Suffolk County

When in 1982 then first lady Nancy Reagan famously advised Americans to “Just say no” to drugs, 50-year-old Tom Cilmi, the three-term Suffolk County Republican legislator of the 10th District, which covers a major portion of the town of Islip and a small section of the town of Brookhaven, was still a teenager. “I remember going from store to store with my mother, putting up the ‘Just say no’ signs,” he told me when I interviewed him in his Suffolk County legislative office recently.