Sleepy Hamlet Rocked by a Neighborhood Feud on Steroids

On July 1, in the sleepy hamlet of East Setauket, Long Island, Christian Antonelli and his wife, Christine Licata, were feeling the holiday spirit three days early. They set off a cluster of fireworks, showering the area with blackened debris, including the yard of their next-door neighbor David Halstead, who promptly called the cops.

The next day, Halstead says, Antonelli and Licata retaliated by setting off more. Then, for good measure, they did it again. And again. For two months, “like three, four times a day,” the explosions never stopped, he claims.

“It's not a normal amount of fireworks. It's not your, you know, the pretty ones,” says another East Setauket resident, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid becoming a target.

Remarkably, the fireworks are just one front in an escalating feud. Halstead and his husband, Andrew, form one main faction. Christian and Christine—the less popular duo—form the other.

Around the beginning of September, Antonelli and Licata installed an extravagant Halloween display, which some in the neighborhood interpreted as a creative way to irritate their neighbors. It featured bright lights, animatronics, and an air pump that sounds like a “jet engine,” one resident says.

“Then there’s a witch,” adds another person who lives nearby. “I can hear it when I go in my garage and my garage door is closed. She's like ‘aaaaahhhhh.’”

There’s more. Antonelli and Licata—ages 43 and 35, respectively—“blast house music the entire day, [and] over the weekends,” a person in the area alleges; Halstead claims they crank things up louder when he has guests over.

‘I’ve never dealt with anybody like them’

This summer, Halstead, 54, took a video allegedly showing Licata trying to flood his lawn with her hose. In September, Antonelli was charged with exceeding sound level limits. (He pleaded not guilty.) Later that month, Licata was arrested for criminal tampering after Halstead found dead rats in his yard; his security camera appeared to show a woman leaning over his fence in the middle of the night. (She also pleaded not guilty.) And on Oct. 17, Halstead says he received an unsolicited package that included a “buzzy butt” vibrating sex toy, ultra-strength gas relief, and Vagisil. He says he called DoorDash and was told the sender’s name was “Christine.”

Since July, police have responded to at least 27 calls involving one of the two homes, according to public records.

“I lived in New York City for 20 years, and I’ve never dealt with anybody like them,” Halstead complains. He and his husband are now suing Antonelli and Licata for trespassing and causing a “nuisance,” among other alleged violations, including flooding their yard, blasting music, threatening their lives, and detonating fireworks “at random hours of the day and night.” The lawsuit notes that a Suffolk County judge imposed an “order of protection” against Licata on Oct. 11. (The Daily Beast saw a copy of the order, though Licata says she is not aware it exists.)

Antonelli, meanwhile, considers himself the victim. People in the area have been “taunting my family since 2020,” he wrote in a text message to The Daily Beast. “I’m a husband, a father of 3, I was raised in a Christian household. My family likes to work hard & enjoy life.” Most of the accusations about his conduct, he added, have “been a guilty til proven innocent routine.”

Christine concurred in a separate text message, in which she denounced Halstead as a “lunatic”: “He harasses the police department which in turn makes them then harass us. This man is sick, there is no reason for his anger and we are afraid.”

She denied virtually all of her neighbors’ claims, saying she and her family have only occasionally set off fireworks (and haven’t set off any this month), that the Halloween decorations are reasonable, that they don’t play excessively loud music, and that she knows nothing about the Vagisil care package.

‘There’s a lot of money in this town’

Residents of East Setauket aren’t used to this kind of commotion. “It’s a quaint town. There’s a lot of money in this town,” one person says. The hamlet sits 10 minutes from the Long Island sound and less than two miles from Stony Brook University.

“If you want [to live on Long Island],” the person adds, “you want to live on the North Shore or the South Shore. You don’t want to be right in the middle. We’re on the North Shore.”

The community clearly seems to be in Halstead’s corner, but as much as people are exasperated by the Antontellis, they appear to be equally confounded. The couple arrived three years ago and obviously had money to blow. Parked in front of their home are two new Teslas, one of which bears the vanity plate “GET SOMM.”

But where did they come from, and how did they seemingly get rich? In March, a federal lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of New York that claimed to hold some of the answers.

‘It was easy to talk me into anything’

Beverly Van Gundy, an 81-year-old widow, lives alone in San Leandro, California. Six years ago, an ad on the back of a magazine captured her attention: A company called Atlas Collectibles said it was offloading gold bullion at rock-bottom prices.

Van Gundy had recently come into cash. When she was 27, she had purchased a home (using a loan she assumed from a man, since women weren’t allowed to take out their own mortgages). By the time she sold the house to fund her retirement, it was worth more than $800,000.

When Van Gundy called Atlas to inquire about the gold, a man from the company told her to hold off, she recalls. “Give me a few days,” she remembers him saying, “let me find something better.” His name, she says, was Christian Antonelli.

Antonelli and an associate, Jason Sullivan, advised Van Gundy to buy collectible coins, arguing that they would appreciate faster than bullion, according to a lawsuit she filed in the spring.

Van Gundy bought in. “Big mistake,” she now says.

Antonelli, in particular, wooed her with what felt like kindness. “He's very smooth-talking, he never gets upset,” she says. “He talked to me for hours about his family. And I talked to him about my family. You know, we got to be more like friends. And it always ended up in him making a deal.”

In all, Van Gundy’s lawsuit says, she did 91 deals with the two men, totaling $500,660. They allegedly even persuaded her to shift her “conventional investments” into additional coins, telling her she was receiving the items at “dealers’ cost.” In reality, she was paying huge premiums; one purchase—an 1881 Morgan silver dollar—was marked up an astonishing 2,350 percent, the suit claims. The actual combined value of her purchases? Just 38 percent of what she had spent, she says.

“I have a disadvantage,” Van Gundy explains. “I’m a Christian, so of course I believe what somebody says, and I never had a lot of money in my life.”

By the time the pandemic hit in 2020, Van Gundy’s health was flagging. She suffers from an iron deficiency that was flaring up, making her feel foggy and vulnerable. “It was easy to talk me into anything,” she says.

It was around this period that Antonelli and Sullivan commenced “phase two” of their fraud, the lawsuit claims. The pandemic, they allegedly told her, “provided an unparalleled opportunity” to cash in her holdings. All she had to do was ship her collection (including hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of coins she had purchased elsewhere) to Antonelli’s house, in East Setauket, and he would sell them “on consignment.” Antonelli allegedly told her that auction houses were “fighting over” the listing and promised her a $1.1 million return. Van Gundy believed him once again.

Before the supposed auction was scheduled to take place, Antonelli allegedly sent Van Gundy a pair of checks totaling $245,000—less than half of what she believes her overall collection was worth. She awaited the results of the sale but heard nothing. Instead, Antonelli “became evasive,” the lawsuit recounts.

“All of a sudden, it’s just like, nothing. Like he doesn’t even know you exist,” Van Gundy says.

‘That was my life savings, and he knew it’

After considerable effort, she managed to get through to Sullivan. According to the lawsuit, he “admitted to Mrs. Van Gundy that Antonelli originally oversold the coins to her and that it was wrong,” adding that he “had warned Antonelli that he needed to stop over-selling coins.” (Sullivan declined to comment.)

Eventually, she spoke to Antonelli, too. He said he had sold most of her collection and “had already paid her” for her share, the suit says. Panicked, she instructed him to send back her remaining coins with “a full accounting,” according to the complaint, which adds that the company mailed back just eight out of the 2,386 she had originally shipped. They allegedly did not send the requested paperwork.

In September, Sullivan agreed to settle his portion of the lawsuit, which accused him and Antonelli of “selling millions of dollars of over-priced coins to thousands of other customers over the course of multiple years.” The case against Antonelli is ongoing, though Van Gundy’s lawyers apparently don’t consider him the brains of the operation, writing in their complaint that he “lacks the education or sophistication to be an expert in anything, much less numismatics.”

Van Gundy doesn’t expect to get all of her money back. Whatever she does recoup will need to last the rest of her life, she says. “Not that it’ll be that much longer anyway. But that’s beside the point.”

Mostly, she says she is angry that she was bamboozled by a man she considered a friend. “That was my life savings, and he knew it,” she says. She recalls reminding Antonelli of that fact during one of their conversations. “Well,” he allegedly replied. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

Antonelli denies that, saying Van Gundy did not strike him as a gambler and that her behavior at the time suggested she had plenty of money to spend. He largely declined to comment on the litigation otherwise. (He submitted a reply to Van Gundy’s lawsuit in April denying most of her allegations.)

Licata, however, defended him at length. She blasted the lawsuit for portraying Van Gundy as a feeble elderly lady, arguing that Van Gundy is a thriving “senior Olympic athlete” and thus—for some reason—was less likely to get ripped off. Last year, she says, Van Gundy competed in a softball tournament, “where they came in first place, by the way.” (Van Gundy confirms that she won the tournament in her age group. In fact, she notes excitedly, her team also won a tournament this October: “All of us on our team are 80 and over. It was a great game. We were eight behind in the last inning and we came back and won it.” Due to her health, someone else had to run the bases for her.)

More relevantly, Licata claims that Van Gundy was a sophisticated investor with a long history of collecting coins who knew that the roughly $200,000 payment was communicated as a “liquidation.” (“I’ve never collected coins. They know that,” Van Gundy retorts.)

Licata also denies that Van Gundy sent her husband more than 2,000 coins; the real number, she insists, was closer to 400. She further disputes that some of the items were sold at such a drastically high mark-up.

“It’s absolutely terrible to be labeled this way,” she says of the lawsuit. “But when you are guilty before being proven guilty it’s difficult to show it any other way.”

‘I’ve called them white trash’

Antonelli and Licata moved to East Setauket just as the alleged scheme against Van Gundy would have been heating up. Halstead arrived roughly eight months later, and as Antonelli tells it, the relationship quickly turned frosty.

Halstead, he claimed to The Daily Beast in a text message, tried to recruit him in a campaign against a neighbor’s noisy dog that sounded like it had “been smoking Marlboros for 50 years.” Antonelli says he told his new neighbor to buzz off. “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he recalls of their interaction, adding, ruefully, “I didn’t say that last line but it would’ve been perfect.” (Halstead says this story is not true.)

A few months later, around Christmas 2020, Antonelli had family in town. He says he found two mortar fireworks in a toolbox and decided to set them off. By his recollection, the neighbors loved it; one supposedly charged into their yard cheering, “DO MORE, DO MORE.” The next house, he said in a text message, yelled, “YEAAAA WE LOVE IT,” while another exclaimed, “FINALLY AWESOME PEOPLE MOVE IN WE LOVE YOU GUYS WELCOME.”

Halstead, Antonelli says, didn’t join in the cheering. Later, Halstead chastised the couple for shattering the peace, allegedly adding, “You’re not in Centereach anymore this is Setauket.” (Halstead admits to participating in “verbal altercations”: “I've said to him, ‘Listen, I know you're a criminal and you steal money from little old ladies… I don't like people like that.’ I’ve called them white trash in the heat of the moment.”)

Licata shared videos with The Daily Beast that she says prove Halstead has been the source of the neighborhood problems, though the materials are hardly dispositive. The most compelling video, from this summer, shows Halstead demanding that Antonelli “be a man, come out here, and talk to your neighbors.” After a pause, he grumbles, “fucking pussies.”

That’s one version of the feud’s origin. Halstead offers another. He says he entered the war over a different dispute: Antonelli and Licata piled dirt against their fence to make their yard level, he says, “which we were completely unaware of until the fence fell down.”

Halstead says that when he asked them to fix it, “they were like, ‘It’s not my problem.’”

He gave up and hired a crew to install a new barrier, he says, but when the workers arrived, Licata allegedly stormed out and accused them of encroaching on her property. “She’s like, ‘I’m gonna freaking kick your ass. I’m gonna have people kill you,’” he says. The feud intensified from there.

“She’ll be like, ‘You fucking faggot’ when I'm going to the mailbox. And I'm like, ‘Really? I can call you a whole bunch of names lady,’” Halstead says, echoing a claim made in his lawsuit. (Everyone accuses everyone else of hurling juvenile insults. Licata also disputes Halstead’s characterization of the fence issue, saying, “Dave’s property happens to be significantly lower than ours.”)

‘It’s a long way from over with this guy’

This summer, when the fireworks started, things “escalated to the ninth degree,” one neighbor says. The Halloween decorations made things even worse, adds Gerard Malcomson, who lives behind Antonelli and Licata. One of the installations “had a bright light,” he says. When it burned out, “they put in a blinking light, which is even more annoying.”

Even after getting charged for excessive noise, Antonelli insists that he’s just defending himself from a hostile neighbor. “He’s obsessive, he’s constantly harassing me and my family, he’s a loose cannon,” he says, referring to Halstead. “My family has suffered greatly and it’s a long way from over with this guy.”

Halstead, for his part, says he had hoped to avoid going to court. Late last month, as he was threatening legal action, the discord seemed to mellow, and for a brief stretch, the Long Island air was once again calm.

And then, he claims, in early October, the fireworks went off again.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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