Kings Park, New York 11754

Supervisor Patrick Vecchio

99 West Main Street

Smithtown, New York 11787 March 18, 2009

Re: Sal DiCarlo, South Fork Management & Tax Assessor Gregory Hild

The DiCarlo fiasco is your personal responsibility. You suffered and permitted those buildings to be demolished without a demolition permit in order to allow DiCarlo to cheat on his real estate taxes. If this statement is inaccurate it is only half so because you are post facto facilitating the same fraud by the dance you have ordered Tax Assessor Gregory Hild to perform for public’s diversionary “entertainment” while you, as usual, grind the organ while hiding in the woodpile. DiCarlo’s buildings were not knocked down at night. They were not silently demolished. They were torn down across the street from you – “In Plain Sight.”

Now I read an article by Stacey Altherr in Newsday where your Tax Assessor states that he is asking the New York State Offices of Real Property Services (ORPS) whether DiCarlo’s illegal behavior should be to his net advantage because, according to Hild, his lumber yard land “could be considered vacant land and the tax burden for that plot could drop from $57,761 to $10,393.” Hild’s “coulds” are nonsense designed to bamboozle people. Watch for the following. A few weeks from now Hild will receive an ambiguously malleable letter from a faceless Albany bureaucrat. He will use it as a pretext to reduce DiCarlo’s taxes from $57,761 to $10,393.

A bureaucrat’s opinion is not law. Note what Stacey Altherr points out from ORPS in Newsday. The town assessor is the authority on assessments. “[ORPS] cannot tell an assessor how to value property.” “It is a locally administered function.” Supervisor Vecchio, pass this letter onto Hild. Push comes to shove he won’t have the defense of being an ignoramus but only the Nuremberg Defense.

DiCarlo may grieve his taxes but Hild is not to consider any proof that the structures have been torn down. It is called equitable estoppel, that is, one may not plead and prove then profit from his own wrongdoing. Equitable estoppel makes fiction fact. DiCarlo’s structures are still standing for assessment purposes until he, nunc pro tunc, obtains a demolition permit. This “fact” will put DiCarlo past the March 2d tax grievance deadline where he would otherwise have been except for his lawlessness. Tell Hild to assess DiCarlo’s taxes at $57,761.

AND --- Before any block-by-block reassessment of residences by Hild there must be a commercial-premises-by-commercial-premises reassessment performed. This is where the real money is. Residential is comparative chump change.

Yours truly,

Lawrence N. Gray, Esq.

Cc: Suffolk Legislators Lynne Nowick & John Kennedy

Town Council