Star Island Yacht Club Owner Buys Liar's Saloon, Offshore Sports Marina In Montauk

Sam Gershowitz, the metal recycling magnate and owner of Star Island Yacht Club, has purchased Offshore Sports Marina in Montauk — home of the locally famous, sometimes notorious, Liar’s Saloon.

Gershowitz confirmed the purchase this week and said he plans to remake the marina in the model of Star Island Yacht Club, which is just a yacht’s length across the harbor channel from the docks in front of Liar’s.

What will become of the bar perched above Offshore Sports Marina’s docks has yet to be decided, the new owner said.

Along with the waterfront saloon, the 2.3-acre property boasts about 40 boat slips, five cottages, a ships store, boat-hauling and maintenance facilities and a swath of open land for winter boat storage.

Gershowitz said that his crews have already started cleaning up the property and will be working quickly on renovations to the docks and buildings.

“We’re going to fix the slips up — the docks had been neglected, clean up the property, spruce things up and make it into a nice yacht club like we did with Star Island,” Gershowitz said. “I bought Star Island 35 years ago — it was a broken down marina when I bought it.”

The new marina will be named — like all of the many boats Gershowitz has owned over the years — after his wife. “It will be called Marlena’s Yacht Club,” he said on Tuesday.

He declined to say what the purchase price for the property was.

Others who have bought waterfront parcels on Lake Montauk in recent years have quickly sought to add residential development to them, but Gershowitz says that building condos or the like at the waterfront site is “not my cup of tea.”

“The marina business is a good, solid business,” he said. “More and more people are buying boats and looking for slips. This will be a wonderful marina.”

Gershowitz, who started Gershow Recycling in 1964 with a single dump truck and grew it into Long Island’s largest scrap metal recycling company by “mining” old cars out of landfills, said that he started coming to Montauk from his native East New York, Brooklyn neighborhood to go cod fishing on the Viking Fleet boats as soon as he got a driver’s license.

His 105-foot yellow-hulled sportfishing yacht sits in the end slip at Star Island Yacht Club now, affording a clear view of the once-lively scene at Offshore Sports Marina and Liar’s.

Gershowitz says he had known that the former owners, the Carillo family, had put the Liar’s property up for sale last year. But he’d been told when the bar closed last fall that a buyer had already snatched up the property. When he discovered that a previous deal had fallen through, he acted quickly.

“Everyone thought it was sold, including me,” he said. “We found out it was still for sale about two weeks ago. We bought it in two days.”