Our Reid Epstein, covering the Patchogue gang killing, interviews Suffolk executive Steve Levy, who insists that the hate murder of a Hispanic immigrant would just be a one-day story if people weren't trying to pick on his policies on illegal immigrants. Would he feel the same way if one of his relatives was chased down, stabbed and left to bleed out on the street? A curious reaction, and a curious message to send to his constituents:

    Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said yesterday that the amount of attention on the hate crime that killed a Patchogue man from Ecuador is exaggerated because of his strong anti-illegal immigration positions.

    If Marcello Lucero, who police said was beaten and stabbed to death by a group of seven teenagers, died in Nassau, Levy said, “it would be a one-day story. You wouldn’t have all of the side stories trying to link motive to county policy.”

    He added: “You have hate crimes all the time in Nassau, but they don’t rise to the level in the media. The media has tried to make a linkage between the two issues where such linkage doesn’t really exist. … There are hate crimes in other areas that don’t get one scintilla of the same kind of coverage in Suffolk County.”

    Levy said there is no link between his efforts to enact legislation requiring county contractors and county licensees to verify their employees’ legal working status, which were seen by many as targeting Hispanic immigrants, and hate crimes in the county.

    “It’s a responsibility of the media to not attach those two very different issues,” he said.

    Levy said Lucero’s death has nothing to do with his immigration policies.

    “If the reason you have these hate crimes was because Suffolk believes in patrolling the border,” he said, “in a sanctuary city you wouldn’t have any hate crimes at all.”

    Levy’s comments came as the chairman of his own Hispanic Advisory Board said Hispanic people in Suffolk have “every reason to be scared” because the county is “one of the more racist counties around.”

    “Suffolk County is a very racial county,” said Alexander Gutierrez, 58, of Ronkonkoma, the board’s chairman. “There are a lot of racists in Suffolk County. I think its one of the more racist counties around.”

    Levy said Suffolk has no more racists than other communities.

    “There are racists in every community in the United States,” he said. “We have our share of idiots, but so do other parts of the nation. Our figures show .......

.....that it has become a safer community since I’ve been in office.”

Levy’s statistics show the number of hate crimes in Suffolk have fallen from 16 in 2004 to two this year.

Gutierrez, a Spanish teacher at Central Islip High School, said attitudes in the county are ingrained and not the fault of elected officials. “It’s what people learn at home,” he said. “It’s their upbringing.”

Gutierrez said it is “a cop-out” to ascribe any blame to Levy or other county officials, who angered Long Island immigrant and Hispanic activists by passing legislation to require county contractors and county licensees to verify their employees’ legal working status.

“This has been a around for a long time,’ he said. “If anybody comes up with that, that’s truly a cop-out statement.”

The Hispanic Advisory Board has been a source of controversy under Levy. In 2005, nine of its 19 members quit to protest Levy’s evictions of immigrants in Farmingville.

Levy said he is popular in the county’s Hispanic neighborhoods, which are primarily in Islip Town.

“I won overwhelmingly as an assemblyman in heavily Hispanic areas and then won overwhelmingly again in my two county executive runs,” said Levy, who had all five established political party lines his 2007 re-election campaign. “There’s the mistaken impression that I ran unopposed and there was every opportunity to vote for the other guy.”

Levy also said he would like to attend Lucero’s funeral, though he said Tuesday evening that he had yet to reach out to his family.