On March 3, 2024, the team of Attorney David Zabel and Dennis Kokenos secured a federal jury verdict in favor of their clients in The NF&W Cooke L.P. et al. v. Shapiro et al. In this matter, the Plaintiffs were a party to an option contract with Costco to develop a new faculty in Branford, Connecticut, pending municipal approvals. The Plaintiffs sued the town’s Director of the Inlands Wetlands Agency and the Chairman of the Inlands Wetland Commission for, among other things, tortious interference with the option contract. Attorneys Zabel and Kokenos presented the Plaintiffs’ case that the defendants tortiously interfered with the options contract by sabotaging a wetlands application made by Costco to the commission when they improperly and surreptitiously made a series of alternations to a peer review report that was being prepared for the Commission by an independent engineering firm. The federal jury agreed and awarded the plaintiffs’ punitive damages in the total amount of $203,181.42.