following the murder, after Pelosi had been using the vehicle regularly, to get it analyzed by forensic experts as part of Pelosi’s defense. Prosecutors asked the judge to remove Burke from the case, alleging that he also had relevant information about the custody of a temporarily missing laptop and stood to unduly profit from his relationship with Pelosi.
Burke says he had become “too close for comfort” with Pelosi but that his work methods were aboveboard. He was not censured by the court. Pelosi was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
ON A BONE-CHILLING rainy Monday morning, Burke rides the ferry to the one-room courthouse on Shelter Island. A weather-beaten ferry worker in neon-yellow leans in the open window of Burke’s midnight-blue BMW 840i, asking what he’s up to. “Protecting the innocent, you know me,” Burke says.
His mentor William Condon, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and former Suffolk County prosecutor, says Burke has a wide circle in what is essentially a closed community. “You have to know the microcosm that is the East End,” he says. “You’ve got to know people, you’ve got to know the political lay of the land. He does.”
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The son of a former local and state judge, Burke practices what he calls ‘country lawyering’—which here can mean charging $1,000 an hour and dressing in Brioni suits and Hermès ties.
Burke sees an emotional element to his lawyerly style. “I can pull certain heartstrings to a judge,” he says. The human side of things, he says, the hug outside the courthouse, that’s why he works “777,” his father’s term for 7 days a week, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. “It’s not about the money retainer,” he says. He represents working-class clients in his wide-ranging practice, charging on a sliding scale.
In the afternoon, Burke heads out for coffee, pulling out a credit card nestled with a wad of bills wrapped in a $100 note. He tried to keep his sons down to earth as they were growing up, reminding them when they worked as caddies that even though golfers slipped them $500 tips, $100 was a more typical amount.
Burke belongs to the exclusive Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton, but because he does business with so many other golf clubs in the area, he says he can walk in anywhere and enjoy full privileges. What about when club employees don’t know who he is? He gives a look and replies: “They know.”