Poquott Mayor Dolores Parrish sues Village Trustee John Pesek

A federal lawsuit filed by Poquott Mayor Dolores Parrish alleging that a village trustee hacked her email has roiled the small North Shore community.

The lawsuit is the latest controversy in tiny Poquott, where a former deputy mayor is facing charges that he stole funds from the Poquott Civic Association while he served as its president.

Parrish’s lawsuit, filed last month in Brooklyn federal court, claims that Trustee John Pesek broke into her personal email and attempted to embarrass her by giving information from the account to civic association members, including Pesek’s wife, Carol, the group’s president.

Carol and John Pesek declined to comment for this story.

The dispute between Parrish and John Pesek has made monthly village board meetings “a horror,” Deputy Mayor Harold Berry said in an interview. Berry, also a village trustee, is not named in the lawsuit.

John Pesek routinely is the lone dissenting vote on resolutions offered by other village board members, and the relationship between Parrish and civic association leaders also is frayed, Berry said.

“The two boards cannot get together. It’s just a situation that, with the current people there, cannot be resolved,” Berry said. “Obviously, there’s no working together. It’s a constant struggle between the two boards and the mayor, and now that there’s been actual charges filed, the tension has gotten 10 times as bad as it ever was.”

The suit also says Carol Pesek and civic association directors Felicia Chillak, Elizabeth Sutherland and Virginia Kryger have threatened to make Parrish’s emails public.

Anton J. Borovina of Melville, an attorney for Chillak, Sutherland and Kryger, said information obtained by his clients was part of efforts to account for funds missing from civic association coffers.

“I felt that they wanted me to quit, and I wasn’t going to quit,” Parrish said in an interview. “It’s really made me not trust people. . . . I took this job to make things better, not to be harassed.”

Parrish said concerns that her personal email had been compromised forced her to resign as human resources manager at her husband Richard’s company, Impact Environmental Consulting, because she feared confidential company information on her computer may have been divulged.

Poquott residents already were reeling from the arrest in August of former deputy mayor Edward Schmidt, who is accused of stealing about $1,850 from the civic association. Schmidt, 22, has denied the charges and is due to appear in court in February.

Parrish, John Pesek and Schmidt had been running mates last year when all three were elected to the village board. They ran together under the banner of the J.E.D. Party — the moniker coming from the first letters of their first names. Schmidt resigned from the village board less than four months after taking office amid questions about his dual roles with the village and civic association.

Berry, who said he supports Parrish, said many village residents appear to be “totally frustrated” by the strife.

“If it was up to me, I’d fire everybody,” he said. “It’s just that we get to do so much more if everybody would stop fighting.”

By Carl MacGowan

carl.macgowan@newsday.comCarlMacGowan

Carl MacGowan is a Long Island native who covers Brookhaven Town after having previously covered Smithtown, Suffolk County courts and numerous spot news and feature stories over his 20-plus year career at Newsday.