I saw here that Joe Gentili's memorial service will be December 3,and wanted to express my regret at the passing of one of the great, mad mechanics of New York's old-fashioned, patronage-dominated Board of Elections.

I wrote about Gentili, a Brooklyn Republican, back in January of 2003 in the late lamented New York Sun, when his tenure asthe agency's acting chief -- which began with the sudden heart attack of his friend and predecessor, Danny DeFranccesco, two days after 9/11.

The photo above is by my Sun colleague Konrad Fiedler; here's the whole profile:

January 27, 2003 -- The looming shake-up at the New York City Board of Elections is likely to mean the demotion or departure of Joseph Gentili, the devoted, irascible deputy executive director who has run the agency since September 11, 2001.

Some hope his going will change the board's old-fashioned style, its 40-yearold voting machines, or the dozens of images of mostly-nude women on the beach that grace a wall at its Lower Manhattan headquarters.

But the routine selection of a new executive director will almost certainly end the profane comments to reporters, the confrontations in the back of the City Council chambers, and the unsigned, hostile postcards to critics that make the Board of Elections a bureaucracy unlike any other.

A rumpled, mustachioed 56-year-old from Brooklyn with a high forehead, tinted glasses, and sweeping hand gestures, Mr. Gentili has worked at the board for 30 years.

He is the scourge of civic groups - the head of the Citizens Union, for one, calls him "alarming." He shoots back proudly that he led the agency through a terrorist attack on a primary day. His admirers and his detractors agree that he embodies the insular culture of the body that oversees the defining function of democracy, the vote.

"This agency is my entire life. I'm divorced, and my son spends some time with me but not a lot. I have no hobbies, no wife, no interests," he said during an interview over a glass table at the board's warren-like executive suite.

Mr. Gentili was glumly considering the fact that his tenure as the agency's acting head will likely end this week. He would normally be shifted to another slot in the agency, but insiders say even that is in jeopardy after the New York Times noted that his response to a critical report was "punctuated by profanities."

Mr. Gentili says he has no idea what he will do if he has to leave.

"If you woke me up in the middle of the night and said who are you, I would say I am the deputy executive director of the Board of Elections," he said.

Mr. Gentili is also Republican. His party affiliation is relevant because, alone among New York City's dozens of agencies, the board is run under what its critics call "the spoils system." They do things the old fashioned way: under the state constitution of 1894, Democrats appoint five commissioners, Republicans appoint five commissioners. One commissioner is under indictment in a bribery scandal.

The county party organizations divide the 316-member staff among their regulars, and Mr. Gentili, a Giuliani backer from Brooklyn, holds the top Republican job.

Since taking control of the agency when his executive director fell ill, Mr. Gentili has found himself in the middle of a century-old war between reformers and party regulars.

In 1902, a mayor elected on the Citizens Union line, Seth Low, began disassembling the patronage system. A century later, the Citizens Union - and other "good government" groups - is still pushing to overhaul the board. They say it is outmoded and inefficient, a Florida-style disaster waiting to happen.

Some are hoping for change from the front-runner to head the agency, John Ravitz, who is chairman of the Manhattan Republican Party. If he is selected at a meeting Thursday, Mr. Gentili will lose the top Republican slot.

"They're just not functional," says Linda Stone Davidoff, director of the modern-day Citizens Union. "Mr. Gentili's alarming behavior is a sign of the alarming structural dysfunction of the Board of Elections."

Mr. Gentili argues that party appointments are necessary to ensure that the board isn't controlled by a single, partisan official, like Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, who became a decisive player in the 2000 presidential election.

And he doesn't take criticism lightly. When the Women's City Club's elections project released a critical report, he sent it back to project director Marjorie Shea with a note scrawled across the front:

"I have never really known how to deal with hubris other than to call it hubris.... How would you feel if we set up a BOE's Women's City Club Project with me as director, barged in on your meetings, offered unwanted advice, and then said, 'We look forward to discussing this with you'?"

Critics also have been taken aback by Mr. Gentili's vehemence, on full display when he waylaid political scientist Ronald Hayduk after a City Council meeting to tell him to "Go to hell."

"What am I supposed to do? Punch them?" Mr. Gentili asks. "I want to be left alone. I have tried to make that clear. They don't understand. I wouldn't tell them how to do their jobs. Why do they feel free to tell me how to do mine?"

The center of criticism is that the board's mismanagement and low technology keep voters away from the polls and lose as many as 2.8% of the votes that get there.

In 2001, bureaucratic errors led to "the disenfranchisement of thousands of eligible voters," according to a Century Foundation report by Mr. Hayduk. In a 2002 survey of 534 voters by the New York Public Interest Research Group, half of the poll workers gave the wrong instructions to a person who had moved from one place in the city to another.

Mr. Gentili dismisses the criticism as "malicious" and uninformed. His ace in the hole is his agency's performance in the fall of 2001. His boss, Daniel De-Francesco, went into the hospital for triple-bypass surgery on September 13, two days after the terror attacks.

Board workers were locked out of the Lower Manhattan headquarters, and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where materials were being stored, had been converted to a morgue. Mr. Gentili led the agency through a primary September 25, a run-off October 9, and a general election November 6, without the major collapse predicted by the agency's critics.

The agency won awards from state and federal election monitors for its work, and even its critics gave grudging praise.

Now, Mr. Gentili says he just wants to be allowed to do his job.

"No one who hasn't run elections, no one who doesn't understand the constitutional framework under which we're established, and no one who hasn't won awards for running elections under wartime conditions, has the right to judge my work," he says with a bang on the glass table. "No one."