Suffolk assessor Hugo E. Mascari, 86

Hugo E. Mascari, who played a quiet yet integral role in Suffolk municipal life for more than 50 years as assessor and clerk, died Feb. 18 of complications from cancer at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by a daughter, Teresa Allar of Oak Beach.

Mascari assessed property taxes for the Town of Babylon starting in 1952, and in later decades for the villages of Amityville, Lindenhurst and Babylon. Illness forced him to pare his schedule, but he continued working for Babylon Village until two days before his death.

With the busy tax appeal season approaching, Allar said, he struggled to finish paperwork from his hospital bed.

The job required him to visit or survey plans for thousands of homes and businesses as they were built or improved and determine their value so that they might be taxed appropriately. Calculating the square footage and age of a structure was only part of it.

"It's not a scientific thing," said a friend, Tony Almo, 91, chairman of the Board of Assessment Review in Babylon. "This is your judgment."

"He was good at what he did, meticulous," Almo said. "He used to be a pain in the neck for me, but we were friends."

Inevitably, property owners sometimes disagreed with his judgment. Neither the system nor the man was infallible. "You cannot satisfy everyone," said Babylon Village Mayor Ralph Scordino. "But Hugo approached every situation in a fair manner, and if he felt there should be a [tax] reduction, he went forward in presenting information to me and the board of trustees."

Mascari also served from 1967 to 1986 in the dual capacity of senior deputy county clerk and deputy county registrar.

There, said Geoffrey Mascaro, a friend and lawyer, he mastered the intricacies of the Torrens title system, designed to streamline land transfer. It was common in Suffolk during the Depression era.

"He had to determine whether the documents were acceptable for filing: He was the gatekeeper . . . You talk to anybody in real estate bar or tax certiorari bar -- they all knew Hugo. You had to get your stuff past Hugo. That's what it was all about."

Mascari, born in Brooklyn but raised in Venetian Shores, also served as Lindenhurst Village trustee and president of the Lindenhurst Historical Society.

He left unfinished a wood-crafted, minutely detailed, scale model of one of the village's long-vanished grand Victorian homes. The master assessor of homes loved to design them too, said Almo.

"It's going to be very, very difficult to replace him [as assessor]," Scordino said.

Mascari is survived by his wife of 64 years, Carmela (Copertino) Mascari, his high school sweetheart; and three children besides Allar: Louise Kessler of Dix Hills, Vera Meinhold of Lindenhurst and Edward Mascari of Oak Beach.